Squad splitting and jobs not working

[Animecore]

I wanna say firstly I like the idea of this game, this is not a complaint. Just not sure why I can't get my squadmates to do a simple job of mining copper then putting the copper into copper storage bins when I go out soloing with my martial arts expert/assassin. So I shift + right click on the copper vein, and shift right click ont he copper storage container for two miners/laborers. I am doing this for a good while. I switch back to my miners and they are just sitting at the copper vein with 5 coppers on the copper vein and not looting the copper and taking it back to the copper storage and nearly starving to death.
Normally they would do this if I am in the area directly, but it seems when you unload an area all those npcs that you control don't do what you want them to do anymore. This is frustrating because, I don't like controlling multiple characters in a squad when I am stealthing and knocking out enemies from behind to build up my martial arts by picking up enemies and running off with them to do a 1v1 battle.

Any ideas what I may or may not be doing wrong about my two miners not mining once the copper vein gets to 5 they stop. Again, normally if I was loaded into that area with them they would grab the 5 coppers and take it back tot he copper storage.

Do NPCs you control stop doing complex jobs when you have unloaded that area they may be in. They will sit in front of a food storage barrel and keep eating my food I placed in there for them. but that is only if they are set on medic and do nothing but sit in front of a food storage barrel.

Is this how the game is intended?

[BLKCandy]

My base works fine when I'm away in a long expedition. But I know sometimes some job assignment just becomes wacky.

I also have a lot of jobs and long job list, but I have dedicated haulers or have the storage right next to the workstation. They seems to do fine.

I only occasionally have problem with someone sinking in the wall or floor due to zone hopping.

[yippeekiay]

Switch the jobs round, or better still, have another person doing the autohauling from that ore & any other haul jobs he has time for. That's what I do so that my workers don't stop working (they should, or used to, empty it without the haul job anyway).
The haulers run around like mad boosting their athletics & strength while doing the workers a favour ;o)

[Animecore]

Thank you both for answering my long winded question. I find them both reassuring. I'm gonna take your advice yippeekiay and make one of them a hauler only and the other a miner. I'll see if that works. I am doing this out of a town too, cause I only have 3 party members right now.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Animecore:

So I shift + right click on the copper vein, and shift right click on the copper storage container for two miners/laborers.

Not necessary. Just shift click the mining job. Then when the vein is full one of the miners at random will grab the ore and run them to either a container or a machine needing the resource.

The hauling job is completely unnecessary and what that will do is cause one of the iners to run each piece of ore at a time to a container instead of five at a time.

If the vein fills up with 5 ore and nobody assigned to mine the vein empties it then it means one of two things. Your workers inventory is full or the game is not registering the location of the storage. To fix storage try rebuilding navmesh first (cntrl shift f11) if it still wont empty the vein then build a storage in a new location.

Originally posted by Animecore:

...and nearly starving to death.

if you have food in a food container then this is a navmesh issue (see above.) Be warned something about mining veins lately been causing this at random to random miners. You could also avoid this by toss food into a nearby miners backpack (as long as they dont ditch it to the container, lol.)

Originally posted by Animecore:

Do NPCs you control stop doing complex jobs when you have unloaded that area they may be in.

Usually yes. Some rare jobs and places they will stop. WWould be much easier to describe what is happening or upload a save for someone to look at and help you.

[enohex]

I've had this happen before, but now I'm running into the total opposing problem(if you can call it one anyway) where my guys are filling 20-30 storage containers of various resources, usually only when I take a trade caravan up a day or two away - when I come back, I may as well rinse and repeat, because my guys are nearing completion of their storage.

When I was having this issues, it usually had to do with pathing issues, or where they're not actually standing still, but instead constantly picking up and putting a resource in storage over and over. Generally, I'd erase the jobs and start them over. If that didn't work, I'd try to see if there was an odd angle the ground was at and if that wasn't the case, I'd try the shift+ctrl+f11 solution to pathing and that seemed to work more often than not.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by The Joker:

I've had this happen before, but now I'm running into the total opposing problem(if you can call it one anyway) where my guys are filling 20-30 storage containers of various resources, usually only when I take a trade caravan up a day or two away - when I come back, I may as well rinse and repeat, because my guys are nearing completion of their storage.

Production and gathering gets faster the higher the skill. Plus factor in everyones move speed increases through strength reducing encumberance and athletics increasing.

Hatsune made a mod to increase production time on everything. The problem was it had a bad side effect of making more xp. When producing something you get xp for doing that job for x amount of time. So a crappy weapon would be worth more xp.

Originally posted by The Joker:

but instead constantly picking up and putting a resource in storage over and over.

That has two causes. The first the above mentioned bad navmesh. The second is conflicting jobs, as in job #6 says grab this material and take it there, but job #2 has a store that material, so when jobs 1-5 are inactive (full containers etc) it goes to 6 then back to 2nd job to store. This is also why assigning any sort of autohauling is a bad idea.

