This update improves item logistics and long-range deliveries.
My goal is to give the players much more control over item deliveries. Instead of relying on the game to successfully figure out what needs to be taken where and making assumptions that may not be correct, this would allow the players to direct items with more precision and have a consistent way of having long-distance deliveries.
Courier stations
The biggest addition are the courier stations – export station (left) and import station (right):
To summarize: An export station delivers specified items to one or more import stations. Export station has dedicated workers for collecting items from nearby processing and storage buildings, as well as dedicated couriers to handle the deliveries. Import stations have dedicated workers to distribute the delivered items to nearby processing and storage buildings.
You can think of these as active item "hubs" in an area (a "passive" hub would be storage buildings). They will promptly collect nearby items and efficiently send them away to a different hub, where they can be distributed again.
Just to be clear, all the existing delivery logic still exists. The game can be played without building any courier stations. Free carriers will still grab whatever items they can deliver (although they won't
"interfere" with courier stations themselves). In contrast, courier stations is a way for the player to "force" consistent deliveries, especially across longer distances.
Most of the setup happens at the export station:
Here, you can specify the item to deliver, the number of workers for collecting, the number of workers for deliveries, and the destination import stations (and their priorities).
The items will be delivered by a worker pulling a cart with up to 12 items. These carts are efficient compared to regular carriers, however will slow down immensely outside roads. This makes planning and building roads increasingly useful if you use couriers.
The items will end up at the import station:
From here, workers can distribute them to relevant storage.
With this, I also removed storage-to-storage delivery logic, so storage building can now only collect and distribute items to and from processing buildings. Courier stations will be needed to take items "directly" to a different storage location.
Better storage
The storage buildings can now store almost every item in the game. There are still separate warehouse/barn/granary variants and the buildings and items will show in the tooltip where they get to be stored.
The HUD has changed a little for these:
They also do not list all the items you can select, because since every item in the game can now be stored and there would be too many to show. Instead, upon clicking the selection button, an item selection menu will pop up:
This selection is now used everywhere where an item needs to be specified, including the export station.
Large storage
The other big change are the large storage buildings:
Besides larger item capacity, the big advantage and important feature of these are the dedicated workers that will collect and distribute items from nearby processing buildings:
These workers will only ever collect and deliver items for their storage building, making these essentially dedicated couriers.
All the existing and new storage and logistics buildings are now in the logistics construction tab:
Other stuff
There is now the option to limit the regular carrier item delivery distance:
This works best when the village has courier stations set up for far deliveries. This way, couriers can be "told" to not bother with long-range deliveries and focus on short-range.
Builders will now also follow a proportional value rather than an absolute:
This means the players don't have to constantly change (or even be aware of) the maximum builder value.
I also added a few achievements and tweaked some of the existing ones.
In retrospect
This update is not perfect by any means. Item logistics is a massive feature set and for every feature that works, there are ten things that could go wrong. It's a relatively simple concept to explain, but a notoriously difficult one to implement. I am writing this and it feels like I just started adding the long-distance routes, but somehow it's been over three months already.
I built the game around the concept "carriers deliver everything". I eventually added worker self-deliveries, and this already complicated matters a lot (in fact, I only now fixed some long-standing bugs relating to that). But now I am adding logic where items that were previously exclusively delivered by carriers can also be freely delivered by building workers – collected from outputs and storage and distributed to inputs and storage. Suddenly, internal logic has become much more complex and difficult to follow.
And this also means that I could not split the update into multiple smaller ones (i.e. Storage update & Hauling update like I originally planned). The underlying delivery logic is just too "spread out" through everything. I also don't have a stable build at any point due to the number of changes. Nor do some of these additions make a notable difference without the whole package, like large storage without dedicated workers.
I also spent a very long time hunting and fixing some of the rare bugs. These were ranging from self-fixing and annoying to actually crashing the game. Despite their rarity and inconsistency, they eventually happen if one plays long enough. Unfortunately, this also means that tracing and debugging them is very time-consuming.
Future plans
Foremost, I want to add more content. By which I mean "immediate" features like production chains and such. I have not really decided on exactly what is most impactful or interesting at the moment. I know I want to make larger maps and more diverse resources and I will probably begin implementing some of that. Namely, long-range deliveries would allow me to spread out the resources more and larger maps won't have as many logistics issues.
On the backend side of things, I need to rework how markets work. Houses currently need 12 items and that's 12 different market stalls, each needing collection and distribution. I can't realistically keep adding more items that I want without making this whole gameplay part overly tedious. This also isn't really how I envisioned markets.
