Nugget #3 - Neighbors

[ShibuyaCloth]

"Neighbors" is an important part of the game. It is even a necessity! They are useful for:

Goals: you often need special items
Bonus: when visiting a neighbor, you get a small bonus: 1 energy (10 per day), 5 coins or 1 XP
Social Points: when visiting a neighbor, you can "tend" a building (heart floating above). It doubles the amount of XP given at the next gathering. A "Visited" building will also glimmer. Having a lot of heart will increase your social score, thus improve your visibility in the community list.
Chat: if you like cluttering walls

https://www.portailsmm.com/cs/rsc/main_social_button.pngNeighbor (https://www.portailsmm.com/cs/inventory2.html#_Neighbor)Storable:NoInfo:Helps you with Quests, Bonus, Social Points, Chat, and many other things. Accessiblwe throug the the "Main Menu" - "Social" button.Type:SpecialSource:StorylineLink:https://forums.storm8.com/showthread.php?77505

How Many
A good question and highly dependent of your gaming style! However, there is a minimum you will need to have an efficient pool. Primarily, during timed goals/events, neighbor interaction is often requested. If you have too few of them, it can impact your success.

During timed events, requesting neighbors will yield a maximum of 20 responses a day. Assuming some margin error, a good safe minimum would be to double this amount. Thus 40 should be your bottom line. If you need to add neighbors you have a thread (https://forums.storm8.com/forumdisplay.php?110)for that.

Active Neighbor
Only active neighbors can helps you with quests as they need to answer you. Therefor your neighborhood should be populated with active players. There is no simple and direct way to know if your neighbor is active or not.

Some pointers you can use to identify the "active" state. Note that you need in general more than one of those clues to validate activity:

The current or last timed event items are present or in progress
The neighbor has one or more social hearts (Note: hearts stay until the player logs into the game; decay is initiated when you login)
You can "visit" buildings, a heart floats on top of it. (Note: you can visit buildings even from inactive players, the "visited" flag resets after sometime, leaving the building open for a new visit)
Check if crafting / animated builds are moving (Windmill, Sawmill, Workshop, Potion Shop, Magical Forge, etc.)
Crops are growing
The realm layout has changed (you Know Your Neighbor after some time)
Your wall or news feed has traces of your neighbor's activity
The neighbor's wall is active (cleaned, self-post, etc.)
They are active on the forum



Social Rating
The social rating increase your visibility within the community and to certain extends shows you are an active player. The higher your social ratings, the higher changes are you are visible in the social community tab, thus people will visit you and eventually "visit" your buildings.

Social rating will be a nice boost when you have a young and growing dominion, once you have reached full maturity (have done all goals), it becomes more a personal choice. Getting XP boosts from buildings are very welcome to level up fast.

The social rating is defined by the 4 hearts in your overview page; tap the star on the upper-left part of the screen to show your overview page. Gaining social ranks is done by visiting buildings with a heart floating above it in another realm, each visit provide 1 heart. Number of hearts needed to reach the next level:


Level 1: 5
Level 2: 20
Level 3: 100
Level 4: 500

Social hearts have a limited life time span. Each day a certain amount will decay. The precise decay formula is unknown for the moment but a first analysis suggests:

The decay starts 2 days after acquiring the point.
Decay rate is 20% of the current level every day, so at level 3, you lose 20% of 100=20 points a day.
If the decayed point is greater than the remain points for the current level, the decay continues on the level below, but not more the 20% of that level. Example, social rating 3 with 5 point left, the decay will claim 20 points. You end up with a social rating of 2, and 16 points and not Level 2 with 5 points.



Requests
You will need, for many goals, something from your neighbors. When you issue requests, your neighbors can accept or refuse it. But, a neighbor needs to explicitly perform the answering action. Now some rules apply:


A Castle Story day starts at 0:00 AM PDT (Converter (https://www.timebie.com/timelocal/pacificdaylight.php)).
You can request a neighbor only once a day.
You can answer as many requests as you want.
You can only receive 20 answers a day, +1 additional from the Stormie's Castle.
Request will backlog until answered by a neighbor or is decayed (number of days unknown, looks like <7 days). Thus a request sent 2 days ago can be answered and validated on the current day, and counts toward the answered day.

In conclusion, if you send out >40 requests to active players just before the end of a CS day, you can get 20 replies back, then the following day 20 more responses. For people living in a time zone where the CS day switch is in their night, they can cumulate 40 responses overnight (max 42 due to Stormie's Castle).

Note: Do not send out too many requests if you know you need to send another one for another goal in the same or next day. You might clog you request pipeline!

Downloads

Nuggets (www.portailsmm.com/cs/CastleStory-Nuggets.pdf) (PDF)



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[JustKay]

One additional thing you can check is that their wall has recent comments. In active account will generally stop showing in the Community and will stop receiving new wall comments from visitors. Some players do regularly clean out their wall, so that in itself might be a sign of activity. In the worst case, you can put a message on their wall yourself and ask them to respond on your wall.

[Liloze]

Also you can check for animated crafting buildings, if the player is active, you will see them moving, Windmill, Sawmill, Workshop, Potionshop, Magical Forge. It means the neighbor is using them regularly.

[ShibuyaCloth]

JustKay & Liloze, thanks for the input. I made the changes.

[Liloze]

JustKay & Liloze, thanks for the input. I made the changes.

You are welcome, great job you are doing with the nuggets :) Glad I could help :)

[PraxisOfGood]

During timed events, requesting neighbors will yield a maximum of 20 responses a day.

Is 20 the absolute limit per day, or is it 20 per request quest? I ask because I have two active quests now for bothering neighbors and I'm wondering if I need to wait on one or if I can get 20 healing potions and 20 hair samples in the same day.

[queentina3]

Is 20 the absolute limit per day, or is it 20 per request quest? I ask because I have two active quests now for bothering neighbors and I'm wondering if I need to wait on one or if I can get 20 healing potions and 20 hair samples in the same day.

20 is the max so you'll have to pick which one you want to have completed first.

[roguebee]

Is 20 the absolute limit per day, or is it 20 per request quest? I ask because I have two active quests now for bothering neighbors and I'm wondering if I need to wait on one or if I can get 20 healing potions and 20 hair samples in the same day.

And never ask Stormie until after you have collected your 20 for the day. He counts against your 20, but will be 21 if you already have 20 for the day.

[ShibuyaCloth]

And never ask Stormie until after you have collected your 20 for the day. He counts against your 20, but will be 21 if you already have 20 for the day.

I never checked that, but Stormie ALWAY answers, that means I also do it last when I need 1-2 additional requests to close a quest.

[PraxisOfGood]

I never checked that, but Stormie ALWAY answers, that means I also do it last when I need 1-2 additional requests to close a quest.

I can confirm that is correct. Stormie ALWAYS answers, even if you are capped for the day.

Another neighbor-related issue, while the thread is revived, is how much you have to let neighbors buildings to gain a social level and how many hearts you lose per day. My neighbor policy is to drop anyone who gets down to zero stars, not because they are necessarily inactive but because they provably aren't petting my buildings as often as I'm petting theirs. But im assuming that it just takes a few minutes a day to maintain a one or two star rating here.

[UnkelFester]

A new member here, I have been lurking for a while, and been playing CS since last November - so be gentle :)

Just thinking here. It may pay to have a King or Queendom name near the start of the alphabet. I should imagine someone with many neighbours may give up visiting kingdoms further down the list once they have obtained their daily quota of ten energy.


I can confirm that is correct. Stormie ALWAYS answers, even if you are capped for the day.

Another neighbor-related issue, while the thread is revived, is how much you have to let neighbors buildings to gain a social level and how many hearts you lose per day. My neighbor policy is to drop anyone who gets down to zero stars, not because they are necessarily inactive but because they provably aren't petting my buildings as often as I'm petting theirs. But im assuming that it just takes a few minutes a day to maintain a one or two star rating here.

Yes it would be great to know how much visiting neighbours affects your social standing. I always try and visit all my 40 odd neighbours each day.

[katbtodd]

A new member here, I have been lurking for a while, and been playing CS since last November - so be gentle :)

Just thinking here. It may pay to have a King or Queendom name near the start of the alphabet. I should imagine someone with many neighbours may give up visiting kingdoms further down the list once they have obtained their daily quota of ten energy.



Yes it would be great to know how much visiting neighbours affects your social standing. I always try and visit all my 40 odd neighbours each day.

I have over 100 neighbors I try to make it through all the one with light hearts ...

[tigarlilyvol]

I have 219 and a lot of days I do not manage to even get half-way through. Some times I just manage to get the extra energy points, so a name can have an effect in visiting.

[55lee55]

If I may make a suggestion based on experience. I have seen what I call two stages in this game, the building stage and the mature stage.

Visiting for profit to your kingdom is extremely important when you first start playing. This would be the building stage. Having neighbors who reciprocate is is a primary reason to retain neighbors until your kingdom reaches the highest level AND you catch up with the main storyline to the point where you have no quest book most of the time. when you reach that point your kingdom transitions to the mature stage and the stratigies of play usually completely change.

I suggest that when you are in the building stage you visit often and if you do cull, it is a good strategy to cull inactive neighbors. You gain much from visiting at this stage and it can help you move more quickly toward the mature stage. I suggest that you befriend those who are also building their kingdoms. Visit mature kingdoms, but don't expect them to be interested in their social ranking because things change when your kingdom becomes mature. If you are building, even if you reach level 50, if you want to keep your meighbors to a controllable number I suggest limiting your neighbors to those whose reasons for visiting are also to maintain a high social rating Of course if you are less interested in keeping your number of neighbors down then by all means befriend anyone you wish, no matter their social ranking. That is what I did and I rapidly exceeded 500 neighbors. i knew, however, which ones wee more likely to be collecting from their coin buildings and to have a kingdom full of hearts when I needed the,. I also kept my collections in my kingdom current as well.

When a player reaches the mature stage the reasons for visiting are no longer profit driven. When you have many millions of coins that you will likely never spend there is little to no incentive to collect from coin buildings, and as a mature player I spend my energy only on those items, craft and resource, farming and building that drop the resources I still need, and my total number of hearts available for visitors is much less than those available when I had a smaller kingdom As I max out on items I stop collecting from buildings that drop items I no longer need, so my available hearts drops even further. when I visit my friends, many times I don't even look for their hearts because I am carrying on conversations, not looking to collect hearts. Or I might enjoy collecting hearts, but I visit purely for social reasons because my kingdom has matured to the point where I no longer gain game profit enough from visiting to spend my time collecting hearts. Most, but admitedly not all mature kingdom rulers visit their friends more often to chat than to collect hearts. Once you reach the mature level with your kingdom, social ranking becomes less important than neighborly loyalty because of the game dynamics. At the mature level it is more profitable in game terms to concentrate on collecting certain rare items such as Adamant, Magic Cement or Golden Apples to name a few as personal, not geme goals. Otherwise, with no ongoing quests to work on, even this awesome game gets extremely boring. As a player with a mature kingdom I rarely accept invitations from players who are at levels below 50 unless the leave a message on my wall that they are interested in being community friends because since I don't maintain my social level and I don't have many hearts compared to the number of daily visitors I have. I haven't checked my social raring in months. Some mature players do monitor their social rating and they do collect hearts because that is part of what they do to keep the boredom at bay. If, like me you don't cull neighbors, it is immaterial what stage your neighbors are in when you transition to the mature stage because if it is improtant to them, they will cull you if your social rating drops to zero.

It is important not to take being culled as a personal affront, because once you make good friends, unless you wish to send them gifts it won't matter if technically they are on your neighbor list once you reach the mature stage. Once your neighbors become friends and the main purpose of staying here is no longer to play the game because realistically the game moves forward at a snail's pace, you will likely find yourself setting personal goals and staying because of the community.

Until then, however, as others have posted their excellent suggestions for managing your neighbor list, if you remember that when building you will fare better for your effort if the majority of your neighbors are also building then you will rapidly progress and you will be able to maximize your time and effort by this mutual give and take scenerio. If you befriend me, you likely won't find many hearts because I have many visitors a day and the relatively few hearts that I produce are rapidly collected. I don't have the best kingdom to visit to maximize your gain. However, if you want a friend to chat with and don't need hearts every time you visit, I am probably a good kingdom to invite once you reach the mature stage. Otherwise I will likely decline your invitation because I assume you are peeking to see my crabable puppies or my crop maze. I can't help you with hearts on a regular basis. Not all mature kingdoms operate like I do, but many do. If you want to befriend a specific mature level 50 kingdom it might be wise to note this on their wall when you send the invite, because otherwise your invitation might be declined because they assume you want to peek. Unfortunately, it is an the nature of the game that in order to look at my kingdom by entering my S8 ID, you must invite me to become your neighbor.

So remember not to take it personally if you invite someone and they decline, or you are culled, or accidentally dropped, because the function of neighbors and friends in this game is dynamic and changes as your kingdom matures. Everyone has their own neighbor management system, and it works for them, but it is not a reflection on you or your suitability as a neighbor if you are dclined or culled. it is the nature of the game and is not something to take personally.

Hope this long post helps some people :D Good Luck!

[ShibuyaCloth]

Pfffuuuu 55lee55! Long post!!!

But yes, I have a mature Kingdom, and like you I don't visit my neighbors on a regular basis to drop hearts (I maintain my social rating at 2, it is quick and easy). I go for the the 10-energy bonus and I am done, so rarely hit more then +20 dominions a day, and I might use first arrived first served from the list.

On my Queendom (this account) I don't visit neighbors unless required and all with levels <30, as my poor old iPad will not support the load. So a different reason.

[ShibuyaCloth]

OK, I added a new section to the nugget. However I am missing the numbers:

+ Number of hearts to reach each level
+ decay rate per level (number of days)

[totalwasteoftime]

And never ask Stormie until after you have collected your 20 for the day. He counts against your 20, but will be 21 if you already have 20 for the day.
I'm pretty sure this is an urban legend. In the current timed goals toward getting the horse I've been sending out the request to all my neighbors at once every day. So far at the end of each day I've had 21/42/63/84 received. And then the next day the numbers start going up before I've had a chance to send my next request, so I can't believe Stormie has been exactly the 21st reply four days in a row.

