Village Notes #5: Reasons to leave the farm

Hello everyone.

The last test with my kids showed me something useful.

The farm is already becoming a place where you can spend a lot of time.

That is good.

But Eldervik should not only be a farm game where the village is decoration.

The neighbours should matter. The carpenter should matter. The blacksmith should matter. There should be small reasons to leave the farm, even before the quest and story systems are all in place.

Right now there is not always enough of that.

One answer is of course to add more events, more characters, and more village things to discover. That is true, but it is not the whole answer. I also want the normal everyday systems to pull the player around a little bit.

So I am going to change crafting.

At the moment the player can craft directly from their own inventory. That is convenient, but it also makes the farm feel even more self-contained. If you have the resources in your pockets, you can just stand anywhere and make the thing.

The old crafting ui:

I want to split crafting into two parts instead:

• Wood crafting.

• Blacksmithing.

Wood crafting will happen at a crafting bench. Blacksmithing will happen at an anvil.

Using the station should be free. I do not want the bench or anvil to feel like a tax. The point is more physical than economical: if you want to make something, you go to the place where that kind of work makes sense.

There is another problem hidden inside this though.

Crafting only from the player inventory can be annoying.

You know you have the wood somewhere. It is in a chest. Maybe three chests. But the recipe just says you do not have enough, because the item is not in your pockets.

So I want to experiment with global storage when crafting.

Not global as in every player inventory counts. Other players should still own the things they carry. But if the materials are in farm storage, the crafting station can see them. That should make crafting less about moving stacks around and more about deciding what to make.

The technical part is the dangerous part.

If two players craft at the same time, and both screens think the same wood exists, it is very easy to create duplication bugs or disappearing item bugs.

So I need to be careful with how the materials are handled.

One option is to lock the relevant chests while someone is crafting. That is simple to reason about, but maybe too heavy. It can make the shared farm feel blocked just because one player has a menu open.

Another option is to reserve materials when the player selects or previews a recipe, and only remove them when the craft actually happens. That feels nicer, but then the reservation system has to be very solid. It needs to expire, release on cancel, release on disconnect.

I am not 100% sure which shape is the right one yet.

That is part of why this is interesting to build. On the surface it is a small design change: use a bench or an anvil. Underneath it touches co-op, storage, inventory ownership, and “can this duplicate items?”.

For now the goal is clear:

• Give players more reasons to move through the world.

• Make crafting feel like it happens somewhere.

And make sure the game does not become worse just because the materials are in the wrong chest.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!