Banished Water World Series Herb Grower Locations

In a comment for Chapter 12 of the Water World Series, I was asked if I had placed any Herb Menders in addition to the Herb Growers. There are 4 on the map by the end of that episode, with some more being constructed near the newer Markets. One area was missed! (Stars indicate location of 4 in operation.)

Banished News - MEGA Mod Now in Public Beta!

Last week Mr. K announced the public beta release for the MEGA Mod. In brief, this is a huge compilation of over 80+ mods created by a wide variety of talented people. Even better is how the work of sorting out load order and conflicts is done for you. That, in itself was a tremendous undertaking! All one has to do is download the archive of the mod, and extract to wherever the mods for Banished reside on your machine. If you've never done a manual install of a Banished mod it is not hard (read directions on the Banished Info website).

The best news of all, for viewers of my YouTube Channel, is the fact the MEGA mod does not interfere with the current mods in use for my ongoing series (Water World). Happily, that can continue for a while. I will, however, start doing a few videos on the MEGA mod quite soon. The interface, for example, for selecting structures to build has been revamped so as to consolidate types. Options, in many cases LOTS of them, are available for all standard building along with some totally new ones. I've only had my hands on it for a few days, so the first videos will be overviews and so forth.

One word of caution, however. Those with older machines may find it impossible to run. The performance tip I wrote about a short time ago would probably help some, so do check that out. I'm seriously considering re-installing Banished and so forth on my old laptop just to give it a whirl. It is 3-4 years old in so far as today's tech, but can run Windows 10 just fine. Until I try that, I can't say too much else! Happy gaming everyone!

Performance Tweaks for Banished that Work!

When recording Chapter 6 of my Very Harsh Farming series I had noticed some lag in performance, though not that serious. This became very evident when attempting to record the next episode for the Water World series. Even though the speed was set to 10x, citizens were walking around in slow-motion as if the speed was 1x. Scrolling actions around the map, even when the game was paused, had slowed down to a crawl. I found this to be quite odd as performance issues should not have become evident (from past experience) until the population base was around 500.
As a remedy, the first thing I tried was to make the changes to Banished's video settings suggested by others. No improvement. While doing those, however, Windows Task Manager was open in the background showing the Performance tab so as to monitor CPU usage, etc. When the Banished game was loaded, there was an obvious increase usage of resources. Maybe increasing the priority level for Banished would help?
It has been a while since I've had to do that, but found a very well written tutorial on the subject here (keep in mind I'm running Windows 10). Bumping the priority level for Banished up one notch (above normal) worked wonderfully! Citizens were once again running about like busy little bees at 10x. In my first attempt at recording Chapter 12 for Water World, however, another issue quickly became evident. OBS (capture software in use) was not, only a black screen.
This was a real puzzler as changing the priority level for Banished shouldn't have any effect on OBS, other than a possible frame rate drop. Tweaking settings around within OBS, and even adjusting its priority level to match Banished, didn't fix things. A removal & re-install of OBS did! Everything was working just fine again, although the priority level for Banished had to be adjusted whenever it was loaded. There may be a permanent way to set that in the Windows setting, but I'm not sure how at this time. If anyone does know how, please do let me know!

UPDATE!!!! I've been a bit under the weather of late, while spending a lot of time playing with the MEGA mod for Banished. When doing so, many of my games were exhibiting odd crashes & behaviors much like the strange performance issue detected with Banished. In searching around for post on Steam's forums for these various games I came upon this one, which I'm sure by now is appearing elsewhere in similar form:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/200510/discussions/0/353915953248830432/
Having already tried a removal and reinstall of XCom: Enemy Unknown (without improvement), the idea of removing the Steam client itself seemed the next idea. Not that the Steam error mentioned had ever shown up, but it was worth a try. Yes, it was highly annoying to have to re-install all of my Steam games including Banished; but it has done the trick! All of my games, including Banished, are all running great (that I've tested thus far)! Posting here for the benefit of my subscribers on YouTube who may be running into those same oddball issues through Steam.

Banished Efficacy Test

There was a question asked by one of my viewers on building efficacy as to if making lots of tiny stockpiles all around where a new building would be built would be faster than the usual method. (One larger stockpile everyone has to run back & forth to over longer distances.) It sounded like an interesting idea to test, so I started exerting some skull sweat to figure out how to do what would - hopefully - be a fair comparison.

My first idea was to have a timer playing in the foreground of Banished while making the recording got shot down pretty quick.  While I really do love this gaming laptop with its two different graphic chips this does on occasion mess things up. See, the "standard" Intel graphics chip was putting the stopwatch program up on my screen, while the Nvidia chip works with game display. The video capture was only going to get one or the other no matter what I did.

What I did was use the Stopwatch app I have on my cell phone, normally used to track how long my videos are running for, and try two juggle the 2 things at the same time. Needless to say, that got fouled up a bit! Thankfully, in the editor used in post production, measuring out when the game was running was quite easy as I had planned to have a graphic show on screen at those times. Adding up the duration for those down to the tenth of a second was a snap.

If you watch the video you'll see what I came up with in so far as this test. Thanks Gianni Campanale for the suggestion!

https://youtu.be/Auke674dZD0

Stable Release for Banished and Other Updates

A day or so after doing the capture for Chapter #13 in my Adam & Eve start Banished series, Luke (Shining Rock Software) finally released the latest stable version. When he did that he also unlock Steam's workshop so that mod authors can upload their latest versions. Black Liquid (making Colonial Charter) released v1.62 of their mod too. Thankfully, my v1.61 saved game files for my series are all compatible with v1.62!
This has been verified in tests with saves from my currently running series. So, a restart will not be needed. Some nice new things are included in this update that will revise my plans. Stay tuned to my channel for what's new!

OBS Settings for a MSI Gaming Laptop - Fix for no Video

Rather than do a video on the setup changes needed in Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), those will be detailed here as it did boil down to one change. There are numerous other videos on the subject of OBS settings themselves, a few that I will include links for at the end of this article. I really cannot improve on those!

On the subject of settings for a machine having multiple graphic displays that is where the trouble began. Much of this advice said the adapter in use had to be identified for OBS. In the current version of OBS Studio, this is found under the Settings, Advanced panel:

OBS - Advanced Settings Panel

As shown in the screenshot above, this option is greyed out. All attempts to change that failed. What finally worked was an option found in the Source, Properties area called the Multi-adapter Compatibility:

OBS - Source Properties

Once this box was clicked, and the game in question was running, OBS recorded the video as expected. It often took OBS a minute or two to sort out which adapter was displaying the game screen, but that is a minor issue. I hope this will help someone else struggling with the issue of OBS not recording video!

EposVox – OBS Multi platform Tutorial: https://youtu.be/YKzcPWFxNZw