Stronghold Style Supply Chains?

[GIF]

Hey y'all,

I was playing that old classic Stronghold with a friend of mine and got to thinking, would it be possible to have a chain of buildings that supply each other in sim settlements?
I'll use the bakery from Stronghold as an example of what I mean;

-First, we have the grain farm, which produces grain and dumps it in a warehouse or directly to the mill if possible.
-Second, we have the mill which takes the grain and grinds it down into flour, again dumping it in the warehouse or into the next building.
-Thirdly, we have the bakery itself which takes that flour and turns it into bread to feed the population, dumping it in the granary.

That's basically how the chain works in Stronghold. Would it be possible to have something like that running in SS/FO4?

Perhaps, instead of using the grain for bread, we could use it to brew beer and Whiskey? :D (Whiskey being a derivative of beer brewing that uses the beer itself, iirc).

 

[Schmidy]

I'd love something like that, not only because you used Stronghold as a base .

It has been suggested with the Molerat farm (one of the mods) and a butchery. So, hopefully in the future we'll see it.

 

[mytigio]

Problem I've run into with a straight supply chains in Industrial City is the nature of the mod which allows for random building selection. I'll be adding some buildings with synergism, and become stronger if you have them both, but making one really rely on the other would require a play-style that relies on the architects t-square, which is a bit against the idea of Sim Settlements and letting settlers build stuff without your oversight.

 

[GIF]

Problem I've run into with a straight supply chains in Industrial City is the nature of the mod which allows for random building selection. I'll be adding some buildings with synergism, and become stronger if you have them both, but making one really rely on the other would require a play-style that relies on the architects t-square, which is a bit against the idea of Sim Settlements and letting settlers build stuff without your oversight.

Good point, well made!

 

[mytigio]

Good point, well made!

So, the other thing I've considered to simulate a supply chain is a variable building. The first one you make turns into a recycling center to produce X which gets dumped into the workbench. The next time the same building is made, it instead becomes Intermediate production facility Y which uses the output of X, and the 3rd time it's produced it becomes final production plant Z which uses the product produced in Y to make the final good.

So the same plot serves as the entire supply chain and can control having the early stages available before the next one in the chain is made. People scrapping plots lower in the supply chain would still be an issue however. And it would be tough to make more complicated supply chain balancing (like needing 2 wire facilities and 1 steel facility to produce circuits in a stage 2 building)

 

[Schmidy]

All good points mytigio.

A thought on my side, would it not be possible to have a plot create a resource, that resource can then either be collected and sold as is or stored in the workshop. When the next building in the supply chain is created it will either take that resource, if available and create whatever it should be creating with the given resource (example wheat into flour). That resource would then be left in the workshop for the player to sell, or leave as is (like the first resource). If there is a 3rd building to the supply chain it would follow along in the same system that it would only work if there are resources available. In the end, each type of structure would only work if the previous resource is available.

My only concern would be that you'd need a system in place that ensures a building is not built until there is a demand for it. Not sure how difficult that would be to implement.

 

[kinggath]

Industrial Revolution implemented a system similar to this!

 

[skodnavn]

The stockpiling of output in Industrial Revolution is not really a supply chain like the OP requested. Having real supply chains would be cool. Also, having a mine that stays a mine but with different tiers, without turning into a smelter is something I would like. The mine(s) could then supply the smelters directly.

Materials (Wood, Steel etc) are already shared by the vanilla workshops even across settlements when constructing/crafting, so lore-wise that should be possible for factories too. If it can be scripted is a different matter.

The problem that will occur is if the factories consume all materials of their input type so nothing is left for other purposes like construction and crafting.
The only solution I see is to require the player to specify a minimum stock level for each material.
This would require a GUI with sliders for each material, ideally accessible via the workshop.