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Update 5: Better Priorities!

Hi Everyone,

For Update 5, I focused on getting the Clanfolk to get jobs done better. There are lots of bug fixes and tweaks listed below as well, so please take a look if you are interested in the fine details :)

Let's dive into the changes.

[h2]Experimental Non-Strict Skill Priorities[/h2]

So there has been a lot of discussion about what I will call the Strict Skill Priority system on both Discord and the Steam forums. Here is the relevant question from the poll.


Assume Cooking Skill at the top, Crafting skill under Cooking, Haul at very bottom for the Unit.
Assume Cooked Eel Task Priority 2
Assume Craft Stone Axe Priority 7
...11 other skill entries here....
Assume Haul Large Rock Priority 10

1. Highest priority TASKS are always selected first - All level 10 tasks done first regardless of associated Skill type. Haul, Craft, Cook
2. All Tasks within the highest priority SKILL are always completed first - Then all tasks of the next highest priority SKILL are completed. Cook, Craft, Haul
3. The priority of both the Tasks and the Skills are combined to guide picking with the highest combined value being picked first. Craft, Cook, Haul


The question was, how did the priority system work. The answer (was) #2 That was Strict Skill Priorities and they still can be used by selecting Settings/Gameplay and ticking the box, not to worry. This system works quite well for about half the people, but is not friendly to newer players who expect the priority on individual tasks to play more of a global role.

SO, this brings us to NON-Strict Skill Priorities, which are a new experimental feature that has been defaulted to as a test. As I say, turn Strict Priorities back on in settings/gameplay if you run into problems with it as it is quite a different method of handling tasks scheduling.

The new system is #3
So Skill priority AND task priority work together to create the task ordering. This means that you should not have to touch the skill priorities very often and instead manipulate task priorities more. So a very high task priority will be seen by more people and sooner. The rule is, to jump in front of a higher priority skill, the task needs to be 1 priority level higher that and task for the higher skill.

Reports on this new system so far have been positive, but it is an adjustment for people who understand #2 really well. I would like to hear your thoughts as well in the forums. I have not decided which should be the default system.

#2 (old) Task ordering localized inside of skill ordering
#3 (new) Task ordering more global but influenced heavily by skill ordering

[h2] Smarter Priority Boosts [/h2]

Priority Boosts also get an upgrade (Soon to be called Emergency Boosts.) They used to all be equal and picked by the next available unit based on distance, but now they are weighted by the unit's own skill priorities. So this means in general the more correct/skilled person for the job will work on the priority boost, and they will less often all get locked down doing a nearby job, ignoring all other boosts.

That being said...

Priority Boosts are not a good long term solution. There is another poll about this in the forums discussing the dangers of overuse. They are really meant to be used to quickly achieve a task and then turned off since they completely bypass the normal task selection procedure and are very inefficient long term.

The combination of large numbers of tasks and large numbers of boosts to complete tasks seems to be the root of many of the complaints about the AI not doing what it is told. I am looking at ways to make it more clear that large task counts and boost overuse is dangerous.

[h2] Task Chaining [/h2]

Another new experimental feature is task chaining. This is used to have jobs serviced in groups. There was a problem of cutting a single tree, then dragging the logs home right after due to hauling being a higher priority than lumber, or perhaps there was a new boost task that becomes available. Anyhow now most job types will try to chain to the exact same task nearby.

The Clanfolk do get fixated on similar tasks nearby now though, so it is a much better to select 10 trees to chop vs 1000 or else that unit will be locked down for a very long time once they start to chopping.

[h2]V0.241[/h2]
  • Updated Hungarian Translation
  • Upgrade to the Trade window to allow scrolling in the buy and sell portion. - This one ended up eating up way more hours than expected. I will try to get a set of smaller bugs fixed next that take less time. This bug was a priority because it hid items off screen.


