Do Swords Rot? And Other Stupid Questions

Farthest Frontier General Discussion
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I like this game, I think it’s very pretty and I like setting up quaint farming towns with small villages populated solely by spawned infants but I am very stupid so I want to ask some stupid questions so I can figure out what is a ‘me’ problem and what is an early access issue.

I spent most of Sunday destroying towns by trying to employ work camps in year 2 but something I noticed when doing this is that I was losing swords over time even on pacifist maps. So do swords rot? They do in real life and I guess the depreciation mechanic in the game must apply to all resources not just food, but none of these ill fated experimental towns lasted beyond year 7 or Tier 3 so that seems a little fast for a sword to fall apart?

I do have other stupid questions like, what is the town centre for? At first I thought it offered storage but immediately discovered that was the wagon. It just seems to exist? You can use it to hide from small enemies but can’t use it to hide from a storm. Is it just a visible level mechanic? Or do you lose if you let it get destroyed?

Why are the unassigned labour pool divided into labourers and builders? Why don’t builders just harvest the resources they need negating the need for a separate category - put more clearly if building is not a skill why isn’t the unassigned population simply ‘labourers’ who gather marked resources, build, transport, and assist with the harvest as they are free? I saw the pre-release stream and it was stated that the game has so much handled by the AI not player input because being low on micromanagement was an explicit development goal but this system is very management intensive? Is it because I build too many saw pits and never have enough labourers? Is it not an intended mechanic that I have to juggle between the two categories to get anything build post T3/Pop. 200?

Probably my stupidest question yet but - why aren’t fishing shacks, foragers huts and hunters cabins single occupancy housing? Why would they need a hut if their house is like, 25 metres away? If it’s not housing why do the occupants treat it like it is housing? I had two hunters die of dehydration in a row because they wouldn’t just go home for a drink of water? I had to build a well in the woods.

So, am I just trying to play the game wrong (yes, work camps are not an early game replacement for manual harvest) or misunderstanding basic mechanics? Probably.

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Actually, while I’m at it why does the healer not live in the healer’s house? And why does building additional housing shuffle the existing population? My healer now lives in the mountain instead of in town where he was before. This one might not be a ‘me’ issue.

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I think the town center gives some attraction around it, gives shelter on raider invasion and also shoot arrows on the invaders(not sure if this is by itself or needs people inside)

I never had a problem with labourers/builders division, you can manually limit how many builders you can have from the labourers pool, so as I understand builders that are not building anything will switch to labourers automatically

The workers kinda live in their working building all the year and goes back home during blizzards to get proper shelters, the market is supposed to supply homes of their needs and the people working in the buildings will supply their working place, if you have people working really far away like in mines you should build temporary shelters so they don’t have to go back all the way to town in a blizzard. The way I see it in a roleplay perspective, the worker spend the entire day at work so they need food, water and heat and in the end of the day they go home to rest/sleep and also need supplies at home including luxuries like candle and soap, we just don’t see then going home in proper gameplay

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True on the desirability, I just meant functionally though. I’m not against the town centre I’m just having trouble making dispersed population nodes that function well and I wondered if the town centre anchored the AI in some way. It seems to find it much easier to obey commands around the village proper rather than anywhere else regardless of item stockage but that could be confirmation bias at play I suppose.

I think I have trouble and end up needing to mircomanage the labourers because I am impatient and build too many things then end up with 4 labourers left and get stuck being totally unable to achieve anything.

I like setting up the temporary shelters for fun out in the woods but they aren’t really that useful. I see what you are saying about the work shelters but I still think that hunters 1 and 2 probably could have stocked the shack with water since there was a well on the way and they are not even far from town. What I was trying to do is stuff like, build a mining village outside of town for example but it seems to confuse the game and it just sends random people to the new settlement regardless of how much that adds to their commute. I’m probably either doing it wrong or not playing the game the way it’s intended to be honest.

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Managing the proportion of labourer/builders and the professions are the most important thing in the game imo

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Huh, I didn’t realize that the occupancy gets shuffled with each new home build. That could be a bit concerning for productivity

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You are right and I know it but I still don’t like waiting and make stupid decisions. I always have like 10 empty houses, Please come to my house, I need more labour. I will let you sample the fruits of my pottery empire. Please never nerf pottery developer team, I love being a pottery community. Shoes are ok too, and candles but pottery will always have my heart.

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I don’t have that much trouble with laborers v. builders. When new folk come to town, they do a turn as laborers before I assign them to a profession.

I would very much like to direct the actions of at least the laborers. “You, go chop down that tree that sits in the way of [whatever].” “You, go get that rock busted up; I need bricks.” “You, go pick up all that wood and food people have just dropped and walked away from.” Like that. Egad – am I a control freak?

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I’m sorry but I have another stupid question and I thought I could just quarantine them here.

Are charcoal burners supposed to be this much better than coal mines?

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I don’t find it a question of charcoal burners being better than coal, but rather the burners supplement the coal mines. I have a silly situation in that there’s a coal deposit so near the town, where I had started building houses. I didn’t develop the coal deposit because it would have degraded the desirability of the houses, which I need to get up to Homestead level (30%). But I haven’t yet found any other coal deposits further out, except for one which has already run out of coal. So I guess I’ll use charcoal, instead, where it can be substituted.

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I ran out of coal in my last game. Charcoal was a necessity very early into the whole “industrialization” thing. They are meant to be used when coal becomes a difficult resource to mine or buy (in fact, for 40 years, no vendor even offered coal for sale. Made life rather difficult)

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So do swords rot?

Not in my experience, but they are equipped by Hunters on top of the obvious guards and soldiers.

what is the town centre for

I think it’s how they designed the “choose your location” mechanic. The code keeps the game in one state until the town centre is place, which starts of the game proper.

And instead of having a once off building that costs resources, which on its own adds to the need to manage resources early, they probably tried to add an actual gameplay mechanic by making housing and the stockyard rely on a complete town centre.

I assume the town centre can be destroyed and that won’t end the game, but it will require you to rebuild it before being able to build some of the other basic necessities. That’s also likely why the wagon exists, as a separate storage so that if the town centre is destroyed the code of the game can continue uninterrupted and still allow you to mount a recovery attempt.

Why are the unassigned labour pool divided into labourers and builders?

Laborers will harvest resources and supply resources. Builders will construct buildings and work on repairs. The builders are assigned to the profession of builder, and will idle if there are no build sites or repairs. Why don’t builders just do it? It might overcomplicate the AI causing unpredictable or unwanted behaviour, and having laborers for only one activity instead of multiple would create an extremely low value unit.

I saw the pre-release stream and it was stated that the game has so much handled by the AI not player input because being low on micromanagement was an explicit development goal but this system is very management intensive?

Selecting the amount of builders is macromanagement. However, there are a lot of elements of micromanagement in the current build since not everything is functioning as intended.

because they wouldn’t just go home for a drink of water?

Could be a number of reasons. Proximity is one of them, but they certainly should have at least died on the way to try getting water. Water can also be kept in storages. The idea behind buildings like the forager taking up resources is that they need water and food while working. You can also try building temporary shelters in these locations as they will be stocked with water and food and nearby workers can take from there instead.

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They’re not ‘better’ per se. They consume a resource to make a resource while also needing labour. Mines only require labour. Output-wise I will agree they work well.

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This could be down to the way storage works. Your resources won’t be transferred to the other town, so for it to function well you’d have to produce most basic resources close by. Villagers prioritize the storage they deposit resources at by proximity, and it will always be the first they come across that accepts those resources.

You may be experiencing the AI travelling to and from the nodes and the original town for necessary resources.