NPCs & Enemies On NPC happiness and vertical space

How should Crowding distance be changed?

  • Increase the distance, they should all be hermits

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    14

Derunih

Steampunker
Loving the update so far, but there is a trend in everyone I have spoken to (3 people off forum): The distance for NPC crowding is too wide, especially since there is a penalty.

Now to preface this, I am NOT complaining about the following:
The size of the penalty
The other happiness conditions
The mechanic's premise
Horizontal restrictions

Thats right: I am purely complaining about how close NPCs can be to each other up and down.

After confirming the radius on the wiki (3+ others within 25 blocks), and trying it out in game, horizontally this mechanic makes sense already. But vertically, it is a nightmare to work with.

To put this in a real world perspective: 25 blocks = 50 feet. One floor of a building is around 10 feet.

So, imagine I gave each NPC an entire floor of a hotel... AND had an empty floor between each. The radius would go through 4 floors up, and down, and still find 4 npcs, causing "crowding".

YOU AREN'T HAPPY WITH 2 ENTIRE FLOORS OF A BUILDING?

So, my suggestion is to make the search rectangular: 25 blocks sideways, and 15 blocks up and down.

I will try and include screenshots tomorrow.

UPDATE: Here are the screenshots of my hypothetical scenario (Quickly mocked up, since this is not my actual base)
Even if you make the houses wider, or more dressed up, or out of better materials... Only the ones on the very top and bottom aren't "crowded", and I feel this is excessive.
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I thought the entire system was put in place to reward people making little towns all over the map, so... I don't see why you would want to be able to put them in boxes like before.
Having a small tower with 4 NPCs in it, 20 feet high of space each, should not count as crowding (And it currently does). Also, there are now 25 NPCs that can move in, with 8 pyloncs you can get easily (and one unknown), so at least one base still needs to have 4 NPCs at peak capacity.

I don't want tiny boxes: I just want to build vertically, that's all.
 
Yeah... I just work around that by making secondary towns in Hardmode and using old-fashioned teleporters for them.
That's one solution, and a valid one. Problem is, not everyone likes building 10 towns in a sandbox game, and punishing people that don't enjoy a singular playstyle is a quick way to lose fans.

Terraria is a game that encourages playing your way (within reason: no prison cells), and I feel the height restrictions go against that ideal. The width restriction has been irksome, more has made me more inventive: height restrictions at present, not so much. They also just don't make visual sense, as per my example in the original post `:p (The greatest issue of all!)
 
For anyone following this: I have updated the main post with a crude mockup of a wood tower as a demo. I feel if I filled every floor, I may concede the crowding kicking in... But not every second floor. If I was in a similarly sized set of housing, I would be happy, regardless of how tall it gets (as long as there is an elevator, of course!)
 
Update: I have added a Poll. Now, Ideally I want people to vote between "It's fine" and "vertical only", but I know there will be other opinions. No, I will not add a "remove penalty" option, as I agree the 3 wide x 10 tall prison cells should have SOME penalty `:p
 
Well, from the poll so far, it looks like I am in the minority here unfortunately. It seems most people like to build horizontally (Or are simply ignoring NPC happiness). I still find the implications of the example I provided to be ridiculous and limiting (purely from the fact I don't count the spaced levels as "close together" when arranged vertically, I mean think about apartment buildings IRL), but it seems people are happy to work around this game logic not matching reality.
 
Well I'll be darned: The moment I mention the poll standings, it flips around. Now I just look cray cray.
 
I just started playing Terraria again after I don't know how many years to discover all of my NPCs with their expansive, luxuriously decorated, full-floor apartments which I provided them free-of-charge are complaining about overcrowding.

The preferred/disliked neighbours and biomes seems like an interesting new (to me) play mechanic to deal with but I agree that overcrowding mechanic doesn't seem to serve any purpose except to limit our creativity for how we'd like to build NPC housing by 1) penalizing skyrise apartment living, 2) require more running around to access NPCs, and 3) forcing those of us who prefer keeping the surface world as natural as possible to clear larger swaths of land.

