but i have a worry crafters will be put on world, and now they will be able to fall through ground and killed with zath orb and other exploits to kill thrall.
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as they said on the stream they are trying to fix it
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hope they figure it out, but the exploits to kill thralls now extend to crafters too. I they dont take care of those exploits this beautifull settlement will have to turn into a prision crafters will need to be put on cages near the benches for their good lol
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While I have praised this new Living Settlements installment and what Funcom plans to add, I did notice a ābugā during the demonstration: AI Pathing.
AI Pathing has also been a long, requested bug fix. With worker thralls moving about, some were getting stuck on objects in the world and just walking in place. Worker thralls need to detect when they get stuck, and then choose an alternate path to reach their destination, instead of continuing in place (ie. stuck).
AI Pathing was a problem for the old purge. AI Pathing was less of a problem for the new purge. And AI Pathing looks to have some of the old issues that weāve seen before. Thus, AI Pathing needs attention before the October release.
@Community @den @AndyB
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The option you speak of is to train the thralls, and never break the seal on their shrink wrap. Yes - sure - these can still be traded. But there are so many times when other brokering takes place that would be defeated by Living Settlements.
āHey. If you can cough up a Bladesmith, we will leave you alone.ā I canāt. Living Settlement. My Bladesmith would be placed.
āHey, do you have like a T3 blacksmith you arenāt using anymore?ā I canāt give you my āyoungerā thralls now that Iāve become better established. Living Settlement. Theyāre all pinned in. Or I can start cutting throats to open up my follower limit.
Some other, common sceneriosā¦
āOhh! Just bring your Taskmaster to Mounds, and weāll farm several Cimmerian Berserkers there!ā I CANT. Living Settlement prevents the on demand movement and relocation of artisan thralls. Instead, I would have to stair-step place him the entire route along the wild. Or I would have to risk him to bears and wolves and enemy players while following me.
āRaid window opens in 30 minutes. They know about this base. We have to move all of the loot and the artisan thralls.ā I CANT. Best I can do is go Authority spec, and move two at a time. This becomes a dicy proposition with a blacksmith, an armorer, a tanner, probably a couple of smelters, maybe a couple of cooks. All of whom have questionable hit points and fighting skills. Especially with the way mobs tend to stun lock ANY thrall. Even combat thralls with 4k HPs and put them in serious danger.
This is not a good change. And it is irresponsible to push this on the community without getting feedback from the community first.
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What is the range on the roaming artisanās benefits? Will it be possible to slap down an armorer bench outside someoneās juggernaut castle and reap the benefits of your hard fought Shieldwright?
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a big problem for me is that crafter could be killed by exploits, out fo the raid time, and in pve and pve-c, if you got lucky and record the griefer acting you may can get one of his/her many alt cheap acounts suspend for a few days till they return to do de the same. Lost a lot of thralls this way, now i cant dress any thrall with good armor on server, since the nerf thralls dont worth much, but crafters are valuable, and lose them to exploiters is a game killer
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Or you can knock out some T3 blacksmiths and keep them in your chests as a reserve.
Or you set him to follow and teleport there via the map room or transportory stone.
Like I said, I donāt play PVP, so youāre free to disregard my opinion, but I always found it weird that you can pick up a vault-worth of loot, shove it up your barbaric ass, and run away.
Maybe fighting should be a risk. And if that risk is too skewed in one direction, then maybe that is the problem to solve, rather than giving players a way to pick up their base and run.
I mean, no wonder offlining is preferred if fighting an online opponent means theyāll just make the whole fight meaningless.
Again, I mean no disrespect here. These are merely my thoughts, not attacks on you or other PVP players 
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Not that they cant do the thing:
In some ways watching it made me sad that a lot of things seem to be being made THERE, but they were āinventedā here.
That being said, I am not in the crowd of āthis game is abandonedā, but you can see clearly that there they are doing things that fit Conan Exiles drawbacks in some ways. As I said before, it is not that they cant make things well. I am really inclined to believe a whole lot of it comes from the reception players have on this game. If I was doing something and people were constantly complaining about everything, I would move on too. Who wouldnt ?
To me ? I dont really care. Conan Exiles for me is more than a sandbox game, it is a sandbox project in which I make my mods mostly for my own enjoyment and publish them to people who want them, but dont really think about what they mean to the overall game.
