Raw resources are being exported instead of used for processing buildings

[CrossingBorders]

Hi everyone,

at first I want to say thank you for the great DLC!!! It's by far the most complex one and a real game changer in terms of design and game mechanics.

I played a bit around and unfortunately I stumbled with the following:

I am placing a lot of production buildings for example "wood" and one building (like the sawmill) that should process it to another product.

What happens is that all of the stuff is rather being exported out of my town than used for the processing buildings. To make things worse my processing buildings seem to rely on stuff thats being imported. I have tons of raw materials and only a very few of them are directed to buildings like the sawmill.
Most of the time there is a litte icon over it that states that it's running out of resources while the raw material buildings even say there are not enough customers who want to buy the stuff.

The same issue is mentioned in another discussion here on steam:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/1732090362063369248/

as well as on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/9qt1a2/raw_resources_not_being_refined/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/9qs11a/sawmill_and_paper_factory_starving_while_log_yard/

The first reddit post includes a screenshot that describs it very well.

In the assumption that the error is always sitting in front of the PC I tried to crack the issue from different perspectives (without a solution) and made the following observation:

#1 One possible reason is that all the new buildings are basically acting like any other service building (graveyard, police,...). Means cars are starting from the building and then driving right. Never directly across the street and then left.

This leads to a situation where a truck with raw materials will never reach a processing building if a street is build "wrong".
I know it's the same behavior like graveyard cars and garbage trucks. In these both cases the behavior is funny and I can laugh about it because it only results in an issue in a very few cases.
Most of the times you build them into a big town with a lot of streets and at a given point you have just enough of them that it doesn't play a role.

When it comes to the new Industry buildings it turns into a real issue because every building is behaving like a servicebuilding.
You could say - hey - build more roads so that every building is good to reach! But in my eyes this limits the selling point that Industries gives to you - to "paint" industry areas that still work without letting them look like every other part of your city.

I wll add a screenshot later as soon as I know how.

#2 If #1 is not an issue from a dev perspective than I have a wish: I wish a function that enables me to controll directly where the trucks are going or to set preferences like "first fullfill every needs of internal industry - all above is allowed for export".

Would be really cool if one of the Devs could read over this.

Greetings from Berlin Germany
Matthias

[DOER]

Yeah - Incredibly frustrating to see extractor buildings shut down because their goods 'are pilling up' Whereas the building next door to refine them is on 'not enough raw materials' ;_;

[CrossingBorders]

I am back with a screenshot of my map that shows the "direction issue" described above:

https://imgur.com/a/Z5sNMwQ

RED arrows: all trucks from production buildings are driving to the right. Only the building on the right side has even the chance to deliver raw materials on a short way to the factory (ORANGE arrow).
All other trucks must hope for a chance to change direction in the city and I can imagine that the AI calculates this before and thinks - ok exporting makes more sense.

The YELLOW arrow shows from which side the factory can expect to receive materials. This would explain why I still import instead of using avail. raw materials.

Same happens and is known behavior with the garbage trucks (BLUE arrows) that can be also seen on the picture. For coincidence I placed one of the garbage fields on the "wrong" road - all of the trucks had to drive to the end of the road before they can reach their destination. Root cause is that they also are forced to drive right. As said above - for garbage trucks this is a bit o fun - but not when it comes to industry buildings and production chains.

Best,
Matthias

[FlameWar]

Well, after running into the same problems, and trying out fixes, I can confirm that it's definitely not a directional issue.
One of my industry districts is set up in a way where everything from my extractors that wants to be exported needs to be sent past half of my processing facilities. And after watching it for a month or two ingame i can safely say that (for whatever reason) the processing buildings that all the resoruce trucks fro mthe extractors drive past actually get less resoruces than the oens on the other side of the road where they don#t drive straight past.
(Oh, and also I tested it, the direction doesn#t seem to matter when they try to pump the resources to a storage facility with room left, they happily turn aorudn in circles for that.)

[DOER]

I've been messing around with it for a while, and having 2 separate industries seems to help out a bit. Have industry A do all the extraction, and have a large storage depot. Whereas Industry B is all refinery and has no storage depots.

[Darklighter]

I had the same issue until I placed a small Log yard. All trucks went to it before exporting to the outside. The Saw Mill then got it's logs from the log yard.

[Protoluz]

I'm having the same problem, i have a small crude oil tank that's full and 2 processing plants. Tankers prefer to export oil than to deliver to processing, which takes a very long time.

A fix could be to increase the priority on all processing units over exportation. Or allow trucks from extractors to pickup from storage facilities.

[FlameWar]

Originally posted by Darklighter:

I had the same issue until I placed a small Log yard. All trucks went to it before exporting to the outside. The Saw Mill then got it's logs from the log yard.

Well, the problem msot of us face is that the storage facilities seem to prefer to export the stuff as just as much as the extractors do.

Originally posted by Protoluz:

I'm having the same problem, i have a small crude oil tank that's full and 2 processing plants. Tankers prefer to export oil than to deliver to processing, which takes a very long time.

Saw a similar vsituation with my storage facilities , and foudn it helps a lot when you hti trains to make a freight train station. then nearly all export vehicles just go there, cutting the time they are away from base by like 80%.

[CrossingBorders]

Hi,

it's good to see that other users are facing the similar situations. Thank you for pushing this topic with your replies.

