Let pawns automatically use "packanimals" as inventory to take items from

[paul23]

In the mid to lategame you often take pawns on long(er) caravans. To keep those caravans work one can take heavy duty pack-animals (elephants, muphalos etc) with them to carry food and other supplies that might be needed (medicin).

Now the game becomes really annoying (up to the point that I just quit) when you start having 10ish of those animals and do caravans spanning many days. - At the encounter site after the battle you have to lick your wounds and heal your pawns. However this isn't easy.

The problem is: you have to find the medicins in your animals, there's no logical space where the sniper is located so you will have to click them one-by-one, scroll through the inventory, find the correct item, drop and only then you can take it.

It would be really nice if the pawns "understood" those inventories (maybe only during a caravan) and could take items out of them, items they require for jobs.

This would make the endgame a much more smooth experience, eliminating the pain of trying to click the right elephant when they are overlapping each other.

[SpaceDorf]

+10 to that.

Same for ressources or equipment like Sleeping Bags

[patoka]

and you didnt even talk about the most annoying part:
food. you can drop medicine once you have found it no problem, but if you drop your pemmican, whatever meals, milk or insect jelly, your pack animals will stop anything that they are doing just so that they can get to the food earlier and gobble it up so that there is none left for your colonists and there is nothing you can do about it except having the colonists around already, waiting for the food. or you can leave the map early.
personally, if i was ambushed and the caravan continues soon, i let my people starve for those hours and send them to mine and deconstruct stuff. if we just killed a bandit base and have three days, i honestly just hope that there is enough food around and then go foraging and hunting as usual. otherwise i will have to do it the annoying way (by supervising them like a babysitter)

to be fair you can always just put animal sleeping spots around your camp and when the animals went to sleep let them drop their food and ideally have a night owl haul it all or otherwise force the other pawns to do so in their sleep time.

lastly, i have noticed how food and other items dont spoil as long as they are packed, which is practical when preparing for a big haul/long trip with relatively few pawns, but it is bound to be abused. i have noticed how often simple meals make up around half of the food by the end of the trip that my pawns have eaten if they get ambushed once or twice and attack a place themselves, while not walking too slowly.