Any way to improve speed of resource delivery?

[deadbeef]

All of my sectors are constantly hungry. This is not a problem of a lack of food though, as my Sector 3 is entirely devoted to food production and it makes more than enough food to feed everyone. But the problem is that the food takes so long to move around the ship that it's impossible to keep everyone fed in time.

This is not a problem of delivery between Stockpiles. I have the Drone Bay and it's doing a good enough job moving food between the stockpile in Sector 3 to the stockpiles in other sectores. The problem is that the food isn't being delivered from the farms to the stockpile fast enough.

I have one farm in Sector 3 that's had 100 food sitting at it, waiting to be picked up, for ages. That 100 food number never goes down, the little trucks are too busy picking up food from the other farms to even bother picking up that one. I have another farm that gets mostly neglected, but occasionally gets stuff picked up from it.

How can I improve this? Why does it take so long to move resources around? Given that its clear the strategy for success in this game is to specialize your districts, this mechanic is making it really hard for me to specialize my food.

[Schlobbmann]

there is a tech that adds more trucks to a stockpile. maybe also build more small stockpiles than middle ones since i think then you have more trucks (the number of trucks for middle stockpiles is not higher than the small ones)

[BobThePenguin]

How many stockpiles do you have? Each stockpile (small, medium, large) only come with 5 transporters (7? if you've upgraded). If you're using a single large stockpile, you won't have many transporters to pick up the food locally. It is sometimes better to use a bunch of small stockpiles so you can move stuff around faster.

[deadbeef]

I only have 1 small stockpile for the food so thats only 7 trucks. because i dont need to store the food......i make enough every few cycles to feed everyone so theres no reason to store any excess. if thats not enough trucks then it seems foolish to build extra stockpiles just so i have more trucks. but if thats what i have to do then.....

edit: yep, that seemed to have done it. now i added a second stockpile and my backlog is getting cleared right up. i had no idea that speed of transport was tied to the amount of stockpiles.... perhaps something to fix in a future balance update ;)

[BobThePenguin]

Originally posted by deadbeef:

I only have 1 small stockpile for the food so thats only 7 trucks. because i dont need to store the food......i make enough every few cycles to feed everyone so theres no reason to store any excess. if thats not enough trucks then it seems foolish to build extra stockpiles just so i have more trucks. but if thats what i have to do then.....

More stockpiles is the only way to get more transporters.

I've got maybe... 10 or so small food stockpiles and everything gets collected locally and shipped inter-sector really quickly.

[PolecatEZ]

In your source area (food sector), it's best to use 2 (scale up to 4) small storage units to move the food elsewhere. Later build a drone system for delivery.

Set the minimum storage for enough for 1 meal. You can see how much your workers eat at the dining hall, it's how much it stores at a time. For target sectors, set enough for two meals.

So long as you're producing enough food overall - you can hover over food at the top and look at the percentage - everyone should stay easily fed.