NPCs & Enemies Housing System's Update

[Artanaris]

The idea revolves around updating the housing system by stimulating the player to build bigger/detailed houses instead of classic "wooden boxes".
However, considering the the creativity of the player and the endless number of ideas one can have to create buildings; it'd be really difficult to make a system that can find which house is "big/detailed" and which is not.

So, what I suggest is:

Housing Size's Update

The wiki says that the minimum tiles for a house are 60 tiles, while the maximum is 750 tiles; size currently does nothing other than calculating if your house is suitable.
Now, the idea towards the size system is to divide the size of houses in four tiers:

• Small House: A house whose size is inferior or equal to 100 tiles. (+0 towards the limit)
• Medium House: A house whose size is above 100 tiles and inferior or equal to 280 tiles. (+1 towards the limit)
• Medium-Big House: A house whose size is above 280 tiles and inferior or equal to 450 tiles. (+2 towards the limit)
• Big House: A house whose size is above 450 tiles and inferior or equal to 600 tiles. (+3 towards the limit)

(The remaining 150 tiles are for the player's choice.)

This pushes the total ideal limit towards 4 (while counting the default 1), and also stimulates the player to make bigger houses for more Town NPCs if they want to.

Likeability

Likeability would be a new statistic that would boost the spawn/respawn time of Town NPCs by using decorations.

It would work with a point system where the limit is 10 (50%), each point would reduce the spawn time by 5% which when maxed out would mean a single minute for Town NPCs to spawn/respawn.

What would give likeability points:

• Paintings. (0.2 each, limit would be 4)
• Cages. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Butterfly Jars. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Fish Bowl. (0.5, limit is 1)
• Jellyfish Jars. (0.5 for Blue, 0.8 for Pink, 1 for Green; limit is 1)
• Vases. (0.2, limit is 4)
• Ship in a Bottle, Ship's Wheel, Wall Anchor and Treasure Map (Only works with the Captain and the Angler, the Angler only with the Treasure Map; the boosts would be 2.5% each)
• Silly Tied Balloons, Silly Tied Bundle of Balloons (Only works with Party Girl, 1% each balloon with a limit of 4, 5% for the bundle with a limit of 2)
• Banners (0.1, limit is 5)

Boss Trophies:

1. Pre-Hardmode: +2%
2. Hardmode: +5%
3. Post-Lunatic Cultist: +10%

Some specific throphies that would be able to break the 50% limit:

• Eye of Cthulhu (Merchant, +10%), considering how his quotes make the player know that he fears the eye; perhaps seeing the eye would relieve him.
• Skeletron (Clothier, +15%), after a long lasting curse, seeing this trophy would make him relieved that the menace is no more.
• Golem (Witch Doctor, +5%), knowing his race, this idol could be fitting.

Please note that this system isn't and won't be meant to obligate the player to build with decorations.

TL;DR: Basically reward those players who spend a lot of time building houses by letting them have more Town NPCs in one house with an updated housing system, plus a system that makes Town NPCs spawn/respawn faster by using decorations.

Let me know if there are any grammatical errors or you'd like to express a similar idea to mine, cheers!

 

[BrusselSprouts693]

The idea revolves around updating the housing system by stimulating the player to build bigger/detailed houses instead of classic "wooden boxes".
However, considering the the creativity of the player and the endless number of ideas one can have to create buildings; it'd be really difficult to make a system that can find which house is "big/detailed" and which is not.

I'm a big fan of wooden boxes. As is, I don't find building npc houses to be a fun task, so I like to have it done quickly.

So, what I suggest is:

Update the use of sofas, dressers and beds towards the housing system.

Sofas:
- Right now sofas are just a chair that takes more resources to make, it could bump the limit of Town NPCs by 1.

Dressers:
- Currently, dressers only have two uses: they function as a chest and let the player modify their clothing; they also count as a table.
Same idea for sofas, however they'd only bump the limit of Town NPCs by 0.5.

Beds:
- Beds are only used to set the player's spawnpoint in a house; they'd bump the limit by 1.

I cant say I'd be enthused to have to try to talk to one specific npc when there are 3 in my base.
Housing Size's Update

The wiki says that the minimum tiles for a house are 60 tiles, while the maximum is 750 tiles; size currently does nothing other than calculating if your house is suitable.
Now, the idea towards the size system is to divide the size of houses in four tiers:

• Small House: A house whose size is inferior or equal to 100 tiles. (+0 towards the limit)
• Medium House: A house whose size is above 100 tiles and inferior or equal to 280 tiles. (+0.5 towards the limit)
• Medium-Big House: A house whose size is above 280 tiles and inferior or equal to 450 tiles. (+1 towards the limit)
• Big House: A house whose size is above 450 tiles and inferior or equal to 600 tiles. (+1.5 towards the limit)

(The remaining 150 tiles are for the player's choice.)

This pushes the total ideal limit towards 5 (counting the default 1).
This isn't "put effort and care into your npc house", it's "spend 2 minutes placing walls for your merchant and 3 other's base, where I placed a bed, sofa, and dresser somewhere on the floor."

