@Eyewatcher9 Hey, thanks for the advice, I’ll try to make good on it <3
It’s been a minute, but I’ve been chipping away at the project, making progress when I can. There’s a lot to cover.
New jobs; foraging and mining. I made the sensible decision to build an item database to help with managing containers, hauling and the like. When a pawn forages or mines, it rolls a chance for a particular seed/ mineral to drop.
I don’t believe I’ve covered it before, hauling technically always existed, but now…
Functional containers, with a sub-menu showing what’s currently stored. It was developing into a problem where I couldn’t see how resources were moving while debugging, so I made its inventory visible.
Pawn 3 collecting wood from the stockpile in the middle, hauling it to the food crate on the right
To follow, I wasn’t sure if I’d include it, but construction also works. Any mats needed for a construction site are reserved, and any pawns set to construct will begin hauling items to the site. While still set to construct, they’ll wait for more resources, and once a mat needed has been stored, they’ll be sent to collect.
Farming works, as well as the gardener job.
Gardeners will look for any seeds in storage and if there are any empty plots, carrying them there. After they’ve grown a set length of time from the item database, gardeners will collect and haul them to the closest food container.
There’s a new kind of research available.
Ideas unlock features to further optimize your bots. These include setting a particular bot’s diet, to prioritising where resources are carried. These are low priority and will be implemented later.
There’s now an activity tracker in the top-right corner of the screen. I set it to the idle state for demonstration purposes, but it’s also used for things like when construction has completed, or when a pawn eats food. It’s not set up, but I left a hook for the related node, so when you click on it, it’ll take you to the relevant building or pawn.
I have a vendor UI for buying bots, but I’m not ready to show it just yet. It serves as a look into how the final UI could look, but I don’t think it’s ready.
Moving/ destroying buildings works. If a pawn needs the building as part of their job, they’ll be redirected to the next job of the same type they’re assigned to, or return to an idle state.
Honestly I’ve probably missed something else. A lot of these features would’ve only been possible after I’d rewrote how jobs worked for maybe the third time, but I’m thankful I did. With how things are going irl I can’t guarantee I’ll be back sooner than later, only when I feel there’s substantial enough progress to document it.
I’m steadily compiling a list of features that need saving between launches. However another substantial part I want to devote some time to is the pawn model and its wg. This’ll open the way to how I want to handle customization, and might make an interesting topic for another time.
Sorry for the long read, but thanks for reading. Until next time o/