Thank you to Flamewar for confirming that the direction issue is propably not the root cause. It just was the first thing that came into my mind while looking at the routes all the trucks are driving.

I also think now that the priority needs to be adjusted from the Dev side. Either raising priority in extractor buildings to serve the needs of processing units first or allow the trucks of processing buildings to pick stuff from extractor buildings.

Just want to add a note to the idea of building a log yard. I played a bit around with this idea - also with no effect. This happened:
It reduced the roads for my extractor building trucks, yes but though selecting "balanced" after some time it was completly full. All log yard trucks exported the stuff instead of serving my processing units. After selecting "selling" > same effect. So although all my extractor buildings and log yards and stuff have enough resources, my processing buildings are not getting enough of them.

If anyone is not facing this issue > could the one please also post a screenshot of his/her city here? I want to compare if we may oversee something essential.

Best,
Matthias

[FlameWar]

Hm, I'm starting to wonder if there wouldn't be an even simpler solution to this than changing the weight systme, also giving players more control:
Change the warehosue system.
Instead of giving the (seemingly rather pointless) options of fill/empty/balanced, we could instead get options of import/export/local.

Basically all extractors can have the respective storehouses as first hcoice for delivery, and the warehouses try to supply all processing buildings first, except if export was choosen. Then it would simply try to export all the produce delivered there.
The other two modes would both try to deliver to local processing/customers, with a simple system that 'import' setting leads it to sne dotu import orders whenever it's less than 80% full or so, while with 'local' it simply never imports.

[CrossingBorders]

This sounds like a really good idea. Like that :)

When I read the tooltips for the 3 current options in a warehouse it looks like they already try to achieve something similar but for unknown reason - it doesn't work.

Best,
Matthias

[Darklighter]

Yeah, I spoke too soon. It worked for awhile and even though the log yard is set to Balanced it went to 97% full. The Saw Mill which is right next store occasionally gets some product.

Thoughts: Is anyone else here running Traffic President? I'm going to try switching that off this evening. Maybe this is messing with routing?

Or, maybe it's an external market issue? These numbers aren't exposed that I'm aware of so maybe it only makes enough to satisfy external demand until other factories are up and running? My city is ~ 6000 pop so I don't have the higher up factories etc..

[FlameWar]

Originally posted by Darklighter:

Yeah, I spoke too soon. It worked for awhile and even though the log yard is set to Balanced it went to 97% full. The Saw Mill which is right next store occasionally gets some product.

Thoughts: Is anyone else here running Traffic President? I'm going to try switching that off this evening. Maybe this is messing with routing?

Or, maybe it's an external market issue? These numbers aren't exposed that I'm aware of so maybe it only makes enough to satisfy external demand until other factories are up and running? My city is ~ 6000 pop so I don't have the higher up factories etc..

Normaly running TM:PE, but turned it off for a test run after I wondered if it's due to that and got the same problem.


What i found helps a bit with the problem is to switch the cargo hubs to 'fill'. it spends a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of money to import stuff at first, but once it#s somewhat full it stops that.
Despite the (grossly misleading) description it seems 'fill' simply turns of exporting, while keeping the willingness to supply local processing the same. Doesn#t do much on paper/at the first few weeks, but after a while it improves the supply situation somewhat since the storage facilities don't send their vehicles on multi-week cruises to export stuff.

[Dongerino]

Originally posted by Darklighter:

Yeah, I spoke too soon. It worked for awhile and even though the log yard is set to Balanced it went to 97% full. The Saw Mill which is right next store occasionally gets some product.

Thoughts: Is anyone else here running Traffic President? I'm going to try switching that off this evening. Maybe this is messing with routing?

Or, maybe it's an external market issue? These numbers aren't exposed that I'm aware of so maybe it only makes enough to satisfy external demand until other factories are up and running? My city is ~ 6000 pop so I don't have the higher up factories etc..

It's still doing pretty much the same thing with or without the mod

[MaxDoomSWE]

Yupp same here. Storage yard is filled 98% with raw material, but the sawmill that lies next to it is not getting raw materials from it. Ironically the sawmill gets raw materials from the "forest farms" that are further away than the storage yard. And when i try to empty the storage yard it goes to export instead of the sawmill, that is screaming for raw materials, right next to it!

Hopefully these issues are the usual release day bugs that will be solved by the devs or some mod soon.

[FlameWar]

Originally posted by MaxDoomSWE:

Yupp same here. Storage yard is filled 98% with raw material, but the sawmill that lies next to it is not getting raw materials from it. Ironically it gets raw materials from the "forest farms" that are further away than the storage yard. And when i try to empty the storage yard it goes to export instead of the sawmill, that is screaming for raw materials, right next to it! Another thing is that they are lying about how many workers that can work in every new facility. i have 54% unemployment, while the new forestry faciitlies never employ more than half of the max amount of jobs available i each facility. Hopefully these issues will be solved by the devs or some mod soon.

Have you educated your people? The industries mostly needs uneducated/low educated personel. So if you got 100% coverage with elemntary and high schools your workers will all be well educated (the 3'rd of the 4 education steps), and simply not want to work in uneducated job slots. and depending on the industry, 30-60% of the jobs are for uneducated workers (aka not even elemntary school finished).
You can usualy get away with a 1-teir difference between job slot/education level, but that#s it.