There are a couple very rare issues we have seen crop up (get it?!), but have been unable to reproduce.
We would appreciate the community’s help in pinning these down:
#1 Crops not Harvesting
We have seen a number of reports now of farmers failing to harvest crops.
The only tell-tale signs of this appear to be that the fields are visually empty, but then suddenly have crops in them upon reloading.
If anyone has had this issue occur, please report back to us with the following information:
Has this issue occurred more than once?
Have you tried verifying game files?
Are you running any mods?
When did the issue start? What was happening in the town prior?
Once the issue starts, does it occur perpetually until you reload the game? Or do fields eventually get planted and harvested?
If you select the empty fields, are there assigned workers in the top right?
Can you share an image of the fields once they fail? Are any of the fields expanded?
What are your system specs? CPU? GPU? RAM? SSD or HDD?
What game speed are you playing on?
#2 Villagers Stop Responding
Another issue we have seen reported is where suddenly the entire town appears to just…shut down. Villagers seemingly all return to their homes and remain there until they starve to death.
If anyone has had this issue occur, please report back to us with the following information:
Has this issue occurred more than once?
Have you tried verifying game files?
Are you running any mods?
When did the issue start? What was happening in the town prior?
If you select one of these stuck villagers (before they starve to death), what is their status?
Can you try manually commanding one of the stuck villagers? What do they do? Do they move to the commanded position? After the command expires, do they return to their home or resume normal tasks? Note: if the villagers are inside their houses, you can drag select the house to select the villagers inside to issue commands.
Are the villagers all of one age group, or a variety?
What are your system specs? CPU? GPU? RAM? SSD or HDD?
I’ve had this happen several times. Most recently while I was reorganizing my 1k population town. I was moving 17x17 blocks of housing and small gardens from one location to another by pausing the game, queuing up all the moves then up-pausing. My 150 builders would jump on the tasks then get about 3/4 of the way through the process then everyone would idle. Restarting the game fixes the problem. I had this happen consistently for each block I moved.
Yes, games files were verified.
Not running any mods
I first noticed it on a town I started during the v0.8.1 play test with the scenario in #1 happening on the full v0.8.1
& 6 I’ll try to reproduce the problem and test.
FYI… This town was started on the the fully released v0 .8.1
I’ve only seen this happen once for two consecutive crop rotations in a single field. It was a 12x12 filed with 7 workers assigned. Each time the entire crop of Rye was lost to rot.
Game files verified - no issues.
No Mods
On my latest town started on v 0.8.1
I’m not 100% sure, but I think it resolved on its own
It had 7 workers assigned
I’ll try to grab an image next time it happens. This was not an expanded field
It happens as long as I have more than crop field.
Yes
No mods
I started playing with v 8.1a and it’s always been an issue.
the fields are worked and planted, they just get left to rot at the end. Restarting does not help.
All workers are assigned.
I had an expanded field once and there were no issues.
The thing I’ve noticed is that the farmers all get grouped together. There is no “field 1” or “field 2” so whenever I try to add fields it does give me more farmers, but they all take turns working at the fields. For example, they’d all be planting at one field with one or two left behind at the other field. When it’s time to harvest they choose the closest one to work on and then move to the next one, but they usually don’t have enough time leftover so the crops rot. Putting distance between the farms does work but it has to be a long one (had two fields on opposite ends of a large settlement and it worked out). This works in the fertile seeds but in the mineral rich seeds it’s hard to find fertile land so not being able to group crop fields close together makes it hard to expand population in the beginning. Maybe try adding an assignment interface like with everything else so you can ensure farmers aren’t trying to attend to every field?
I had a bit of issue two happen today, and a few random deaths a few days ago related to this issue (which i never saw before).
Yes, only in the recent beta.
Verfied
No mods.
Randomly, but it happened in the winter when usually a child was trying to seek shelter. Instead, they went and hid NOT in but right out of town hall. They then died of exposure in the winter, however a raid was probably present that year.
Status is about to die from exposure.
Tried mutpile times, no. They just stayed their and died.
I have found that when crop fields are placed directly adjacent to one another, without any space between, then the farmers seem to confuse one crop field’s required activity for the other, and soon disregard both, leaving crops in the field to rot.
Leaving at least one space between fields eliminates this problem.