[Darqfire]

I found that storage container/ machine placement can muck up things

[enohex]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Originally posted by The Joker:

I've had this happen before, but now I'm running into the total opposing problem(if you can call it one anyway) where my guys are filling 20-30 storage containers of various resources, usually only when I take a trade caravan up a day or two away - when I come back, I may as well rinse and repeat, because my guys are nearing completion of their storage.

Production and gathering gets faster the higher the skill. Plus factor in everyones move speed increases through strength reducing encumberance and athletics increasing.

Hatsune made a mod to increase production time on everything. The problem was it had a bad side effect of making more xp. When producing something you get xp for doing that job for x amount of time. So a crappy weapon would be worth more xp.

Originally posted by The Joker:

but instead constantly picking up and putting a resource in storage over and over.

That has two causes. The first the above mentioned bad navmesh. The second is conflicting jobs, as in job #6 says grab this material and take it there, but job #2 has a store that material, so when jobs 1-5 are inactive (full containers etc) it goes to 6 then back to 2nd job to store. This is also why assigning any sort of autohauling is a bad idea.

This is super useful in figuring out how to get jobs to have fluidity. Good god, thank you. I'm gonna go through each character and define their jobs with less complexity. I like auto-haul, because it helps clear out other storages to move them to a new area (which is something I've been doing progressively in my current playthrough). Trying to move all of my iron/weapon crafting to a new section of town to open up less annoyances when it comes to pathing with what everyone is doing. So far, because of job order etc, I've run into issues with people not moving things to where I actually need them and instead running into the repeating effect that you explained insanely well.

I'm currently going mod-less. For some reason I want to play completely vanilla lately and it has actually been pretty interesting using the original, intended mechanics to do everything. Auto-haul is problematic on a few levels, but with playing around and your description of what is causing the problem, I'll be going through each, individual unit to simplify their work-load and thus, hopefully fix the issues of guys not doing what their jobs are telling them.

When I posted a video: https://youtu.be/Izsg-PEo6JE (shameless self-promotion? XD Totally not trying to be professional at this point, just posted a video for another creator that's also making videos of the game) I had no real intention of keeping the save, now that it's posted, I've expanded and am having a ton of fun trying to sell off the crafted items (hash, fuel and medicine) faster than they can produce and it's simply not possible at this point. I have 8 farmers, working on the farm nodes only (I think one or two of them are tasked with a few things outside the farms, because otherwise they'd fall idle while "growing" stages are happening - it could be all 8, I'd have to look and don't want to boot up right now) while the rest of the units have their own tasks, which are usually no more than 3 per unit, in a certain area, to reduce their pathing issues.

The farmers are always working and almost never sit down, while the others that have various tasks with crafting often run into issues with doing what they're assigned to and I think that has a lot to do with the amount of tasks they've been assigned to. This is partially because of the vanilla limitations (are there any? I haven't been able to recruit in at least a week in game, because I haven't found anyone), and the normal pathing that ends up happening because building a ton of storage often messes with the paths of your original build, if that makes any sense. I'm gonna (when I have the time, mind you, father, fulltimer, yaddayadda) work on simplifying the job lists and see if I can reduce either the amount of product being pushed out, or at least make sure that jobs aren't conflicting with one another. It really only seems to happen with the guys that have engineering in their list ahead of all the other tasks such as crafting, or laboring. My guess, from your description, is that they're thinking that they have to pick up iron plates, but are supposed to use those plates on a project, like a tower and instead are confusing the fact that they're also supposed to put iron in storage. Then they stand there putting it away and taking it back out.

Originally posted by Darqfire:

I found that storage container/ machine placement can muck up things

I think that has become an issue that could probably be alleviated by larger portions for storages. 50 hemp takes no more than 10 minutes right now. I have 25+ hemp storage, so if I go out on a trip to sell some, by the time I've gotten back they've already refilled all of the storage - creating a never-ending loop, which is more frustrating than anything else. Sure, I can make a lot of money by never stopping this loop, but ... it takes away from the time I could be out in the world finding this and that. At the rate their crafting my products, I can't leave for more than a day or two before they'd be full and have to send out another caravan. Public sales that work while you're not actively in town, for all items you can produce would probably alleviate this problem, save for the fact that hemp is wildly illegal where I'm posted.

On to the quote (sorry, I ramble), because I rapidly end up having to expand my storage, I've run into tons of various pathing issues (the funniest is probably how guys will zig-zag their way through boxes to get to where ever they're headed). I honestly think that the amounts you can store needs to either be raised, or there needs to be something that causes production to reduce or even completely fail for various amounts of time. It didn't take any real time to get to where I am and I could literally make millions if I bought an army of garru to move the product - and that's only talking about the first load of removing everything from storage and selling. I'd like to see the public sales system become advanced enough to handle all types of product (because there's a ton), thus reducing the amount of times per in game day, I need to send a caravan out to make sure everyone stays working at any given time.

