Eating Ochre Dye and Too Much Pottery

Consumption Type

Ever fathom the consumption type of a good? Cultura has! Bread? That's food. Ochre dye? That's a consumable good. Pottery? That's a property good. Polished gold rocks? That's super property. And it just so happens it finally made its way into the code base. The consumption type that is. No more eating ochre dye or smashing pottery into faces for good fun. That might look a little wrong to the player so it was decided by the Design Gods that it should be changed.

Food is eaten to prevent starvation and food must be eaten each day. The bonuses gained from food (usually health) last for seven days because that's the arbitrary length of time that was decided. Eating the same kind of food confers no additional bonus. Consumable goods when consumed confer a bonus and immediately disappear. The bonus lasts seven days. Property goods are placed into slots in a family's home. A home is comprised of different rooms, and so buildings are built room by room by the player. More slots means more property items that can be enjoyed at the same time. Once a slot is filled it spreads its bonus evenly across the people in the family. Property requires repair over time. Probably every seven days.

Collecting Goods

Once a day each person queues up actions to eat food, collect consumables and another to collect property goods. The one issue has been the hierarchy of the actions. If placed at the individual level, the actions of eat food and collect consumables works out fairly okay. Everybody needs to eat and everybody would like to consume as many goods as possible. But for property, you only need to fill the slots or repair damaged property. So if every person queued up such actions you'd end up with too much pottery. Too much pottery is a problem that exists in Cultura.

One solution is to have an action queued up at the family level (similar to faction level actions) so that the family needs it completed but it doesn't really care who in the family does so. That way it only doles out enough actions to individuals to meet the exact demands. It's possible to also shift collecting consumables up to this level. This is useful for maintaining a family budget when private markets are introduced into Cultura. At the very least, the code needs to be able to handle it if not do so currently.

So, hopefully in the next update you will hear how pottery has been enjoyed by the residents of Cultura. In fact you might consider that since they no longer consume pottery (presumably by smashing it into their faces and then laughing) and instead enjoy pottery in their homes what has been done is aesthetic pleasure has been hardcoded into the minds of Culturans.