Will there ever be villages in the game?

[StaryPierdziel]

The most village-like naturally generated thing in the game I had pleasure to encounter was a "trading market" with a three traders living together.

I always enjoyed building villages in survival games, be it with NPC's like in Terraria or Minecraft, or other players like in 7DTD. Being in charge of governing the village, building roads and structures and trading with citizens was always my kind of a gameplay. I heard that game devs were planning on adding villages in the future but I can't find any information about that right now. I don't even know how would that work, if possible.

This could also be quite fitting for the main protagonist, as in one of the possible dialogues with traders he says that he "would live in a cosy village if they could".

My assumption is that it would be a late game thing (for a ballance reason, as having lots of traders and warriors around yourself would make a game extremely easy). You could achieve that by requirement to gather hard to obtain ingredients that would be later used to craft a "claim block". Then you would have to prepare 8x8x4 (or something like that) room/building/place (hopefully as customizable as humanly possible) in which you could use claim block, just like you use temporal gear to make a spawnpoint. That spawnpoint would work not for you, but for a citizen, that would settle there after X pediod of time.

There could be more than one type of a claim blocks. Separate ones for traders, guardians, farmers etc.

Establishing a decent sized village would then activate the high-end boss fights. I'm thinking about protecting the village from sieges of barbarians, temporal storm hordes, or some bigger threats.

What do you guys think?

 

 

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, StaryPierdziel said:

What do you guys think?

I think you should play through the main story. 1.20 added the second chapter, and without spoiling too much, features a village. It's still a work in progress, as there are some NPC features that are obviously planned but not yet implemented. Judging by what's there though, I would say that villages/civilized areas are going to be story-specific locations and not randomly generated, thus making them very rare. The advantage of building them that way is that the NPCs and stuff within those areas can be detailed a lot more thoroughly, rather than left more generic for random generation.

[Tom Cantine]

I think that the rarity of villages is kind of part of the lore, and so quite deliberate. (Still, there are some minor inconsistencies; one of the trader dialogue lines I think says something about how "most people" live in villages, but in my experience these scattered traders represent the overwhelming majority of the population. )

But my style of play also very much includes the sort of village-building you talk about, and I would just love to have something like that in VS. 

So I wonder if there could be some code that looked for the construction of roads, and analyzed them (sort of like the code that checks for whether something qualifies as a room or a cellar or a greenhouse). Here's one possibility: When two or more traders are connected by a valid road network, an area along that road becomes a valid destination for a village to form, and if you build a house and furnish it with some bare minimum of facilities, an innkeeper villager may move in after word gets around of the opportunity. How does word get around? Well, you interact with one trader, then travel along the entire road and interact with the other. If you achieve this without your feet ever leaving the paved trail, it registers as a valid road, and gives a new dialogue option or a new item for purchase (that might represent sponsoring a franchise for a journeyman from the Innkeeper's Guild to take up residence).

That's just one mechanism that springs to mind. But it seems to me that roads (and perhaps coastal ports) should be an important part of creating and growing villages to repopulate this world.

[D3K01]

or it could be handled similarly to Terraria, or Minecraft in how NPC's spawn and respond to buildings. for instance it could require a handful of artifacts placed together within a specific space enclosed by 4 walls, a floor, a roof, and a door for a building to register as a building, and then, when you have a certain number of buildings within a certain distance of each other it counts as a village. or it could be buildings surrounded by a wall counts as a village as a village requires protections. something that could be considered as well is that Lore wise there are rifts leading into an eldritch realm of living cloth and metal constructs, so maybe a rift inhibitor enclosed in a large wall counts as the trigger for a village, dependent upon the buildings available.

[Morndenkainen]

Hopefully villages will have a bit more lore on the temporal storms. Considering that this world is apparently supposed to have been torn up by them. I kinda like the lore concept of this game so far, and having a reason to migrate towards a town that you can expand or take over or farm supplies for is always a nice gameplay arc. Besides, it'd be cool to have more specific general goods traders that always have some guaranteed supplies for sale... Like seeds, compost, raw hides, ingots/ores, different swords/armors/gear etc.