Problem with mortar loading

[stu89pid]

Hi,

Not sure if this belongs in bugs or suggestions. Feel free to move if I've misplaced the thread.

When loading mortars, only a single colonist can interact with the artillery shell stock pile at a time, per stack of shells.

I'm struggling to explain the problem so let me use an example.

My colony has 10 mortars set up, and 3 stock piles of artillery shells near the mortars with a total of 75 shells (3 stacks of 25 shells stored in 3 different 1 tile stockpiles).

At this point, I may pause the game and draft all my colonists. I try to load all 10 mortars at once. However, after I have commanded 3 pawns to load mortars, I get a message that there are no available stockpiles/shells to load the 4th+ mortar. I can't command more than 3 colonists to load the mortars until the first 3 have picked up a shell from the stock pile and started loading.

The only way I have found to alleviate this is to create as many stockpiles as you have mortars. The problem is that I would only want stacks of 9-10 shells in each zone, but since you can't split stacks, this becomes difficult to manage.

I think this is a bug but I am not sure. Two colonists can be walking to the same stack of meals simultaneously, the second doesn't have to wait for the first to pick up a meal for making that decision, so I'm not sure why that is the case for artillery shells.

[nccvoyager]

If I am not mistaken, this is an issue around a full stack of shells being "reserved" by a pawn, even though only 1 shell will be hauled.

Also happens for hauling and crafting jobs sometimes.

Example I have seen while playing:
Pawn creating drugs; single-tile stockpile next to drug lab, stack of Psychoid or Smokeleaf Leaves will be reserved by the pawn creating drugs, disallowing the hauling of Psychoid or Smokeleaf to fill the stockpile.
Once the stockpile is no longer "reserved" by the pawn making drugs (that pawn starts taking finished drugs to a stockpile) a hauler will begin to "fill" the stockpile; the stockpile will then be "reserved" by the pawn hauling, and the drug-making pawn will go elsewhere on the map to find leaves to make drugs from.

It is interesting that the pawn making drugs will sometimes not consider the stack of leaves as "reserved" and will take some anyways, and other times will indeed consider the stockpile "reserved."

[ItchyFlea]

Bug confirmed. I have listed it on Mantis here: https://ludeon.com/mantis/view.php?id=2735 Thank-you for reporting this.