Housing Flags

[Adre]

How can I change where in a house the flag is? I'm having issues like NPCs not registering for happiness and them hanging out in weird parts of the building.

[Goofdogg627]

you see the house icon in your equip area? click on it the click on the npc's flag when it appears on their housing, now you can change it

[Adre]

Originally posted by Goofdogg627:

you see the house icon in your equip area? click on it the click on the npc's flag when it appears on their housing, now you can change it

I'm not sure I understand?
I want to change where in the house the flag is, just to be clear.

[Kascin]

I do that by forcefully digging out the solid floor-block under the flag and replacing it with platforms, which makes the flag move somewhere else.

[Lucifer]

The way the house is designed determines where the flag ends up. During the daytime, the NPCs will have a tendency to wander around though, which I don't think you can really control unless you put them in a very narrow type of house without a normal exit and very little room to budge around in. I find the NPCs seem to like sitting in chairs in their homes during the night and mostly stay stationary during that time.

The smallest and easiest type of house to build that restricts NPC movement is probably a box house that is three tiles wide and ten tiles high. You can make the floor with wooden platforms (so that it counts as an entrance/exit of sorts) with one solid block of your choice in the middle of those platforms so that the NPCs will have a viable spot to stand. This way, the house technically counts as an NPC home but the NPCs cannot actually leave it or move around very much. The appearance of these types of houses is not exactly pretty but, if you want to cram as many NPCs as you can together in one general area, this is one way do it efficiently.

[Adre]

My problem isn't with them wandering (actually I have the opposite issue with my merchant, who is stuck in my basement and doesn't seem capable of climbing the stairs for some reason. But that's a different issue.) I have a problem with my Wizard, who is in a tower with multiple floors, and keeps hanging out in the weird intermediary floor with nothing in it. Stranger yet, when I try closing it off to make only the bottom part be a house, i get the incredibly strange message "this is not a valid housing", which really does not help a lot.
Also, My Angler and Pirate are both in nearby houses at the ocean, but their flags are too far away. I tried closing off a big part of one of the houses and reassigning the flag and it did work... but later I'd found it reverted.

[Lucifer]

Hard to say what the problem could be without being able to see what your house looks like. The issue could be a number of things. Perhaps a bit of background wall that needs to be filled in, a missing chair or some other bit of furniture, floor being comprised completely of wooden platforms, room being too small (or, in some rarer cases, too big), etc. You could try posting a link to a picture of your house so that people can try to analyse the situation, or perhaps invite someone to examine your NPC home in-game. Either way, I hope you find a solution soon.

[Adre]

Oh the room has full platforms for the floor. But the larger room has the same base, so...
I'll try and get a picture soon.

[Adre]

here's a cap
the cursor location is where i swap the rope for another platform to make only the bottom part the house.

[Lucifer]

From my own experience, I can say that you need at least one solid block of flooring in a room that you wish for an NPC to inhabit. For your own player spawn room, you can get away with complete wooden platforms as flooring but, for some reason, NPCs will not accept rooms like these even if checking it gives you the message that it is "valid housing". It's a very odd situation like that. All you need is just one solid block of flooring replacing one of the wooden platforms. NPCs need at least one solid block to stand on in their homes. I don't know why it is coded this way but it is. If that wasn't the issue with your house, hopefully your screenshot can help shed some more light on the problem.

[Lucifer]

Originally posted by Adre:

here's a cap
the cursor location is where i swap the rope for another platform to make only the bottom part the house.

It's possible that by closing off the floor where you've placed the cursor, it is cutting off the upper rooms from any tables and any table-filled rooms from the sofa up above. You may need to just place more furniture in each room for them to count as valid separate homes.

[Lucifer]

In the case that the game is counting all of those floors as an entire single NPC house, you may have to make sure you're not going over the maximum limit of 750 tiles for the "room". I haven't tried to measure your housing so I'm not sure what its dimensions are exactly.

[Adre]

it counts as a house when it's the full thing, but when i close off the space and try to use the bottom room, it doesn't work, and doesn't tell me why. It says "this is not a valid housing", which is not something I've ever seen before.
You'd think it could be the flooring, but the same platforms act as the flooring in both the small room and the big one, so??

[Adre]

this is what it says. note this was after clicking the lower room, i just happened to move my mouse after. I tried adding a solid block but it doesn't seem to have worked
edit: by breaking the middle platform it accepts it as housing. I don't know why.

[Lucifer]

May I make the suggestion of bringing the sofa/couch from the upper floor down to the room with the workbench? They should be together in the same room, not separated by a floor. A single "room" has to have all of the appropriate furniture and lighting for it to count as valid housing.

[Adre]

Um, I did. It's in the screenshot lol