A great game so far and really interested to see where it goes.
A minor cheat/trainer I found yesterday though, I had a major rock (± 250) in my farmland. to clear I set up a stockyand right next to it and prioritised the clearance, so far, so what. When it was cleared and the fence completed, I moved the Stockyard away and the entire inventory went with it.
As an idea, maybe not moving the inventory. I’m fine with (theory) moving baskets of food or arrows as you reposition homes/food producers, but surely bulky goods (stone, ore, logs, compost, etc.) should be dumped when the building is shifted.
The founders already have the ox-cart, do we realy need a building we can load with tons of building materials we can teleport around our town?
This is a known dynamic of the game. Whether intended or not hasn’t been stated by Crate to my knowledge. I used this strategy when I first started playing quite frequently, but as I’ve learned the dynamics of storage in the game I find myself rarely having to do this.
I understand how the system works, my issue is more about how it seems immersion breaking. IRL, (I understand this isn’t IRL,but still), when we move house we pack stuff up and move. Commercial or industrial movements take much more logistical support, planning and time. All I’m proposing is some mechanic in the game to reflect these additional processes.
The game already has a differentiation of materials, into those carried by hand and those carried by the Wainwrights’ oxcarts. Perhaps a simple extension of this differentiation to Stored Materials, in that those coming in by cart (Gold, Coal, Iron, Sand, Clay, Timber and Stone once Work Camps are in play) are ‘dumped’ and have to be explicitly moved to new storage while other materials of smaller intrinsic bulk (even Furniture is easier to move than a ton of Iron Ore!) can be ‘teleported’ or moved as part of the movement of the building itself.
would the simple answer be NOT move your storage buildings, if the the game required us to move it then you could call immersion breaking but you are choosing to do it your self. We do start the game with a large moveable storage resource you could have parked down there and moved later if you wanted to keep it real.
For me, the issue is the instantaneous industrial movement of ±250 units of stone, not the movement of the temporary sunshade and fencing that make up the stockyard.
I understand the ability to designate this or that area as a stockyard, but teleporting the content of the yard is the issue I’d address by dumping the stock and moving the building.
Of course there is the ox-cart to help with that,and later in the game there is the wagon building, but Crate have made a point of saying that each resource doesn’t teleport between storage areas, it needs to be fetched from where it is to be used where it is needed.
I have played many games that have many different ways of doing this. But this a design choice by the devs and for good reasons.
Your problem with it is that it breaks immersion. Well, this is a simulation. Once the decision was made to code the ability to move buildings they had to decide on how that would function. The way they choose is the cleanest both for coding and gameplay but this comes at a cost of immersion. They have to make these decisions all the time but here’s the thing, the devs must be doing a pretty good job at building an immersive game as this is the one that breaks it for you.
Consider just scaling, both of map and time. The fact that you are a frontier colony, who explore and settle er… frontiers, yet the map just ends at some point. No more exploring for you. Yet things exist outside the map like traders, raiders and of course other settlements for your immigrants to emigrate from. Spoiler - they don’t exist. But they are coded in such a way that give you that impression. So you are fine with all of that because they coded it in a way that does not break immersion.
Here’s why I think they made this decision. There is a master job list of jobs to be done. This is a complicated process as different people do different things. This list is further complicated by priority allocation which you choose. All the time things are being allocated and prioritised by the jobs list.
Now imagine adding to that list a move building order. As it works just one lowly worker can magically gain the strength of a God and the storage capacity of black hole and move it.
If you had it your way, literally 100’s of move orders would have to be added and completed on high priority before you could disassemble, transport and then rebuild for “realism”. Not only that, where are you going to store the goods in the emptying phase? You need another storage, right?
You see it adds a lot of complexities that attempts at realism brings. Magic is ok sometimes.
Oftentimes your wagon is full because of whatever else has been getting put into it near wherever it was last parked. It would be great if the wagon could be emptied and then driven somewhere else to fill it with something else. But that isn’t a functionality yet.
I agree I think a ‘dump’ mechanic would be great and if it was ‘auto cast’ when moving a storage building, (To address a point raised earlier, I don’t think the fetch tasks associated with the move need to be high priority), I think the system could work within the system.
I know that Crate have asked for minimal theory crafting on the forums, but this is my head cannon. The basic stockyard is a dumping ground for high bulk/low spoilage/low value goods that do not need shelter. As a result the boundaries of the yard are simple fences. Those fences and the shelter of whatever guard/cart is associated with the yard can be moved with little effort. But the movement of the yard to ‘over there’ should be either 1. At the expense of leaving the goods behind to be collected at the convenience of the towns inhabitants. or 2. Add an amount of work units to the move depending on the stock level, so a yard with 20 firewood would have no penalty, but units of work are added for every 300 goods to be moved, as an example.
Again, I am aware that there are coding limitations, I know that I don’t know what is involved in writing code for this, my feeling is just that there is an exploit here that can be closed by dropping the contents of a/any/all building(s) when moving the buildings. A version of the mechanic already exists in the game where your people drop their goods when running away from raiders/wild beasts.
Games have followed your head cannon and created a stockpile mechanic.
As you say things that do not need to be roofed can just be dumped in a stockpile or just left… They chose not to do it this way. It’s messy and does not fit with the aesthetics.
I think you are aware that there are coding limitations but not aware of the ramifications of them. They want a general function that works for everything. You are suggesting a specific function for specific cases. That gets messy real quick. Villagers dropping goods when a new need supersedes the current one is not the same function as moving goods. It’s an object creator to avoid loss. The objects created (tracked is probably a better word) have to be graphically displayed and are re-added to the jobs list, which is a separate function. And so on…
Let the magic happen on this one and you have a smoother game I think. This is one of those, be careful what you wish for moments. I have seen many games get this wrong and you don’t want that.
The simplest solution I can put out is to have a variable labor requirement established by the contents of the building. If your building is full of stone, it should require much more labor than an empty building. Since each worker has an arbitrary inventory limit for each item already (less stone than firewood can be carried by an individual), the labor cost of the move should be set based on the number of trips a person would need to make to move the material.
The destination building needs to be built first. Then the material moved, and finally the origonal building gets material reclaimed. This process should reclaim only part of the material used in construction just as if you manually reclaimed the building now. The move building function should be no different, and this loss of material from new to reclamation would certainly give players a reason not to move it around constantly. To ensure new material can’t be added to the old building, this building’s activities would have to be shut down. This would mean material couldn’t be removed by other workers either. The job foreman has to take inventory of everything being moved, and ensure the same inventory reaches the destination, so this makes sense. This also locks in the cost of movement once you decide to move it.
If we had the ability to manually move material from one building to another, we could certainly do away with the easy to use move building feature and just require us to build the new building first, move the goods, then reclaim the old building if we still wanted to. That would keep the old building’s functionality in tact during the entire process.
Or, if it’s a building in the Storage category: moving it means leaving all the goods where they are, as commodities on the ground, collectable by waggons as well as labourers, which then get hauled to the nearest facility of the same type. If the building is not in the storage category then the goods within are moved.
But of course, if the current mechanism is something you consider an exploit and you don’t like that… don’t do it. It’s a single player game after all. You do you.