This is the reason why growing fields also needs priorities!

[Sion]

All this colonist have huge mental issues at the moment (they make up about 90% of my colony), so I have set up a large rose field to save them, (the blue square, top right), and changed all colonists priority to do farming, but the colonist thinks it is much more fun to walk across half of a 400*400 map to harvest potatoes, and suffer a total mental breakdown in the process.

This is the reason to why you would set some growing fields to be more important then other fields!

[Sion]

I managed to make them plant in the blue field by using the dev-tool and turned off: "No global work searches", but it shouldn't be necessary to use dev-tools for this type of things.

[Sion]

I have notised 2 things that hapened when I disabled the "No global work searches"-option.

1 (Bad): When something needs to path a really long distance (say +200 tiles) the game becomes super lagy, because it is a huge amount of work for the path finding algorithm to proses so many tiles, this is how it looks:
Close view
Far view

2 (Fun): When a animal goes psychotic it cant find my colonists, so it just wanders around back and forth in a raidius of about 15-30 tiles

[Shinzy]

Prioritizing fields has already been suggested! (by me! *ahem* *pretends to be entitled prick*)

So I have to support this one!
and you even have actual legit useful reasoning for this, unlike me =P
I just wanted my potatoes to be grown before the numerous patches of flowers and flowerpots I have
thumbs up!

[Damien Hart]

I agree with this idea, so under normal circumstances, my food can be more important, but after (or perhaps just before) an assault, I can give gardens top priority.

[bjo0rn]

Maybe it would be better to bake distance into the priority equation in some smart way, so that they prioritize tasks that are nearby. If this is already the case, then the mystery is why it didn't work this time. Maybe the equation just needs adjustment?

If it works as it should in most cases, maybe a quick-fix would be to add an option to disable a field, so if they start walking towards a field when they are not supposed to, you can just disable it temporarily.

[Damien Hart]

Colonists usually prioritise nearby tasks first, but they also have sub-priorities within tasks, for example corpses are top priority within the hauling task. Looks like food growing may be a higher priority than flower growing.

Disabling fields would be good too, and it would also be convenient for when food reserves are high, and you'd rather your growers work on other tasks, you don't have to unassign the growers or remove the zones.

[Tynan]

Actually, it's harvesting that's higher priority than planting. I'm gonna look into doing field priorities, but not for A6.

In this case, you could have just deleted the growing zone on the taters. Not a great solution, but workable in extreme and weird circumstances as this.

[Sion]

Actually, it's harvesting that's higher priority than planting. I'm gonna look into doing field priorities, but not for A6.

In this case, you could have just deleted the growing zone on the taters. Not a great solution, but workable in extreme and weird circumstances as this.

Easier said than done, that potato field was supposed to be a rose field "snaking" around on both sides of the roads for improved mental health and happiness, but because you can't drag a growing field over a road I had to "snake" around a lot to have the same field everywhere so I only needed to set it to roses in one place.