Hi everyone,
After last week’s quick introduction of fast travel, I decided to introduce another quick quality of life feature this week: the “runner” wagon.
The runner wagon is, at least for now, a slimmed down version of what will become the transport wagon in the future. It can be sent around the world similarly to the pioneer wagon, though much cheaper to build, and it obviously can’t create a village. The main reason for the runner wagon is to have more control over sending a variety of goods, and to collect a variety of loot.
Let’s take a defeated fortress, for example. The ruins offer lots of hard won loot to the player, but getting that loot to your villages was a frankly tedious process. The player’s inventory is small, so grabbing each piece of loot one at a time would take ages. An alternative, to simply add the loot to the closest village’s inventory would also be difficult - each chest would lead to a warehouse worker going back and forth, which could easily overwhelm the logistics of the nearby village.
The solution here is the runner wagon. It has lots of space, and can take more than one good at a time. Looting the individual chests and dumping it all into the wagon is pretty straightforward (and fun), and at the end, you can simply direct the wagon to go back to your chosen outpost.
Similarly, moving goods between outposts can be a strain on your logistics. Each warehouse worker will only move one type of goods, so moving 20 metal, 50 fruit, and 50 vegetables will take 3 trips by warehouse workers - or a single trip by a wagon. This gives you both an option to send many goods at once, and generally more control over the flow of goods in your settlements.
There are some obvious upgrades that the wagon could get - a function to automatically drop off the goods in the designated outpost and return to the player, for example - but for now, I think seeing how players will use the wagon is a good first step.
Until next week!