Simple question, never did a caravan before.

[greggbert]

Never did a caravan before, what happens to your settlement while your caravan is traveling?  Where is the game focus?  When I'm playing the game I'm always pretty busy I can't imagine switching back and forth between world view and settlement view every few seconds, so how does it work?  The non-video tutorials don't say this and the video ones are too annoying.

[ITypedThis]

Your colony will run as if you were still there. Likewise, your caravan will keep moving and resting by itself and likely won't to be watched.

You can switch between the two very quickly, but shouldn't have to do so very often.

[greggbert]

Ok so while the caravan is traveling I'll be managing my colony, dealing with raids, etc..  When the caravan has some sort of event, like it reaches destination, same thing?  Like if I'm fighting at the destination my main base could be raided and then I've got 2 combats going at once?

[khearn]

If you have pawns in both the settlement and the caravan, the pawns in the caravan will be greyed out in the row of pawns at the top of the screen, and you can pretty much ignore the caravan until you get a notification about it. If you do click on one of them, you'll go to the world screen and can see how they are progressing. Caravan progress is pretty boring compared to the frenetic activity at a settlement.

Once they get to their destination, or have an encounter along the way, you'll get a notification and then you can pay attention to them.

What gets fun is when you have pawns on two different maps at the same time. Even more fun is when you have combats going on two different maps at the same time. I sent a caravan to get an item cache once, and while it was fighting the cache's defenders, I got a raid on my settlement. It gets very hectic when you're hoping back and forth between two maps trying to micromanage two fights.

But other than that presumably rare incident, it's generally not too bad.