Trader Based Village Mechanics (Far down the road)

[EndlessOats]

Villages have been suggested countless times, I'm sure. But I think everyone is missing the point of the game. There has been an apocalypse that leveled strongholds, obliterated all of society even with Jonas' machines, and wiped out essentially everyone but the traders, and they are (supposed to be) few. No, there absolutely should not be a little farming hut village every couple miles.

What there should be is a few stragglers, a couple survivors barely surviving through their trade routes and crafts. And lo and behold, that's what we have. However, the player is different. Building structures, learning crafts, establishing themselves, bringing back the old ways. It stands to reason the player should be able to bring them back proper, and only the player.

What I'm suggesting is that instead of generating messy villages that conflict with lore and serve little purpose on their own, we leave it entirely up to the player whether they want to create society again, or not. Build houses and workplaces and then recruit the traders to come live there and serve their crafts, and depending on the type of trader they can do different things for you and sell/produce different things for the village.

In order to recruit a trader, you'd need a place for them to live, a stable food supply (and you'll have to continuously feed them and your entire population, or else they starve/leave) and obviously fight off the drifters (and new mobs in 1.20). In later iterations more things should be required to run a village such as clothes and medicine, which can be purchased from trade routes or produced by your population or yourself. I think this system plays into the class system well for singleplayer worlds, and can even be a good source of labor for multiplayer worlds at the cost of obviously requiring endgame level amounts of resources to attain and sustain.

On that note, this entire process should absolutely be endgame content. You not only need to sustain yourself, but one or two other people at a time, who may or may not be producing their own food or resources or tools depending on profession, so this is (and should be) an expensive endeavor.

TLDR; Villages shouldn't generate, but should be solely built and managed by the player if they choose to do so, and should be entirely optional. Generated villages obliterate lore, are literally always messy and improperly built/generated (functional structure code is basically impossible to implement consistently, it has nothing to do with the skill of those involved), and do not add anything whatsoever to the game except scenery and maybe some resources to pilfer. However, personally, I still love village mechanics, so this is a great (and very lore friendly) compromise, making villages useful and much, much easier to implement.

Edited September 19 by EndlessOats

[EndlessOats]

I'd also like to add, as an optional sidenote, that villagers could absolutely still build structures once the player establishes a village. Obviously you'd have to pay them and your village would need the resources and infrastructure to do it. This sounds hard to implement, and likely will be, but it is definitely possible, especially with modern tech. Millénaire has been out for literally a decade (2011, I'm old as dirt). Given that Baritone has been out for years too, it stands to reason a scaled down and simplified NPC building system is possible and probably not too tall an ask under this system. The player designates an area for a structure to be built, the NPCs build it given resources and pay, and the player can obviously also do the same and designate their own structures for certain purposes as long as they have functional blocks/workstations (anvil and forge for metalwork, fruitpress and barrel for winery, etc.) The speed at which a structure is built can be dependent on how many NPCs you've hired to do it, and even change slightly depending on how much you've paid them, with underpaid workers building slower.

Villagers should only build structures when prompted by the player. This means that there's no random huts being built inside caves or in unreachable spots, no paths that go nowhere, and no messy or immersion breaking terrain weirdness and dirt cubes under badly placed houses.

 

Spoiler

(I have also just realized and really need to add that this suggestion is quite literally exactly what happens in The Morning, with Bearfirth coming forth to the peoples of the world and sharing her madness with them, absolutely one of my favorite lore bits in any game ever.)

Edited September 19 by EndlessOats