[h2]V0.242[/h2]
  • Increased Bread Oven's heat output from 6c over 27 tiles to 7c over 48 tiles
  • Guests no longer tend fires. It sometimes put them in situations that lowered satisfaction too much.
  • Fix for case where all Clanfolk would stay awake if there were humans or animals needing doctoring but there was not bed to place them in.
  • Fixed case where Workers who joined the family left their clothing marked as not droppable, causing they to stay on in the wrong times of year.
  • Fixed case where Clanfolk could get forever stuck when they were trying to clean or collect poop from hard to reach locations
  • Fixed a case with task indecision where the Unit would want to sleep, but travelling through the cold would make them too cold to sleep so they would do something else and warm up, then want to sleep again. Happened when had to walk long distances in winter to get to their bed.
  • Wood Ash recipe 1:1 with the Bark consumed now. So doubled the output. More fertilizer!


[h2]V0.243[/h2]
  • Fix for carried humans and animals having their priority reset each time they are picked up.
  • Added Toggle in Settings/Gameplay for Strict Skill Priorities, currently defaulted to off. Strict Skill priorities is how priorities worked prior to v0.243. Definition: "ALL Tasks within the Highest Priority SKILL are always completed first"
  • Note: Non-Strict Priorities are experimental currently, but are currently Active. Please turn Strict Priorities back on if you run into problems or dislike it. I am just trying to get lots of testing on this experimental system
  • New Smarter Priority Boost System. Instead of just looking at distance for priority boosts, it also uses the Units skill priorities to pick what
    the next boost to attempt should be.
  • Auto Water and Auto Fertilize tasks given neutral priority (5) instead of low priority (2) This should lead to these tasks being picked more
    often now.


[h2]V0.244[/h2]
  • Added a Sanity check to Abort Tasks if the task cannot progress due to a loss of pathfinding.
  • Fix for case made much more visible in v0.243 where testing a potential Haul task could cause the Unit to drop their carried item. This could happen at a time when the item was already expected to exist by another task causing all manner of hard to find suffering for the Dev. From the player perspective this was the reason Clanfolk stood there forever holding a poop basket.
  • Upgraded Hauling Task to prioritize hauling carried tools back.
  • Skill Priority has 1.5x the weight of Task priority vs 1:1 before
  • Hauling skill weight is not so heavily tied to distance when it comes to non strict skill priority mode, so far hauling tasks do not need to be so heavily weighted to be used.


[h2]V0.245[/h2]
  • Added a sanity check for poop collection that in the case where the task started with the the wrong tool being held, it was possible that the task could get locked up for a long period of time.
  • Fix for Manure Basket Collecting such that the entire local area will be cleared of poop until the basket is full before it is hauled back.
  • Added Task Persistence to Harvesting Tasks such that when a harvest ends, Units will try to find another similar task within 15 tiles. There was a problem of units being pulled off of their harvest tasks after harvesting 1 tile, this was due to boosting intercepting the unit's task priority before the next similar task could start.
  • Task Chain will now break the task series if the Unit is too hungry, tired, etc. Units won't work to death stuck in a task chain.
  • Clear Tile Tasks like Cutting Trees or grass or mining all try to chain now as well.
  • Auto Harvest base priority increased from 2->5
  • Fixed a case in the evaluating the haul task that could cause paths in active tasks to be stopped, causing the active tasks to pause out indefinitely.


[h2]V0.246[/h2]
  • Fixed priorities for cleaning tasks not being evaluated correctly when comparing to other tasks using non strict skill priorities.
  • Fixed Doctoring priority such that with non strict priorities, Doctoring and baby care are less easily bypassed for non emergencies
  • Lowered Task Chaining range from 15 to 7 tiles. Don't want units fixated to the same task over such long distances.
  • Lowered Gong(Manure) Collector task chain range from 20 tiles to 12
  • Add/Auto Water and Fertilize will now also Task Chain within 7 tiles to keep the jobs more persistent


