Hey Everyone, Alpha 17 is now on Steam Unstable! Early, even! We’re hard at work fixing the bugs you’ve reported yesterday, but in the meantime, here’s a Desktop Tuesday covering some of the building improvements that are in this release, courtesy of lots of hard work from Yang.
Building Improvements and Autoqueue
Recap from the video:
- We know our building editor is super hard to use, so we think that everyone who is currently making amazing things with it is incredibly cool. Thank you all!
- For everyone else, when we made A17 about building, we started by going through all your accumulated building-related feedback, and picking things that we thought would be both high value and immediately feasible. So here are a bunch of improvements you will find in A17, now on Steam Stable!
- Expanded Access to Furniture/Decor: The furniture section of the building editor now contains not just all the furniture & decor that is currently in your inventory, but also all the furniture and decor that your crafters know how to craft. This means that as long as any crafter you’ve ever had knows how to make something, you can add it to your building templates.
- Crafter Autoqueue from Building Editor: Furniture, fixtures, and decor that are added to a building from the building editor are then automatically added to the relevant crafter queue. So if you’ve set your crafters up right (i.e., near plentiful materials and with all the correct workshops) before you start a building project, the building should just complete all by itself!
- Caveat 1: If your order is blocked for any reason, like by a unplaced workbench, or lack of materials, it’s up to you to go to the crafter and figure out why.
- Caveat 2: If the thing you order is dependent on other things, the way a comfy bed is dependent on simple beds, the child-dependencies will not be auto-added, because this could be a long chain with no end.
- Caveat 3: If you had a ton of an item already, and then ask for more from the building editor, the items will currently auto-queue anyway, because there’s no way for the game to know that those items weren’t designated for another building project, or for the goblin chieftain. So don’t make windows and doors anymore in advance of needing them for building, unless you actually need them for something else.
- And a note: If you find that auto-queue isn’t working for you, there’s a way to turn it off in the settings.
- Colors have Names, More Colors: Added names to all the colors of rock and wood, so that it’s easier to describe and remember what block you where using. Also, added a ton more colors to things like pillars, so now you should be able to make even more combinations of interesting houses.
- Notification of Building Stuck-ness: We know that many of you are incredibly frustrated by the fact that often, your hearthlings just cannot figure out how to build the house you’ve designed. Most of the time these days, it’s because their pathfinder cannot figure out how to get to some part of the structure that they need to get to, to advance. This is not a bug, as much as it is a challenge of pathfinding and AI as a field, and Chris is working on it! In the meantime, we continue to look for ways to let you know when YOU can help your hearthlings finish a building. For A17, Yang has added a toast that will pop up when you have run out of the resources needed to complete a building, and tweaked the UI to call out what is needed. This way, if the building is stuck not for pathfinding and AI reasons, but because you’re simply out of materials, you will be alerted so you can do something about it. The building does NOT alert when you are out of furniture and decor (though it shows in the UI) because presumably your crafters are hard at work making those things.
All of these features are currently in Alpha 17, and on the Steam Unstable branch right now, so please try them out and let us know how they’re working for you!
Other Notes:
Stream schedule will happen as usual this week!