Turn Off Living Settlements on Official Servers ***Disabled May 5-6 during server reset***

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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21

Yeah, I mean, I’m not expecting it ever will get removed, just expressing what I would prefer. It is what it is, so the main thing is that it gets fixed and, in the meantime, people should be able to switch it off so it stops causing them problems. If it became possible to switch off player-side rather than server-side (as I’ve seen suggested) that’d probably be the best - but I suspect there’s logical programming reasons why that wouldn’t work. At least a switch off on officials would give folks a chance to recover while the devs work on the fixes.

As for QoL etc, I’m definitely with you there - UI/inventory fixes would be a major one for me (including giving us back persistent custom sorting - I’m gonna keep banging that drum :wink: ). Dyeing saddles would be good - as would restoring the ability to dye stuff in our inventory - I recently had to do some mass dyeing on the dye bench and it’s an absolute PITA. Pet emotes would be great too. But mostly just getting back full functionality for things like inventory would be my priority.

I’d imagine the hotfix will ,as usual, only deal with a few specific issues related to this patch - so we’re probably back to campaigning for the next six months for the major fixes we would like…

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22

I could be mistaken but i think live settlements was a bit precipitated to make front to soulmask. It is not a bad idea but it was not ready to be implemented as it is. Also i believe the follower limits should be raised in least 18-20 to compensate the slots we lost putting worker thralls in world. A player that not want to cheese purge in vulcano would need a lot of figthers and archers, and warmachinery operators.

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23

Disable it until it is fixed.

Rigorous testing of future fixes before that fix goes live.
That means taking feedback from the test and then tinkering more, having another round of testing, and not implementing until it is working at least adjacent what is intended.

Funcom’s reach has always exceeded their grasp.
That’s been acknowledged with the “technical debt” statements.
Sometimes an idea is good, but the implementation is so rough that it just needs to either go away, or be taken off the table until it can be brought back in a less jank state (Al Meryah).

Until Living Settlements is no longer Dying Settlements, this one continues to request it be disabled on public servers.
It’s such a small toggle.
And with it disabled we would retain the ability to dress up our followers as well as slay the followers of others. Crafters would still count against thrall cap.
Losing the emotes would be unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as losing the thralls as they once more go screaming into the void.

Again, a temporary abatement until the feature can enter a more polished state is what is requested.

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24

@RealGroove and @Tweed, this is what I do. Since October 17, 2024 I have not lost 1 thrall to the bugs of Living Settlements. This serves me in PVP, with the playstyle and building techniques I prefer.

However, players are justifiably within reason to expect that they do not have to do as we do. Many don’t even know about it. Ours is a workaround that surely protects our thralls but effectively disables Living Settlements. Further, some want their thralls wandering and interacting within their constructions.

What is being asked here is to temporarily disable to prevent further losses and a request to fix, refine and ensure the Living Settlement features’ success.

We also don’t know if eventually our workaround stops working.

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25

If we’re talking player control I think it would have to be clan side for multiplayer :thinking: seeing some of the entries in the devkit I think it’s very much intertwined.

Palworld, different game, yadda yadda, is a great example of having control.

I’m certainly with you on the dye bench, hate it XD

I have to wonder, there hasn’t been communication yet about cadence of patches like this or resumption of content chapters. Andy did hint at an upcoming hotfix though.

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26

refinement? common… you know better than anyone that it needs WAY more than refinement…
they need to TEST THEIR CONTENT , THEIR PATCHES ANYTHING> NEEDS PROPER TESTING… and they keep not doing it, maybe because financial reasons? i dont know. but as long as they keep doing the disastreos closed beta they are doing, expect the same crap happening over and over again.

THEY NEED TO UNDERTAND THAT THE SETTLEMENT SYSTEM AS IT IS< NEEDS TO GO!.. it did not work, keeping on it, and trying to put bandaids to a system that will not work , will simply add grief, and angry people, they dont need it, conan exiles does not need it, DUne AWAKENINGS does not either.

they have great ideas, the idea behind the settlement system was good, but as usual the implementation was… the worst it can be. the reason is that the game itself is not able to deal with this . the platform they are used, or their spaguetti coding could simply not support it, and this is not going to change.

people likes to have control of the things that are mostly cosmetic, let people decide how to run the settlement, leave options to each player, let players decide.

they CANT Fix it ? they dont have the platform or the people to devote to a 7year old game,

i agree they should have never released this . hate to come here saying i told everyone so in this very forum that it was a mistake, SADLY i was not wrong.

better REMOVE IT instead of having peopple to break the system, people shoulnt have to rely on that, if something does not work, remove it, they did with al merayah . they did to certain degree with the combat system. they can do it with the settlment system.

this has been requested for years, and it is stil not happening.

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27

Hey, I’m with you - I’d be happy to see it go. But I don’t believe that’s a possibility in the same way as (for example) Al Merayah. Now that all crafters have been placed in the world, I’m pretty sure there’s no way to put them back into boxes - which means that if the system was removed all crafter thralls would ‘poof’ into bags and start to despawn.

Personally, I’d be willing to pay that price - and I think you might too - but there’s going to be a lot of other players who would be really unhappy about that (especially any that lose legacy crafters or others that would be really hard to replace). Realistically, I just don’t see what we might want as being possible without way too much damage to too many people. (And that’s not even taking into account the people who do like the system and just want a few small fixes.)

I think a ‘fixed’ version of lving settlements is almost certainly the best we can actually hope for. I’ve no idea how possible that is - as you say the underlying seven year-old code is a problem that might make it impossible - but it’s almost certainly all we’ve got. (I do remember hearing that part of the point of the current ‘Age of Bug-fixes’ was for the devs to work behind the scenes untangling some of the mess of code - hopefully that has been happening and may mean that they are able to get better control over it. Hopefully that will lead to them being more able to fix at least some things going forward. But there’s a fair bit of ‘hopefully’ in there, so we’ll have to see how it goes.)

