Wishlist: Quality-of-Life Features for Alpha 6

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Alpha 4, playing it more than I ever played the previous alphas combined, and I feel as though (provided bugs don’t prevent me), I can actually start to build a real settlement in the game, and make long-term plans for my denizens. But, in doing so, I’ve come across a few simple ideas for features that would dramatically increase my enjoyment of the game from a settlement-building standpoint. I don’t imagine these would be all that difficult to add in, and I’d love to see all three make it into Alpha 5.

  1. Planning Mode - If anyone’s played Prison Architect, they know what I mean. I would like to see some kind of way of drawing out rectangles on the ground that indicate where I’m planning to build. If this would come with dimensional measurements too, that would be fantastic, but for now I’d settle for just the ability to draw on the ground. Right now it’s possible to fake it with empty stockpiles, but ideally we could get some kind of separate “layer” that had no effect on the game, but allowed the player to really plan things out. Of course it should also be just as easy to erase planning marks. The way I see it looking is simply a transparent white overlay on any squares the player decides to fill in, and these would of course represent anything the player wished, from walls and buildings to stockpiles to roads.

  2. Destroy or Transplant Wild Silkweed/Berry Bushes - This has been suggested a bunch of times already, but it’s worth mentioning yet again. The sorts of settlements I’m wanting to build are quite large, and take up a significant footprint on the ground. The first real task I seem to have in a new game is actually figuring out where the immovable objects are so I can plan around them, and it’s really not that fun. Being able to deal with wild plants and get them out of my way would be of huge benefit to me, and let me actually start playing the game sooner, rather than spending lots of time up front trying to avoid these objects as I draw up my plans. Adding in a new mechanic to transplant such objects would eliminate nearly all of my siting issues, allowing me to start building immediately without worry my row of houses is going to bump into a bunch of plants along the way.

  3. Designate Items for Disassembly - Right now, I’m not building any of the starter beds because once I place them, I’m stuck with them. I force my denizens to sleep on the ground until I’ve tech’d up enough to build the nice beds. Every item, next to the move button, should really have a disassembly button, causing a worker to pack up the item and return it to a stockpile. Now that I think about it some more, #2 and #3 could be solved with the same feature. Those objects you no longer need or want, stick them in storage.

So, anyway, that’s my wishlist for Alpha 5. I am of course looking forward to seeing new major features and additions of items/classes, but if I could get the above three ideas implemented I would be very happy indeed. I don’t expect they’d be all that hard to add, but they’d have a tremendous impact on my quality-of-life as a player.

Anyway, if anyone else has any minor quality-of-life additions they’d like to see for the next Alpha, feel free to post them. Just please keep them fairly simple. This isn’t a topic for discussing major features, just those you feel would take a minimum of developer work, yet result in a significant reduction in your stress/annoyance levels as a player.

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Very good idea :slight_smile: . Another way would be the ability to plan out a building, but save the design & location instead of removing it or start building it - not as flexible (eg say you want planning mode for farms etc), but for structures at least it might serve the same function.

Agreed on the ability to destroy them. For transplanting… hmm. I think that for resource-producing plants, it might make sense if you had to have a farmer (or some future green-fingered class) to do that, if only to prevent people making things like wild silkweed farms that only ever need harvesting, and not replanting etc.

Upgrading some items from tier 1 to tier 2 etc (eg mean beds to comfy beds) would also go a long way towards this too. I’m in the same position WRT bed quality - my settlers all sleep on the ground until I have a nice pile of comfy beds made :smiley: .

For other suggestions, see my thoughts here:

I would definitely prefer a planning mode that worked for farms, buildings, and everything else. I’d want it to be as generic as possible, at least in a first implementation. Then maybe they could add other planning colors or something down the line to keep all your boxes organized.

Right now what I do with a new map is place out stockpiles representing buildings and roads. I keep the building stockpiles empty, and remove them when I’m ready to build. I use the “roads” as my actual stockpiles, using smaller segments so I can use them efficiently for different types of items. There’s no need to plan out farms, really, since you can place them immediately and keep them fallow, but seeing as the settlement design I’ve been working on since Alpha 3 has a very large number of farm plots, I typically have to go back and delete most of them so I can get my first farmer working on actual food crops rather quickly, as soon as I have the layout of the settlement down. At this point I’ve got detailed plans mapped out on graph paper, so I can start laying out these plans without too much thought (provided I can find a space large enough without any immovable objects present), but the whole stockpile thing just adds extra work so an official planning mode to just draw on the ground would be lovely.

