Forming Caravans breaks Resting? 1.3/Ideology/Pen Management

[Entropy2060]

I am finding that whenever I try to form a caravan that will take a long time to load with gear, both my pawns and my roped animals will just keep trying to form the caravan until their rest meters tank and they pass out. No one will go to bed or use sleeping spots and once it starts, it means the whole process has collapsed into an endless loop of waking and passing out that will not recover. I am playing mostly Vanilla, with some quality of life mods. Is this normal behavior for 1.3, or should I start trying to prune mods? It's making my ranching-style colony completely untenable/infuriating.

[Astasia]

It's intended, it means you haven't optimized your caravan forming process and/or are trying to pack too much stuff with too few colonists. Set a caravan packing spot near the storage with the items you are trying to load, make sure your pens with your caravan animals aren't too far away or too big, or you have the animals nearby because of a sleeping spot.

Colonists will not normally try to rest or do any other activity while forming a caravan because it's a prioritized command, forming a caravan is only supposed to take a very short amount of time and it's important they get it done as soon as possible so you can for example leave in the early morning to reach a destination before night. It's like if you right clicked on a workbench and told an artist to make a grand sculpture and just let them work on it until they collapse. If you tell a colonist to do something you have to be aware of how much work is involved and what effect it will have on them.

[auamoti]

Originally posted by Astasia:

It's intended,

nah, its broken. where is the statement of intent?

you say OP is trying to pack too much stuff? it doesn't let you, tells you about carry weight, reduces movement speed to nothing.

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by Entropy2060:

I am playing mostly Vanilla, with some quality of life mods. Is this normal behavior for 1.3, or should I start trying to prune mods? It's making my ranching-style colony completely untenable/infuriating.

Yes, it's a normal vanilla behavior caused by animal AI and pen system changes. You either have to make a very small caravan (one colonist, one horse), or not load caravans at all. Drop pod trader and good near city or drop pod goods on existing caravan with no load once it reaches destination (overloaded caravans can't move but can trade). Former is for small trading where one colonist is enough to carry everything back, latter is for big trading where you need pack animals to carry goods back.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by auamoti:

nah, its broken. where is the statement of intent?

you say OP is trying to pack too much stuff? it doesn't let you, tells you about carry weight, reduces movement speed to nothing.

It's always worked the way it does for the most part, there is the statement of intent. If you tried to start a caravan in 1.0 with 50 elephants all with a full load with a single colonist it wouldn't work well, it's too much stuff for them to load. Like many things in the game you aren't given a hard restriction on caravan size or how much to pack on animals, you are just expected to be sensible.

1.3 hasn't really changed much, colonists have to lead the animals over as an extra first step but if you keep them close this doesn't add any noticeable extra time to the caravan formation process.

[Entropy2060]

Originally posted by Astasia:

It's intended, it means you haven't optimized your caravan forming process and/or are trying to pack too much stuff with too few colonists. Set a caravan packing spot near the storage with the items you are trying to load, make sure your pens with your caravan animals aren't too far away or too big, or you have the animals nearby because of a sleeping spot.

Colonists will not normally try to rest or do any other activity while forming a caravan because it's a prioritized command, forming a caravan is only supposed to take a very short amount of time and it's important they get it done as soon as possible so you can for example leave in the early morning to reach a destination before night. It's like if you right clicked on a workbench and told an artist to make a grand sculpture and just let them work on it until they collapse. If you tell a colonist to do something you have to be aware of how much work is involved and what effect it will have on them.

Gotcha. Thanks for the quick reply. I'm still pretty new to RimWorld, so learning the hard way is kinda the default, but I honestly didn't know if this was just broken. It just felt very much like a bug since pretty much everything else operates on a bill/order system until you enforce a priority order. I assumed forming a caravan was a longer term thing that would get done between other priorities (you can force your colonists to do things without stopping the caravan prep) but you can't make them sleep. >.<

Looks like a get to solve a bunch of logistical problems I didn't expect trying to get a bunch of starving herbivores off the map after it got decimated by toxic fallout (and I burned all my wake-up trying to built a fallout shelter that I was hammering the last nails into when it ended ...)

[Mr. F]

Forming a caravan in rimworld is more difficult than fighting a raid with 50 enemies or multiple mechanoid clusters at once.

Here is my story (happened yesterday):

Me forming a caravan in a boreal Biome during fall, close to winter. 5 pack animals and a lot of stuff to carry (apparel, old weapons, etc.). Everyone in a good mood (not perfect but ok).

- 2 days to load everything on the caravan
- shortyl after departure the first mental break because lack of recreation and sleep
- everyone waiting another 8 hours until the pawn get along again
- caravan starts, but now... the next pawn gets a mental break for the same reasons the first
one got before
- 3 hours later, caravan finally starts
- on the way to the edge of the map 2 mufallo fall asleep, because they had no rest for three days
- several hours later, close to the edge of the map: muffallo dies because of starvation, all gear on the floor to pick up again

Yeah, I agree that some more planning when setting up the caravan would had helped...

[Zane87]

Planning your colony and your stockpile/pens for caravans is pretty important now. Key is reduce movement time as much as possible.

Therefore:
-Pens close to stockpiles
-Sleeping spots as close together and close to stockpile as possible
-Assign extra pawns to the caravan for roping, remove them once loading has begun

-Caravan packing spot as close to the stockpile as possible, if multiple stockpiles have them close together and put the caravan spot where more needs to be fetched from
-Increase hauling priority for non-caravan pawns

Be smart with your schedules. If you have 2-3 regular caravan operators, change their schedules so:
-They get recreation before sleep
-They end sleeping 3-4 hours before your pack animals wake up
-let them eat before starting the caravan
-start the caravan while animals still sleep (but have mostly fulfilled their rest need) speeds up roping tremendously. They all are at one spot and can thus be roped really fast comparatively

This saves imo a lot of time and offsets the lower rest they got from waking up early. It also reduces the break chance for your caravan operators as their needs start fulfilled and they have to waste less time roping too.

Note that this only applies for pen animals. Advanced intelligence pack animals still move by themselves and don't need to be roped. That makes elephants despite their huge filth generation and hunger pretty decent pack animals that also can fight


Otherwise you can make smaller caravans that can merge together on the world map as well.