This patch brings in the first steps in a number of different directions, all of which relate to town functionality.
One of my main underlying goals for Solace Crafting has always been to add meaning and reward to building. Having said that, building is not something that everyone is interested in. A lot of the systems I'm designing I want to reward players for making the extra effort, but make it optional, not punishing or forcing onto everyone.
With this patch all town buildings can now be built from scratch letting players customize their own town buildings and layouts however they like. That doesn't mean yet that there is a built-in reward for doing so, but I definitely have some plans for that in the near future. One of the best parts of this change is that storehouses can now have crates added to them manually to increase their storage capacity, rather than "leveling" them up. An unfortunate side-effect of this patch is that storehouses "plopped" down with the basic "construct" option from the town interface cannot yet accept crates, making them basically useless. I got stuck with some data management bugs getting this patch ready and haven't fixed that yet, but it's top priority for me tomorrow morning.
Custom buildings are now no longer started with facilities, and instead assigned using summoning circles. Many town buildings however have facility prerequisites, such as a miner needing a forge. I've also added in two other prerequisite systems, one for unspecified furniture, meaning two chairs, a table, and a carpet would meet the requirement for "4 pieces of furniture" if a town building were to require it, and a system for requiring specific "items" such as a forge or a bed for example.
Here I'm looking into a storehouse I threw together and added 3 crates to, awarding me 300 slots of storage using the same storehouse interface as before rather than interacting with the crates individually. This sort of a centralized storage system in much easier to manage than trying to move between various chests and locations. I think it would make a lot of sense to expand this system to work with all in-game items, perhaps with different tabs for different types of items, for example.
Now that storehouses are no longer upgraded, towns no longer rank up based on the level of the storehouse. Instead, there is a special town building required to increase a towns rank, all of which are now clearly marked with an arrow icon in the town interface. These buildings are the Storehouse, the Trader, the Market, the Town Hall, and the Guild Hall. There is also another new building called the Training Hall. All of these new buildings are works in progress and are not yet functional in this patch, though placeholders and/or custom structures can be placed in order to level up towns.
The Training Hall is intended to be a requirement to unlock a Job skill tree. The current four adventuring skills trees (which are scheduled for overhauling in version 0.8) are the Archetype skill trees, each of which is planned to branch into 2 different Job trees. The Guild Hall is then planned as a requirement for unlocking Class skill trees, which come after Job trees. These will each likely have a quest that the player will have to undertake in order to unlock them.
The Trader is intended to move resources from one town to another. The main idea behind this is for players to have a favorite town, or a main headquarters of sorts, even though that may be located in tier 0 territory, while their character is now adventuring in tier 10 or higher territory. Creating a new town in a higher level area will allow the gathering of higher tier resources, and using the trader will allow for sending those resources back to their main base in cases where that's preferred.
I do also plan to increase not only the base yield of resources from town harvesters, but also allow them to be equipped with player crafted equipment to further increase their productivity.
The Town Hall is intended to offer town specific upgrades, such as specializing in a specific resource or trade to increase productivity.
More to come!
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
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