Hey Everyone,
Are you tired of forging iron ingots on an anvil? How about creating thread and bolts of cloth on a table? Well, so are we! Introducing: new workstations for crafters, coming to a Stonehearth Alpha* near you!
When this update eventually goes live, your crafters will be able to create multiple types of workshops. Recipes will in turn require a specific type of workshop: spindles for thread, looms for fabric, forges for ingots, etc.
As a happy side-effect of this change, crafters will also move to a team-based model, making their interaction more consistent with the worker/farmer/trapper brethren. If you have more than one carpenter, for example, the carpenter UI will allow you to queue tasks for all of your carpenters. They will work in parallel from the shared queue, or share workbenches if necessary.
This change has actually been quite a long time coming. As those of you who have been with us since the beginning may remember, we’ve spent quite a lot of time iterating our way towards our ideal set of crafters and an intuitive crafting UI/workflow. Though it’s always been our intent to give crafters a whole workshop full of tools, the complexity of the crafter’s AI and the many elements involved in their UI originally encouraged us to create a tight pairing between the crafter and their workshop. In order to allow for the above features, we had to break this pairing, resulting in quite a bit of fallout to our save/load code, the crafting AIs, the workshop reservation system, the pathfinding system, the inventory, and more.
One of the first things you’ll notice about the new workflow is that it fundamentally revises the last major change we made to the crafter promotion workflow, (a whole year and four months ago now!). Though crafters are still promoted via talismans (keeping their parity with other classes), they will no longer be prompted to make a workshop before the player can see the craft item UI. Instead, you’ll be able to access the crafting UI from either the crafter or the main menu. From this menu, you’ll be cued to create a workshop (or as many workshops as you like), which will unlock the level-appropriate recipes that depend on it. As a happy side effect of the inventory overhaul we yet have to do to enable this enabling, we should also be able to resolve a couple longstanding bugs involving stuck crafters and maintaining extra items.
*Though this feature was originally slated for A11, bugfixing efforts and a number of inventory/UI/UX issues have encouraged us to push this out until we’re sure we’ve got it reasonably right. Look for it in A12 or later.