Trader suggestion + wooden Bee house

[Stefan Rambaran]

Good day All ,

I would like to suggest 2 things here , first :-

a way to grow your local village , as it stands , I believe the traders generate with the world randomly and that's it . maybe the player can somehow designate an area for a trader , and the game can provide a "traveling trader" who may decide to settle down . I'm not saying make it easy to get as many as you want , traders, as is ,necessitates infrastructure development and travel , I'm only suggesting a late game convenience.

Secondly :-

I strongly suggest that wooden bee-house for apiary . The skeps are great for the early game , however , they are definitely not the final solution . Wooden bee-houses are within the technological reach  and fit in nicely with the game . Additionally , I hear alot of people suggesting the scythe should cut reeds because it's grindey refreshing the reed supply , this , i believe is wrong , this is the encouragement to advance to the next age .

Much respect to the team behind this game , everything about it is wonderful .From the visuals to the music ,even the load times and the AI . Keep up the great work and I wish you nothing but success . 

[Prin]

I like both of these ideas, though another thing to consider, if village building isn't an option, but to have random travellers pop up at a set location at the village, to really give them the just-passing-through feel. I suspect that this may be something that they're working towards, as the next update is supposed to give the travellers actual wheels (albeit stationary). Though, that said, if they do make the travellers mobile, this could add to the difficulty of the game, because you would either have to wait for the right one to turn up, or you would really have to hunt around to find one, because you can't waypoint a moving target.

[Soliton]

Interesting suggestions.  As to your first suggestion I have often wondered the same thing but was worried about game balance.  The game rightfully prevents players from simply enslaving found traders by separating them by long distances and making it that they "teleport" back to their spawned location given a certain amount of time/distance.  We have all seen the abuses that occur in other block-based games.  Also, I don't really understand traders in the context of the game's lore.  Where do they come from?  How do they get the wares they offer to trade?  Until that mystery is resolved, I do know one thing about traders... they are capitalists and should be where ever there are gears to be made.  So I was thinking that maybe the traders could spawn in a user defined location if the following criteria are met.  The first criteria would be that you would have to make a road to them.  They have wheels and got to their locations in the first place, so maybe they just need encouragement to travel.  By the way, what actually powers their vehicles?  While I don't know, I would love to see a large passive animal (i.e. oxen) enter the game under this pretext.  So much could be done with them even if you made them some inedible lizard creature.  The second criteria is that you would have to a prepared spot for them to set up.  Maybe a flat spot, along side the road near your base, with some number of other improvements.  Third criteria, you would have had to have traded with them some amount.  Being good traders, they follow the gears and will only go to a place if they think there is profit to be had.  Fourth (and final) criteria, they only stay around as long as they are making gears.  If the trades stop they move on.

 

The only thing that keeps the current bee keeping system from being totally broken is the grind of getting reeds.  Without that you would end up with tons of honey at very little cost.  So how would the game balance the advantage (less time gathering) of a wooden apiary?  A couple of things come to mind.  Namely with greater reward you should have greater risk.  Right now the only threat to beehives is raccoons and that can be easily mitigated by a fence and a 2x deep trench around, which also serves as a significant source of meat in the early game.  So the first balance in my mind is that the more apiaries in an area the greater chance of an invasive wasp.  The player wouldn't know until he either breaks a skep or opens the wooden apiary and then lets loose the bees of war!  They would be an identical particle animation as a bee swarm but do far more damage and the dummy wouldn't distract them.  They would have consumed all the resources and have a significant chance to infect surrounding beehives.  So if you are not paying attention you could loose all your bees.  The advantage of a wooden apiary would be it could have a larger radius to service flowers.  Larger radius, lower density, less chance of invasive wasps.  This would only really become valuable if you balanced the substantially broken flower mechanic.  The first part of doing that would be bind flowers to a specific beehive.  Beehives already identify the number of surrounding flowers, so the idea would be to make it where once a flower has been identified, it becomes "invisible" to later places beehives.  Obviously once a beehive is broken then the flowers become available to be bound to surrounding beehives.  The second part is to make the only produce pollen for a short duration, depending on the flower species/season/moisture/etc...  Depending a string of variables, the flowers become visible/invisible to beehives.  

Sorry for the long response, but your comments got me thinking about this issue.

[Stefan Rambaran]

@Shaelin I agree with " just-passing-through feel" , much in the same way we can have cellars and charcoal pits  , we can build some sort of multiblock structure to designate the area and when we sleep and wake up ,there could be a trader there .While not what i originally imagined , that does seem to fit the game feel much more but it doesn't make sense to have them be mobile , despite the wheels ...that would be counter productive to the game , if the game expects us to travel to traders and build infrastucture to support travel between various traders , then why have them moving ? And beside that , the implementation of such a feature would probably be impossible , deciding paths , and dealing with terrain features ?

 

@Soliton You make some excellent points , but when you said "they are capitalists and should be where ever there are gears to be made" that really stuck a chord with me .Additionally , your suggestions to maintain balance seem ,well , balanced .As for your expansion on the apiary point ,I agree on most points with 2 exceptions ,there should indeed be a way for the player to detect his hive has been compromised so that he/she may take corrective action in a timely manner and the second point i disagree with is the binding of flowers to the hive , this sounds  expensive for the game performance for such a small game mechanic , making the honey timer longer would achieve the same thing .

As a counter to your last point about timed pollen , let us take frames out and extract the honey with restriction being that the bees don't produce honey during the winter  and are required to be left  with some honey to survive the  winter  akin to how its done . As I've said that , i realized that the frames could be consumable , but reusable , to reduce the grind of getting reeds , but keep it balanced . 

 

Thank you both for your ideas.

[AngryRob]

I think that villagers are something that should be "made", using bones and temporal gears. maybe even some sort of ritual during a temporal storm? When a villager is made they will need a bed, and food, and will help around the area. 

At the same time, being able to make animals this way would also be great. I am in a spot with no animals at all. So either A i move, which can be a pain, or B i lure animals to me, which is also a pain. So a new option to use dark physics of temporal distortion to bring an animal from bones would be useful.