Getting rid of stuff on the floor

[Lanrutcon]

So my game has a million blocks of dirt and stone lying around, and it's stopping me from placing structures. I have 15 dudes dedicated to hauling and they're barely making a dent. How do I clear things away to actually build there?

[Your BFF]

get friends to join you and make them send you their peaple and then boom more peaple to haul maybe?

[BrunoSupremo]

If it is actually trash that you do not care about, you can destroy them. In the harvest menu, the last icon is the eraser, you can click and drag an area and they will simple delete the items there

[Kristlyn]

mostly it's about inventory issues. clean anything unessicary out of you inventory constantly. it fixes stuff lying around and also greatly improves game performance. the inventory system is a major cause of lag and idle workers.

[YetiChow]

If you place some containers (e.g. crates, urns, the iron vault if you really have a lot to move) near the items to be tidied up, then the hearthlings won't have far to walk when they do their hauling. This will dramatically speed up the process in terms of actual work effort, and if your PC is struggling to compute any of the hauling tasks then this will also make the tasks simpler to figure out. Once the mess has been cleared away, you can move the filled containers to somewhere more useful; especially if you filter their contents (e.g. have some for only stone so they can go to your mason's workshop for easy access to stone, some for ores to go to the blacksmith, etc.)

A key thing to learn about games like Stonehearth is to not make big messes like that in the first place -- doing so not only means you spend more time cleaning it up later, but it also chews up a ton of memory which could otherwise be spent on building cool things or keeping more workers around. The easiest way to avoid this situation in future is to break any big jobs up into smaller jobs, and always keep storage containers as close to where they're needed as possible. In a simulation game, having a large excess of resources which have to be physically moved and stored only makes more work. By planning ahead, though, you can "condense" the work and make everything run efficiently. For example, if you have a large mining project in mind then I'd advise you to never do it all at once, always break it down into smaller sections and mine them one at a time, waiting until the previous section is mined and cleaned up before starting the next section. Even if you're planning to, say, remove an entire mountain or dig a massive underground tunnel network, you should have no trouble with it if you take it in bite-sized chunks. You may spend a little more time dragging out orders and managing the project, but you'll still save a ton of time overall and you should never have to go back and "troubleshoot" issues later arising from the game not being able to keep up with tasks, or unexpectedly hitting the inventory limit, or so on because you'll be able to head off any such problems before they happen.

[Lanrutcon]

I make huge messes when I start mining. Gigantic ones. I left 10 townsfolk to haul and it took them about 5 or 6 hours to get my base clear. Ended up with a few thousand stone. I wish I could prioritize areas to clear. Also: what's up with trapping? the trapper only brings back 1/50th of the stuff, and normal haulers won't haul trap goods. I have 100s of pelts lying around on the floor and no-one will haul them.

[Lanrutcon]

and I've just given up on the create house tool. The thing never works. Half the time the entire building flags red for no reason. I can't even place a single 1x4 stack of blocks to fill in a gap in the scenery. Always red, never allowed. It's quite frankly the most useless feature I've ever encountered in a building game.

[Lord Quinton]

sounds like a lot of the same problems i've had in playing the game. Then again, when I complained about it i had people saying they'd played 100+ hours and never had a single problem, and then showed off mind boggling complex structures and massive towns. I think some people out there just build their stuff 1 block at a time to avoid the terrible house system.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by lanrutcon:

I make huge messes when I start mining. Gigantic ones. -snip-

Well, as I said in the post immediately above yours... in my opinion, there's your problem.

The more items you create (and mining creates a lot of items), the more work the game has to do jsut keeping track of them, and thus the longer it takes for the game to figure out each time a hearthling has to clean one up. Remember, it's not just as simple as "hearthling walks over and picks up rock" -- there's the "game finds rock on ground" step, then "game looks at whether there's room in storage for rock", "game finds hearthling to go clean up rock", "game figures out if hearthling can physically get to rock, and to storage box", "hearthling goes to pick up rock", "hearthling walks over to storage box", "hearthling puts rock in storage box"... and then "game finds new rock on ground" and the whole thing happens again. Except, in reality, the game finds a new rock on the ground before the first rock is even in the storage yet, and the game creates a hauling task for every rock on the ground until it runs out of either rocks or places to put them. So now you not only have 1000+ rocks to keep track of, but also hundreds of hauling tasks, and the pathfinding for all those tasks, and a list of what rock goes where... it's exponentially more work for the computer/game to do.

That's why I say, start out by breaking all your big jobs into bite-sized chunks. Your computer will thank you for it, your RAM and processor will last a little bit longer, and more importantly your game will run smoother as a result.