Growing zone priorities

[ComradeYevad]

Hello!

After playing through a couple of colonies (starvation, mental breakdown spiral and the other usual stuff)
there's one feature that I feel is missing from the game:

Priorities for growing zones

Having different levels like stockpiles would help greatly in my opinion, this way it would for example be possible to focus on healroot instead of potatoes.
It would also come in handy for colonies with growing zones both inside and outside their perimeter, where you'd want to focus on keeping a steady and live supply inside your walls instead of prioritizing the outside farms.

I'm sorry if this has been suggested before, I couldn't find any post about it though.

Greetings

[winddbourne]

This sounds really good. I'd also like to be able to set priority zones for construction. It's a real pain to plan out an entire village and then manually forbid every block one by one while the game is paused. It would be so much easier to plan a bunch of stuff out and give them some sort of rough order as to when I need each thing finished.

[hwfanatic]

This would be a great addition. Use the planning tool for planning. It could use some refinement as well.

[Trish42]

I'd also like to be able to set priority zones for construction. It's a real pain to plan out an entire village and then manually forbid every block one by one while the game is paused. It would be so much easier to plan a bunch of stuff out and give them some sort of rough order as to when I need each thing finished.

You could make a new area so it encompasses only the room(s) you want to build first (or make an area that encompasses the build zone with low priority and then click on the invert button so you have the rest of the map in the allowed area) and then expand or clear allowed area accordingly (and then assign people or just builders to that specific area).

[winddbourne]

You could make a new area so it encompasses only the room(s) you want to build first (or make an area that encompasses the build zone with low priority and then click on the invert button so you have the rest of the map in the allowed area) and then expand or clear allowed area accordingly (and then assign people or just builders to that specific area).

This works. I honestly didn't plan to hijack ComradeYevad's thread though. His idea about priority zones is already in the game for stock piles and it would be really easy to set up for crops and other things.

The reason construction immediately came to mind is because the "planning" tool is really limited right now. It's great for planning a layout and counting things out so your base is symmetrical but its little squares don't really let you set up construction order . . . they don't even let you mark doors, or lay out furniture and crafting stations that need to be built.

Being able to highlight a set of walls and say "do this first if you are going to build" and then highlight a zone over the door and say "do as second priority after that is done" and then being able to highlight the contents of the room and say "Build this stuff last" would be really useful.

Suddenly everything is clearly marked out on my screen and the zones tell my workers where my priorities lay. The beauty of it is that it lets me automate my task list and since the option is already in the game it probably wouldn't take much coding.

ComradeYevad's crop area list is the same elegant thing. I'm pretty sure the same idea could be applied to all sorts of tasks. You set up an area, give it a priority, and tasks within that area get first pick. If a pawn wants to farm I can tell him to check the potato field first. If he wants to haul I can let him know that those distant iron bits (or the expiring foods) are more important than that nearby lumber pile.

It's simply elegant and I have to give the OP a huge thumbs up for coming up with such a simple and versatile solution.

[Xav]

Hello!

After playing through a couple of colonies (starvation, mental breakdown spiral and the other usual stuff)
there's one feature that I feel is missing from the game:

Priorities for growing zones

Having different levels like stockpiles would help greatly in my opinion, this way it would for example be possible to focus on healroot instead of potatoes.
It would also come in handy for colonies with growing zones both inside and outside their perimeter, where you'd want to focus on keeping a steady and live supply inside your walls instead of prioritizing the outside farms.

I'm sorry if this has been suggested before, I couldn't find any post about it though.

Greetings

+1

I needed this feature today.  I experienced a blight halfway through a summer grow season.  Just so happened my growers had just begun sowing some hay grass fields.  I wanted them to switch all efforts back to the main fields without removing the hay grass growing zones, forbidding them, or some other round-about way of dealing with the issue of 'plant this first!...it is more important!....YOU IDIOTS ARE GOING TO STARVE!!!'.

[Wolf619]

Awesome idea! I really like the growing zone priorities idea!