So I have a tribal colony and everyone is eating pemmican -- including the alpaca I just bought from a trader. I have a pen set up and a food stockpile for my colonists to keep full and my alpaca fed.
My problem is that my freezer/dining room is on the other side of the base... so any colonists in the area who get hungry decide to eat the pemmican in the barn instead of walking to the freezer to get food, receiving a -3 "ate without a table" penalty in the process.
Argh!
So how do I stop them? If I "forbid" the pemmican the alpaca won't eat it. If I block off the zone the colonists won't fill the stockpile. How else can I tell my colonists it's ok to bring food in but stop eating it!
Restrict access to the area to all but one colonist, other then that having hauling animals is another option.
Just build a table and chair next to the pen. :)
It's a really small pen... I converted a bedroom. 4x3.
Hmmm, I could put it in the room next door, but that's my locker room. Seems kinda silly to have my devilstrand dusters hanging up next to the kitchen table,
It's not the kitchen table, it's the locker room table. There's nothing at all silly about having your devilstrand dusters hanging up next to the locker room table.
;)
Hmmm, maybe this is a feature, not a bug. When I wake my pawns up to kill raiders they always insist on running to get breakfast first. "C'mon guys, there's a horde of marauders coming to kill us, there's no time for bacon..."
Maybe my locker room is the perfect place for a breakfast table. "Let me just run into the barn first and grab a snack..." ermmm...
OK, so the breakfast table in the locker room worked. Silly, but effective.
But I'm writing because I discovered something else about zoning. Zoning can be employed to tell colonists not to wade through lakes when going from one place to another. If you have a large inverted zone which you just exclude where you don't want them to go, you can put a big cross in the middle of the lake which will generally cut off their pathing through it without having to select the whole thing.
I imagine this would also work to make cleared snow paths to your mines feasible. Normally if you clear a straight line your pawns will refuse to walk on it (they love diagonals). But box them in with a zone and they should stick to it.
I thought zones only mattered for start/end points and that pawns would path anywhere between regardless of zoning. Maybe I was wrong? Or maybe it changed?
Colonists can cross a prohibited area but will try to path around it if they can. I've noticed they do this even when drafted. This may be an a16 change, I don't know. But it definitely works.