Hi there. I’m new here, so I apologize if this is in the wrong place. I have been playing stonehearth practically non-stop for the last few days and I LOVE it… With one exception. I can’t seem to get past day 8-15 without all of my workers going idle. I have tried having only one task lined up, and that seemed to work for a while (until about day 10), and cancelling all tasks, etc. There appears to be a lot of people experiencing this issue, based on what I’ve found on the web, and it’s a huge issue.
The game is amazing, but the workers just going idle for no reason is game-breaking. You literally CANNOT play if this bug (if it’s a bug because I’ve never had a world where it didn’t do that), happens. Please please PLEASE fix this so I can spend way too much time playing this game XD
UPDATE: Since the post where I talk about the weaver, I’ve managed to keep a game going (on about day twenty). The weaver thing was me being dumb and I fixed that -_-’ but this time, when I ran into the idle workers issue, I sent them to mine. The whole time I’ve had this issue, hearthlings still seemed to cut down trees, mine, and harvest berries fine. At the moment, it seems like if they get idle, I send them to go mine, then after a couple minutes, they start doing other stuff as well.
I’ve started 2 new games since posting this earlier today and both times it bugged out on me. I’ve been playing around seeing who will do what exactly, and it seems like it’s mainly the carpenter I’m having trouble with. Farmer and Trapper continue doing their jobs, and will help with other jobs, but the carpenter will go idle even with stuff queued in the workshop and plenty of materials to use. Switching out the carpenter and saving/reloading seems to work sometimes, but then you’re constantly training a new carpenter. Other times, the new or old carpenter after a reload, just brings another piece of wood over to the workshop (there’s already one sitting on it), and then stops. No one will undeploy the workshop when ordered to, and moving it gets the same reaction as I just stated.
I have tried cancelling all orders and re-ordering them (even tried just putting one thing in queue, but still nothing. For the first few in-game days, the carpenter works great. About day 4 or 5 I start having trouble and by day 8 or 9 I usually have to give up on my little hearthlings and create a new village because no one will work!!
I was wondering if there was a way to set priorities for the hearthlings. I cannot figure out how to open the character sheets for them for the life of me, but I wonder if we were able to set priorities, then the carpenter could be told to do only the carpentry duties.
Overall, this is just another plea to fix the idling issues. This game is so cute; I love it!
AFAIK you can’t set worker priorities. They prioritize from a pre-set template of what needs are most important and work from the top most needs on down. You may have noticed that gathering is one of the highest, if not the highest priority. My bet is because if you lack raw materials then there’s not much else you can do, whether it be producing items or simply having food to eat.
The bottom right there’s a tab that pulls up a full list of your hearthlings. From there you can click on the banners on the left of their names which should pull up their character sheets. I don’t know if this is implemented yet or not but I always hire footmen who have at least 5 points in the body category as an example.
You can also get to a character sheet by selecting a hearthling and you’ll notice a button in the bottom left of the screen that will also display their character sheet.
P.S. - Are you using 64 bit of 32 bit version of Stonehearth and does it match your CPU architecture? From what I can tell Stonehearth should detect specs and run the proper bit but you never know.
Actually I find it a bit refreshing and relaxing. I’d be a lot more tense knowing I’d have to micro manage all of those aspects and there’s already plenty to do at any given time in a game that’s not nearly done yet.
So far I’ve never once thought to myself, “Wow I really wish this silly hearthlings would do this other thing instead/first.” That alone should be a compliment to the devs or however they’ve chosen to handle task management. I also think that, if you didn’t have this idle worker issue, you’d not even notice the fact you couldn’t manually set priorities. I suppose you might if you were very used to that sort of thing from other games. I’ve had to do that in other games but it’s not fresh on my mind.
Now that I think of it safety would be the #1 priority above gathering, such as town defense mode. Can’t gather food or resources if you’re dead!
I’ve noticed that sometimes clearing the queue by dragging the queued items onto the trash bin and then entering the items to be built again can fix these issues sometimes, provided certain conditions are met.
It seems to always be my carpenter
I’ve managed to get a couple saves going since with no idle workers issues. Generally, when people start going idle, I tell them to mine, and then everyone works properly.
I don’t understand but how does the zombie bug spread?
If one of my people freezes I try to force them like promoting them, giving them a short cut to something or etc. I didn’t try this solution by try put your town into defence mode or try put them into a party and force them to go to the centre of the village. If nothing works get the goblin to attack the idle ones because they will try to run away.
I’ve noticed that assigning workers to parties and using the attack function to move workers to the area you want them to work helps. Once your city gets too big, the resources get too far from the workers and the works seem to no longer be able to sense them - having them be omnipotent would require supercomputers to play the game. On my last file that I got into the second month I was just starting to work on a second city cause my first city was getting too large.
Other solutions would be making a more compact city. Make vertical storage for resources, keep your resources at the center of your town, build tall houses, create sky bridges between them, and don’t dig very deep. It would probably help if they introduced storage containers.
If the resources are too far away then we will need to start extending the town, not keeping it compact.
If we spread stockpiles and homes so the workers can reach more areas but if you want to it compact then you will need to get your resources from caravans since they will be next to the camp fire (which should be the centre of your town)
What you are describing is basically the same as having multiple towns- each sector is an individually functioning unit just like multiple towns. The difference is only in the spacing between the two.
I do just buy all my resources other than ores and keep my carpenters and blacksmith at the center of town along with a mine going underground to mine ores.
I also should note that I think I may have been wrong about the location of the items mattering. I’ve seen workers travel something like 150 blocks to get stones or beds.Being near where the item goes may be all that matters although I haven’t tried to pay that close attention to what individual workers are doing but rather general trends. I’m not sure which way would be better- having the person closest to the closest instance of the needed item retrieving the item would be the fastest for the individual task, but it would make it more difficult to manage worker’s activities if the worker who is going to do task A may be on the other side of the map.
Usually the bug occurs when there is something wrong about the task like when they are mining but can’t get out they will stop or when you tell them to place an object but then unploy the object causes them to be confused.
@AngelicHomicide here’s a tip for you:
Try save every 10 minutes or so then when you encounter a bug then you can load the previous saves and not have to loose that much progress
I wouldn’t consider that a bug. If you tell someone to do something impossible, they shouldn’t be able to do it. I can have people in an open field in a party and if I put the flag too far from them, for example, they’ll just ignore it. I’ve had a few people die because they were sent to do some task in a far-off field with no food in a 300 block radius and die because they just stood over there doing nothing after they finished their task. It seems to me that the radius they’ll listen within decreases as the game goes on. At the start of the game, they may travel 100s of blocks to go somewhere, but by day 40 they won’t listen unless the task is within 30 blocks.
To be realistic the hearthlings should travel far because if they can’t then you don’t have access to other resources like ores sooner or later (unless you live near/ on a mountain)
So what i understand you’re saying that the developers purposely implemented this feature
I’m not sure if it is a feature or a bug - you would either have to look at the code or get one of the programmers to answer that. I have seen mentions of radii in the code, but I forgot what they applied to.
Somewhere between day’s 12-13 and 14-15 hearthers. Hearther’s have now became idle and will not eat or work. No MOD’s enabled or installed. Playing from STEAM install of latest update.
and have stuff queued but he/she does nothing …