Just started playing this game again, after not playing for a year or so, and after 2 weeks I think this game has greatly improved since the previous time I played.
One constant annoyance though is having to move the tiny, tiny radius of the rat catcher around every minute or so, constantly needing to interrupt the other things I’m doing to make sure rats don’t multiply. It isn’t fun at all, it feels like a chore.
Why doesn’t the rat catcher just work like the Compost Yard, not with a working area, but the catchers just go wherever on the map a rat infestation occurs? I know people have suggested this over a year ago already on these forums, so I was kind of expecting this to have been fixed in one of the recent updates.
Are you trying to have one rat catcher doing everything? Just place rat catchers so their areas overlap a bit while covering what’s needed and leave them alone. Works for me.
That solution doesn’t work at all, because I DO have multiple rat catchers, and I still have to move around their tiny areas all the time.
A problem is that there are a lot of buildings susceptible to rats, including root cellars of which I often place single ones to service local food gathering camps or barns further out from the town. With your solution I would need to build a designated rat catcher for every single one of them, that is then inactive 99% of the time (and wasting gold and an able bodied villager).
With your solution I’d build 15 rat catchers just to catch everything in their tiny working areas, while the amount of work that needs to be done is easily done by just 3 of them. And every time I build a root cellar I have to build another rat catcher.
I don’t get why they don’t just work like Compost Yards, is there a specific reason the devs think this would break the game? Because both our strategies would work perfectly fine, while at the moment only your strategy works of building six times more ratcatchers than your settlement needs.
When I construct more buildings, this should be because my settlement requires them, not because the game makes them so user unfriendly that I build more simply to get rid of the annoyance of having to deal with them.
TLDR, making them work like Compost Yards will solve this issue entirely with zero downsides, will lead to more enjoyable gameplay and does not force players to unnecessarily overbuild stuff, just to get rid of an annoyance that is completely preventable. It’s an easy fix.
My solution would solve that issue too, if rat catchers no longer have a working area you wouldn’t need to place them in between your houses anymore. You could just place them in your industrial area and have them work from there. Similar to the Compost Yard.
Update - there is new version of Nexus Mods called ‘Work Area Overhauled’ with one single file and this now works with the Rat Catcher on the latest 0.95 game
That gives the option to increase the work radius up to x10 for a wide variety of buildings. This included the Rat Catcher and solved this small radius issue. However since the most recent patches ( I am now on the latest version of the Game) there is now an issue as the mod author has never updated this. Ironically, for you, and me… this mod now produces an error message in the Melon Loader (the framework for mods) which affects ONLY the Rat Catcher… doh!
This causes a crash now and so I have had to remove the .dll file associated with the Rat Catcher in this mod’s contents. If however the mod author might eventually update this mod, it may sort your problems out so you may wish to track it on NexusMods
I agree for a different mechanic for this. Maybe give them a big boost for the work radius. A T2 upgrade for the rat catcher en maybe a little bit of increase upkeep.
Could the buildings that use a radius could just have a center-of-work marker instead of a circle with a hard boundary? It’s a bit annoying to have to keep moving the circle for the forager hut every season because the circle is a few feet away from a whole bunch of berries. What you really want is to tell this building to work in this general area (and prioritize collecting this resource, if it’s a foraging building) and then if you have time, work farther away from the center.
Expand the working area for ratcatchers, so we need fewer of them. The way I build, I can get pretty good coverage in my industrial areas, especially if I can concentrate the buildings related to food. But in my residential areas (usually more than one), the present system requires that I build a huge number of rat catchers, which is wasteful, to me. Maybe an upgrade, as Ro84 suggested. When I get a large rat infestation and have only one rat catcher, and he or she is “Seeking Shelter” or “Stocking Shelter” or, game forbid, gets sick and ends up in hospital, then I effectively have no rat catcher in that area. Giving us an upgrade with two rat catchers would alleviate that condition. But at the very least, I’m sure many would appreciate as much as I would, having the rat catchers serve a much larger area.
I agree. Maybe an improved T2 rat catcher could employ cats, or terriers, to make their efforts more efficient? Odd, actually, that there aren’t any dogs or cats running around in our towns as in many city builder type games.
I agree the rat catching mechanic is annoying. I have like a dozen rat trapping buildings. I would prefer to have one and a worker deploys to the rat problem…no need to have a workers sitting around idle waiting for rats.
It would be neat if the Rat Catcher could get a 2nd tier upgrade which allows them to create Rat traps which reduce the chance for Rat infestation. Similar like Barrels in Food Storage will reduce the chance for Food to spoil.
A Tier 2 Rat Catcher could create instead traps while not on active duty, which they then regularly check and repair/exchange.