[h2]Next Top Priorities[/h2]
  • Getting Hunters to Haul Bunnies when they are cold [DONE Update 2]
  • Preventing personal needs from breaking chained tasks [DONE Update 2]
  • Keeping fires lit overnight [DONE Update 3]
  • Automating burying loved ones [DONE Update 4]
  • Fixing bed owners stealing unclaimed beds, blocking them [DONE Update 4]
  • Wells duplicating water jugs somehow [DONE Update 4]
  • Upgrading the Boost System to also read skill ordering for decision making [DONE Update 5]
  • Any and all cases of a movement stuck problem causing starvation [DONE Update 5]
  • Carrying Tools back home better
  • Performance upgrades for very large homesteads 40+ Clanfolk 100+ Livestock
  • System to make large task counts and over boosting less attractive to new players


Thanks again people on the testing branch. It helps keep the main branch stable. If you like quicker daily updates, come join us in the testing branch too :)

Library->Clanfolk->Properties->Betas->testing

Diving back into the code now.

Andrew Hume (Blorf)
MinMax Games Ltd.

V0.242

V0.242
  • Increased Bread Oven's heat output from 6c over 27 tiles to 7c over 48 tiles
  • Guests no longer tend fires. It sometimes put them in situations that lowered satisfaction too much.
  • Fix for case where all Clanfolk would stay awake if there were humans or animals needing doctoring but there was not bed to place them in.
  • Fixed case where Workers who joined the family left their clothing marked as not droppable, causing they to stay on in the wrong times of year.
  • Fixed case where Clanfolk could get forever stuck when they were trying to clean or collect poop from hard to reach locations
  • Fixed a case with task indecision where the Unit would want to sleep, but travelling through the cold would make them too cold to sleep so they would do something else and warm up, then want to sleep again. Happened when had to walk long distances in winter to get to their bed.
  • Wood Ash recipe 1:1 with the Bark consumed now. So doubled the output.

V0.241

- Updated Hungarian Translation
- Upgrade to the Trade window to allow scrolling in the buy and sell portion.

The trade window rebuild took longer than expected, but it can now handle infinite items for buy and sell without anything going off screen. :)

Update 4: Reliable Beds + Auto Burial

Hi Everyone,

So it has been 12 solid days work since release now, and I think we have the worst of the bugs and quality of life issues under control. Thanks very much for your patience and bug reports. Those of you on the testing branch have been a huge help as well!

Let's dive into the changes.

[h2]Hotter Fireplaces[/h2]
I have increased the amount of heat that the fireplaces will emit from a 5 tile to a 6 tile radius for optimal heating. This amounts to a heating area of 75->108 tiles. As rooms get bigger than that, the heating power is proportionally reduced. Also keep in mind at 108 tiles, the most heating improvement a single fireplace can give is +10 degrees over those 108 tiles. So if it is -20 outside and you have a lot of floor space you will still need multiple fireplaces (just not quite as many)

[h2]New Wood Ash Recipe[/h2]
I had never anticipated the need for so much Wood Ash, but some of you have quite the major farming and tanning operations and Wood Ash gets low. The Charcoal Kiln now has a recipe to turn Bark from the Timbery into Wood Ash. I chose the Charcoal Kiln for this recipe since in most cases players will already have auto stack set up from the Charcoal Kilns to a nearby Ash Bin.

If you don't know about Auto Stack, if you place a storage object within two tiles of a crafting object, the crafted items will auto stack to the appropriate storage. It can save a lot of clutter and haul time.

[h2]Better Planting[/h2]
A common problem was people trying to plant crops in Fall, and there was no feedback as to why the Clanfolk were ignoring the orders. They actually would not plant because the crops would not grow and the seeds would be lost. I have made this much more obvious now.

So in Seasons where the crops cannot be planted, they will show up with a red X in the menus. To make it clear it is not planting time. Also planting jobs that cannot complete will clean themselves up in Fall.

[h2]Musical Beds Fixed[/h2]
Sorry for this one. The Clanfolk were always trying to find the best bed to sleep in, and while no one could sleep in someone else's bed, anyone could sleep in an unclaimed bed. This lead to Clanfolk sometimes not picking the beds they owned and blocking unassigned beds.

Now Clanfolk see their owned beds as 1000x more attractive than other beds.

