Greetings, medievalists!
If you're on the experimental branch, you may have already noticed a quality-of-life improvement in how settlers handle construction and mining tasks. But what does it all mean?
If we ignore their stats, settlers in our game are not the brightest bunch when it comes to certain actions. They’ll do stuff that you order them to do, but the order in which they do it would sometimes… cause problems.
Take for example a building:
Deconstruction:
Mining:
As you can see, the will is there but they couldn’t figure out the order in which they would perform those actions so it doesn’t block them nor trap them. The problem would be additionally extrapolated by the complexity of constructions and amount of settlers on the map.
It took a bit of a code overhaul when it comes to job prioritization, but we think we found a solid alternative thanks to this Rimworld mod. The new system would calculate positioning when it comes to construction/deconstruction/mining orders and “point” out the “right” position that would not affect other orders. This also means that settlers will work on jobs that do not create new enclosed regions, but will work on those "blocking" jobs if there are no more non-blocking ones left.
Here is how that will look in practice:
And here is the side by side comparison to see how big of a difference this new logic makes.
A nice bonus from the new job priority is that they first destroy the foundation and then the walls just fall, so they seem even smarter. Huzzah!
The system is still not perfect as there may be some edge cases that we miss, so do let us know if you see something off when it comes to this type of behavior.
This logic has been on the experimental branch for a while now and we’ve seen no complaints about it. This usually means that the patch is ready for the main version, so keep your eyes peeled.
How do you like this QoL stuff? Was mining/construction/deconstruction order something that bothered you or you didn’t pay attention to it? Let us know in the comments. Until next time…
Stay medieval!