Please further improve harvesting-sowing-hauling IA decisions

[giannikampa]

As the title,
I noticed that often a colonist goes for a single square harvesting then completely ignores to sow that spot and leaves the area empty-handed to go in the opposite part of the map for a similar duty. Then another colonist goes for the sow of the spot and empty-handed leaves as the prior one and a third colonist has to go there to collect the harvest laying one step away from the spot.

So much time waste in useless travels!

I'm pretty sure that a local research for harvesting after an harvest action already exist.
What seems to be missing is a local research for sowing action after a harvesting action ( if no more local harvesting is available) before looking for new jobs.
Then - PLEASE!!!- a local research for hauling job after sowing action.

Expectation is to have a colonist that harvests, sows, then grabs the harvest and leaves the area

(of course in my observation there were no "incapable of" limitations)

[Regret]

That is strange, for me they usually do the sowing and harvesting somewhat randomly, partially dependent on proximity, they usually stay nearby unless they spot a task with a higher priority elsewhere.

[Limdood]

This happens in planting, building, mining, hauling, cleaning, doctoring, firefighting, wardening, and nearly anything else.

Constructing is the easiest to give an example of, but you can apply it to most any activity.

Redfields grabs some wood to start constructing the walls.
Redfields drops all the wood into the wall sections and starts building section 1 (of, lets say, 10)
Jerbear, across the map, gets a job update, and decides to do section 2
Redfields finishes section 1, moves to 3, then 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
Redfields goes and does something else since he's done.
Jerbear gets 80% of the way to the wall to construct it, long after Redfields is done, and gets too tired.
Jerbear cancels his job to go sleep.
Sometime later, someone checks jobs again and FINALLY finishes section 2.

Or lets go even more common and Jerbear doesn't get tired, instead he finishes his job...but still way slower than if Redfields could just OVERRIDE Jerbear's "calling" of section 2.

Ideally, the game would let Redfields do all 10 sections...unless maybe i manually specifically assign Jerbear to construct some of that. 

As it is now, having multiple colonists assigned to do a type of job USUALLY speeds that job up.  Sometimes, though, it uses up far more "man hours" than it should, as people cross maps to do trivial parts of a job that could have been more efficiently accomplished by 1 person.  Occasionally it even slows down a job when travel time for a job causes the last part of a job to be delayed significantly beyond the initial colonist's potential finish time.

Perhaps it might be possible to have a toggle?  maybe you could toggle so that a higher skill colonist would ignore "reserved by" markers of a lower skill colonist and force the lower skill colonist to perform a job check when his reserve is cleared?

This would help give a specific, measurable indicator of when a job reservation would be ignored, while avoiding potential irritating issues with the possibility of a low skill constructor or crafter wiping a higher skill constructor or crafter's reserved job.

[Regret]

Oh, you mean another colonist taking one of the jobs while they are miles away.
Yeah that is annoying as hell.

Good point.
I imagine it is hard to code though.

[cultist]

This is a common issue with multiple colonists assigned to the same work type. I gotta ask though, are you using mods so you have like 30-40 colonists? Because the game isn't really designed to handle that many colonists at once.
I usually only have, say, 2 constructors and while I recognize the scenario you describe, a similar problem often occurs because of a colonist being tired, hungry, joyless or something else overriding their work orders.

[Tekuromoto]

Perhaps it might be possible to have a toggle?  maybe you could toggle so that a higher skill colonist would ignore "reserved by" markers of a lower skill colonist and force the lower skill colonist to perform a job check when his reserve is cleared?

THIS.

[giannikampa]

This is a common issue with multiple colonists assigned to the same work type. I gotta ask though, are you using mods so you have like 30-40 colonists? Because the game isn't really designed to handle that many colonists at once.
I usually only have, say, 2 constructors and while I recognize the scenario you describe, a similar problem often occurs because of a colonist being tired, hungry, joyless or something else overriding their work orders.

As for me I can tell that I noticed the issues described in simple vanilla game, mostly in late game having let's say from 10 to 20 colonist and many growing areas spread all over the map to use fertile soil.