Hey everyone, Desktop Tuesday makes it’s triumphant return! Despite a wide variety of work-and-personal travel, Team Stonehearth has been hard at work on Alpha 21, and it’s tentpole feature, Hearthling Traits. Let’s take a closer look!
Traits Make Hearthlings Individuals
Recap from the video:
- Traits are a natural outgrowth of hearthling mood. In A20, we focused on giving hearthlings thoughts and feelings. In A21, we make these thoughts and feelings different for different hearthlings.
- The end result–an increased sense of life in the world, and gameplay optimization opportunities galore
- When a character is created, they are automatically assigned a few personality quirks that will affect their behavior, or that will alter their mood when they do certain things.
- A21 comes with about a dozen traits, which cover a bit of ground.
- For example, a carnivore hearthling will preferentially eat meat, requires less meat to become satiated, and will express their unhappiness via the thought system if only vegetables are available. A vegetarian hearthling is the opposite: they prefer eating vegetables, can be satisfied with fewer calories when eating vegetables, and will share unhappy thoughts when there’s nothing to eat but animals.
- Profession traits cause hearthlings to prefer certain job classes. They receive happiness bonuses when assigned to their class of choice.
- Mood traits: The optimist trait skews its hearthling towards the happy end of the mood meter, and the pessimist trait does the opposite. The excitable trait amplifies any movement across the meter.
- Night Owl causes offsets sleep cycles by 12 hours, and Green Thumb means a person becomes really happy when interacting with plants.
- Packmule and featherweight affect how much a hearthling can carry, as well as their movement speed.
- When creating the traits, Designer Richard worked hard to make sure that each trait had both positive and negative elements to it, and that each element on it’s own had only a moderate gameplay impact, so that no trait could make its hearthling an instant liability to your town, or an instant superstar, either.
- Each trait implies an optimization pathway for your town, to both grant you micro-goals on each playthrough–gotta make that green thumb guy an herbalist or farmer–and also to diversify play experience between playthroughs: in THIS town you had a carnivore, so you had to diversify into trapping, and in THAT town most people were herbevores, so you leaned more towards a farming solution.
- Together, the traits present on your collective set of hearthlings should result in a different narrative experience for each town and it’s inhabitants.
- When first creating your starting party, traits are assigned at random, but you’re always welcome to re-roll on a per-character or on a whole party basis until you get a good distribution. This element of randomness is actually quite important to us–we think it makes the hearthlings feel more like real people if you can’t control everything about them.
For those of you who have been playing with Traits for a couple of weeks now, we’ve really been enjoying the suggestions you’ve been making for new traits on discourse.stonehearth.net. Keep them coming! For the rest of you, we’d love to hear how the traits are affecting your game. 
Other Announcements
We had a really productive three days at PAX East this year, so thank you to everyone who dropped by the booth with a comment, request, or word of support. We had three demo stations going all weekend, and this was the first time many of our newest teammates have gotten to meet you and interact with you as you played the game. We came back stuffed with ideas for making improvements, both small and large.
Special callouts to the young lady and gentleman who told me that you guys watch these Desktop Tuesdays every week as a break from your homework. It’s really nice to know you’re enjoying them! 
Our schedule should hopefully return to normal this week. This Thursday at 6:00pm PST, Nikki Galvan will be streaming, perhaps about some of her thoughts on the existing Building editor and how she intends to make it better for all of us. See you then!