Caravan forming needs reworking.

[ReZpawner]

At the moment it's totally and utter retarded the way it's done. So far I've had 6 mental breaks, 19 miscarriages of muffalos due to starvation, 2 escapes and fuck knows what else. Oh, and for some reason - the caravan is formed half way accross the map, so it takes an eternity to get there with all the items.

[RemingtonRyder]

If your colonists have meals on them and they get hungry while the caravan is forming, you can tell them to eat them from the inventory screen.

[Mkok]

Yes, it needs reworking. In my first game, I opened ancient ruins on my first day, and found a centipede with inferno cannon. Since I didnt have enough firepower to take it down, I decided that my only option is to abandon the place and settle somewhere else, and so I ordered a caravan to be formed. I put into it all my colonists + food and medicine. The problem is, while some were picking up the stuff, the rest wandered around. Their prefered location was right next to the centipede.

[swaggeringcuban]

If your colonists have meals on them and they get hungry while the caravan is forming, you can tell them to eat them from the inventory screen.

Sure, you can also force them to eat meals in storage by right clicking.  But you can't force them to rest so it doesn't help with exhaustion and mental breaks.

[Casazzo]

This may help a bit.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=28678.0

[digger1213]

Same problem with the prisoners, except theres absolutely no way to feed them. I had a prisoner wander to the opposite side of the map to eat some random alpaca meat that was there for some reason, before collapsing on the way back. Another prisoner went insane from lack of food or sleep, went berserk, tried attacking the muffalo i was loading that had malnutrition from the same problem, and the muffalo killed the prisoner... that was worth over 1300 silver. I ended up just using debug mode to give them good thoughts while loading.

[malloc]

The caravan creation screen needs to have indicators for health status of all pawns so I don't accidentally include the three-legged late-stage pregnancy Muffalo again, seriously. 

[Thane]

Please Tynan. Caravans are broken as all get out right now.

[Ford_Prefect]

Problems:
1. No one/animal preparing the caravan rests until they pass out.
2. No one/animal preparing the caravan eats until they start to starve.
3. No haulers, that are staying, help with loading the caravan.
4. Instead of random direction by default, use the last direction the player selected.
5. No way to cancel/change while it is still preparing to leave.
6. It is very easy to miss the alert message when they reach their target.  It should be a persistent letter message, not one that pops up for a few seconds and disappears.

[Ford_Prefect]

7.  Need to see what sex each animal is... don't want to accidentally bring all the female <insert animal here> to sell.
8.  Need to see if the animals have a bond, don't want to take Larry's pet, if Larry isn't coming.

[swaggeringcuban]

Does anyone have a prblem with them not packing the correct amount of food?

I chose hundreds of simple meals to ensure there was 20+ days of travel.  When the caravan was formed it only  had 5.7 days food, which wasn't enough to get to the nearest town.  When I checked, there was only about 70 simple meals in the caravan.  Why didn't they pack everything?

[malloc]

Pawns shouldn't lose their bed assignments unless/until they form another colony.  Husband comes home from his travels, refuses to sleep with his wife, preferring a vacant bed or the floor if no beds are available. 

Medical care should also happen while traveling even if of similar quality to being on an outdoor sleeping spot.  I had a herd of cats, literally, that I sent out to be sold but due to the lengthy packing stage several of them passed out due to exhaustion prior to leaving.  One of them just a short distance from the departure point which prevents the caravan's departure.  I debug blunt injured the poor kitten in the right ear which destroyed the ear but did have the intended effect of waking it up so the caravan could depart.  The kitten bled out on the trip despite being with two doctors.

[gchristopher]

I just tried forming a caravan, and yeah, it's too crazy to work for now.

First, they station the muffalos in the dead center of the map, far from the colony, then they have to haul every single item (one by one, in many cases) all the way to the muffalos, while all involved slowly starve to death and can't sleep until they've finished several days worth of hauling?!?

So, except for caravans only carrying trivial supplies, forming them is completely unworkable.

That's disappointing! Caravans should be regarded as largely broken and unusable in the current version.

[Marduk]

I just tried forming a caravan, and yeah, it's too crazy to work for now.

First, they station the muffalos in the dead center of the map, far from the colony, then they have to haul every single item (one by one, in many cases) all the way to the muffalos, while all involved slowly starve to death and can't sleep until they've finished several days worth of hauling?!?

So, except for caravans only carrying trivial supplies, forming them is completely unworkable.

That's disappointing! Caravans should be regarded as largely broken and unusable in the current version.

I usually confine the cargo muffalos to a small animal zone right next to my warehouses and draft move the pawns there too before forming the caravan, they usually don't wander off too far during the caravan formation.

[gchristopher]

I usually confine the cargo muffalos to a small animal zone right next to my warehouses and draft move the pawns there too before forming the caravan, they usually don't wander off too far during the caravan formation.

I tried that and it doesn't work. The muffalos immediately move out of their assigned zone to wherever the game wants to form the caravan. (Which appeared to be the exact center of the map.)

Maybe the place you were trying for happens to be coincidentally near where the game decided to form a caravan?

The only workaround I know of so far is to pre-stage everything for the caravan near the formation point. (Which puts it outside the defensive perimeter and far from a cooler, in this case.) Even then, only the caravan members will help with loading the Muffalos, while everyone else stands around uselessly.