If there's going to be living condition happiness rules I'd be more interested in seeing each NPC having individual housing requirements. For example, perhaps no-one except the arms dealer is happy living in the same building as the demolitionist regardless of how big it is, the tavernkeep prefers to be on the ground floor, and the princess would like two floors at the top of a building to herself. Maybe each NPC has a random favourite colour and animal/insect/plant and gets a happiness bonus if their dwelling is decorated accordingly. The dryad might prefer a building made of wood with no background wall (or a certain number of potted trees if the valid dwelling check can't be modified), the goblin tinkerer is happiest underground, and the demolitionist thinks double-thick stonework walls, ceilings, and floors are best.

Also, anything associated with a specific building requirement (as opposed to decorations or moving NPC flags) should be a bonus rather than a penalty so that players with existing worlds don't have to chose between tearing down or abandoning buildings they may have put a lot of effort into creating to avoid suffering a penalty due to an update.

...which is exactly what the generic overcrowding mechanic does which brings us back to the original point of this thread. To that end, I'd vote for ditching overcrowding entirely; but as that's not an option, even though it's only the vertical distance that messes me up, I vote to decrease both on behalf of anyone that the horizontal factor may have adversely affected.
 
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I just started playing Terraria again after I don't know how many years to discover all of my NPCs with their expansive, luxuriously decorated, full-floor apartments which I provided them free-of-charge are complaining about overcrowding.
...

Taking up the premise that 1) NPCs that love/like each other should be able to live within 25 blocks of their respected attractors while 2) those that hate/dislike each other remain 25 blocks distant and 3) no NPC has more than 3 others within 120 blocks (excluding NPCs subject to rule 1) it must be possible to actually build to accommodate these mechanics, else why introduce them in the first place. With this goal in mind, I dedicated a few days to trying to find some way to see if it's possible, and it simply isn't.

I did complicate things somewhat by building on the snow/forest border (because that's where my starting point and luxury apartment building is) so forest lovers and snow haters could stay on the forest side, the forest haters and snow lovers on the snow side, and the underground lovers below, but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that there is no way to simultaneously accommodate both the love/hate proximity and overcrowding mechanics.

Not only does the overcrowding mechanic work against logically arranging it so NPCs that want to live close together can, it also leads you to suppressing mob spawning across a huge swath of the map (particularly on a small world) because it requires a lot of buildings spaced 120 blocks apart. Alternately, you can space them vertically/diagonally but that results in houses that take a lot more time to both build and visit while still forcing a choice between building for the intricate love/hate proximity mechanic or building just to avoid overcrowding.

Now, one of the thing I liked about housing the NPCs in a single apartment building (besides less impact on mob spawning) is that you tend to create better decorated housing because all your supplies and crafting benches are there in one spot. Jogging back and forth across the map to build without NPC overcrowding becomes increasingly less like fun and more like work, and that's not my idea of a good design choice.

Yes, I know: Pylons. I haven't used them yet (another new-to-me game mechanic) but I can see that once you get to the stage of the game where you're using them the overcrowding mechanic automatically becomes pointless.

...so why have it? It runs contrary to fully utilizing the NPC love/hate mechanic, it punishes players who enjoy building towers, it encourages mob spawn suppression, it causes more time-consuming house building, and it ultimately becomes moot in the late game once you start using pylons.

As a happiness bonus/penalty for a couple of specific NPCs to add more complexity to the love/hate proximity puzzle it would be a welcome extra challenge, but as a universal game mechanic all it appears to do is reduce enjoyment rather than enhance it; so I hope the developers take a look at this poll (albeit not exactly overwhelming participation so far) and consider tweaking or getting rid of NPC crowding distance because, as it stands, it doesn't quite work.
 
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