Likeability

Likeability would be a new statistic that would boost the spawn/respawn time of Town NPCs by using decorations.

It would work with a point system where the limit is 10 (50%), each point would reduce the spawn time by 5% which when maxed out would mean a single minute for Town NPCs to spawn/respawn.

What would give likeability points:

• Paintings. (0.2 each, limit would be 4)
• Cages. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Butterfly Jars. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Fish Bowl. (0.5, limit is 1)
• Jellyfish Jars. (0.5 for Blue, 0.8 for Pink, 1 for Green; limit is 1)
• Vases. (0.2, limit is 4)
• Ship in a Bottle, Ship's Wheel, Wall Anchor and Treasure Map (Only works with the Captain and the Angler, the Angler only with the Treasure Map; the boosts would be 2.5% each)
• Silly Tied Balloons, Silly Tied Bundle of Balloons (Only works with Party Girl, 1% each balloon with a limit of 4, 5% for the bundle with a limit of 2)
• Banners (0.1, limit is 5)

Boss Trophies:

1. Pre-Hardmode: +2%
2. Hardmode: +5%
3. Post-Lunatic Cultist: +10%

Some specific throphies that would be able to break the 50% limit:

• Eye of Cthulhu (Merchant, +10%), considering how his quotes make the player know that he fears the eye; perhaps seeing the eye would relieve him.
• Skeletron (Clothier, +15%), after a long lasting curse, seeing this trophy would make him relieved that the menace is no more.
• Golem (Witch Doctor, +5%), knowing his race, this idol could be fitting.

Please note that this system isn't and won't be meant to obligate the player to build with decorations.

That's a nice disclaimer, but the entire suggestion tells the player to do just that.

TL;DR: Basically reward those players who spend a lot of time building houses by letting them have more Town NPCs in one house with an updated housing system, plus a system that makes Town NPCs spawn/respawn faster by using decorations.

Let me know if there are any grammatical errors or you'd like to express a similar idea to mine, cheers!

My responses are in the quote. Sorry if I sounded a bit rude.

 

[Gotcha!]

I do like giving my NPCs decent housing, but forcing players to do so, no thanks.

 

[Artanaris]

My responses are in the quote. Sorry if I sounded a bit rude.

No, you didn't sound rude at all; instead you let me know what was wrong with my suggestion, and now I can see it too.
I agree with the first part of your critique, since it actually forces the player to build three pieces of furtniture that they might not want.

I cant say I'd be enthused to have to try to talk to one specific npc when there are 3 in my base.

Well, I have changed my idea: instead of using furtniture, size is what will matter for a house so it shouldn't be a problem?

 

[Laluzi]

I prefer the system as it is (though I dislike the 'this house is too big' rule.) It's simple, but it works. There's nothing currently stopping the player from lavishly decorating if they want to - which in and of itself validates the existence of things like sofas and paintings - and fitting multiple NPCs within the same house could become janky thanks to the way NPCs like to pick spots to stand on. Obviously they can't choose the same spot as each other, or it'll be impossible to access different characters at night, but some of the things you're using to bump NPC capacity - paintings in particular - block an NPC's ability to stand on a piece of ground. So more NPCs need to fit in a room with fewer valid spots.

In any case, building a large house with distinct rooms is quite simple, and also a natural way of designing things. You can fulfill the chair/table requirement easily in most rooms - a bed and dresser for a bedroom, a piano and sofa for a sitting room, table and chair for kitchen, bathtub and toilet for bathroom, workbench and chair for a smithy or workshop. Heck, you can avoid the appearance of placing tables or chairs at all. Flesh bathtubs look like stone blocks. Ebonwood bathtubs look like barrels. Bars look like countertops. Marble chairs look like tiny plinths. You can even do things like this.



A bus stop and two storefronts, each valid housing.

You can also separate a room without using walls - platforms as stairs or ladders will do the trick, letting you fit more NPCs in the same room. So overall, I don't think this adds much to the game that can't already be achieved with a little creativity.

Finally, the kinds of players who enjoy building decorated, extravagant housing are the kinds of players who will generally build enough buildings or rooms to house all NPCs, making the reward of fit-more-in-one-room a little pointless. Being able to put more NPCs in fewer houses is more of a boon to people who don't want to spend time building.

 

[Ordinary Orange]

The idea revolves around updating the housing system by stimulating the player to build bigger/detailed houses instead of classic "wooden boxes".
However, considering the the creativity of the player and the endless number of ideas one can have to create buildings; it'd be really difficult to make a system that can find which house is "big/detailed" and which is not.

So, what I suggest is:

Housing Size's Update

The wiki says that the minimum tiles for a house are 60 tiles, while the maximum is 750 tiles; size currently does nothing other than calculating if your house is suitable.
Now, the idea towards the size system is to divide the size of houses in four tiers:

• Small House: A house whose size is inferior or equal to 100 tiles. (+0 towards the limit)
• Medium House: A house whose size is above 100 tiles and inferior or equal to 280 tiles. (+1 towards the limit)
• Medium-Big House: A house whose size is above 280 tiles and inferior or equal to 450 tiles. (+2 towards the limit)
• Big House: A house whose size is above 450 tiles and inferior or equal to 600 tiles. (+3 towards the limit)

(The remaining 150 tiles are for the player's choice.)