I will of course be on the lookout for how well these new changes work and will adjust things based on feedback.
Full changelog
Changes
• Add Export Station and Import Station buildings for bulk item delivery Routes
• Add item selection popup window for selecting among many items, use for shipment item selection for Export Station and storage buildings
• Implement Export Station item retrieval from nearby processing and storage buildings
• Implement Export Station item delivery via "couriers" following specified Routes, add route priority adjuster
• Add Routes creation/selection HUD for Export Station
• Implement Import Station item distribution to nearby processing and storage buildings
• Add markers for shipment target and destination (and active transfers)
• Couriers don't carry items, but load them into a cart and pull it instead
• Couriers with a cart don't experience slower base movement speed regardless of the number of items in the cart
• Couriers pulling carts outside Roads move much slower
• Add several issue checks for the new buildings (shipment item not set, no source or target in range, no shipment routes set)
• Add Hauling technology that unlocks the courier buildings with Roads and Storage being prerequisites
• Add max delivery range for carriers that can limit how far items are delivered by regular carriers (excluding couriers and self-deliveries); add UI slider next to carrier slider at the profession distribution window
• Max builder value is now a proportion of total worker population (like carriers); adjust UI and controls to match
• Rename "Roads" construction tab to "Logistics" and place Export Station and Import Station there
• Storage buildings (Warehouse, Granary and Barn) no longer transfer goods between other storage buildings (they can still toggle regular input/output deliveries)
• All items can now be stored (except Corpses) in storage; set up lists of items for each storage building "type"
• Storage building stored item selection now uses a popup to show all items and a separate section to show stored quantity
• Change storage building description to describe what they store better and remove explicit mentions of storage from individual items
• Changing storage building's stored item now "drops" all items and "collects" any compatible items already on location
• Move storage building construction entries to the (new) "Logistics" tab
• Add large Large Warehouse, Large Granary and Large Barn with increased capacity
• Large storage can employ dedicated workers that retrieve/collect outputs and distribute inputs to nearby processing buildings
• Storage workers will also obey storage item transit input/output toggles
• Add Large Storage technology to unlock large storage buildings with "regular" Storage tech as prerequisite
• Add Goals for Hauling and Large Storage, adjust requirements for Storage
• Shift+copying buildings also copies Export Station shipment item selection
• Building workers will run to the building instead of walking if they are far away
• Buildings can have 2 worker "rows" with different tasks, namely Export Station's collectors vs. couriers
• Buildings can have different worker "names" for building inspection, such as "Collectors" and "Couriers" and optional description tooltips for their labels and buttons
• Shift-clicking worker slot buttons in building inspection toggles multiple slots - clicking an enabled slot disables it and all slots to the right while clicking a disabled slot enables it and all slots to the left
• Add icons for Animals and display them in all HUD locations - inspection, buttons, tooltips, etc.
• Add Animal conservation (by Game Warden's Lodge) tooltip information entries
• Builders will remain at their construction site if there are tasks pending or incoming items rather than walking off early
• Building and road construction sites to show a marker for their builders
• Technology window now uses large icons (that match items)
• Add additional vertical space to the Technology window to fit the new technologies
• Add "Monumental" achievement to construct the Monument
• Add "Wildlife Conservationist" achievement to establish a Game Warden's Lodge for every species of wild Animal while not hunting at these Animal Habitats
• Add "Populous" achievement to reach 2000 Population
• Add "Rocky Road" achievement to have 1000 tiles with stone or better Roads
• Construction menu will highlight newly-unlocked buildings
• Make invalid tile overlay indicator more obvious
• When placing multi-tile buildings, only invalid tiles will turn red instead of also valid tiles where the building wouldn't fit due to being multi-tile
• Roads and techs to show icons in Micropedia along other icon fixes
• Remove item delivery distance grace period during which newly-available items would be prioritized to closer destinations
• Add building marker/indicator for non-idle workers
• Add building marker/indicator for outgoing item delivery target buildings
• Building marker incoming icons are now more cyan than blue
• Add Marker concept and Micropedia entry explaining the individual icons
• Building efficiency value now counts missing workers as being inefficient
• Clicking construction tabs will not cancel the current selection
• Building's selection HUD will not hide when building auxiliaries or selecting its operating location
• Add next happiness level note to the top HUD happiness segment tooltip
• Building sites do not affect Animal Habitats score until construction starts