[h2]Berry Parades (Mostly) Fixed[/h2]
So Clanfolk want to eat the food that is going to spoil the most to prevent waste, however they were not taking distance into consideration enough, which could lead to "Berry Parades."

A Berry Parade happened when berries had been left out in the wild and were about to spoil somewhere across the map. The Clanfolk being thrifty Scots wanted to save them and trekked out in the rain to eat those berries instead of eating the fresher food nearby.

In some cases this behavior is desirable, so it remains, but the distance is taken much more into consideration now before attempting this.

[h2]Info Mode (Left Shift + F1)[/h2]
This one is more for the testing branch, but everyone can use it. If you see odd behavior, please use info mode and click on the object or person who is misbehaving. There will be extra info in their description box when selected that may shed some light on the problem and could be useful in a bug report.

Even just out of curiosity, some of the info in there may be interesting to people. So have fun :)

[h2]Nursing Baby Fire Fighting Juggle Fixed[/h2]
So this was a weird case, but the babies will not nurse anymore when the mother is fighting a fire. This baby juggle was quite funny to watch while it lasted. Mother throws off baby, Mother to fight fire. Baby jumps back on. On Repeat. Not A Good Time Baby!

[h2]Load Game Not Loading Fix (Very Rare)[/h2]
This one is worth calling out here. There was in issue with the Windows System Culture sometimes preventing saved games from loading due to their different time/date format. This is now fixed. Sorry about that! Only saw this in the case of Arabic Windows, but there may have been others.

[h2]Auto Water Gather[/h2]
I have set the Winter Ice Jug filling active in all seasons. So if there is less than 201 water and there are empty jugs available, someone will go fill those jugs.

The natural way to get this done is to set a Clanfolk's Gathering skill high (Water Collection is Gathering) and set the Drink Zone to High Priority. With this task though, you can rely on at least having a small stable water supply no matter what.

[h2]Easy To See Long Paths![/h2]
So this was a quick one but a popular one. The paths no longer fade out near the Clanfolk, so you don't have to guess where the path is going on the long ones, searching for that blue line.

[h2]Red X's on the Troughs[/h2]
I finally have the troughs looking like the stockpiles when you disallows certain seed types. This issue was reported so often that I am calling it out here as well. This also works for the Graves and Composts. Speaking of Graves.

[h2]Auto Burial is here![/h2]
Burial has been a huge problem. To bury a body, it had to be assigned to a grave using a button list just above the main rack of buttons at the bottom of the screen. It was not intuitive and lead to a lot of frustration.

So now we have Auto Burial. New Graves are set to priority 9 and will automatically select a body to be buried in them. This can still be overridden by stopping the grave you don't want used for the body if you have multiple graves too.

Remember, Burial is a Repair task as well so you have a Clanfolk with high Repair priority (you should always have at least 2.)

[h2]Change Logs[/h2]

[h3]V0.236[/h3]
  • Baby animals will no longer nurse their mother to death like vampires as a final farewell when sold to traders.
  • Increased fire heating optimal radius from 5 -> 6 tiles. This is an increase of 75->108 tiles
  • Fix for case where butcher blocks could stall out permanently
  • Added Bark -> Wood Ash recipe for Charcoal kiln
  • Mulch paths (bark) now have an environmental bonus
  • Renamed Dirt Path, Gravel Path, and Mulch Path to better describe their function and why they don't touch walls.
  • Fixed ice jugs breaking when emptied.
  • Fixed Wells duplicating water jugs if on tilled soil


[h3]v0.237[/h3]
  • Planting menu will show red X on items that can not be planted due to current season
  • Planting jobs will clean themselves up in the fall and winter when they cannot complete.
  • Automatic cleanup of automated tasks improved


