Maximum Hauling Capacity

[guardian504]

Having true problems with hauling food across a map. Specifically speaking of harvesting agave/berries from natural spawning bushes and hauling them back to my base. I have one person doing the cutting and like 4 people doing the hauling and still the haulers fall behind and I'm not getting the food fast enough. I toyed with it and figured out what is wrong. The colonists will only carry what is necessary to fill up an already established stack. Since berries stack up to 75, if there is no stack, they will haul up to 75 if the berries are all nearby each other. However if I have a stack of 74 in my cooler, then even if there is plenty of free space in the cooler, my colonists will only carry 1 berries to fill that stack. Talk about frustrating. I don't know how you would fix this, but as is I don't see how this could be thought of as good gameplay. Also, I cannot manage stacks at home. Furthermore, colonists only chain their pickups if the plants are right next to each other, which is usually not the case. Combine these three aspects and I have a colony with 8 people and four of them are dedicated haulers with only one thing to haul, berries and they still can't do it. They can only make 1 - 2 trips daily and they are only carrying 10-30 berries each trip. That's beyond inefficient. Is there a fix to this? Am I doing something terribly wrong? Thanks.

[khearn]

Don't pick berries a couple of hours' travel away from your base? It sure sounds like you're doing your picking a looong ways out there. If you've picked everything close enough to be practical, then don't continue picking so far away that it becomes impractical. Plant some rice early on, and by the time you've picked all the close berries, you'll have rice to harvest and you can wait for more berries to grow close by.

[Greep]

Husky haulers,  nuff said.

But seriously, yeah hauling is in a sorry state.  I've found you need to do weird ass tricks sometimes just to get around it. 

For instance, the worst in the game is cooking.  You can have a single cook keep 20+ huskies/colonists hauling, and the reason is that the cook will constantly be dropping single stacks that are constantly hauled and constantly be taking 10 ingredients from a small stockpile that will trigger people to fill it with only 10 stuff.  The only solution is to have your cooks cook inside your fridge with no dedicated ingredient stockpile for them and drop on the floor in a stockpile which needs to accept meals.  Means you'll need 2 cooks since it's inefficient as they need to walk to ingredients in a large stockpile, and your colonist will have to walk to your fridge to get meals, but better than tying up your entire fort.

Not sure there's any easy solutions coding side due to performance considerations.

[Euzio]

Think one of the problems with "hauling" as well is that pawns can seem pretty dumb to it. For example, you get a few miners to mine out a steel vein. However, the minute they finish the job, unless their next job is strictly hauling, they'd just leave the stuff there, head back to base and have another pawn who has been tasked hauling as his first priority to come all the way from like across the map just to collect the stuff they mined out.

I'm constantly having to pause and get pawns to manually pick up stuff they mine, chop, harvest, etc immediately after a job.... there needs to be a change such that they will pick up whatever stuff they can on the way rather than just leaving stuff out there.

[guardian504]

Don't pick berries a couple of hours' travel away from your base?

Great advice for sure. I have certainly been doing more of these hourly hauls than perhaps necessary. I think i made my growing area too small, thought I was set for the winter, just bought a slave, and elephant and a megasloth self-tamed, a lucky toxic fallout killed the whole map and I thought I was set. But I guess volcanic winters can last quite a while.

There was vegetation close by when it all ended. I had a little meat, but no veggies, and only 15 simple meals. I figured I'd forage a few days
while the rice is planted. But my colonists had other plans. I caught one guy carrying only three berries. He didn't even pick up a stack of three, he looked at a huge pile of them and simply selected his favorites.

I guess what I'm saying is... I don't think it's reasonable to assume that colonists ever acted this way. I'm praying it's a bug. Those are ez 2 fix. Like grammar.

[guardian504]

I've discovered a solution. I set my kitchen berries priority to critical. Then i deleted half of it. Then the haulers moved all the food to one side of the room. Then I set priority to the other half of the room. Then everything was stacked! So they got more berries. I mean, what works, right?