• Cut-down Trees during construction will leave a Log item behind
• Shift-selecting an auxiliary building while a compatible parent is selected will leave the parent's selection HUD active
Fixes
• Fix workers delivering items to other buildings sometimes incorrectly counting/reserving the items potentially either over-delivering items or getting stuck never receiving more deliveries
• Fix rare bug where cancelling deconstruction of a partly constructed building or road would result in it never being completed due to incorrect pending material counter
• Fix rare bug where delivering multiple materials to a road would not count the items correctly and would either complete the road with "incorrect" materials or get stuck with missing material(s)
• Fix rare bug where saving would fail due to an unfinished road construction when multiple material delivery task incorrectly decreased the pending material counter
• Fix rare bug where assigning conflicting tasks would sometimes cause another task to "disappear" and at worst cause a crash
• Fix rare occurrence of food items being used up due to global hunger not properly cancelling tasks involving them potentially causing a crash and "broken" items
• Livestock Animals not wandering in their pens
• Minor discrepancies in counting idle villagers
• Items occasionally incorrectly visually offset in Stockpile when multiple are delivered
• Minor item delivery discrepancies due to using item-to-villager distance rather than item-to-destination
• Minor item distribution discrepancies when reaching internal overdelivery limits
• Add missing button click sound effects for distribution panel
• Redeploy Sewing Desks due to incorrect internal version (that didn't cause issue before, but would cause them now)
• Builders will leave their construction site if there is nothing to do rather than stay idle permanently when there are other construction sites waiting for work
• Builders will actually stay at the construction site (like the tooltip says) if it is set to highest priority (even when builder proportion is exceeded)
• Building workers won't accept and "lock in" tasks before they have actually arrived at their building (potentially delaying processing or item usage by other workers while they are running)
• Fix Hemp description wrongly listing it as deprecated
• Barn being unlocked without Storage tech
• Minor marker display issues, such as with worker self-deliveries
• Fix incorrect (visually missing) Town Hall shadow
• Fix multiple tasks involving same multiple items not verifying that all items do not conflict and potentially causing a crash and "broken" items
• Worker marker constantly removing and readding itself
• Some rare marker glitches
• Fix crash when a villager dies while constructing a building and leaving behind an "invalid" item
• Have higher priority construction sites receive items by not having a delivery distance grace period
• Fix macOS start-up crash
• Cancelling building construction with an active item use by builder leaves it in an invalid state that causes saving to crash
• Clearing selection with Esc not clearing internal selection and markers
• Fix buildings having invalid internal item state upon loading/upgrading from an older save and crashing the game when interacted with
• Fix Mason and Windmill continuing to work and failing to produce items when the output is full
• Fix building efficiency value resetting after loading a game
• Esc occasionally causing an internal exception when building an auxiliary building or selecting building operation location
• Internal exception during selection-based input mode while the selected entity changed state (such as building deconstructing while selecting its operating location)
• Internal exception redrawing tile borders when selected entity's state changes
• Erratic carrier hiring and firing when at 5/6 carriers or occasionally at the exact minimum proportion value
• Profession distribution carrier slider current value indicator not matching up with the slider's handle
• Global self-delivery toggle value not being saved
• Productivity and other "bonuses" not applied to certain auxiliary building operations
• Completing certain auxiliary tasks would not update parent building's task (e.g. Farm not planting produce before continuing to repair Wasted Dirt)
• Rare internal exception drawing tile borders when multiple changes affecting them happen on the same frame
• Shift-selecting a building and then canceling construction would leave last selected entities selection HUD, but it would not update
• Potentially fix cases of "black screen" on launch on macOS
• Fix crash during saving while a worker is trying to plant something in a Dirt tile that has decayed into Wasted Dirt
• Fix crash during saving when a villager dies while having an active pathfinding request queued or being processed
• Fix a rare case of a carrier choosing an incompatible item for multiple item bundling/delivery
• Fix a very rare crash when saving the game exactly when the path-finding process returns a result
• Update game engine to (potentially) fix compatibility with latest macOS versions
Balancing
• Arborist work range is now 4 tiles (from 3)
• Reduce Warehouse and Barn capacity from 64 to 32
• Replace "Utopia" achievement with "Happy Place" which in addition to 3 minutes of Happiness, also requires 500 Population
• Wasted Dirt repair is slightly faster
• Wasted Dirt repair is much faster outside Winter
Rudy
Snowy Ash Games