Making A Home Planet Worth It: My Suggested System.

Again, I suggest you re-read my post, because, yet again, you're not understanding. First off, you're not "Constantly hiring and deciding their jobs", you're supplying the workshops and they're moving in and automatically taking up the job. Secondly, they're only moving in when you have the free space for them, AND have the conditions met for them in that space. Thirdly, they'd just leave if they didn't have the food, which wouldn't effect you at all. They'd simply disappear when you left the planet. Finally, If you wanted a "normal", self-sufficient village, you would simply build a hunting camp and a Tavern, like I stated. At which point they'd feed the majority of your citizens. Unless you were going to be having 20+ villagers. It could easily fill "No micromanagement". Don't want more villagers? Don't build more buildings for them. You're basically saying you want all the benefits without any of the effort, and then throwing my statements into an extreme. You want a "Normal" village that is self-sufficient, and doesn't produce you free goods, that supports 10 - 15 villagers? Then build a hunting camp and a Tavern, and your houses. It's done. Simple as that. You're making it more complex than it needs to be. The Butcher is for advanced villages.

In other-words, you decide you want to have a village with 10 citizens. Each citizen, just as an example, eats two cooked meats a day. You have a hunting camp with four hunters. They're bringing in four meat each, and have ZERO meat upkeep. So you're getting 16 meat a day, passively. This goes to the Tavernkeeper, who eats half as much as a normal citizen. Assuming the rest of your people are either guards, or do-nothing citizens, the food upkeep is 11 meat a day, with the Tavernkeeper cooking 15 raw meat into cooked meat each day, which means you're getting a net bonus of 4 cooked meat and 1 raw meat a day, with the rest going to feed your people, automatically. Meaning you've built two buildings and have a "Self sufficient", "normal" village that requires no management at all past this point. Meanwhile you either have 5 guards, or 5 citizens, or any combination of the two, just hanging around. A ten person village, with no effort, and positive gains. Aka, far from "SimCity" (And honestly, comparing this system to sim city, I have to wonder if you've ever actually played Sim City, you don't see any power lines, sewer lines, healthcare requirements, taxations, etc. In the end, this is a REALLY simple system, and an extremely simple economy)

So, that's still not "Safe" enough for you? You don't want just 10 people? Fine, you build the butcher. We get one more citizen, who has half food upkeep. Now each guard is passively spawning 2 more meat a day. Now we "only" have a surplus of 3 cooked meat a day and (with 2 guards, for arguments sake) 5 raw meat. We hire one more tavernkeeper (Food cost is now 13 Cooked Meat a day.) We hire on one more hunter. Now we're producing 24 cooked meat a day. So now we have space for another 5 Jobless villagers, and still gain 1 cooked meat a day surplus. That's a total of 2 guards and 8 Jobless villagers. 5 Hunters. 2 Tavernkeepers. One butcher. Eighteen people, being self-sufficient, with three buildings. Eight of them aren't doing anything, just standing around.

Seems pretty simple, hands-off, and easy to me. The only way it could be any less complex, is if the game automatically built the village for you, in which case, why don't we just have it build our houses for us, too, and craft our weapons?

Beyond this, even if you go with the argument that you "don't want five hunters to sustain eighteen people in your village", which, mind you, just cooking raw meat into cooked meat is the -most- inefficient way of feeding people. So you decide to have more people "in the village". You plant some wheat crops. We'll say you planted 20, to support a population of 10. Farmers have no food cost, just like Hunters. So we have 2 Hunters, producing 8 raw meat a day. We have 2 farmers, producing 20 wheat a day. We have one Wagonmaster, to transport the crops by hand. We have one Tavernkeeper. Our Tavernkeeper has the recipe for bread automatically, because it's a staple recipe. He converts the 20 wheat into 10 bread. He converts that and the raw meat into 5 hamburgers. He cooks the 3 extra raw meat into cooked meat. This cooked meat feeds the Wagonmaster and the Tavernkeeper. The Hamburgers fill 10 hunger bars each. Each Citizen has a hunger requirement of 6 bars a day (Meaning just bread is enough to feed each normal citizen, or guard, each day). This means the hamburgers have enough hunger filling capacity to support 8 1/2 citizens or guards. Four of our citizens are hunters and farmers, with no upkeep. The Wagonmaster and Tavernkeeper account for two more citizens, the cooked meat fulfills their food requirements. That means we have 4 more citizens, who consume under half of our hamburgers each day. This means we have a surplus of 2 1/2 hamburgers a day. We have: A hunting camp, a tavern, a farm, and a wagoneer's house. We can support 8 "Do nothing" citizens, without ever having to do anything. Again, simple, and far from a "ghost town", and not even close to anything resembling "Sim city". In fact, it's less complex than TOWNS, and that has a pretty simple economy.


