It is cool to make those RP ideas, like many mods have been doing for a long time, but incorporating the idea without really seeing how things work for the “player” is a little … strange.
While it is very “nice” to see for a 10 minute gameplay snipped or test your thralls doing stuff around and so on, and it looks nice on YouTube, for a second time it is made without afterthought when things start to scale.
The first was the implementation of the “thrall pot”. It is a nice idea, but shortly after it started to work very “strangely”. Thralls would take from the pot and accumulate food to spoil in their inventories. You would not be able to leave it there for a long time as the thralls would be taking practically every time they are “reaching the radius”, so if they were going to attack or following, each time they got in range, they would take something.
Now the same problem around the routine the thralls do seems to be following the same pattern. They will kinda repeat some patterns and as it is “cool to see in a 5 min video” or a “hour of dev stream that just shows what they do without having to show how they function”, when in a base, they really get more in the way of playing rather than aesthetically pleasing to move around.
You start to have to model a base in the way your thralls do not come in the way of your playing, so you need to put things in specific places, or put doors over steps so they dont go there, even if there is no reason for them to. Meanwhile you need to put the beds and pots you want them to use in specific ways because even if they are “clearly accessible” the thralls wont get to them, entering through doors they should not in order to get where they wont.
I often test my mods in patters they start to cause so they wont suffer from the problems ants do because they follow simple rules. When I had the test server to try the patterns of the thralls “living” in a simple base, it reminded me of this:
