How hard would it be to implement a mechanic where you create a number of characters and then start to play them. After a day of playing the first character you move over to your second character. Play a day as that character. Then so on and so forth, until they’ve all been played and you get to start the next day. Would it work exactly realistically? Nope. But I think it wouldn’t be too too broken. Or maybe just a reminder to switch characters? (Your other characters are a week behind.)
A later implementation of something like this is you have the group and being able to switch between them and set tasks for them. But not going back in time. Be a bit more of a struggle for food and what not.
Control one character. Other character reads skill book while you are out. Lol. 
You mean NPC possession or just save+load as different character?
The primary question is about force save/load of characters utilizing a set time period.
The secondary idea is about maybe having some NPCish functionality in order to keep everyone on the same time period. But that is a much later on thing.
Im not sure swapping characters all the time is a reasonable feature, there would be way too much opportunity (and benefit) to abuse it for e.g. item duplucation. It’s the time warp part that is the real problem.
If you were required instead to have one active character and the rest were assigned some background activity, it’d be a lot more manageable.
This feature already exists, but only partially. You can manually do this. I was just suggesting something that would help automation.
You can already have multiple characters in the same world. So as for balance… I don’t really see it as a valid argument for not allowing it as it’s already allowed… Just manually. Granted, that may not motivate others to create it as I’m not a coder, but like I said. This is more about automating something some people already do and making their life a bit easier then about making huge changes to the game. If there was a way to make them fully experience the same world and deal with the same item spawns so there is no duplicating. That’s beyond me to answer.
There’s a huge difference, making it an official game feature implies we’re at least trying to make it balanced.
Fine. How about as a mod then?
A “switch the character currently being played in this world” mod would be nice. Allow players to switch between players without having to exit and then load back up again. Perhaps a marker of where other characters are (on screen not world map) and the option to “create character at ____'s position” to allow players to make a “team” of specialized units to play “together” casually switching between when a specialized job needs doing would be nice.
It wouldn’t be to hacky because you can only play one at a time and they all still use up the same amount of resources they normally would, the easier play comes from the ability to make characters specialized instead of jack of all trades to support themselves. Not a play style I am particularly interested in, but I can understand its appeal.
Stage two would be the AI’s for characters thing to bring it all together. Would require some serious codding though, and again I am not overly interested except in the prospect of seeing a starting team of AI’s that I can survive with, similar to the family start someone suggested some time back. All in all, stage two relies on NPC’s continuing to get better.
Good idea, a nice bit of variety to starting /play-style option, not really something Im personally pushing/asking for though.
[quote=“Miloch, post:5, topic:11622”]This feature already exists, but only partially. You can manually do this. I was just suggesting something that would help automation.
You can already have multiple characters in the same world.[/quote]
I haven’t tried this, how does it currently work? Time continues to pass for the active character and the previous character is not in the world? So you can start a game as character A and then start as character B and play for 30 days; then you switch to A and he is survived 30 days without any food or water?
Tried one thing like this, in which each character had very heavy specialization, and they all worked and lived in the same base.
The only problem I had, was the time thingy, as crops would do weird stuff. But I did it more as to emulate DF’s community games than anything else. And after a bunch of months away, I see that the NPCs work better, so all this could go a bit like DF’s.
Human_shield, the way it works now, every timeyou change characters it will time warp you to the last time you played that character.
Kinda sounds like state of decay if you’ve ever played that. I think it would make for a really great mod. Maybe when one character needs to catch some sleep you have to switch to another. Designate zones for food and other resources and have the characters your not playing as auto take care of themselves and do tasks when you’re out and about.