I don’t get this. I have more than enough homes already. I built a new home out by the mines to test something, yet it was instantly taken by 4 yahoos that already had lived in a higher tier home in town. They didn’t work at the mines, they worked way back in town. There was no reason for them to suddenly jump to a tier 1 home far from town.
And if I unassigned everyone from their jobs, then assigned miners… it didn’t assign the 4 people that lived in the house next to the mine.
This is the kind of stupid stuff that is making the game so difficult to deal with. I try not to criticize the team but this stuff is just terrible.
Which is why it is in a thing we call early access.
Then everytime you feel like criticizing a game developer (of any game) trying to implement a complex AI that is receiving input from multiple integrated game systems how about you go ahead and ask yourself how well your AI would turn out, and how human-like would the decisions it make be, if you made it.
That should tone down those kinds of statements real quick.
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Better to simply point them at where you think the issues and hiccups are so they can take a look at it for you and see what they can do to smooth the wrinkles out.
As an Engineer for 30 years… there is a significant amount of discussion, planning, testing, etc that I did for projects or programs I created. So yeah… that’s exactly why I feel this implementation is terrible. This should have been discussed and worked out before a single line of code was written. Villagers don’t just move to new homes by themselves, they are coded that way. So someone specifically coded a new home to be populated by villagers that ALREADY had a home. But apparently, it’s completely random because there is no logical reason why it would be some random guy from town, not the guy working in the mines next door. They already have proximity/travel on the UI when you run out of workers. It’s not based on that. If you remove every single worker, then add one worker (all are now free), it just picks some random guy and is not based on travel distance.
I can accept they didn’t intend that to be the case, and planned ahead of time to actually work based on proximity to work location but it doesn’t work because of bugs/code issues. But that’s also something that should have been caught long before the game was ever even to this point.
You can’t build a second tier house. But if you mean the Temporary Shelter that is listed as Tier 2… yes I already have those. The problem is the workers in the mines only get food from those. They still spend a ton of time running back to town to “Stock Shelter” with food that they don’t need since they are getting food from the temp shelter.
The primary function of homes in this game outside of housing people is to increase their desirability by building (you guessed it) desirable neighborhoods through the use of appropriate buildings and decorations. They serve as one of the few ways you can consider any particular playthrough as complete, since if you have every house at T4 then something you did must have gone right.
I believe that the developers view housing in this context, meaning that the purpose of housing is not to keep miners on the mountain (and so forth), but to serve as the litmus test for how well you are progressing through the stages of the game. I can certainly understand how you may view this as an oversight, but I really think its simply a matter of differing perspectives as to what “housing” means in the context of Farthest Frontier.
In the case of your housing example perhaps all that is going on is that, considering the previous assertion that houses are primarily a means of measuring your overall performance, that you would do everything in your power to aggregate your houses together so as to maximize the potential desirability score for each house. If this were the case then it would matter significantly less that your villagers house swap at the drop of a hat since, at least in theory, all of your houses are going to be in one generalized area.
As for the Temporary Shelter, assuming you have enough spaces for everyone then they will be used in the event of extreme weather (blizzards, deadly cold). If you didn’t have that up there then your miners would trundle back to town and inevitably die of exposure. I have had my Temporary Shelter network used regularly and it has cut down on the exposure deaths pretty significantly. I have not noticed the miners running back to town to stock shelter since someone else in the home seems to be doing that, so instead they just work the whole time.
Putting a home at the mines was a test. It doesn’t matter, when I had them all in town eventually you get large enough that the worker ends up being in a home on the far side of town. This how “progressing” thing is nonsense. Sure, it’s a valid part of the game. But it’s NOT why building a tier one home would suddenly fill with people from random locations when those people ALREADY HAD A HOME. If you are going to have people change homes when a new one is built, then don’t just randomly fill it, especially when they left at T3/T4 house to go to a crappy T1.
I’ve spent hours watching characters to see why they are spending so much time running all over and not working. Yes, I used temp shelters, they help. But the biggest problem is the “Stocking Shelter” call and the fact that workers are just placed in random houses and there is no good way to change that.
I mean, I would obviously much prefer it if people stayed in their original home, I’ve been whining about it for days, not going to lie, but I think that @Jaaro has a point that it is possible that the system as is does have an intended functionality that has something to do with population density. I have noticed that it usually affects full houses so it might be that the frontierpeeps prefer more space and do not like to live in full houses. It is a new game and learning new systems can be difficult and frustrating so maybe I’m just missing the point of the existing system. The fact that it occasionally but not consistently triggers on reload and not just when new houses are built kind of makes me feel like it is probably some kind of bug though.
I also agree with @Jaradis that since population density is not required for any part of the game’s functionality, it seems weird to include a system that forces it other than, you know, impending death from irked landlords or drunk bears. If it was an intended system I would be disappointed, it is very much my number one top disliked feature. If it is working as intended I probably would stop playing the game before it annoyed me too much. Is this Crate’s problem? Absolutely not.
they have a really complex and realistic AI. Maybe you didn’t notice but that family had a member of their household spent a year in hospital and couldn’t work; together with the inflation, increase cost of living and a new child, they could not afford the tier 3 home anymore. They decided to move to a tier 1 house in the outskirt and rather spend the last of their earning in food and a new fur coat for their child so they could survive the winter. Once they can overcome the unexpected hardship, they’ll move back to the town to make sure their child can have easy access to education.
I saw the temporary shelter as an “inn” where people would “kind of” live to avoid returning home in the city. But that’s not the case, there is no innkeeper and I never saw anyone inside even when the blizzard stroke.
I would like people in the game to choose their home depending on their workplace. It would really help to build “satellite” villages that can function nearly autonomously.
This and have the ability for “stores” to exchange goods so that one of these remote villages could have access to pottery even without building some itself.
I really would like to make a network of mini towns on my huge maps. Guess I’ll have to dig in the code and mod it maybe someday.
I don’t see the point in such huge maps if you can’t take full advantage of them. Mines and temporary shelters are OKish, but not ideal.
Actually, do you think it might be being triggered in occupations that ‘should’ have occupational housing? I feel like it is disproportionately affecting fishery, healers and rat catchers.
Edit:
In the small, semi-controlled tests I just did it is fishers, foragers and healers who get moved first.
Can’t wait. They already work well for feeding the workers, the biggest problem I have is the constant need for the workers to run all the way back to town to stock their shelter with food that they are never going to eat.
