quick question about hauling efficiency

[dr33mz33]

Greetings. I find it useful to have a couple of 1 tile stockpiles set to high priority, particularly one for meat and another for vegetables next to my cook, and also one for a dining room freezer. The problem is that, since priority is high, a lot eficciency is wasted in hauling 1 or 2 items  instead of  full stacks (1 or 2 meals to a 10 meal stockpile or 10 or 20 vegetables to a 75x one). Even loops are formed sometimes.
Do you have any ideas as to how to get around this?

[Canute]

You can use mod's like
Rimworld Search agency
https://github.com/Killface1980/StorageSearch

which give a hauling hysteris function to stockpiles.
Then you got a threshold at which percent the stockpile should get refilled.

[dr33mz33]

Thank you, that solves my problem

[5thHorseman]

Your problem's solved but I figure I'd pipe in. I solved this by not having multiple permanent stockpiles with different priorities for high volume jobs like food. I keep my stove in the fridge and  border it on 2 sides with a meat and a veggie stockpile, so the cook has to sully himself to actually haul his own stuff, but doesn't have to haul more than a couple blocks. And the work penalty is less than the penalty of having to walk through doors back and forth to carry the supplies.

[B@R5uk]

Wow, that's too bad!!! You waste time due to temperature as well as due to moving. This will not do.

Let me explain how to make super efficient food chain for one cook without any mods. Game features used for this are:
1) Stools and zones
2) Ingredient radius in bill settings
3) Cook work schedule
4) Sometimes areas restrictions

How to set thing:
1) You place stockpiles for ingredients next to the work bench and build stools on top of them. Stools eliminate the need to move to take ingredients placed on them, thus cook spend time cooking, not moving. Of course you should set stockpile priorities to critical.
2) You set handle type in the bill settings to "Drop on the floor" or "Take to the stockpile" that placed right under the cook, so he will not waste time hauling meals one by one.
3) You set ingredient radius in the bill settings to 3, so when ingredients next to the stove are used up cook will not go to freezer to fetch them 5 by 5 (or 10 by 10 in case of simple meals).
4) You set work schedule for the cook so he starts hauling right after he ends cooking. This makes him haul finished meals to freezer, when there are no ingredients next to the stove, and at the same time haul ingredients from the freezer to the stove. When there are enough ingredients the cook will start back cooking and cycle will be locked.

Notice: you should always have 2 cells with ingredients or more because sometimes cook will not understand that it is time for cooking, not hauling and ends up hauling some steel slag from other end of the map. Also in the newest version of the game pawns prefer hauling corpses to the freezer above anything else which is wonderful feature, but you need to set restriction for cook to home area or other specialized area if you want to prevent him doing that.

Also if you want to prevent other haulers from wasting time being locked in endless cycle between freezer and kitchen you should restrict them to dedicated hauler area that includes all the map except 3 by 3 block with stove and stockpile zones next to it.

You can place kitchen between two freezers (one for meals and bigger one for ingredients). This makes kitchen freeze to preserve meat when there is no work being done in it and warm back to appropriate working temperature as cooking starts. Warming is faster when there are two cooks cooking on two stoves.


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[Shurp]

Also if you want to prevent other haulers from wasting time being locked in endless cycle between freezer and kitchen you should restrict them to dedicated hauler area that includes all the map except 3 by 3 block with stove and stockpile zones next to it.

This is the part that made me give up on having a kitchen next to the freezer.  It was too much bother controlling all the other pawns who constantly wanted to run halfway across the map restocking every time a meal was completed.  Your solution will work; I'm just too lazy to implement it.

So my cooks wear parkas and cook in the freezer.  Much simpler solution :-P

[B@R5uk]

Much simpler solution is to train a pack of dogs and let them haul every single thing. No need in haulers at all! This frees pawns to do little more professional jobs. Like cleaning... =))) Also dogs can hunt retreating raids as their move speed is very high. This speed also helps a lot with hauling steel slags from entire map.

[zgrssd]

If you go into the details of any Recipe on any Workstation, the default option is "Take to best stockpile". But that is only the default. The other options are:
"Nearest Stockpile" and "Drop on Floor".

What I do is:
Place a stockpile in the room that is set not to accept finished meals. But set to draw in cooking material at a high priority.
Enable "Drop on Floor".
As the meal is in a Stockpile, it will be counted against the "Do until X" counter.
But as it is in a stockpile set to not accept it, it will be quickly moved by a hauler or dog.

That way they get to drop their meals the moment they finish. And also have raw materials a few steps away. So cooking troughput is maximised. Only slight issue is that the cooking room looks uggly as heck. But that is something my cooks have to deal with.

[Scavenger]

Greetings. I find it useful to have a couple of 1 tile stockpiles set to high priority, particularly one for meat and another for vegetables next to my cook, and also one for a dining room freezer. The problem is that, since priority is high, a lot eficciency is wasted in hauling 1 or 2 items  instead of  full stacks (1 or 2 meals to a 10 meal stockpile or 10 or 20 vegetables to a 75x one). Even loops are formed sometimes.
Do you have any ideas as to how to get around this?

Get the feed the colonists mod. Lets you make four of any meal at a time, four four times ingredients and four times the cook time to make it balanced. Basically just makes you only have to make 1/4 of the trips back and forth to get the ingredients. Greatly speeds up cooking time.

[5thHorseman]

1) You place stockpiles for ingredients next to the work bench and build stools on top of them. Stools eliminate the need to move to take ingredients placed on them

I haven't tested this but all reports are that in 1.0 this does not work anymore. This is easily the biggest gain from this - frankly - annoyingly ridiculous setup that I simply won't bother doing.

Don't get me wrong, it's cool that it works and it's cool that you figured out how to optimize it and I really do appreciate the concept, but it's dumb that the game requires this level of doohickery to be maximally efficient. And maximum efficiency is less desirable to me than just not bothering.

[TheMeInTeam]

Stools not conferring a benefit is a regression.  It could have been simply made not-instant or something, rather than making this interaction less realistic and removing an instance of tangible resource --> tangible benefit.