With today's patch out, I think it's time to take a break from combat for a while. Tomorrow will be 3 months since the start of the current combat focus and a lot of missing things related to combat have been added - ranged combat, hospitals, squad perks, new enemies, etc. I will continue to fix combat issues as they come up or adjust balance when necessary but the overall focus will move to the general management aspects of Gnomoria.
Some things I am considering working on during this focus:
Crafting - A lot of crafting recipes are placeholder. When filling these out, I think crafting will get a bit of an overhaul.
Crafting recipes will have their quantities lowered but in general have more steps. Also, the amount of time it takes to craft once all the items are gathered will go up a little but there will be less items to haul. Combined with more crafting steps, the overall progression will end up slowing down a little bit.
With some of the burden moving from hauling to crafting, a higher crafting skill will help speed up crafting more than it currently does. Also, currently every item has a skill requirement to craft but that skill level is 1. Some items will start to have higher skill requirements to craft too.
Item quality doesn't seem to be generating correctly. I'm going to take a look at how quality is determined again and make sure that it's more consistent for a given crafter skill and recipe skill requirement.
Item values will also need to be adjusted during these crafting changes. Since Kingdom Worth is closely tied to enemy spawns, the formulas for those spawns will need to be adjusted along with the value changes.
Item Quality - With item quality working as intended, quality filters will need to be added. Merchants, stockpiles and uniform UI will get options to select or view items by quality. With these changes, item quality will increase the effectiveness of weapons and armor. Stockpiles will also get a filter for specific materials.
Merchants - Merchants will start to offer better items than they currently do based on your Kingdom Worth. Merchant trade rates will get adjusted as well.
Workshops - There has been a lot of good feedback for improving workshops that I'm excited to start implementing.
Workshops will get a "Craft To" option that will craft an item as long as the current amount is lower than the specified number. For example, crafting a plank and entering "Craft To 5" will queue a job to craft a plank when there are 4 or less planks but have no effect when there are 5 or more.
"Repeat" will be changed to simply not be removed from the list after crafting. Currently, it only skips the job in the queue if required materials are missing. For example, in the current setup if you have Sausage, Bread and Sandwich in your workshop queue and all on Repeat, it will craft sausages until there is no more meat and then start on bread. When new meat is available, crafting sausages will take priority over bread. With the changes, it will craft 1 sausage, 1 bread, 1 sandwich and repeat. If you run out of Wheat, it will craft 1 sausage , skip bread and then craft 1 sandwich if able. If both methods are desired, I'll add an option on the workshop for how it should handle Repeat tasks.
Workshops can be assigned a gnome and only that gnome will be allowed to work there. I'm also considering linking a stockpile to a workshop so that newly crafted items will stock there. I'm still considering if this is necessary and if those items can ONLY be stocked there and/or if other items are allowed to be stocked there.
Butcher shop needs some improvements. I'll add a filter for Pastures, so that specific animals can more easily be selected to butcher. When viewing livestock and corpses, there will be an item to queue it to be butchered at the closest butcher shop. There will also be options to have excess animals in a pasture and corpses to automatically be queued to butcher.
Tinker bench is missing it's UI entirely and needs to be added. Right now the tinkering progression is completely linear but if adding new items ends up adding tinkering options then I'll add the choice of what to tinker next here.
UI and usability - I'll do another pass on UI in general. There have been suggestions that I'd like to add like sorting gnomes in the population window and adding arrow buttons on menus, like gnome stats, to cycle through everyone as well as tracking more item quantities on the HUD. I'll look into giving better feedback for why jobs aren't being accepted and more control for prioritizing jobs.
Tree farms - These will be designations like farms but for trees. The orchard will work just like current farms but for fruit trees. So, apple trees will be planted and apples will be picked when available. The grove will automate planting saplings, cutting clippings and felling trees.
Other stuff - I'm going to adjust the formula for determining how many gnomads spawn so there isn't a soft cap around 45 gnomes. Claiming items for jobs will change so that items will remain claimed to a job when a gnome stops work on the job. I'll add a way to salvage items back into it's components, but I'm not sure if it'll be 100% refund or not. I'll be adding some more building options like fences, tombs, thrones, etc too.
Audio - Not exactly related, but I want to take the time at this stage to also add in sound effects as well as some changes to music and how music is played.
As always, I'll be fixing bugs along the way and listening to feedback. I'm sure changes will come up that aren't covered in this list.
