a16 (minor) deconstruction always scheduled last?

[DropbearNinja]

Any deconstruction task seems to always be re-scheduled last. I.e. if there are ANY construction jobs at all, they are always prioritised first. This means that a pawn will never continuously go through any deconstruction jobs while there are construction jobs, even if told to prioritise deconstructing a tile.

As I almost always have a heap of jobs queued up as I expand, this means deconstruction never happens I have to prioritise every single job one by one...

[MythicalNinja]

I have to do the same thing, and it's getting annoying.  I wonder if there is a way to make it throw a deconstruct in the queue every once and awhile (im not a dev or anything but) like a 1% chance for every deconstruct job. So if lets say there were 10 deconstruct jobs it would have a 10% chance of doing that job instead of another (this also seems to happen with uninstall). This way it would get thrown in with everything else.

[Calahan]

I am not sure if this is a bug. The construction priorities were re-ordered in A16, probably to deal with the issue of Pawns potentially killing themselves by deconstructing walls that were holding up roofs before removing said roofs. The result being that deconstruction was lowered (to the back of the queue I think? Haven't tested). So now in A16, if you order the removal of a roof (using "expand no roof area tool" IIRC), while also ordering the deconstruction of the walls supporting the roof, then your Pawns will remove the roof first, and only then deconstruct the walls, and so avoid an unfortunate accident. If you did this in A15 then you'd likely have some dead or injured Pawns.

In which case this is probably not a bug IMO, and just a change in priorities. Which might take some players a while to get use to, but that doesn't mean it's a bug (if I get time I'll see if I can find anything on the Mantis that confirms and/or explains this change in priorities).

Edit - Like several other aspects of the game, an order of priority needs to be programmed by default for most tasks, but that default order doesn't always match what an individual player wants. In an ideal world players would be able to customise these orders to their liking, but at the moment RimWorld has not reached this utopia (for the obvious reason the game is still being heavily developed) so players are restricted to the default order. In the meantime though, I believe there are mods that allow players to customise these orders. IIUC, Fluffy's work tab mod is one such mod (although there are likely others).


@MythicalNinja - Introducing an unpredictable aspect to any job will probably just annoy players. Or at least I know it would annoy me. Random is one thing, but unpredictable is something else. For example if you had a lot of urgent repairs to do, and set Pawns to do those repairs, you'd be pretty annoyed if they all suddenly decided to ignore your orders and build some unimportant walls instead because... unpredictable! Plus what happens in my roof removing example? What if you had a large roof being supported by a single wall tile, and then while wisely removing the roof a Pawn suddenly decides to kill himself (and maybe others) by suddenly deconstructing the lone supporting wall because... unpredictable!

Call me crazy, but I don't think players will appreciate that sort of feature being added to the game.

[skullywag]

the correct fix is to check when a deconstruct job is occurring for a roof above and then flip to that when found, then continue the deconstrcut job after the roof is removed, moving the priority of this job has caused more micromanagement to happen based on feedback.

[ison]

So the question is whether we should make deconstructing more important than constructing, or perhaps make it random. I'm not sure yet, so I'm just gonna bump this thread for now.

[skullywag]

can we not do exactly what I said, if pawn is about to deconstruct a building that "supports wall" and it has a constructed roof above, make him switch jobs to "deroof" that building as per normal, then go back to the construction job as before. Actually ive just rubber ducked myself and found an issue with that, if he half finishes the deroofing then goes off to do something he could come back and start deconstructing the wall (as theres no roof over that cell) but then he will eventually hit another wall with roof over it and do the same...hmm would this work...

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Personally I'd like to see it set as this:

Priority list:
Deconstruct roofs
Construct Roofs
Deconstruct non floor items
Construct non floor items
Construct floor items
Deconstruct floor items

Suppose somewhere in there we would need Repair currently (although I also vote for bringing that back on its own), that should probably be pretty high up the list.

And rather than having auto deconstruct roofs, perhaps make learning about de-roofing prior to deconstruction a part of the tutorial as well. When I'm deconstructing walls, I'd rather take the roofs down myself if I want them down. I don't always. I wouldn't even be heartbroken to see auto setting a "build roof" area go away. I think assigning roof zones would be better left to the player to decide and implement completely.

[hwfanatic]

Sounds about right. Are you sure you're not overworking your pawns? Happens even to the best of us.

[Tynan]

This isn't a bug. No matter the order there are annoyance cases, it's just a matter of minimizing them.