I have been insanely busy with my regular work, but also made really good progress on Path to Prosperity. I have implemented a lot of new mechanics, including a new version of consumption buildings, so today I’ll talk a little about that.
Before I go into the details, let me get back to something I mentioned before: Now that plant clusters are the main source of seeds and are randomly placed in the world, your expansions define your access to resources, and are a lot more relevant. Or should be. However, at the moment, the majority of resources are fairly interchangeable. All resources are more or less relevant only for selling, and consequently, anything you find will come down to having found money. This is a remnant of when the game was still meant to be in faster paced PvP matches, where we did not want the randomness to affect the game to the point of losing. However, the game is PvE now, and much more slow paced - so the randomness can have much longer lasting effects.
The way in which this will happen is through development points. Most resources will have a process by which they can be turned into a consumption good, and consumption goods can be provided to your citizens for development points. DevPoints won’t scale with quantity like selling them - if you provide one cigar to your citizens, you will get some DevPoints for that - but you won’t get more DevPoints for providing a second cigar. This is where having access to a variety of resources will allow you to get more DevPoints faster, as providing some coffee and a cigar will give more points.
Providing consumption goods to your villagers will happen through consumption buildings. For example, the General Goods store will provide furniture (and some other goods) to all people in its range. For now, I decided that this will happen in a fairly simple way: The General Goods store has a set range, and uses a set amount of products (1 furniture per minute). Any villagers whose houses are within range of the General Goods store when it has furniture in its inventory will then generate development points. This will happen at different rates for different goods. Furniture currently requires 500 “villager minutes” to generate one development point, while more advanced goods will require fewer. This means, if there is a single small house with two villagers in range of the General Goods store, it will take 250 minutes and 250 furniture to generate one point. If there are 25 houses with 50 residents in range, it will only take 10 minutes and 10 furniture to generate one point - so where you build will become very important, and upgrading houses is definitely encouraged.
Development points are generated per village, so your main village will likely have many residents and points, while your mining village will generate fewer points. Development points can then be used to unlock research of buildings and new recipes, and to upgrade villages. Upgrading villages will allow you to place buildings of the next tier - so don’t expect to be placing a large stone house as the only building in a village in the future - placing large houses will only be possible in settlements that are sufficiently developed.
For now, I have created the consumption mechanic, and development points can be generated and saved per village. I have also created a basic settlement level mechanic, and a research mechanic that allows the unlocking of buildings with development points. However, most of this is currently possible only through developer commands, so I will have to jump into the dreaded area of creating some decent UI to make all of this accessible from a reasonable player perspective. I will keep you updated!
Until next time!