What's New
Settlers in Novus Terminus: First Flags just got a lot more believable. We gave every settler a proper inventory -- think tool belt plus both hands -- and it changes the way the whole construction loop looks and feels.
Watch a builder heading out to fell trees for a new building. She walks to the flagpole, picks up her axe, and heads into the forest. After chopping down a tree, she tucks the axe away, hoists the freshly cut log with both hands, and carries it back to the flagpole. She sets the log down, pulls the axe back out, and marches off to the next tree. When every tree on the list is down she drops the axe at the flagpole for a carrier to return to the depot. The entire sequence runs on its own -- no player input needed once the job is queued.
What makes this satisfying is that every step is visible. You can see the axe in her right hand while she chops and you can see it disappear when she switches to carrying a log. Put the log down and the axe is back. It sounds like a small thing, but it solves a problem that had been bugging us for a while: items used to vanish mid-action or linger as ghosts at flagpoles long after they had been picked up. Tools and goods were fighting over the same slot, so equipping an axe could erase a log and vice versa. That is all gone now.
Carriers and depot workers benefit from the same system. A carrier swings a sack onto her back and walks the road network; a depot settler cradles a good in front of him. Every item in the settlement is accounted for at all times -- if it is in someone's hands or stowed on their belt, it will not also be sitting on the ground somewhere.
Behind the Scenes
Under the hood, each settler now carries a small set of slots: one for each hand, one for a two-handed carry, one for a backpack load, and a hidden stash for tools that are put away. The game checks these slots every frame to decide which items should be visible and where. That brute-force approach is intentional -- rather than trying to track every single hand-off event perfectly, we just look at the current state and render accordingly. It is a little more work for the computer each tick, but it wiped out an entire category of visual glitches in one stroke.
What's Next
With the inventory loop solid, we are turning our attention to the world around the settlers -- animals, terrain, and a road system that actually feels like part of the landscape.