You’re probably right about transplanting being a bit OP early on. I will happily settle with the ability to destroy the plants, instead. As long as I can have some tool to deal with currently immovable objects, I’ll be ecstatic.

Upgrading objects is only half the battle. Being able to return items to stockpile would also allow you to trade those unneeded objects to a passing caravan.

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I also ignore the mean beds and opt for the comfy beds. That is the main reason my mod includes cloth bolts as a starting equipment

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Here’s a thought for a new Class: BAKER! We now have pumpkins as well as berries, and villagers have really already had this thought…baking pies.

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Could use wheat as well then :stuck_out_tongue: .

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seconded! :+1: and surprisingly, we dont have a thread dedicated to this class type…

:clap:

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I’d like the ability to manually assign and un-assign items to different citizens.

I guess it ties back to the upgrade/automatically use upgraded bed ideas. Our settlers already claim individual beds, I’d just like to have control over that process a little bit. I expect we’ll see more of that once the clothing/equipment system is fleshed out a little more, but it would be nice to start seeing some of it in game.

I’d also like to see, or better yet set, different buildings and walls with higher or lower priorities. It can be a little frustrating watching your workers split their time between 5-6 different buildings instead of finishing one and moving on to the next.

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I want this (or similar) as well, but I don’t think it’s necessary quite yet. There are IMHO more immediate things to do first.

A quality-of-life feature I would suggest is a change to the pick berries behavior. Each basket picket should be immediately returned by the villager who picked it. The concept of leaving the berries in the forest to do some other task just doesn’t fit the “intrepid explorers out in the wilderness, alone and unprotected”.

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Agreed. I think it’s okay for, say, farmed crops - better to harvest all the food, THEN carry it back to camp - but foraging and similar jobs should absolutely be done your way.

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Yes please. I can understand picking all the berries in a particular cluster before carrying some back, but it’s rather strange to see a bunch of workers going out and putting berries in baskets, then all of them leaving to go do something else while the berries are left behind.

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I agree with all your suggestions! Especially the dissemble or discard option! And yes, I think workers having more accountability to their actions would be great; instead of being wishy washy.

What I’d really like is for workers to clean up all the unused logs that are ditched on the roof. :frowning: Though if I think about it this could also be connected to the berry scenario. It’s just frustrating that if the worker gets hungry and drops the log down on the spot… and no one takes it back to the stockpile, it just sits on the roof and is visible even if you are in the no wall mode!!!

I had a problem like that, but you can actually build a ladder that accesses the roof, and they’ll eventually get around to getting the wood. You can even place furniture up there! I have a sunset viewing roof with park benches now :blush:

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You can also add ladders to a roof that hasn’t been built yet, and can also build them inside structures, in the event that you have a trapped worker with an oak log lying around inside.

Oh, and speaking of ladders, of course being able to build ladders down would be a great quality-of-life feature as well. That might be a little more difficult, though, and certainly would require a bit of thought as to what that would look like, so I can understand if we don’t get that in Alpha 5.

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No I think we should get that in alpha 5, and here is why. Bailey bridges. Basically you construct a bridge on land and roll it over the span you want to cross. The villagers should construct a ladder on the flat part of the ground and lower it into place.

Boom, ladders that go down but were built with current technology.

Actually I can think of more interesting ways of doing that. Add rope to the game and have a villager toss enough wood off the cliff, repel down, and build the ladder up. The need for rope means that only more tech-ed up villages can go down. Minor tech but does add to the process needed to traverse down.

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i’m onboard with this idea, just to see the eventual “rappelling animation”… :smile: :+1:

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I don’t know if you can currently do this, but I couldn’t figure out how. I want to be able to put beds and such back into the stockpile when I’m not using them. or atleast be able to destroy the item.

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Can’t be done yet I’m afraid. TBH I don’t think it’s a big deal yet, but as settlements grow in the game and you move up the “tech” tree it’ll be more important.