This pushes the total ideal limit towards 4 (while counting the default 1), and also stimulates the player to make bigger houses for more Town NPCs if they want to.

Likeability

Likeability would be a new statistic that would boost the spawn/respawn time of Town NPCs by using decorations.

It would work with a point system where the limit is 10 (50%), each point would reduce the spawn time by 5% which when maxed out would mean a single minute for Town NPCs to spawn/respawn.

What would give likeability points:

• Paintings. (0.2 each, limit would be 4)
• Cages. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Butterfly Jars. (Non Gold = 0.5, Gold = 1; limit is 3)
• Fish Bowl. (0.5, limit is 1)
• Jellyfish Jars. (0.5 for Blue, 0.8 for Pink, 1 for Green; limit is 1)
• Vases. (0.2, limit is 4)
• Ship in a Bottle, Ship's Wheel, Wall Anchor and Treasure Map (Only works with the Captain and the Angler, the Angler only with the Treasure Map; the boosts would be 2.5% each)
• Silly Tied Balloons, Silly Tied Bundle of Balloons (Only works with Party Girl, 1% each balloon with a limit of 4, 5% for the bundle with a limit of 2)
• Banners (0.1, limit is 5)

Boss Trophies:

1. Pre-Hardmode: +2%
2. Hardmode: +5%
3. Post-Lunatic Cultist: +10%

Some specific throphies that would be able to break the 50% limit:

• Eye of Cthulhu (Merchant, +10%), considering how his quotes make the player know that he fears the eye; perhaps seeing the eye would relieve him.
• Skeletron (Clothier, +15%), after a long lasting curse, seeing this trophy would make him relieved that the menace is no more.
• Golem (Witch Doctor, +5%), knowing his race, this idol could be fitting.

Please note that this system isn't and won't be meant to obligate the player to build with decorations.

TL;DR: Basically reward those players who spend a lot of time building houses by letting them have more Town NPCs in one house with an updated housing system, plus a system that makes Town NPCs spawn/respawn faster by using decorations.

Let me know if there are any grammatical errors or you'd like to express a similar idea to mine, cheers!

I like it, but I do have to say building huge houses is not my kind of thing. Maybe just the decor part of the suggestion, or tone down the house sizes, and also being together would also increase happiness. Basically if we are updating NPC housing, I thinke we should have an Oxygen Not Included( Look it up)-style decor system

 

[Empty air sandwich]

I also had thought about having an NPC buff system to incentivate doing more than box houses, I had a more simple and manageable idea, really it's supposed to be more about just incentivating cuter things instead of ending up with making a scenario where you still just minmax the rooms with memorized size and layout and X items researched, written about, and thrown in just because of X artificial requirements, especially if stuff ends up going character-specific too which sounds like trouble or gets points from lists of themed sets. I guess the more complicated it would be and the more notes you would want to write it down about it, the worse of a mechanic it would be.

My idea was, a room gets points if

• It has more than 1 type of background wall (this could be anything and it's such a small but neat part of it the aesthetic. It could be a glass window, it could be a horizontal line at the bottom 1 or 2 tiles as a different wall, it could be a horizontal line by the ceiling, or zigzag patterns or more complex painted mishmashes. It's very simple a rule and starts to lead into a lot of cool stuff)
• Has anything more than the minimum amount of the required furniture types (so if you put a basic table and chair or equivalents, and decide to also throw in a bookcase(which counts as a table) for show or anything else like that, that's bonus points, but you never need more extra than that, just those 3 is already the full amount of points you can get this way)
• Has at least 1 top-mounted item (chandelier, lantern, banners, etc) or at least 1 painting
• Has a flat surface item or platform shelf that is actually spent holding small furniture other than piggy bank (books, cups, candelabra, ship in a bottle, etc), but also fills this requirement by having at least 1 plant item anywhere
• Room has above-minimum size, getting points depending on the size but specifically with diminishing gain

With something sorta basic and vague like this you really could just say to someone "make your box prisons better" and they'll be sure to get points from it with whatever way they went even if they don't know the rules. Simply making it cuter works, and it's still very direct and broad and still perfectly versatile to frankestein a room for high points, basically it's just more decorations than zero. The only thing they would need to get explicitly told to ever figure out is to use more than 1 background wall and that's the best one to get told, and seeing the rest would give some fun pointers.

As for the actual results for the person living inside, I wasn't even thinking about spawn rates, what I had in mind was
-NPCs will get accordingly higher HP/DEF/regen, so they can last more in the places you made for them if it comes down to it
-With enough of a bonus, I'm thinking even less than half of max, certain items that are only sold at certain hours (like night only) are sold anytime for convenience (maybe their stat boost includes HP and you can always gauge if this effect is on by seeing if their MaxHP is at least X)
-With a huge bonus, certain items sold only at certain biomes are available regardless of biome (so like yes for Witch Doctor so it's not mandatory to put him away if you make a great enough room for him, but doesn't work for Painter's millions of things)