Key changes
For this update, the main focus has been on adding animals as proper "units". This means they can move, have animations, make decisions, age and die, and generally interact with the game world.
For now, I added three domestic animals to see how it goes -- pigs, sheep and cows:
Pigs have basically the same purpose, but with the updated interactions:
Carriers will lead the animals from pens to the butcher, scheduled similar to carrying items.
Sheep are used to produce wool clothing:
Cows are used to produce cheese:
Both wool clothing and cheese are stocked at markets and used by civilians at houses.
I have not yet added a proper way to breed and acquire new animals. The workers are able to "spawn" baby animals in animal pens as before. I have some ideas for handling this, but many of them rely on future content (like trading for certain non-native animals).
The new items have also complicated the UI a bit, and I'm not happy with it yet. For example, there are now linen (hemp) yarn and wool yarns, and they are processed separately but in the same building with an intermediate product in-between:
I also added a toggle for relevant buildings to choose the production item (and enable corresponding input items), so that buildings can focus on a specific item rather than process all as by default. Especially, if they are not located at a place where having both chains would make sense. (I thought about making these separate buildings, but opted out to have toggleable production instead.)
I (finally) added a deconstruct tool (X) that allows quickly (un)marking buildings for deconstruction:
I also added an item usage chart section to the item report window that shows how many items are being added and removed over selected time periods:
I've kept it very simple for now and I will likely extend this in the future (it's mostly about UI and doing some maths).
There are a whole lot of other internal and backend things I've been working on that will facilitate further features.
Future plans
I want to add more animals and interactions, including wild animals and hunting. However, I need to make other adjustments to make these viable first. So I'll be adding additional features and backend stuff and adding new animals "on top".
There are certain mechanics I'm not I'm not happy with. For example, I need to redo civilian logic (especially idling) and how they choose and carry items to houses. There are now 12 different items that they have to individually take from market to houses and it's becoming a chore to micro-manage and visualize it all. Similarly, there are 10 house desires each driven by its own conditions. I want to consolidate and group desires and simplify what it means that a residence is (un)happy. And make markets more productive, especially for supplying houses.
I also want to start working on expanding endgame, adding trading and reworking research and goals. But these are all big features that will likely slowly come together over many updates.
Full changelog
Changes
• Various buildings are reset/redeployed for loaded games
• Change Pigs to mobile mobs/animals (instead of item Pig)
• Animal Pens no longer "grow" Pigs directly and Ranches no longer directly produce Pigs as output items
• Add Cows and Sheep
• Animal Pens house individual animals (Pigs, Cows and Sheep) that wander around the enclosure; workers must prepare the area and can spawn animals there (for now)
• Animals will randomly walk around and graze; animals in pens will stay within the pens
• Add animal sounds
• Pigs are now led from Animal Pens to a Butcher by a carrier
• Animals grow over time and only grown animals can be "harvested"
• Add Milk milked from Cows
• Add Cheesemonger with Curd Vat and Cheese Press; add Curd and Cheese
• "Sliver", "Yarn", "Fabric" and "Clothing" are now Linen Sliver, Linen Yarn, Linen Fabric and Linen Clothing
• Add Fleece sheared from Sheep, which can be processed at a Wool Scourer with Fleece Tub into Clean Fleece and with Wool Comb into Wool
• Add Wool which can then be processed to Wool Sliver, Wool Yarn, Wool Fabric and Wool Clothing similar to Linen Clothing pipeline
• Houses now accept Cheese and Wool Clothing as reserves; Food Stalls and Supply Stalls can now stock Cheese and Wool Clothing respectively; add the related sentiment and needed amount for happiness
• Buildings with multiple auxiliaries can now support multiple work slots; Ranch, Beekeeper, Carding Mill, Brickyard, and Potter slots increased from 1 to 3
• Buildings with multiple outputs or intermediate items can now toggle their production (and corresponding input item delivery); enable this for Ranch, Carding Mill, Wool Scourer, Brickyard, Brewery and Tavern
• Add item production, consumption and usage over time charts to Item Report window
• Adjust Drying Rack presentation
• Replace full "close" buttons with "X" buttons for most windows
• Clicking on knowledge section in top HUD overview bar opens the knowledge research window
• Add Tool tab to HUD construction menu, and add deconstruct tool for quickly marking building for deconstruction; add shortcut X when not inspecting
• Add low disk space warning
Fixes
• Villagers always facing left when randomly moving around
• Building input and output items duplicating and mixing intermediate products
• Civilians idling next to Brewery instead of Tavern
Optimizations
• First map generation or load has much faster entity creation for larger maps
• Pathfinding runs in a separate thread, now taking almost no time in main thread
• Pathfinding checks are pre-calculated on changes only and repeat lookups do not consume additional time on main thread
• Post-pathfinding path cleanup/smoothing is now part of pathfinding thread