[totalwasteoftime]

In terms of the hearts for the social rating, does one heart mean the person is for sure playing? I've got a few players who really look like they've moved on (abandoned construction sites, perpetually no crops growing, no new stuff, none of the mines/mills/crafting buildings moving, staying on the same lower level for a month...) but then I notice some of them have a one-heart rating. So they are apparently playing??

[Castloninian]

In terms of the hearts for the social rating, does one heart mean the person is for sure playing? I've got a few players who really look like they've moved on (abandoned construction sites, perpetually no crops growing, no new stuff, none of the mines/mills/crafting buildings moving, staying on the same lower level for a month...) but then I notice some of them have a one-heart rating. So they are apparently playing??
It means they haven't logged on since they stopped playing. The hearts only reset to zero once they log on again after a period of inactivity. I have had neighbours with four hearts who have obviously stopped playing.

[ShibuyaCloth]

Useful feedbacks, I will write some addendum. Thanks!


Modified post #1!

[ShibuyaCloth]

Added info on the decay rate of social points

[Britilina]

Okay, so let me see if I understand the workflow correctly.

I receive a quest telling me I need to request 60 whatever from my neighbors.

I should go request from all of them except Stormie. When I receive my 20th response that day, then go request Stormie.

The next day, I can do in and request from all of the people who responded the day before, and after I get my 20th, request from Stormie, and so on until I reach my goal. Is that correct?

[ShibuyaCloth]

Okay, so let me see if I understand the workflow correctly.

I receive a quest telling me I need to request 60 whatever from my neighbors.

I should go request from all of them except Stormie. When I receive my 20th response that day, then go request Stormie.

The next day, I can do in and request from all of the people who responded the day before, and after I get my 20th, request from Stormie, and so on until I reach my goal. Is that correct?

Yes, so you can get up to 21 responses a day. Now for 60 requests this leaves you at 3 days anyway. I generally don't care and fire a bunch of requests >40, then next days I can fire to those who responded. If you fire too many you might clog your bandwidth. For timed quests this might be crucial as timing is key.

[Britilina]

Okay. I don't have a super ton of neighbors. I usually count out 20 people who I know will likely respond, seems them and then immediately go send one to Stormie. But that is the wrong way to go about it!

[ShibuyaCloth]

I am still looking for the decayed rate of neighbor goal requests. In other word how old are some of the requests you get. I remember it was around 7 day in the past. But recent with tweaking, I have the impression it is more like 2 days.

[olcastle]

I am still looking for the decayed rate of neighbor goal requests. In other word how old are some of the requests you get. I remember it was around 7 day in the past. But recent with tweaking, I have the impression it is more like 2 days.

It's 7 days for main story requests.

It's bizarre for event requests - they not just unpredictably carry over or don't to the next day but sometimes they do not carry over to the second day and do carry over to the third day.

This is what just happened with my second kingdom. 3 days ago I sent a lot of requests and got 20 answered, yesterday I got nothing (on it and from it) and today I can see 3 day old request from it on my main account.

I was very curious how the system worked but it will probably remain a mystery for me.

[shortdanzr]

i know this is an old post, but do you still have the crop maze? that would be cool

[SofiaDeo]

I read on another thread it's possible to select all neighbors at once. How?

[ShibuyaCloth]

I read on another thread it's possible to select all neighbors at once. How?

In dreams, unfortunately.

[wallywaldorfrox]

Hi, can someone tell me how to find neighbors who are daily players like me? Most of mine seem to have stopped playing

[AresLiam]

I feel silly for asking but how do you eliminate neighbors? Have been wondering for some weeks now?

[SpiritWind00]

I feel silly for asking but how do you eliminate neighbors? Have been wondering for some weeks now?
Go to your social tab. There's an edit button (kinda tiny). Tap that and the visit/gift button is replaced with a remove button. Just be careful as there is no undo button if you remove the wrong neighbour. :)

And we have no silly questions here! The help me thread has over half a million views! Chances are other players have the same question. I wrote a thread for new players in the Hub to explain the game mechanics if you need light reading. :) Welcome to the forum.

[Pollyville65]

How do I get people?s Storm id to aske them to be neighbours? My Storm id is Pollyville65. I need neighbours.

[AnnirasSweets]

How do I get people?s Storm id to aske them to be neighbours? My Storm id is Pollyville65. I need neighbours.

Welcome to the forum! For new neighbors, you can post in the CS Add Me thread here (https://forums.storm8.com/showthread.php?114707). Good luck in your quest for new neighbors :)



Mod Update from SpiritWind: if the thread is closed that this link points to, there will be a new ADD ME thread located in the top of the Castle Story Discussions forum (https://forums.storm8.com/forumdisplay.php?108-Castle-Story-Discussions)