Crafting Priorities & How to sell stuff if not placed in Orbital Beacon Area

[exodus1028]

Aquired the game lately, LOVELY sandbox game!

I have two issues though. Please note, I use the Mod Variety Pack to add further depth. My 2 Problems though arent related to that specifically I think.

1.) Crafting priorities:
The more advanced i get on a map, the more often i get stuck in certain loops of needs.
I understand i can priorize Jobs. But setting more colonists at priority 1 for crafting doesnt quite do the job since there is no priority list for which crafting table to use first. Maybe this would qualify for a feature request, or i just dont get it.

Example, I'm realising its late Autuumn and I'm not that good with enough food for winter for whatever reason. So I want to quickly set up a indoor room with hydroponics. My mod requires me to have glass for constructing that. I also have enough raw materials to do that and I've set it to highest priority on the particular workbench, but because this workbench is just one out of like a dozen, my colonists keep working on other tables like stone cutting or whatever to refill stock.

Of course i could cancel/suspend tasks on those tables, but i think this is VERY inconvenient.
Also manually priorizing the colonists is inconvienient, cause lets say i need like 6 hydroponics, each requires 60 glass (just out of my head, doesnt matter) thats 360 glass total....one crafting process nets in 15 glass, that would be 24 manual clickings.

It would be much easier if there was a priority list on all goods, where i can quickly push that one item in dire need to the top of it and colonists do their jobs respectively (hauling & choosing appropiate workbench).

Is there another way to work around that, without breaking all current (otherwise fine) settings, to achieve the desired tasks asap?

2.) I understand for in order to appear on the traders screen, items must inside the zone of the orbital beacon.
I dont exactly like that tbh. And besides, why are animals excluded from that?
Anyways, I dont want to store everything within said zone only to be able to trade them. There are often times where i have one certain item in excess and could trade away a portion of it. I cant do that without hassling around with many storage settings.
Why cant there be some sort of filter, a setting on each storage area that toggles availability of the items contained to the trader?

Or do i just miss a point here?

I like to store my stuff where i need it for short ways. And setting up multiple beacons there wouldnt work anyways since each storage unit is basically its own storage area.

[Moriros]

Hm, when we are talking about second point... I think, that colonist could haul things to beacon area for trade. It would be cool and realistic. For example: you give them order to trade somethink for silver. Your people haul that thing to trade-zone, and then it had been taken and trader drops silver. How about that?

[Masquerine]

Easiest way to priority focus a single bench would probably be to make a small zone around the table/materials and assign it to a crafter, so that tiny work area is the only place he's allowed to go. That way he won't choose one of a dozen benches to work at, he can only make glass.

As for trading, best way is to just fill your base with a bunch of orbital beacons, which one of them having access to outside. I find that I already get swamped on hauling jobs doing everything else, and there would never be enough time to haul things to a specific trade zone in time. More beacons means everything within range is ready for sale at any moment.
The beacon outside is for your silver.

[TLHeart]

Build as many trade beacons as needed to cover everything. They are cheap to make. I have one in my covered storage, one in my outside storage, on in the food storage, in the the alcohol/drink storage, all so I can sell excess to the traders.

On supply chains, it is all about using the "do Until" part of the bill, so that what you need is crafted, and then used at the next bench. And not every bench uses the crafting skill.

As an example, glass, requires sand. I have a bill set up on the powered crafting table to do sand until I have 50 sand. That way I have 50 sand ready to use. Glass is made, sand is reduced, which triggers more sand to be made.

It is also about distance from the stockpiles to the crafting tables. The less time spent hauling the supplies, the more gets crafted. This also includes the hauling back to the stockpile.

It is also about preplanning and preparing for upcoming needs.  Hydroponics takes lots of resources to get up and running. Glass, steel, mulch. Power!  Need to start laying in those supplies BEFORE even thinking about building hydroponics.

