Medieval Monday Talk #77 - Proper Order

Greetings, medievalists!

Just because 1.0 version of the game is out, we don’t wanna stop doing Medieval Monday Talks because:

The game will continue to receive content, improvements and bug fixes and it’s important to acknowledge that and keep you in the loop.
It allows us to keep transparency with you while also getting valuable feedback.
They are fun to do and it’s exciting to talk about the stuff we are doing.

Now let’s talk about improvements we are making. Construction and mining are such complicated things to solve due to the existence of 3d dimension. Tie that to complex buildings and systems you are building both above and under the ground, and it can become evident how the settlers do not behave as you wanted them to do for these situations. We are improving them, but it may look like we are just patching edge cases rather than addressing the issue as a whole.

And that is why we are doing some more upgrades. When we break it down to essentials, it seems that two things are particularly important to the core problem. One is that settlers are not choosing shortest paths when they perform their tasks, and the second is that construction/deconstruction/mining tasks are calculated by system trying to be smart which led to situations where settlers would zone out for a bit because they figured they would get trapped by performing those tasks.

First thing will be solved by smarter and optimized calculations that will take into account the settler’s distance from a resource/pile/building. Ideally, this could also solve that long known issue where settlers would not choose the closest production building (if there are more of the same type), but the one that has a production set first in the global list of productions. But this is still in the trial and error way on our side, but we are experimenting with it.

Second thing should be solved by a system where settlers will build/dig/deconstruct in order you marked for them, with the preexisting benefit of avoiding getting trapped.

Here is the comparison between the current system (left) and this work-in-progress version (right). Notice how they’ll prioritize your order of placement and how mining is no more zig-zag process but a smoother from-one-side-to-another approach.

But again, it’s worth noting that we are still experimenting with it and that there are different scenarios and factors we have to consider and will continue to do so. But it looks like a good progress, right?

In other news, we are also into bug fixing mode and are trying our best to cover the most vital issues. Some things are resolved with a simple save and reload, and if not – sharing your experience on Steam discussion is also valuable. The best thing you can do is report bugs via F10 and join our Discord server for direct communication with the team and other players.

So how does this all sound to you? Let us know in the comments. There is still more to do, to fix, to improve. While you wait, be sure to…

Stay medieval!