Constructing a building and hauling just required number of materials instead of full amount worker can carry, rest could been dropped next to constructed object which usually is about 50 times closer than that vein you had on other side of the map.
There are myriad of issue where workers are incredibly inefficient. Adding some sort off secondary haul job queue which would compare distance to the next queued job and if it's closer would overwrite main queued job. Another solutions purely to farming, that might need to change farming a little bit, is to have harvest seasons/events/system that would make majority of the workers harvest the fields and bring it back at the end of the day, you know just like irl..
Edit: just noticed that first half of my post is missing O_o, my keyboard decided to leave the text out after typing it in :D
Anyway, my first half of the post was about growers/farmers who wouldn't haul their harvest after harvesting, or the fact that even with growing set as number 1 priority they often would go plant couple seeds and jog off doing something completely different, not only they wouldn't carry food back along the way, they would waste time going back and forth.
Same goes for hunters or plant cutting, usually those carry back their own produce, but that isn't always the case as often they just leave it be, especially wood cutters, might be issue with eating habits interrupting them mid jobs, or wood cutter cutting one tree and bringing back 1/3 of his carry capacity, when he cut off 3 trees and brought them back, and even if he cuts 3 tree down, only one stack out of 3 will be carried back, but when ordering any worker to haul, they will correctly gather all the stacks around up to the carry limit, same should be done for any job that possibly can carry back materials, mining, plant cutting, hunting, harvesting.
This time wasting issue becomes increasingly bad if you use mods that require more crafting or processing raw materials before using them to craft items. Because of one job, you might have to do 5 and when you have 2 dedicated growers just to see that half the fields are still empty or that food is rotting away over and over again until you manually tell them to haul it.. just drives me mad.
Optimization is an issue that is well known, and supported
Being able to select zones of work would greatly improve this issue IMO.
Then you won't have 1 guy beat out a fire, run to eat some potatoes on the otherside of the map, and another 7 beating the fire that was next to the first that grew.
Quote from: Smikis on May 12, 2015, 04:19:36 PM
Constructing a building and hauling just required number of materials instead of full amount worker can carry, rest could been dropped next to constructed object which usually is about 50 times closer than that vein you had on other side of the map.
That works as long as you have the desposit "on the other side of the map", and only then. If you have it closer and your construction site farther, cononits hauling full stacks of items would only make for more hauling back, from the construction site to the stockpile.
I see your point, but while solving your problem, it would create another problem to solve.
I think it'd be best to look for a solution without creating more problems, even if they are less problematic. :)
Just thinking...
What if... harvest job had a 10% chance of being followed by a direct order to haul whatever he just cut ?
The 10% is meant to make sure a lot of plant have been cut before gathering & the direct order to make sure it take priority.
The hazardous statistic make it inelegant though.
Alternatively, a dedicated hauler usually solve that problem.
+1
If hunters haul corpses so why growers (?) can't do it too? Now this look like this "Jon! Corns are ready! Ok, i'm gonna harvest them all and left until they spoil"
Quote from: Kegereneku on May 13, 2015, 03:26:55 AM
Just thinking...
What if... harvest job had a 10% chance of being followed by a direct order to haul whatever he just cut ?
The 10% is meant to make sure a lot of plant have been cut before gathering & the direct order to make sure it take priority.
The hazardous statistic make it inelegant though.
Alternatively, a dedicated hauler usually solve that problem.
a dedicated hauler for every 2 workers is hardly solving issue that shouldn't exists, If you ever performed any manual labor or for that fact gathered strawberries/potatoes at any point in your life, did you just leave it there in the field after gathering?
Another solution to farming might be to actually have harvest seasons, or some sort of harvest system where majority of workers would harvest and at the end of the day would bring it all back, just like it is in real life..
I, for one, want my crops to be harvested and replanted as fast as possible. If they keep stopping to haul back my crops, I will never get a decent food storage built up. If hauling the crops was my main priority, I would have hauling set higher than growing.
The only viable times I see adding an extra check for hauling jobs would be when:
-The colonists is going for a meal and is not starving.
-The colonist is going to bed and is not exhausted.
Even these really depend on how a colony is set up.
Quote from: Matthiasagreen on May 13, 2015, 08:25:27 AM
I, for one, want my crops to be harvested and replanted as fast as possible. If they keep stopping to haul back my crops, I will never get a decent food storage built up. If hauling the crops was my main priority, I would have hauling set higher than growing.
