Hey everyone,
Over the last month I’ve been working on something big behind the scenes: a complete bottom-up rewrite of Venusville’s job system. This affects how machines, buildings, and NPC workers decide what to do, how they move, and how they react when things change.
This update was triggered by one of the most serious issues in the game so far:
NPCs stopping work, getting stuck, and eventually starving to death — even when food was available. Not exactly the future we’re aiming for on Venus.
What was wrong?
The old system worked most of the time, but it was fragile. When things went off the “happy path” — like:
switching production recipes
power cuts
stopping an NPC mid-job
removing buildings or machines
…the system could break in subtle ways. NPCs would stop responding, jobs wouldn’t recover, and saves could load into completely broken states. Fixing this on top of the old logic started to feel impossible.
What changed?
I took a big (and risky) step and rewrote the entire system from scratch.
The new system is built around modern AI behaviour trees, which are much better at handling:
interruptions
job cancellations
dynamic changes
recovery from errors
In simple terms:
NPCs and machines are now far better at understanding what they should be doing right now, and what to do if something goes wrong.
The results so far
✅ No more global meltdowns
✅ NPCs no longer randomly stop working and starve
✅ Systems recover gracefully when interrupted
✅ If something does go wrong, turning a machine off/on or stopping an NPC usually resets the situation cleanly
It’s already significantly more stable than before.
The honest part
This system is new.
The old one had 9 months of demo testing behind it — this one doesn’t yet.
So while the foundations are much stronger, you may still encounter rough edges or strange behaviour. That’s expected, and this phase is about identifying and smoothing those out.
Why this matters
This rewrite unblocks a lot of future development. With a reliable job system in place, I can now:
expand NPC behaviour
add more complex production chains
improve performance and simulation depth
improve save and load system stability
This overhaul will be released in the next update (coming soon).
I mainly wanted to share this now, as it’s been a while since my last community post — and to let you know that Venusville is very much alive and moving forward.
Thank you all for your patience and continued support. If you notice anything odd with NPCs, jobs, or machines once the update is live, please report it — every bit of feedback helps.
Onwards, upward, and hopefully with well fed happy citizens ☁️🏙️