This may have something to do with the mechanics of how fields can be expanded or enlarged.
been watching for this and i have had the issue relly bad till i took down and limited how many bee heeves i had built now i made get a field now and then but never a enough to hurt
Unsure if this is related to this issue but I agree i think it is an issue but am doubtful physically connected farms are the problem. The issue I had like this was had maximum size farms in this shape where X’s are farms and bars are fences
| X | X | X|
I then added another maximum size farm below:
| X1 | X2 | X3 |
| X4 |
What happened is that farmers would bounce between harvesting the farms and trying to build the new farm, even in mid task or before they completed a task. They would either run from working X1, make it halfway into X4 and then run back to X1. Sometimes they would do work in X1 and sometimes in the middle of running back to X1 they would turn around again and go back to X4. This caused X4 to take multiple years to build and caused some crops to rot.
If distance is a cause, then we are back to cookie-cutter optimization, again.
All Farms must be grouped, in order for the platoon-nature of farm labor to be adequately utilized by the game engine.
Having labor tuned to live closer to workstation could go some way to fixing some of that, and I am pretty sure it is on their radar, but farm labor being en masse according to the clock, it will be difficult to apply here.
I routinely set up my farms in different parts of the map, especially on maps where fertile land is hard to find, and my fields are touching. If that was a reliable cause of harvest issues, I would have observed it by now.
Presently, the best lead involves field expansions, but still not clear on what the exact steps are yet.
Disabling the expansion mechanic, requiring players to go the long route, salvaging the old farm and re-tilling of a completely new one, would seem to be the easiest solution?
Or at least a way to find out if it is a cause, no?
I have not had any (bad?) luck replicating the instances of field rot I experienced, through joining the fields.
No. In my case, I saved the file and then reloaded the game file and all seems to work again.
Are you running any mods?
No.
When did the issue start? What was happening in the town prior?
Unfortunately I got a telephone call and got distracted from the game and when I hung up the call I noticed the game had changed. I know there was a merchant in town and that there was a food shortage. Other than that, nothing out of the ordinary. But, again, I was focused on the telephone call, not on the game.
I took a screen shot though and from that I can see that the icons indicating food shortage over the houses disappeard and that seemingly all villagers had left the roads, except one.
If you select one of these stuck villagers (before they starve to death), what is their status?
Unfortunately I did not try that before reloading the game.
Can you try manually commanding one of the stuck villagers? What do they do? Do they move to the commanded position? After the command expires, do they return to their home or resume normal tasks? Note: if the villagers are inside their houses, you can drag select the house to select the villagers inside to issue commands.
Unfortunately I did not try that. I zoomed in on a guy, the only one left standing on a road. He was active but with no intentions of going anywhere. He stood still and occationaly turned his head an looked around a bit.
Are the villagers all of one age group, or a variety?
I only looked at one guy and he seemed to be a middle aged male.
When did the issue start? What was happening in the town prior?
I was in the trade centre switching back and forth between two traders and moving goods to be sold to the trading post. Suddenly all villagers disapeared.
If you select one of these stuck villagers (before they starve to death), what is their status?
At first it looked like all of the had unable to work or passive. Looking around I found one guy with the status working with pottery. In the UI he was as passive as al the rest of the villagers. After a while his status changed passive. Looking further afiled I could se that other villagers in fact had several other statuses, such as moving to another place or refilling stock in a simple cabin, but again, none of them were moving other than swaying back and forth.
Can you try manually commanding one of the stuck villagers? What do they do? Do they move to the commanded position? After the command expires, do they return to their home or resume normal tasks? Note: if the villagers are inside their houses, you can drag select the house to select the villagers inside to issue commands.
No, the villagers do not respond to any commands.
Are the villagers all of one age group, or a variety?
They are a variety. I could see men and women between 16 and 58.
What are your system specs? CPU? GPU? RAM? SSD or HDD?
I have previously shared my DxDiag (Please se previous post).
What game speed are you playing on?
3
Some other observations:
All building UIs seem to be working in the sense that you can ad or remove workers (which remain passive), if goods are available in the trading centre, they can be sold and the money is transfered and so on.
I noticed that the deer are moving around as normal but a wolf chasing a villager stopped the same way as the villager.
Bees are also sworming and looks normal
Status messages continue to appear as if the game engine is running in the background but the UI isn’t replicating what the engine does. A guy got sick for instance.