Oh, and the "current" system they plan to add calculates NPC equipment and information based on the value of the items around them. Keep in mind how that will effect decorating.

So don't take this post the wrong way. I'm just pointing out that the system ALREADY supports the playstyle you're saying you want with villages. The only thing it doesn't do, is automatically build everything for you, which, quite frankly, would be silly. On a related note, I don't need to "Prove my system is nice", I just need to prove it's better than the proposed system of "You get nothing but vendors that take your money for things and live in your houses, and their equipment is based on how expensive the decorations are around you, and you still have to pay to craft their spawning items, or complete quests to obtain them", which is the system that the staff is planning on adding.

So, if you want your people to survive on a level 10 planet in that system, you'll have to decorate your city with very specific decorations, as opposed to this system, where you'll be able to craft their equipment, give them uniforms to wear, gain benefits in resources and crafted items for running your city, don't have to pay anything besides a food upkeep, which can be set to be self-sufficient, to have the people show up and stay, and can decorate your city pretty much however you want, as long as you have the spawning items placed, and places for them to sleep/stay warm.

 

Just some mockups of potential build styles for certain "Structures".

First up, we have a watch tower, supporting one guard.

Next up, a "Lavatory", which is an upgrade building, that increases the yield of your crops (Via Compost. Yeah.)

Then we have an example Hunting Camp, supporting two hunters.

Finally, we have a Well (Upgraded Field Production) and a Wagon (Upgrades overall production in a radius around it)

Here we have a one-resident farmhouse, with enough crop space to produce 8 wheat.

As I build more areas, and plan things out a bit more, I'll refine the system to include descriptions of "Work Areas" and "Upgrade Areas", flesh it out a bit more, and edit screenshots to focus primarily on the area. Basically, I'll bullet-point the "Areas" and include an example screen shot of a functional "Area" for that type.


On an odd note, I have these two random Florans that walk around from a nearby house and basically keep tilling the earth with a hoe, but not planting anything, and speaking like glitch-influenced florans.

 

The structures are a nicely done, but it needs to be customized to the player. For the town maybe have build a few things for yourself and you could use an item to recognize the buildings as a tower, or a store. Just trying to add freedom to the player to design their own structure.

ONE THOUGHT - maybe later you can use a crafting pad (like the 3D printer, or Pet manager) to create drawings of the building, and hire a builder with pixels to create that building. It would make this seem like other games where you build bases (Warcraft, Starcraft, etc.) and you can have this builder spread your civilization across the stars (under your control)

Thanks for reading, Zixc

 

Oh no, these aren't buildings that would be automatically placed. These are just some example layouts of what would be "Valid" for each building. For instance, the guard towers or bunkers need a bed for each guard, a source of heat, a food source, and the weapon rack used to equip the guard. The Hunting camp requires the storage for the food they acquire, a bed (The tents), a heat source, and the hunting equipment storage. The player would decorate however they wanted, and would just place a single item to define that area as a "hunting camp".

 

Yea that's what i was expecting since every one has their own taste, but it would be nice to have a builder NPC that could upload your builds and you can assign him to spread colonies to selected planets based on your colony art style.
Or maybe later you could have an item that scans the house and creates layouts that you can use in the 3D printer and the buy one and move to different planets and place it like any other piece of furniture.

 

That's certainly a good idea, bit like schematics in T-Edit.

 

nice idea

 

http://playstarbound.com/the-future-of-starbound/

NPC Spawners & Building Logic: NPCs will scan the structures you build around them and the contents of chests; they will have improved inventories/behaviors depending on how valuable their surroundings are.

being worked on right now

and the future plans have the ablity to control your home world and colanize it with an npc village and develpe that vilage