A16 Caravan preparation woes.

[NolanSyKinsley]

If your caravan takes too long to load, it ends in absolute disaster. Pawns don't eat, won't sleep, and neither will the muffalo. This ends with the muffalo passing out due to exhaustion before they leave, and your pawns going berserk because they can't leave the map with the muffalo passed out, and during that time they will neither eat, nor sleep.

This is caused by only the pawns participating in the caravan loading it up. ALL pawns with hauling should help load the caravan, and pawns should not completely disregard their needs to load the caravan, it may take many hours, or even over a day to fully load the caravan if you are packing many light weight items, or depending on how far the caravan is from where your resources are.

May even want to make the caravan process two stage, loading/ preparing the caravan, then disembarking at a set time, like morning the next day so everyone is well rested to start off. That way you can take your time while loading up, and the pawns can do what they need to in order to stay sane, then you disembark when the animals and pawns are fully prepared, physically and emotionally.

[ison]

There are 2 problems here:

1) Colonists prioritize forming a caravan over eating/sleeping
2) Colonists who are not part of the caravan do not help loading the caravan

1) Loading a caravan is of highest priority so you can send it even during an emergency. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to send any caravan when starving or exhausted even if it could save your life (because e.g. there's another base 1 tile away with food and your base is under attack). It's quite difficult to decide what the priorities should be here.

2) I think it would be a good idea to make all colonists help loading the caravan (the same as with transport pods), this would make loading process much faster. Though probably not for A16.

[Tynan]

In any case, thanks for the report. We'll close this because it's more of a general suggestion than an active "bug".