The only viable times I see adding an extra check for hauling jobs would be when:
-The colonists is going for a meal and is not starving.
-The colonist is going to bed and is not exhausted.
Even these really depend on how a colony is set up.
Yes we all want that, but even without hauling, farmer usually never plant all the empty fields he can , for some reason he will jog off to do anything else and I am not suggesting that after harvesting 2-3 plants he should haul it back, I want that my farmer would haul it back when he's actually going back to say, eat, sleep, or relax in doors, basically he is already walking back to my base, he might as well take produce off the ground and take 5 extra steps to drop it off in the refrigerator and he's going to eat, which is usually the case, he is already going to the refrigerator or kitchen..
Quote from: Matthiasagreen on May 13, 2015, 08:25:27 AM
I, for one, want my crops to be harvested and replanted as fast as possible. If they keep stopping to haul back my crops, I will never get a decent food storage built up. If hauling the crops was my main priority, I would have hauling set higher than growing.
The only viable times I see adding an extra check for hauling jobs would be when:
-The colonists is going for a meal and is not starving.
-The colonist is going to bed and is not exhausted.
Even these really depend on how a colony is set up.
THAT! Exactly that. I'd rather make pawns haulers and plant non-stop rather than have them haul back each and every plant they harvest. That'd take weeks in-game for larg"er" colonies, 100+ tiles of plants.
It'd be bad.
Quote from: LittleGreenStone on May 13, 2015, 08:38:21 AM
Quote from: Matthiasagreen on May 13, 2015, 08:25:27 AM
I, for one, want my crops to be harvested and replanted as fast as possible. If they keep stopping to haul back my crops, I will never get a decent food storage built up. If hauling the crops was my main priority, I would have hauling set higher than growing.
The only viable times I see adding an extra check for hauling jobs would be when:
-The colonists is going for a meal and is not starving.
-The colonist is going to bed and is not exhausted.
Even these really depend on how a colony is set up.
THAT! Exactly that. I'd rather make pawns haulers and plant non-stop rather than have them haul back each and every plant they harvest. That'd take weeks in-game for larg"er" colonies, 100+ tiles of plants.
It'd be bad.
Read the answer above :P
Quote from: Smikis on May 13, 2015, 08:23:56 AM
a dedicated hauler for every 2 workers is hardly solving issue that shouldn't exists, If you ever performed any manual labor or for that fact gathered strawberries/potatoes at any point in your life, did you just leave it there in the field after gathering?
Another solution to farming might be to actually have harvest seasons, or some sort of harvest system where majority of workers would harvest and at the end of the day would bring it all back, just like it is in real life..
I think you are confusing mimicking reality for the sake of it and finding a acceptable gameplay solution.
Aside I did have gigantic field in game, around 6 pawns cutting, one dedicated hauler was more than enough to keep everything off the ground by the end of the day (because I make sure to not plan too much)
Alternative idea : JUST before the end of the day, everyone who cut crop seek to direct-haul the expected harvest.
Expected result : They'll haul at least the last type of food they cut, but we have to remember the more automated reaction we give them the more risk it have to create new problem.
do you continue working when it is your time to eat? no you go and eat. so do the colonist.
Crops lay in the fields after harvest, until the haulers show up to haul them away, in real life, why should the game be any different?
Now I do understand the frustration of sending colonist to deconstruct a siege area across the map, they will deconstruct, and NOT haul anything back. That is when I step in and force they to haul it back. Close things like my farms, My dedicated hauler takes care of it.
I am in favor of opportunistic hauling, meaning that when a pawn changes job types (say from plant cutting to sleeping or eating) it looks to see if their is a haul job that it can do along the way to the next job that is not too far out of their way. Thus the harvester, when complete, will naturally haul food back to a food storage area when he goes back to eat or sleep as long as the food storage area is "close" to the final destination. Similarly workers deconstructing distant walls for stone blocks will naturally carry back whatever they have scavanged.
Another thing that would be nice is for the Haulers to evaluate not just what is the nearest job, but weight jobs by how heavy(pun intended) the haul is, so hauling that single steel ore that was just mined would not be as high a priority as hauling the 75 potatoes that are just a little farther away. That way the haulers aren't constantly making short single item hauls.
I think the problem is rooted in the fact that growing, apart from the initial seeding process, seems to be based entirely on individual plants and the zones are there purely as geographical limiters.
