Greetings, medievalists!
We’ve mentioned before that we plan to improve pathfinding when it comes to handling construction, deconstruction and mining orders. In other words, some of the most common things your settlers do.
These improvements have been live on the experimental branch for a while now, and so far the reception has been positive. Because of that, we feel it’s a good time to bring them to the main branch soon.
So, in this Medieval Monday Talk, we’ll explain what you can expect from the new logic – via videos!
Settlers will reserve up to three construction, deconstruction, or mining spots.
Notice how settlers place buildings in the order the blueprints were placed, as seen in the version on the right. At some point, all reachable jobs for the house on the left are reserved, just before the roof blueprints become reachable. One of the settlers then switches to building the house on the right. Even though the roof becomes reachable in the meantime, that settler will not switch back to the house on the left, despite it being a higher priority. The jobs they have claimed by delivering resources now have a fixed, highest priority.
When it comes to delivering resources, settlers will go to the closest pile first. This logic also applies when taking resources to production buildings and stockpiles.
With this logic, we will finally solve the issue where settlers would not choose the closest production building if there were multiple buildings of the same type. Previously, they would choose the one whose production was set first in the global production list. Yup, it’s happening!
Some frequently reported issues came from situations where someone would occupy a building or mining spot, which could break or delay that action in the process.
Now, humans and animals will try to avoid those spots and let your settlers do their work in peace.
Also, if there is a big gap between jobs, settlers will take a more clustered approach to assignments and prioritize jobs closest to them.
The system is not perfect, and it does not work all the time, as you can see in the video. But this is the best trade-off we could make without affecting or disrupting other systems. Compared to the previous mess, it is significantly better.
In addition to that, if a settler has a “deliver materials” goal, they will prefer to pick up as many resources as they can carry when the goal starts. This helps create a local reserve of resources when building one-wide bridges and similar job sites where reachability opens up gradually.
There are some cases where settlers will only pick up piles for the carry-over scenario if those piles are very close, up to two voxels away. Ideally, you should not see situations where a settler visits ten separate piles of two wood scattered around the area when they only need one wood.
There may still be some edge cases we missed during this process, but none of them should be blockers or game breakers. Once this update goes live, please let us know how it feels. Oh and… it goes live tomorrow. Yup! Stay tuned, and…
Stay medieval!