[h3]V0.239[/h3]
  • Musical Beds and Berry Parades Resolved? + Info Mode for Bug Reports
  • Clanfolk give 10x more choosing weight to items they own when filling attribute bars
  • Clanfolk give 1000x more weight to beds they own.
  • Clanfolk take the distance much more into account when deciding which thing to eat next. Was too heavily weighted to what would perish next which lead to treks across the map to eat a berry that was going bad.
  • Less weight given to perishables on their last day. Was overwhelming other picks too much causing far travel for that last berry.
  • In all cases owned objects are 10x higher weighted for picking than non owned ones.
  • Enable Info Mode with Left Shift + F1 this will provide internal info for bug reporting when clicking on entities. Many bugs fix themselves on reload, but this info can help track down problems.
  • If possible enable Info Mode, select the entity causing trouble and take a couple of screenshots showing all the info in the info pane for the entity (scrolling may be needed)


[h3]v0.240[/h3]
  • Fixed Gravel Path, Dirt Path, Mulch Path so they do not default back to English in other translations
  • Updated French Translation
  • Updated Hungarian Translation
  • Fixed babies continually latching on to mothers fighting fires to nurse. No fire fighting baby juggle
  • Fixed issue where hauler could try to move an items from a stockpile that they were locked out of
  • Optimization for validation of hauling tasks between stockpiles when boosted. Could get really ugly in some cases
  • Fix for loading games with different Date/Time culture formats for the OS
  • Objects will clear the grass out from under them on load. There cannot be grass under objects as it prevents their normal use.
  • Fixed grass being able to be planted under objects
  • Fixed Plants reseeding themselves under other jobs causing weird states. Seen with reed planting job on top of reseeded reeds.
  • Made long paths easier to see near the starting point (Unit) - No more fade out
  • Grain Troughs and Composts use the red X's to show the items that are not allowed now instead of just the darker button
  • Graves no longer allow ownership as burial does not use that system and dead units cannot own things
  • Graves have a default priority of 9 so they get picked quickly when a person dies.
  • Auto Burial now works. If there are more bodies than graves (oh no) then you can still pick the permanent resident
  • Set the auto gather of water to be available in all seasons, not just Winter. So if less than 201 water someone will fill jugs. Remember, water collection is a gathering task.


[h2]Next Top Priorities[/h2]
  • Getting Hunters to Haul Bunnies when they are cold [DONE Update 2]
  • Preventing personal needs from breaking chained tasks [DONE Update 2]
  • Keeping fires lit overnight [DONE Update 3]
  • Automating burying loved ones [DONE Update 4]
  • Fixing bed owners stealing unclaimed beds, blocking them [DONE Update 4]
  • Wells duplicating water jugs somehow [DONE Update 4]
  • Upgrading the Boost System to also read skill ordering for decision making
  • Any and all cases of a movement stuck problem causing starvation
  • Carrying Tools back home better


Thanks again people on the testing branch. It helps keep the main branch stable. If you like quicker daily updates, come join us in the testing branch too :)

Library->Clanfolk->Properties->Betas->testing

Diving back into the code now.

Andrew Hume (Blorf)
MinMax Games Ltd.

p.s. Fun fact, as of this morning, Clanfolk's combined play time is now over 47 years!

Hotfixes Live v0.236, v0.237

Hi everyone,

I have just set the changes from the testing branch (join us) to the default branch. Here is what's new/changed.

[h2]V0.236[/h2]
  • Baby animals will no longer nurse their mother to death like vampires as a final farewell when sold to traders.
  • Increased fire heating optimal radius from 5 -> 6 tiles. This is an increase of 75->108 tiles
  • Fix for case where butcher blocks could stall out permanently
  • Added Bark -> Wood Ash recipe for Charcoal kiln
  • Mulch paths (bark) now have an environmental bonus
  • Renamed Dirt Path, Gravel Path, and Mulch Path to better describe their function and why they don't touch walls.
  • Fixed ice jugs breaking when emptied.
  • Fixed Wells duplicating water jugs if on tilled soil


[h2]v0.237[/h2]
  • Planting menu will show red X on items that can not be planted due to current season
  • Planting jobs will clean themselves up in the fall and winter when they cannot complete.
  • Automatic cleanup of automated tasks improved


Thanks very much for your support! I am going to continue to fix bugs as fast as I can, sending them to the testing branch and then setting them live after a couple days of testing.

Andrew (Blorf)