Forming caravan causes starvation + exhaustion?

[weevis]

Is it intended behavior that "gathering supplies" for a caravan causes colonists to stop sleeping and eating?

As a player I tend to over-prepare. I thoroughly read about the new caravan feature. I then tamed two muffalo so that my caravan would have a lot of carrying capacity. I tried to launch the caravan with two colonists and two muffalo and a bunch of valuable things. These two colonists got the "gathering supplies" status. Since muffalos can carry quite a bit I see that it is taking them a while to gather supplies. I notice that everyone involved in the caravan does not eat or sleep while gathering supplies. No one has yet left the base, but after a while, they all collapse from exhaustion because they have stopped sleeping -- including the muffalo. Next, the colonists are downed from starvation because they have stopped eating (so have the muffalo). Am I misunderstanding something about caravans or is this a bug?

[davidrs4]

I have the same problem.  It has to do with taking a large qty of smaller items - IE Hay.  If you take fewer large items they stack everything fine and are ready to go.  If you try to take 2000 hay and 2000 rice and 2000 corn + other things they pass out and die.  You can make them eat and they go back to making the caravan however no way to make them go to sleep that I can see.  I think this is a bug.

Also we need a way to set a "caravan start point".  They keep wanting to start outside of the walls I created even though it has a door.  I have to take apart a wall section and then they start close to my town.

[weevis]

Ah. I want to sell clothing and it I see that it takes too many trips to load. 

As a workaround, I just tried restricting the muffalo to my storeroom to speed loading, but when I form the caravan the muffalo start ignoring area restrictions. Even stranger, the colonists in the caravan immediately lead the two muffalo to the most inconvenient place on the map that is adjacent to the home zone and try to load it from there. That's even farther and slower than my last attempt.

I've tried changing the home zone to see if the muffalo will be led to somewhere more useful but their behavior seems impossible to predict. In my most recent attempt when I formed the caravan the muffalo were led to stand in the shallows of an inconvenient lake.

[milon]

Sounds like an issue that needs a little work yet. I suggest that the "gathering supplies" job could be a high-priority hauling job that all hauling-enabled colonists can perform.  Also, I don't think this AI behavior is desired, so I'm moving this thread to Bugs.

[weevis]

Thanks! After some experimentation, it looks like a few (?) different problems.

1: "gathering supplies" dynamic can really penalize non-stackable items
2: caravan animals ignore needs during loading (e.g., muffalos collapse during loading)
3: colonists ignore needs during loading
4: caravan start point is often nonsensical

So a "gathering supplies" job helps with #1 but #2-#4 still don't make much sense. Allowing the player to designate a caravan start point could help #1 and #4 by speeding loading, but on the rare occasion when you really want to load a lot of stuff #2-#3 are still odd behavior. You can micro-manage to mitigate #3 somewhat but your Muffalos will still starve in a field of grass (#2). Etc.

It's a great game overall -- this is my first frustration with it.

[ItchyFlea]

Bug confirmed. I have listed it on Mantis here: https://ludeon.com/mantis/view.php?id=2877 Thank-you for reporting this.