Simple hauling priorities.

[bobucles]

I find there are two major types of hauling in Rimworld. There's the main hauling where your pawns look for a resource on the map and bring it to a stockpile, then there's the consolidation where they sort the items you already have. I find that once a pawn starts to consolidate, they give up on trying to find new items to haul. They can go for days or months without leaving the base because they need to, NEED to haul 5 meat onto the kitchen shelf and absolutely MUST do it again 5 seconds later. Haulers turn into a hornet's nest, juggling items around the inventory while precious food rots in the field. I'm stuck forcing manual priority on EVERY single rotting piece of food because my colonists absolutely refuse to do important things first. It's very annoying and renders the inventory priority system one of the most useless systems in Rimworld.

I'd like to suggest a minimum of two tiers of hauling priority. The top tier priority is to draw items from outside storage into storage. Pawns should ignore storage priority when they do this, and simply draw items into nearby storage as quickly as possible. Generally anything outside storage is something that's going to rot or decay and therefore pawns should always try to bring items into the safe haven of storage first and foremost. The secondary hauling priority is to organize storage. In this secondary mode the items are already in a safe location, and the task is merely to sort items between existing storage to make it pretty. Consolidating loot is generally not that important and if I REALLY need to sort items NOW I can just force a pawn to do it.

This 2 tier system should help pawns be less blatantly retarded. It is absolutely silly to be forcing pawns to pick up 20 stacks of rotting vegetables, berries, cloth and milk because a duster needs to go on a shelf.

[AileTheAlien]

I've never seen this actually happen. My pawns always do to-the-stockpile hauling first, then merging-style hauling second. In fact, they often skip the merging, to do other things like cleaning/sweeping, cooking, etc, then finally when everything else is done do some merging. Maybe this is a consequence of the priorities we've got set differently, on stockpiles and work?

[bobucles]

The pawns go pants on head retarded once you start touching the storage priorities. They like to consider it before anything else and it causes the hauler AI to break down. Set a storage to preferred and watch the pawns drop everything to fill it up. That is NOT how a casual preference works! I'd try forbidding the items, but then no one can touch them so it's worse than before. Generally you're better off not using priority at all.

If I were to get into more detail I'd prefer multiple tiers of hauling. The simple 2 tier system takes care of the biggest issues but a more detailed system may help smooth things out:
Normal: Pawns pull items from outside storage into storage. Pulling from outside storage ignores priority as the goal is to place items into (an ideally protected) storage. This allows all levels of storage priority (even low priority) to be useful in some way. Consolidation happens when all outside items are hauled, lack storage space or are forbidden.
Preferred: Pawns will pull items from a lower tier storage when there is time to consolidate.
Low: Pawns prioritize pulling items from here when consolidating.
Important: Generates a priority haul when empty. Otherwise the same tier of importance as preferred.
Critical: Generates a priority haul when 50%. Otherwise the same tier of importance as preferred.

Compare this to the current system of

Code Select Expand


Critical: Pawns stop at nothing to fill it from lower tier storage.
Important: Pawns stop at nothing to fill it from lower tier storage.
Preferred: Pawns stop at nothing to fill it from lower tier storage.
Normal: Pawns stop at nothing to fill it from lower tier storage.
Low: Pawns don't use this at all. Ever.

I'm playing with very few pawns right now. Inefficient hauling doesn't matter much once you get a loaded colony but when labor is scare every bit matters. I've had too many times where my pawns don't take care of important things because of broken priorities.