In an ideal world, each grow zone would be a meta-object formed of all the plants within it. You would then be able to designate a zone to be tended and the task would be to harvest/cut all the plants in that zone, then to haul all the crops from that zone, then to reseed the zone before moving on to the next one. That would most accurately represent the most common agricultural routine.
However, I'm also assuming that this would be a nightmare to code because Tynan would have to come up with a method for more than one colonist to be assigned to one of these meta tasks at the same time, and I don't think that's terribly likely given what he has said elsewhere about getting colonists together to haul large objects.
If Pawns carry the items or equip them fully while moving about it would fix the issue if they don't place them down when working.
For all the headache it might be worth it to have them equipped like "tools" all the time.
Then again IRL how different would things be? Gas Stations are always filled with more than enough for a single job. If you want the gas back you'll have to drain it. Else it just sits there like a stock pile.
Quote from: TLHeart on May 13, 2015, 12:27:13 PM
do you continue working when it is your time to eat? no you go and eat. so do the colonist.
Crops lay in the fields after harvest, until the haulers show up to haul them away, in real life, why should the game be any different?
You must be living on different planet, because that's not how it works here and it doesnt matter if its big commercial farm field or small strawberry/potato field at your country side house, there are no such thing as gatherers and haulers, both are one and the same.
Yes harvest usually stays on the ground until the end of the day when everything is hauled ( my other suggestion) and workers usually eat in the fields. That is for all day harvest, if you are just going to harvest a bag of xxx vegetables/fruits , because your mom/someone ( not you ) is cooking dinner , do you go to the fields, harvest it and leave it there, so the cook has to haul it himself (which what happens in the game if storage room is empty ), or you harvest and haul it back?
And this is only considering that growing is interrupted by eat/sleep, heck I had my growers do other jobs with lower priority for w/e reason, or switch after planting 2 seeds and so on.. which makes it even worse.
The idea of having a pawn haul something right after deconstructing/mining/harvesting is bad. The idea of a pawn hauling back as much as they can carry depending on what's around them and their route back, sure, although I'd imagine it wouldn't be as easy to make as it sounds, as it also needs to compute will it take a detour to put it in the stockpile that's x amount away, if it's 1 more then x amount away, it wont?
We have no better solution at the moment then the idea of them hauling back whatever they can carry if going near a stockpile. That's the best solution, that's the best suggestion here, not much else to debate.
If I may make a suggestion, perhaps a colonist with the Hauling and Growing jobs should (if Hauling is higher priority than Growing) do hauling of produce only when either there is a full stack of the thing they are harvesting, or when there are no more of that crop left to harvest in the close vicinity.
Thusly, when harvesting rice (which yields 3 per crop) the grower would harvest exactly 25 rice crops, notice that there's a stack worth of rice on the ground, and then do the hauling.
The advantage of this: if you have a dedicated hauler, then a full stack of that particular produce may not build up on the ground, so the grower will keep on harvesting and planting. If you have a dedicated grower and a hauler/grower, then the second guy will stop to haul things back but the first one will keep on going.
Sound reasonable? :)
Quote from: Smikis on May 13, 2015, 03:03:07 PM
Quote from: TLHeart on May 13, 2015, 12:27:13 PM
do you continue working when it is your time to eat? no you go and eat. so do the colonist.
Crops lay in the fields after harvest, until the haulers show up to haul them away, in real life, why should the game be any different?
You must be living on different planet, because that's not how it works here and it doesnt matter if its big commercial farm field or small strawberry/potato field at your country side house, there are no such thing as gatherers and haulers, both are one and the same.
Yes harvest usually stays on the ground until the end of the day when everything is hauled ( my other suggestion) and workers usually eat in the fields. That is for all day harvest, if you are just going to harvest a bag of xxx vegetables/fruits , because your mom/someone ( not you ) is cooking dinner , do you go to the fields, harvest it and leave it there, so the cook has to haul it himself (which what happens in the game if storage room is empty ), or you harvest and haul it back?
And this is only considering that growing is interrupted by eat/sleep, heck I had my growers do other jobs with lower priority for w/e reason, or switch after planting 2 seeds and so on.. which makes it even worse.
Go and watch the vegetable fields, of california, arizona, florida, and see that the pickers do NOT haul the produce back to the cooler, that is the haulers job. The pickers work in the field until quitting time, then they all head home ,regardless of what is left to haul to the coolers.