[polis27]

This mod here may help with your problem. It set what job got priority first. https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=15964.0

[exodus1028]

Easiest way to priority focus a single bench would probably be to make a small zone around the table/materials and assign it to a crafter, so that tiny work area is the only place he's allowed to go. That way he won't choose one of a dozen benches to work at, he can only make glass.

this is actually quite awesome, never thought of that...definately quickly set up and better than messing with the material chains ive already set up

if this works aka he is able to leave the area to acquire necessary components, this would work

I still do vote for a convenient crafting-order list

As for trading, best way is to just fill your base with a bunch of orbital beacons, which one of them having access to outside. I find that I already get swamped on hauling jobs doing everything else, and there would never be enough time to haul things to a specific trade zone in time. More beacons means everything within range is ready for sale at any moment.
The beacon outside is for your silver.

interesting idea, a bit of misconception from my side here then
i thought that beacon wouldnt work inside buildings and also needs it drop-area being set up to show the items in the tradescreen...now when i put a storage unit in it i thought that any otherwise defined storage area would be overwritten and therefor the beacon wouldnt include the contents of the storage units

I will mess around a bit with that, thanks for your input!

@the others
yes i always run my tables in the "do item until have x at stock" mode
however, there are times when multiple stocks are ran down and, by all preplanning, you cant have everything on spot ALWAYS, especially with the random events droppin in here and there, which was the case of the food dropout i described above... early winter + some sort of "destroy harvest" things wiped out nearly everything, while i can still do some hunt i thought it would be better to set up hydros...i had everything in place basically, power, required raw mats (stones/sand)...yet they somehow rarely chose to make the glass....at that time i had planned several pen areas, it was already in construction plus along all the daily stuff at hand, it kept my colonists busy (refilling stock, cooking food, hauling stuff around yadda yadda) and they never actually went to the glass table - that looked somewhat inconvenient to me

so yeah, this was all about desperation mode, when the sh*** hits the fan and i need to do important adjustments, were i felt i should have better tools at hands to control that area of the game

[exodus1028]

This mod here may help with your problem. It set what job got priority first. https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=15964.0

this is interesting, thanks alot! not exactly what i meant, but good enough to priorize a certain table!
i have not yet tried to combine multiple mods, gonna try to get that to work with the mod variety pack...thank you!

[Duban]

See, what this game really needs is a "pause construction" button rather than prioritize. It would let you stop construction of certain projects without canceling your work. It would also let you prioritize by pausing construction projects you don't want worked on yet.

[zandadoum]

As for hauling, two words: animal haulers

Then as many stocking piles as you like, with different priorities.

Small specific stockpiles next to crafting tables and kitchen. Food stockpiles in animal barns. Fridge, morgue and whatnot, low priority sellable trash stockpiles, steel stockpile next to kill box for quicker turret re-construction, weapon and apparel stockpiles and shelves, etc.

I have a lot of stockpiles, different sizes and priorities and it's all clean organised and tidy.

The more colonists and animals, the better this works.

[Regret]

See, what this game really needs is a "pause construction" button rather than prioritize. It would let you stop construction of certain projects without canceling your work. It would also let you prioritize by pausing construction projects you don't want worked on yet.

That is good problem you point out there.
Do you think using allowed zones could be of help there?

[exodus1028]

I never had problems with hauling with the MVP i can buy hauler-bots, they are quite cheap for the ease in workload they provide
the colonists essentially only do the crafting

the MVP i use comes with the enhanced tabs mod actually, i just didnt realize that cause the labels are a mess on my german client...it was just confusing at first glance so i didnt really look closer there and forgot about it

i offered fluffy translation help though to clean that up, i'll see if thats possible

on the #2 of my request, just putting beacons everywhere you need them/store your stuff works perfectly...as I mentioned earlier, my fault was just to assume each beacon would have to be in an unroofed area + didnt know multiple ones would build some sort of network enabling access across the board