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28

you dont need to. they can still behave as … regular followers, as a fighter or archer if you most.

there is nothing wrong if you can deploy whatever thrall you have in ytour posession, they will obviously not work as crafters but they can if you want behave like any other thrall.

you can also give then the option to roam using the emote menu, if you so desire, people can choose how to approach it, and if you loose thralls you can decide to not use it. its all in your hands.

yes, but we know better.
they have a mess in their spaguetti code.
they dont have the people or the workforce to basically fix the base , then add a system like that.
there is NO need to have this.
as proposed you could select the logic from the emote menu , and they will just… roam , get lost, die, eat, sleep etc.

29

The problem with what you are proposing - however much I might like the idea - is that you are asking them to program a more complex system again. Currently crafters are still not the same as fighters, even though they are both now ‘in the world’, they are still something different. They would need to program a way to make them the same as fighters. Then they would need to program a way to give the options you suggest. Then they would also need toadd back in the old style crafters. Plus, under your proposed system, all crafters already placed in the world would stop being crafters and become fighters, which for most people would be the same as losing them. It’s a nice idea but it’s not just as simple as adding a couple of toggles - all of the underlying code would have to also be written to do these things. It would certainly be better in my view if that was how they had originally set it up, but it isn’t. So what you are asking for would layer even more layers of complexity on top of that ‘seven year-old code’ that you pointed out is the problem in the first place. Adding more layers to it is not going to help.

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30

they act as regular followers when you tell them to follow you, the only thing they need to remove is the wandering system, and the crafting they influence.

i cant certainly say for sure, how much this would require, but whatever its needed to be done they need to do it, if its too much work is their problem no ours, they brought a broken system to the game, and now they need to solve it,

if they would just listened we wouldnt be here.

its their problem now, and we all should demand they fix it. for real… no more band aids, please.

31

Implementing a Thrall Radial Wheel function that enables or disables the Living Settlements feature for that specific thrall is a solid fix. FC is over-thinking this feature so much and how to implement it, they forgot how to give the player agency in their experience.

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32

Apart from the buggy mess living settlements is, there is another thing to consider.
It somehow seems FC doesn’t want the crafters to be part in any end game loops.
Before the ages, when they reworked thralls, they took away unique recipes for armorers and removed one of the endgame loops, that made people hunt certain thralls for their recipe knowledge.
Removing the itemization of thralls now removes the end game loop of searching for T4 thralls in decays. A lot of people did that as a past time with the chance to get some really nice crafters.
That removes a big motivation to wander the map and check for decayed bases.
Instead of embracing and understanding certain endgame loops that exist(ed) iin the game, they remove them and you are confined to the same 2 events repeating over and over or doing the purge (as long as there aren’t more than 10 people on the server and it fails to start), which gets stale rather quickly.
This puts a big dent in waays to maintain player retention.

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33

At least you can now disable DOORS from being used by thralls, so I think living settlements have reached a relatively decent and playable state. Dont forget to disable your doors and gates from thralls, folks.

I am not 100% sure do tavern guests ignore the door settings or not (Im talking about t he spawning tavern patrons that technically arent your thralls yet). Even if they did, I think its mostly okay since everyone can put their tavern wherever they want.

The biggest annoyance currently for me are the fatalities, which have nothing good associated with them.

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34

Yeah, they’ve really screwed the pooch with this. They’re bound to upset lots of their customers either way unless they can fix the feature, and it’s doubtful whether they’ll ultimately be willing to invest the resources into doing so if it’s that difficult. Really unfortunate situation that could have been avoided with better quality control preventing the release of a ruinously bugged feature.

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35

Agency, this is the best way to describe it imo.

36

I’ve started a new game on about the least poped PVE I can find. Working through but still low level. Have not unlocked the well or food pot, both my blacksmith and carpenter are always
blocking my front door both trying to get out at the same time, I assume to go to the river for water.

This is yet another {blanked} that wasn’t thought through. Not everyone builds big, seams most PVP build pretty cramped. which precludes a well and food pot. My drop, now transtone bases are smallish maybe 2 foundations bigger then the pad. My hunting lodge is a carpenter for arrows, cook, and preserving bins{fridges}. bearer and a fighter. Where am I going to put a well and a food pot?

That is why I’d like to be able to turn it off per thrall.
In my main base a wandering thrall or 3 wouldn’t be bad, but I hate walking in to a quiet empty work room.

I was hoping funcom would give us a small water station based on the dryer, and let thralls take food from campfires.

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37

To give them credit they did envision some kind of lively situation early on far before anyone new Soulmask was a twinkle in their devs’ eye.

I also agree a slight increase in thrall allotment would be nice. But hard to say if the performance would suffer further.

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38

Lost 3 thralls in the last 2 days, My Jebbal Sag Arch priest :cry: It took me so long to find her.
If there’s some kind of petition to turn off Living Settlement throw my name on there.

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39

Killing other player thralls on PvE is an old exploit that increased in popularity because of live settlements. I’m not going to explain how, but there are multiple ways to do it. Funcom should disable damage done to thralls on PvE servers, when player is offline, to prevent this endless harrasment going on. Until then, game is unplayable. Uninstalled and see you in 2026.

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40

Platform: Steam
Issue Type: Gameplay
Game Mode: Online Official
Server Type: PvE
Map: Exiled Lands
Server Name: #1027 PVE
Mods: No mods

Leaving settlements fires AGAIN. Turn this shit OFF! I lost my alchemist today. Previous time it was shieldwright, which took 6 f***ng months to replace.

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