Living settlements ? I have mine for years now. Walking around, taking stuff from one place to the other, crafters sorta walking around (I made so a walking thrall having an artisan item in their inventory can do what that artisan can do). Long time ago I had the walking thralls to stop at places and do stuff (emotes) like the working one and craft stuff in a separated system.
When they came up with the Smart Object Component, I just started to offload that work to it. Like my barkeepers do take breaks, do work on shifts, and walk around on their own:
Crowd command also is a thing:
But I never thought for a second anything I do they cant do better, faster and more practical. I just think games players love, devs love to dev. Games people dont care to love, they dont care to make an effort either. I do my effort because I love the game and dont care about what people think. If it was my work, I might not do what I do as a modder maybe.
Itās certainly a symptom of other issues.
The biggest being weak base defence. Thereās been creative ways to achieve better defence but they have become obsolete, exploitative or an infraction.
So the solutions are to have no base, minimal footprint or a big well oiled clan. Having consistent numbers is a challenge; we all have lives outside of the game, children, jobs, hobbies and responsibilities being a factor. A game being played for entertainment should not become a second job.
All of these are multi-faceted.
Base defence was actually better pre-AoS. Much has changed in terms of HP and how the tools of assault damage building pieces.
So people look for exploitative ways of retention and replayability. Like, exploiting the entrance of keyhole.
A rework would need to be done first for the settlement system not to have such a huge impact. Maybe as an addition finally implementing DBD onto Officials.
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They can, but as any dev worth their salt knows, itās always easier to do it right when you start from scratch. Conan Exiles has a codebase that is 7 years old, and itās built on top of a heavily modified and customized version of UE4. The base version, 4.15, is now considered pretty much obsolete.
So, can they ādo the thingā? Theoretically, yes, itās possible and theyāre capable of it. But in practical terms, ācan they do the thingā doesnāt mean āis it theoretically possibleā, but rather āis it feasibleā.
People who actually have a job and understand what professionalism means. I believe Funcom devs are professionals.
The only way you can just get up and abandon something is if itās not your source of compensation and youāre doing it for the love of the art itself. Maybe itās a side project you do on your own outside your day job, maybe you have an investment portfolio that lets you live comfortably, maybe something else. But thatās the only way to have the freedom to say āmy users are wrong, and my feelings are hurt, and Iāll take my ball and go homeā.
And even then, even when you have that freedom, there are still other factors that might not hobble you, but they can ā and often should ā give you pause. Did you manage the expectations of those who came to depend on your work? Were you upfront with them?
Whether youāre an amateur or a professional, whether youāre doing it for money or for passion, you leave your mark on the world and on your users. You donāt have to do everything they ask you, but taking their feedback into account is rarely a bad thing. Itās not easy to do it right, but thatās the way things are. Sure, maybe you have the freedom and the right to tell every single one of your users to go pound sand, but then you donāt get to be surprised when your game or your mods are less popular and praised than others.
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What we need next is a system for transferring ownership of already in world thralls.
That would really wake up the economy and add that slave market system that has been going Sub Rosa in PvP for awhile.
As thralls are no longer the prize, they will be slainā¦
But if they can be transferred, suddenly a whole world of extortion and taxation can be explored.
If people are squeamish about slave marketsā¦
First of all, how have you been playing this game for any length of time?
Secondly, it could be a job transfer or contract broker or whatever other modern faƧade/euphemism makes coerced labour palatable to the person in question.
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Or FC can figure out a way to make other peopleās thralls susceptible to knockout and you can bring said worker to a neutral point, set him to passive and offer him up to be knocked out and the other player can break them on their wheel. Trade accomplished.
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Iām in a similar boat. Iām concerned one of my workers will fall through the mesh never to be seen again 
If a player kills/steals them itās one thing. If they vanish due to a bugged point on the groundā¦ugh.
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Respectfully, Joel hasnāt been in charge of CE since 2019. Thereās been 2 directors since his departure and no indication that they shared his vision.
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I donāt know what to expect or criticize when it comes to the update.
But i do know what i wish.
This is no other than to keep their goal focus which is no other than āproper updatesā.
Itās time for the dev creation team to stop passing the ball on the bug section and deliver something properā¦
Letās see, beta is close.
