about cooking overlapping berry foraging and similar lack of efficiency

[Nonbinary]

and there are other things like this i cant remember on the spot, but it makes pawns walk back and forth much more than is necessary. instead of harvesting all the berry bushes nearby, they forage just until they have enough to start cooking. whereas if you manually put them to cut all the berry bushes, they can walk home with the whole or a full stack. but this becomes a problem when there are several pawns or even just two pawns that require more micromanagement than you can possibly follow. you cannot hold everyones hands and walk them step by step through their tasks at the same time

another thing i can think of is that pawns only chop down one tree to start building walls or other projects, instead of considering all projects nearby and chop enough wood or collect enough steel for all of them so they can focus on building afterwards, and then collect the last resources on things that were botched. it would reduce the need to walk back and forth a lot more

are there a mod that improves the pawns micromanaging skills like this, especially when they venture out of home territory? i know there is a mod that adds common sense to pawns, but as far as i know, it only really made them clean the nearby area before cooking and i feel like it did something else that didnt seem like common sense at all so i ultimately removed it. but it would be nice that when i am stuck in helping one colonist micromanage, it doesnt mean other colonists do stupid things. like for example they could prioritize cooking if hunger isnt a huge problem yet, instead of consuming a higher quantity of raw food than prepping a meal would. small wasteful actions like that or too much time spent on walking back and forth from the same tasks that could have been finished on the spot or done more efficiently. the pawns often overcomplicate life for themselves like this. i also think it would be nice, though changing the priorities could also help, that if a filthy area they stand in can become the last straw for a pawn to break down, they will start cleaning if they are not otherwise forced to do something, to relief the stress it causes them, and then get back to the task they were planning to do. basically instead of always cleaning like they would with a high priority, they instead only clean when its absolutely necessary for their mood, and they can stop what they are currently doing to get it done within the room they are about to spend time in. i know thats how i personally do it hahah

[ImSolidGold]

For your first question: Welcome to rimworld. Only thing that helped me a bit (not completely) was, so set priorities straight. My Farmers always get their only "1" Prio for farmin, everything else is 2-4 So that makes it up for a bit of running forht and back. Doesnt help if your field hast reday crops ever now and then. YOu can try to cut down whole fields t any given point to sow them entirely new in as little time as possible so it all matures the same time so they can harvest a whole field at once.
For your second one, use the "shift" key. Its a pain in the butt, but putting 10 trees for chopping and call your lumberjack with the "shift" key "chop this one, then that one then that one over there" etc helps a lot.
Fopr the third, i dont know about that because I dontuse that much mods. Wouldnt surprise me, if theres a mood for every problem. So just have some patience, something will come along. ;)

[Astasia]

This is an issue with your priorities and the ranges you have set on your bill. If your cooking bill covers the entire map and your colonist has cooking as a higher priority than plant cut, then they will harvest however many plants are needed to cook one meal before walking back and cooking that meal. That's intended behavior, it's basically what you told them to do. If you give them plant cutting as a higher priority they will harvest everything you have marked to be harvested before doing any cooking, or if you set the bill to only include an area that covers your stockpile, then they will harvest a bunch of berries and once they are hauled back they will start cooking.

Similar deal with construction and chopping, if you set plant cutting as a higher priority they will chop everything designated before doing any construction.

[ZS Maeklos]

To deal with food issues, the best thing to do is go into Assign and then edit your Lavish (the default) food setup. Disable raw foods and corpses. This way, your people won't be scarfing down the corpses of the animals they kill, or chowing down on the raw meat and fruits before you have a chance to cook it.

Just remember to enable berries and agave (or all fruits/raw fruits if you're using the Vanilla Expanded or Kitchen Garden mods) later on, once your colony is on its feet, so that your caravans can actually eat the food they forage up.

As for your cook running back and forth with handfuls of berries/crops to cook without hauling them first? Yeah, you can either have them haul everything to a storage area (the Pick Up and Haul mod is great for this), or suspend your meal bill until everything gets brought into storage. Fortunately, this is something you'll only face in the first couple of days of your colony's existence, and then things should even out and you won't have to micromanage.

[Cat®]

You can set bills to be range-dependent so they don't run across the map looking for raw ingredients.

[ZS Maeklos]

You can also set the bills to pull from a specific zone, too. Like if you wanted to make separate vegetarian simple meals, you could setup a zone that's only crops, fruit, etc, and make the meals from that.

[Dippo]

If you want for example wood, pick the person with the best planting skill, press SHIFT and RMB to mark the trees to be chopped. This way the wood wont be hauled instantly after chopped. I do find hauling important because it drives me nuts if a hunter kills an animal on the other side of the map, but leaves the body on the ground to do something else.

[ZS Maeklos]

Originally posted by Dippo:

If you want for example wood, pick the person with the best planting skill, press SHIFT and RMB to mark the trees to be chopped. This way the wood wont be hauled instantly after chopped. I do find hauling important because it drives me nuts if a hunter kills an animal on the other side of the map, but leaves the body on the ground to do something else.

If you make a dumping zone only for (fresh) animal carcasses, pawns *should* haul their kills to it before they stop "hunting", since game recovery is part of the hunting process. Or should be, at least.

[Nonbinary]

Originally posted by Cat®:

You can set bills to be range-dependent so they don't run across the map looking for raw ingredients.

ah i think this is something that would be useful, thanks a lot. i dont really like to mess with the priorities of the pawns as others suggest cause then they might end up going back and forth foraging too much instead of starting cooking when they have enough ingredients to make just a few but important meals