Child NPC

[ldsvegeta]

Just an idea from a biased new mum:

Ability to have a child by right clicking on a suitable hearth-mate (perhaps whose hearthfire has been within the same claim for x number of ingame days?)

Child Ideas:
- Having a child would be expensive - req a lot of resources to simulate just how difficult raising a child is.
- The incubation period would be lengthy.
- There'd be a cap of 1 child per claim.
- The child would need to be fed / clothed / entertained.
- If the parent's hearthfires are moved outside the claim, the child dies maybe??
- If the childs parents don't see it in x number of days it dies?
- Perhaps the child can be assigned one job (e.g. farming??) with a cooldown if its switched to another task. i.e. not a bot, more an endgame aide.
- Perhaps after x days, it requires a random specific item like a toy or medicine which must come from the parents within x number of days or the child dies or gets sick or runs away (aka disappears)
- If the child is killed or dies prematurely, perhaps a debuff comes onto the parents
- Similar to a claim, LP may be required to encourage active parents rather than alts

More thoughts:

- Currently I'd guess NPCs aren't in the world as they'd have to come from a preexisting village which seems outside the games scope. Children can be created from players thus wouldn't hurt the idea of the game's realism I'd think.
- Have read threads discussing one reason bots are made is to minimise repetitive tasks such as farming or smelting
- Creating and maintaining a child may be an end-game activity that encourages players to exit their walls (to create child-maintenance-specific-items or trade for such) and introduce another aspect of randomness
- I wouldn't be advocating this, but perhaps child slavery could be a potential addition for pvpers. There would still be a max of 1 child per claim, but this would make it so pvpers wouldn't need to create the child, but still be able to get the benefits.
- Alt-spamming children on multiple nearby claims could be a potential problem but hopefully avoided if the cost of creation and maintenance is sufficiently high?

[overtyped]

This is haven and hearth, not haven and children.
If you want a child, just go find a random newspawn, and there you go. You can let the roleplaying begin.

[NaoWhut]

after all that work i will slaughter
your child and throw his body around
in front of you before the lights fade.

[dageir]

I fear someone will abuse the child mechanics.

[shubla]

Haven and Hearth
- Game where you can raise your own child and put them to do dirty work for you.

[LoLa]

I can support simulation and roleplay gameplay ideas, the problem is I feel a lot of people who play the game including the developers may be against such ideas. If however the devs say they support such things then I'd be happy to go over your ideas on this with you. I'm assuming you are taking inspiration from games like Harvest Moon, which is pretty cool.