Gah, I think this is why I would hate being a developer, or on a development team. There are entirely too many variables to everything, lol.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by The Joker:

This is super useful in figuring out how to get jobs to have fluidity. Good god, thank you. I'm gonna go through each character and define their jobs with less complexity.

You can have long complex job lists for a worker. You just need to make sure there is no priority conflicts or infinite jobs that creates a jam. I do this a lot with smaller squads of 4-6 units. Where as my large base games I usually have 1-4 workers assigned and named to that kind of job.

I have set up entire assembly lines for robotic kits and crossbows using jsut one worker. It takes a machine for each step then a matter of prioritizing the parts (otherwise you make a part infinitely.) Although the crossbow one was still kind funky because the smoothness depend on running out of iron ore to make iron plates, lol.

You can do one infinite job (like mining) but it HAS to be at the bottom of the list. Otherwise as long as there is storage nothing below that job will ever get done.

Well you could do other infinite jobs like mining iron and mining copper at the bottom, but you just have to keep in mind the lower one is only get to get done if the upper container is full. If you do that I would most definitely put copper a higher priority than the iron because copper container fills quicker because it has a lower usage than iron (usually.)

[enohex]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Originally posted by The Joker:

This is super useful in figuring out how to get jobs to have fluidity. Good god, thank you. I'm gonna go through each character and define their jobs with less complexity.

You can have long complex job lists for a worker. You just need to make sure there is no priority conflicts or infinite jobs that creates a jam. I do this a lot with smaller squads of 4-6 units. Where as my large base games I usually have 1-4 workers assigned and named to that kind of job.

I have set up entire assembly lines for robotic kits and crossbows using jsut one worker. It takes a machine for each step then a matter of prioritizing the parts (otherwise you make a part infinitely.) Although the crossbow one was still kind funky because the smoothness depend on running out of iron ore to make iron plates, lol.

You can do one infinite job (like mining) but it HAS to be at the bottom of the list. Otherwise as long as there is storage nothing below that job will ever get done.

Well you could do other infinite jobs like mining iron and mining copper at the bottom, but you just have to keep in mind the lower one is only get to get done if the upper container is full. If you do that I would most definitely put copper a higher priority than the iron because copper container fills quicker because it has a lower usage than iron (usually.)

THANK YOU, lol. This explanation is going to be useful for more than just myself.

[Bored Peon]

The job list is easy to do once you understand the priority system. If done right the game almost plays itself.

However you also need to understand how your production and storage system is flowing and affecting your priorities.

For instance if I have a manual iron plate machine I will assign one worker to the plate machine with a mining iron below it. That way when the machine runs out of iron ore they will help mine until an ore is produced. You can also use that same method for creating building materials.

The other thing is to not make too much extra storage. As you mentioned earlier you can not sell the stuff fast enough later on anyways. So not really a point with all the excess storage. When your storage is full this allows that worker to fill in for another job elsewhere.

As I mentioned above my one man crossbow assembly line depended on me running short on iron plates. That was the only way the worker got off that "infinite job" and produced the other part because there was no supply of iron plates so it would move on to the part that uses copper. Then after that copper part was made it would assemble the crossbow. Of course now that crossbow production itself was patched the assembly line no longer works because the time spent creating the crossbow allows the iron plates to be in supply. Although getting to the point the part storage box is full would make the weapon assembly work.

[yippeekiay]

I screwed up on the extra storage part then. I have multiples of every storage, and they all hold 10k where the quantity can be modified lol.

Means I have plenty of stuff & I can keep huge amount of guys in constant work.

I just like to hoard, is that wrong hahaha ;o)

[Bored Peon]

I do not even like to have to place a second storage container simply because the AI get kinda twitchy when you place a second one. Plus you have the whole navmesh issue with storage and extra containers jsut increases the odds, lol.

I have no idea why those people made mods for such high storage because you aint ever going to be able to sell all that unless you modify vendors as well. Then of course you still have to figure a way to carry it all.

I look at full storage as an advantage that I can place a secondary job on a worker.

[BLKCandy]

I do use super large storage, the storage shack mod, and only for foods, construction materials, and iron plates.

Food was to support caravans and mass recruitment. I use hydroponics and they take time to expand. Also have huge food stock make me feel secure.

Construction materials and iron plates are common materials for base expansion or rearranging the base. Because I really don't want to wait for material production when I rearrange or expand my base on a whim.

Otherwise yeah, we won't be needing that much

[enohex]

The only navmesh issues I've had with my ridiculous amounts of storage containers for what I need is that guys zigzag their way through, which lowers efficiency a little bit, but otherwise they don't often get stuck, unless they bug out. I'm trying to keep away from mods for the time being for some reason, but a storage shack sounds like a pretty damned good idea at this point to reduce the insane amount of clutter I have going on in my city at the moment, lol.

You don't have to sell it all in one sweep, I've spent a couple weeks on a town run where I'm waiting for vendors to replenish their stocks - it's especially easy in the UC area because the cities are all in a fairly easy area to move from town to town.