Thanks to Funcom’s inclusion of the Living Settlements feature – even if it isn’t quite what my particular build needs it to be yet – I’ve spent a lot of time thinking how to distribute thralls in my Conan Exiles build to make the most of each one. Given the possibility of crafters wandering the streets, there was little need to spawn a whole bunch of prop thralls for that purpose. As I still have Living Settlements disabled, I’m instead using Immersive Routines to accomplish much the same thing.

The pre-release notes for Living Settlements included wording about thralls needing bedding and basic needs being met. Those needs are apparently: eating bowls of air and standing on tables. It’s not a perfected system…

At any rate, I took that wording to heart. Aside from creating a ridiculous number of houses, I started thinking in terms of compartmentalizing neighborhoods into mostly self-contained areas where an NPC wouldn’t need to wander off to the other side of the map to find a thrall pot.

As I owned a bathroom set, this idea led to the wildly popular franchise – a first for Aresburg! – Mister Poopies.

OK… toilets are purely cosmetic items in Conan Exiles (though NPCs will sit on them. SIT.)

Still, it seemed like a neat immersive solution: sprinkling the city with public facilities and onsens. Neat and immersive, but it did nothing for the thrall population or the non-thrall population of one: namely myself.

Even in creative building mode, where you can just go and go without consequences, lugging around an assortment of furnishings and decor gets cumbersome. So you have a bearer thrall follow you around to lighten the load. That’s assuming you’ve planned ahead and know the load will need to be lightened. I absolutely hate having to drag myself around the map all encumbered because I didn’t plan on tackling that one problem area I just noticed, or I didn’t consider how long it would take to get from the place where I’m harvesting iron to the nearest smelting furnace.

Outside of a cheat mode, lugging around both decor and building supplies gets tedious fast on a larger build. Part of the way I wanted to double up thrall duties was to fill my city with retail outlets that would be crafting stations. So I have “That Smelt Funny” to tackle my smithing needs, with “Devane’s Fine Metals” just around the corner if I want to cast coins. “Design Haus” is centrally located and serves as a base for a handful of bearers dedicated to lugging around inventory items, as well as providing storage and dismantling capabilities.

Rather than build entire store franchises for Design Haus throughout Aresburg, I chose to build a series of smaller buildings just big enough for a dismantling bench and a few storage boxes. These serve as inventory depots where I can dismantle stuff I won’t need, and store stuff I will… just not right now.

Thanks to Immersive Routines, I established a small army (ok.. it’s just three guys right now) of bearers to wander endlessly between the various cargo depots on set routes. If I’m still too far away from a crafting station or dismantling table, it’s pretty easy to grab a bearer wandering by, have him follow me around until my temporary inventory problems are sorted, then let him unfollow when I’m finished. Immersive Routines will put the bearer right back on path assuming there is a clear and pathable route to get there. Or, I can just unload inventory to the bearer and sort it out later.

Living Settlements animated crafting thralls but did nothing for military NPCs, leaving them to stand guard stuck up to the knees at whatever place you left them. Immersive Routines allows you to animate any thrall you choose, which means another double duty trick is to use your fighter and archer thralls as props.

I still have guards where one would expect there to be guards, but they’re no longer placed like a group of Stratego pieces awaiting an onslaught. I can have bearers in uniform wandering the city delivering imaginary parcels, and my off-duty military can spend time whiling away the hours in restaurants, or I can set them to wander the retail districts doing some window shopping.

With a significant amount of time spent at the local thaumaturgist’s (Magic Mike!), or the Fashonist mod, NPCs wandering the city looking for bargains don’t looked armed to the teeth. In case of incursion, they’re still ready to fight.

At this point, I think I prefer the granularity offered by Immersive Routines than to the Living Settlements concept, even sorted out and working as intended. There isn’t much appeal in opening the barn door to let out the horses I’ve spent a lot of hours collecting and arranging the way I want to suit my style of play. When I walk into a blacksmith’s shop, I expect to see people hard at work over open flame; not empty workstations offering perks while I stand and wait for the ghost to craft me ingots.

Funcom has designed some constraints in that objects can be disabled for Living Settlement-enhanced thrall interaction. But there aren’t any constraints on the thralls themselves, and once gone or stuck, they don’t seem to have any ability to fix their own problems.

A previous complaint with Conan Exiles is that the thralls didn’t do anything. Sit one in a chair, it just sat there staring into space. Now… you’re just as likely to find thralls sitting in chairs staring into space, plus all your crafting stations will be empty, all that housing you built for your thralls’ needs is going ignored, and you have to spend your time tracking down thralls stuck in chairs and foundations.

This isn’t SimCity. I don’t want to have to tailor my builds to suit the whims of the software-controlled masses. I’m the king. Me! Me! Me!

Seriously, though. Pretty high maintenance for “thralls” overall.

I still think in order for Living Settlements to really work, you have to have some direct control over the thrall itself, not just potential landing points like crafting benches or bar stools. Fighters and archers have follow, attack, and chase distances. Maybe those same bits of code could be re-used (or slightly modified) to provide “wandering” distances from some sort of home object to which a thrall is bound: either a crafting station or a bed as a spawn point.

As Living Settlements doesn’t address martial thralls at all, there’s no reason to believe utilizing these values in crafting thralls would cause any sort of conflict, though CPU cycles and resource usage in general might be an issue.

Aside from the courier service, I don’t know what else I could put into the city that would do double duty as convincing backdrop and quality of life improvement for the player. I have a zoo, so there’s an available supply of various animals should need arise. Crafters everywhere.

I’m also not sure how much time and energy Funcom should be putting into feature updates like Living Settlements. It’s cool that thralls want to wander the map looking to have their needs met. The question is, do I?

At the end of the day, Conan Exiles remains a great building simulator, but it’s advertised as a survival game. I’m at the point where I’m installing a franchise of boutique toilets. Can this really be considered “survival” anymore? At the very best it’s extremely high-income glamping.

But I’ve killed the demon crocodile and fought the demon queen. I’ve freed Liu Fei from that extremely naughty plant. There isn’t much left to do besides get out the paints and detail the models.

I… seem to have wandered. The basic point of this post was supposed to be along the lines of steps I’m taking to make a large-scale Conan Exiles build while conserving “server” resources and keeping it all an enjoyable environment to play through when adventuring.

I’m always playing with ways I can get more functionality out of less.

That was supposed to be the story and I tried to stick to it.