Key changes
For the past few weeks I have been working on adding civilian needs to MicroTown, among many other improvements. The population is now divided into workers and civilians. Workers will continue as before -- carrying items, constructing things and working at buildings. However, civilians will not do heavy work and will instead supply houses with items from markets -- food, firewood, medicine, etc. Several new items and simple early production buildings have been added to that effect. Clothing finally has a use! 🎉
Each villager is now assigned a residence at a house:
Markets have been repurposed. Civilians will come to markets, where food and supplies are delivered:
They will take these supplies to houses, where they will be stored as reserves and gradually used up:
This also brings a large change to how happiness works, which is now primarily based on how well a house is supplied:
Each house will provide one or more (un)happiness points, depending on resident sentiment, which is mainly fulfilled by keeping the residence well supplied.
This means most existing villages will end up unhappy until the new supply chains are built. I decided not to penalize high unhappiness yet any more than the previous small reduction of worker operation speed. However, extreme-size villages may not make it past this update without making the mortician very busy.
The tutorial has been updated to include housing and market explanation.
Many other improvements were added. For example, workers will fetch their own input items if there's no one closer or carriers are busy:
Many usability thing are added, for instance, I'm working through the tooltips and trying to make them more understandable and explanatory and to avoid "hiding numbers" from the player:
Reflections
Adding this civilian feature set turned out to be a much larger endeavor than I expected and took 2 weeks longer than I wanted. Partly, because I was also adding a lot of enhancement based on feedback. And partly because it was a pretty large feature that I should have likely split into a couple smaller updates.
Future plans
There are still many improvements that I need to do. I will likely work on adding various report tools (like production rate overview) and quality of life improvements (like manually clearing forests) before other stuff. After that, I want to do another content update.
Full changelog
Changes
* Separate Worker and Civilian villagers (villagers working at buildings are now called "Tradesmen" instead of "Workers")
* Houses now have 8 resident slots that get occupied by villagers and are shown in building inspection HUD
* Add Woodcutter] (with Chopping Block) and Firewood unlocked by default; add goal
* Add Carpenter] (with Carpentry Table) and Furniture unlocked with Carpentry; add goal
* Add Potter (with Pottery Wheel and Pottery Kiln) and Pottery unlocked with Pottery]; add goal
* Bricklaying now also requires Pottery
* Warehouses can now also store Firewood, Pottery and Furniture
* Houses now have residential supply item stores for all food items and Firewood, Pottery, Furniture, Clothing and Medicine that are shown in building inspection HUD
* Tavern and Market Square no longer provide global happiness
* Market Square now serves as the parent building for individual stalls
* Food Stalls and Supply Stalls now supply a selected residential food or supply item respectively for Civilians
* Civilians "work" at Houses, bringing food and supplies from markets
* food is now consumed by its residents from Houses first; understocked and homeless villagers will consume food items "directly"
* Food consumption and production info in food tooltip
* Remove requirement for minimum distance between Taverns and Market Squares
* Houses now have a sentiment for each various factors, like having food and supplies
* Additional sentiments unlock when corresponding techs become available and sentiments become important to residents once the house is supplied for the first time
* Total sentiment in a House awards or deducts happiness for the village
* Happiness is now primarily based on the total sentiment of Houses
* Tavern now provides a sentiment point for nearby Houses and uses drinks proportionally to the number of nearby residents
* New villagers spawn from Houses (or Town Hall if there aren't any houses)
* Town Hall no longer provides housing, but initial population does not require housing to spawn
* Villager spawns faster in larger population towns and will not spawn if housing, food or happiness threshold is not met
* Villager happiness from population increases in "brackets" as population grows; shown in population tooltip
* Top HUD overview bar no longer shows Clothing
* Deliveries now have better internal priorities, for example items for processing or items on ground are now chosen first for deliveries
* Tradesmen at buildings will now fetch their own nearby input items for the building if they have nothing else to do
* Stored items (like at Warehouse) now shown as icons instead of text
* Brick and Glass production buildings are now in resource building tab
* Shift-building copies now also copies the storage item, like for Warehouses
* Monument now also needs Bricklaying and Glassblowing
* Arborist and Smeltery now have more worker slots
* Victory window shows total play time
* Items now shown in a single inspection box
* Various sprite and text adjustments, various UI tweaks and layout adjustments
* Item in-world stack sprites now visually show only up to 3 items
* Add tutorial steps to include Market Square construction and related features; tweak wording
* Tutorial arrow now point to in-world building for steps that need such selected
* No parent building in range reported as issue for auxiliaries
* Idle villagers will spread out instead of grouping up in large numbers
* Idle villagers mostly walk instead of run
Fixes
* Building deliveries being chosen by carriers closest to the building rather than the (closest selected) item
* Saved game times not being shown in local time
* Items rarely being ignored when differently prioritized for delivery
* Delivery proportions not adjusted when only one building at a time requested items
* Delivery proportions incorrect entries after loading older saves
* Starting to deconstruct and then cancelling for buildings with multiple production items (like Garden Plot) would have the production item record stuck
* In rare cases, a random consumed food item could stay reserved
* Goals with item consumption not triggering updates
* Mead to only unlock when both Brewing and Beekeeping are unlocked
* Error when moving mouse across tiles while confirming operation range range
Optimizations
* Faster item and building lookup for large quantities
* Faster delivery task assignment for large number of requesters
* Faster compatible worker search with many tasks and workers
* Slightly faster save loading