Hauling hauling hauling!

[bobucles]

Heya! I picked Rimworld up from a friend and have been losing weeks of my life. As such I've become fairly intimate with how the hauling system works in Rimworld. In short, it's become REALLY annoying. There are several behaviors in particular that have been causing me some strife, mostly due to the extreme inefficiency they cause. They are:
- Micro hauling. Citizens are given recurring tasks at their most miniscule level, rather than waiting for full hauls. In some cases they'll never leave the central base to pursue other hauling duties.

The biggest cause of micro hauling comes from farmers. They drop piles of 3/4/5 crops all over the place. While citizens are smart enough to gather piles in a local area, chances are EVERYONE has a 3x berry pickup task before the pile behavior kicks in.  Fixing this is pretty simple.

* Have crop gatherers hold on to their "basket" of crops until their stack is full or they have to drop it (harvesting another crop or walking away). Less crop spam means less hauling duties overall.

- Stockpile transfers. The threshold for moving between stockpiles is way too small, and citizens are FAR too eager to move goods which are already comfortable in storage. This is highly visible with the conveyor mod or with the mulcher. Similar items are a complete nightmare to use with current stockpile behavior.

I chose a few major angles for this issue. Put together they should both help the stockpile priorities behave in a desirable way, and prevent most cases of wasted hauling.

1) When an item is in a proper stockpile, it can ONLY pull from other stockpiles that are TWO or more priorities lower:
- Preferred pulls from low
- Important pulls from normal and low
- Critical pulls from preferred, normal and low. It should probably ignore the distance penalty for preferred storage.
Most mod machines are classified as important or critical storage, so citizens will never transfer out of these. Citizens will no longer run an endless conveyor loop pulling preferred storage back into the important loaders.

2) Citizens will have altered behavior based on priority. This is done by modifying the "work distance" that citizens use to pick a nearby storage. On average they'll want to keep moving items towards the highest priority storage, but will accept lesser options if they are convenient. This replaces the current system of "ignore everything but the highest priority storage".
- Citizens will go slightly out of their way to avoid storing low priority piles, (plus 10-20 tile distance) and will give more effort to pull out of them (minus 10-20 distance).
- Normal is normal.
- Citizens will put more effort to store in preferred piles (-10'ish distance), and will shy away from using preferred stock (+10'ish distance).
- Citizens want to fill up important piles (-20'ish distance), and hate using items from them (+50'ish).
- Citizens MUST fill critical piles (-40'ish) and will pull from them as a last resort (+100'ish).
New option?: Critical Store is like critical, but citizens will NEVER remove resources from them.

3) Important and critical piles are the typical target for a "storage to storage transfer". In addition, give them the following behaviors:
- Important piles will not be the target of a storage transfer until the important tile is 100% empty. No more hauling 2-3x wood for the mulcher a dozen times, one trip a day should suffice.
- Critical piles will not be the target of a storage transfer until the critical tile is 25-50% empty. Anything that uses fuel will keep a healthy supply without spamming hauls.

If you read this far, thank you. I look forward to what Rimworld has for the future!

[bjo0rn]

I like the idea of the cutters or miners holding on to their crop until they can't carry more instead of leaving a large number of small stacks. The downside of this would be if you need some material/food quick and you have to wait for him to drop it. This could take some time if he's mining or cutting wood.

I also like the idea of stock pile priorities affecting not only where colonists drop things, but also where they take things from.

The rest I don't have an opinion on.

[bobucles]

The downside of this would be if you need some material/food quick and you have to wait for him to drop it.

That's not really a problem. Drafting anyone causes them to drop their material immediately. Other than for the first 5 minutes of wood chopping it's not an issue, because if your stocks are SO low that a harvester can't carry his basket there's already major trouble.

The other hauling behaviors are more important for huge maps. Citizens will cross mountains and oceans to dump in a +1 priority stockpile, and ignore everything else along the way. Super long distance hauls lead to citizens suffering psychological stress as they starve/fatigue along the way, and by the end of the day they've only moved a single thing. It's frankly kind of ridiculous.

Nearby piles should be given more consideration because they're in a convenient spot. Between the choice of dumping in an adjacent low priority pile and a preferred pile half way across the map, just use the low pile. It can be moved again later.

[welcomeHub]

The downside of this would be if you need some material/food quick and you have to wait for him to drop it. This could take some time if he's mining or cutting wood.

It's not really a problem, but just require people to have more reasonable plan instead of selecting all the trees when they just need one in immediately.