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Iām curious about this too, and from what little Iāve seen on the stream it seems like this might be the case. Hereās my line of speculationā¦
Here we have three slots. Nowā¦ does the station have three slots for three thralls? Well it doesnāt now, but does it now? In the video they explain those slots only appear when there is T4 bonuses available. But is there three slots for three T4 thralls on the Armorer, Alters, Blacksmith, and Carpentry benches?
The explanation in the stream didnāt allude that there is. Which means a thrall is conferring its bonuses remotely. Now the question that Codemage is posing comes into play, does a thrall confer the remote bonus into everything in its 50m radius?
My question from a mechanical point of view is why would it not? If the thrall doesnāt need to be specifically assigned and you cannot specifically assign 3 (well we might, but Iām leaning towards not) thralls, then logic says that the bonuses will be conferred remotely to every station in range unless weāre blocked specifically from doing so.
And if they are, how do we choose which thrall goes where? The only choice given is which of the three T4 bonuses we want. Not the specific thrall we want. The stream says we specifically cannot choose a lower tier thrall if a higher one is in the area.
In the image of the ghost placement, we see an alchemist only having a singular slot in its stations. Unfortunately alchemists do not have separate bonuses like Priests, Smiths, Carpenters, and Armorers have. So we donāt really get an indication here.
I am still speculating that it would mean that if you have a T4 smelter, and 4 furnaces, heāll confer his bonuses to all 4. Thatās a significant change. But one I think weāre getting. Though I am not 100% on that.
If this is the case, this is a very interesting change to how we design our crafting areas. As someone who routinely gets tasked by their clans to design and build the crafting and storage areas, I am very much looking forward to these changes coming in Age of Heroes. Especially if they work the way I am speculating they might.
One thing I used to hate doing is swapping out thralls to different stations to get different effects based on specific jobs. This change will make that a bit simpler.
If we have to tell our crafters to go to specific stations, that could be a tad messy. Putting Three T4 thralls into a single slot means how do they interact when wandering around and try to enter the same station to work? Do they queue? Do they merge into each other? Are they smart enough to take turns? Seems like a ton of work for something that is mostly visual. Weāll see on the test branch when it goes live I guess.
This one is interesting. Many servers have very strict thrall limits and I see that not being lightened up at all. Its going to behoove many server owners to take live databases and get some testing done on the test branch. Not just Funcom. Though I suspect most private servers will likely just wipe in some form, especially the heavier populated ones that would be affected.
But Funcomās QA team has their work cut out. Ideally they would want to take the largest database, copy it, and find a way to run it. However thatās not exactly easy since all the thralls will simply dump into their stations. And the server will seem to run better than on live (since no thralls on stations), even if small amount.
How are they going to go around and put hundreds of thralls on stations in a meaningful amount of testing? I believe they should be able to set owner of every build to one clan for that purpose, but thatās still a ton of placement that needs to be done.
I foresee them not actually upping the limits, and if they doā¦ expect performance to nosedive.
I donāt want to go off topic here, but on the subject of server performanceā¦ they may wish to consider turning off logged out characters stay in world for PVE and PVE-C servers. That cuts database size by 50-66% on average. I would think this would let them increase the follower limit some without much impact. This is really something that should have been done years ago.
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I do have to question this one Alexandria. Having played on a private RP server (unmodded mind you) we had zero issues with the tavern system. So I do not think that the issue lies with the Tavern system itself, but with the Tavern system ON TOP OF the number of mods installs (which often include a LOT of particle effects and other issues). How many mods do you run on your server?
I am pretty sure they said in the stream that they would be moddable.
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I tested it first on an unmodded private server with just 2 players and like 2 builds. It was very janky. Thralls sitting weirdly, backwards, etc. Bad pathing around furnishings. So even in a āpristineā environment it was not great.
And as an aside, did you see the thrall that was literally floating in midair during the stream?
Still, I did feel it added some life to things. So we went for it. And that was when it got even jankier and the lag hit anywhere remotely near it. Yes my server is pretty heavily modded. Tho not nearly so much as many others. So yes, that most certainly probably made it worse. Thatās not FCās fault. But, point being, it was not good to begin with.
My secondary point is my concern that this is going to be just another thing FC is putting in the game thatās going to make private servers with mods encounter yet more problems. No, they canāt know all the possible ramifications on modded servers but itās also pretty apparent that they donāt care either. LOL
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