REVISION 41E NOW IN THE EXPERIMENTAL BUILD

awesome update, just started a new colony to try it out, altho I am noticing a small issue right out the gate.

I designated a all purpose stockpile, gave my guys orders and let them loose. What I am seeing right away, is a overseer now taking resources and stacking them with others, which is fine, except they are taking resources closest to stockpile to stack with resources AWAY from stockpile. I did a quick save if need one, but seems to me if idle and stockpile has room to gather there and worry about stacking later, unless I am missing something.

I can see stacking nearby items so no wasted trips but right now seems like their wasting trips anyways. Will be diving back in later and in/out this weekend.

 

Huzzah! My plan to improve Clockwork Empires through nagging bears fruit! Or cabbage, in this case.

 

Is it because it's too easy to loose crops though bad luck timing if their work phase happened to occur at night when no one is around to do work?

 

Still seeing crews assigned to workshops, some time after being assigned, silently disable all their job filters without player interaction.

This is a tad frustrating as for things like a carpentry workshop, when the production quota is met, I'd prefer they go off and find something to do within the filters I set just after assigning them to the workshop, rather than just go idle. They don't even haul, as that disables itself too...

 

It's now quite harder to feed your citizen. Building a 6x6 wheat field on day 1 didn't give any grain before day 10. Was it too big ? Maize seems like the new first obvious choice for crops, living wheat for when you have enough colonists to tend to it.

 

Just done a test with farms / kitchen only and almost impossible to keep everyone fed - can't do other jobs as need everyone to farm or cook. Cabbage is a no-no as spoils just after planting and colonist seems to grow each one to maturity before planting any more. Maize is the quickest by the look, followed by pumpkin. At least they don't seem to spoil within a game day although nothing is getting planted as a whole field.

 

Colonists have been doing that for ages unfortunately.

Stacking behaviour is all over the place, colonists won't stack existing stacks onto other stacks which means many produced goods are entirely unstackable and each job cycle that produces 2 units at a time will require yet another stockpile tile.

Colonists will also walk miles to stack goods without actually performing any distance checking to see if the stockpile is actually closer than their attempt to make a stack out in the wild, and of course as soon as colonists DO make a stack in the wild that means those goods can no longer be combined to a stack back at the stockpile... so yay! more storage inefficiency.

But been that way for months and mentioned in a half dozen posts. Albeit posts on the Steam discussion forums, maybe no one else posted about it here. hehe

 

Regarding 41E food balance. Just at the end of the first week of a new colony and having no problems at all so far.

Built a 5x5 pumpkin patch on day 2, and it quickly produced pumpkins that my colonists then almost immediately used to churn out sufficient amounts of cooked food to keep everyone fed with the occasional few units left in stores. (Eventually expanded it to be slightly larger around the end of the week)

So far the balance feels about right between end of day consumption and during the day harvesting and production after taking faster farm maintenance turn around times into account and not growing multiple fields too soon.

Sure the slightest hiccup would likely disrupt that balance and cause temporary negative memories from some colonists, but that's a good thing really. Previous it was just far too easy to rig food production to never be a problem except in more extreme scenarios.

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Starting a new colony trying slightly different farm approaches, and had a colonist elevated to become a aristocrat through a random event. They were properly removed from their workcrew as expected but the game still partially thinks they're a problem colonist that needs to be made part of a workcrew.



Edit: Spoke to soon about that Aristocrat. Whilst they didn't show up in the assignment pool initially it seems something triggered them to be readded to it and they can now be assigned to a workcrew as a worker.

 

Was that why I suggested making that change? Mostly, although it was also in part to make the day and night segments of the game behave differently.

 

Tikigod - what load out are you using? I am having a devil with any load out that does not come with a few days food in keeping colonists from eating raw food as a three oven kitchen just is not keeping up - have not tried it with pumpkins yet though. Maybe a mixture of pumpkin and maize is the best option. I have had a lot of bandit activity ( several 6-7 bandit raids each day) which has disrupted my farming to quite a degree so there has been a lot of colonists running all over the shop instead of doing useful stuff. Not got as far as a week yet to really test.

Something is not right with cabbages though. The only good thing about cabbage is the possibility of bubble and squeak being on the menu if we ever get potato plants.

 

Yeah, the cycle for cabbage is *really* fast. I'm curious to check the crop stats and comparing the different crop times and yields.

 

Strangely enough just been reading about pumpkins and they grow a lot more at night than in the day - as do many other plants such as wheat.

 

Pretty much. Recently been growing Courgettes/Zucchini and those buggers practically explode from nowhere over night.

One evening there's just a few flower buds, next morning there's these giant triffid looking flowers that sprung up over the night.

Then the next evening notice a few small fruits (berries?!?) growing, following morning check after noticing again and you have something growing that borderlines on the size of a baseball bat. lol

So was strange to see this change in CWE that assumes such things only grow during the day, when really they're stealthy night ninjas.

I've been sticking to pumpkins for now, as no real need to focus on wheat or such until later production lines are planned and pumpkins are quick and give a reasonable harvest.

Started with a 5x5 field on day 2. As immigration kicked in I built another 5x5 farm for pumpkins and repeat as colonist count grows (providing overseer count increases at a steady pace every 1 or 2 days like it has been in my colony).

I've very much taken the same approach to farming as I would other job orders. Don't give one order to chop down 50 trees, instead break it down into smaller job areas. So in other orders as demand grows, build a new smaller field rather than just replacing the existing one with a increasingly larger one.

Not sure if that has any major advantages but seems to work.

 

That was my idea!

Shit, this is going on my resume...

 

Good point on the growth of plants; I didn't know that.

Pausing growth at night does cut down on spoilage, and that should be kept IMO. Maybe the code can be tweaked some more so plants keep progressing to their next stage at night but stop once they get there, so the spoilage timer doesn't start until daytime.

The spoilage timer itself should also be extended a bit.

Good observations - lots to think about. Thank you.

 

Any links you could share? I'm curious how much this varies between different crop types.

 

Just had some wheat harvest from a small experimental plot I'd built away from my actual food farms. Seems at 5x5 plot size which gives a 4x2 crop yield, each row of 4 seems to yield around 16 units of flour.

So I'd say the yield is around approximately 4 units of flour per crop with what seemed to be a 4-5 day growth period.


Edit: Changed figures slightly, miscounted crop row length as they were clipping through each other.