Fix the caravans!

[Boomer Remover]

Since the 1.3 update, preparing a caravan has become so long and such a hassle that my colonists all go sequentially crazy so the caravan never actually gets to leave. I've tried twice now with reloads, attempting to make the process faster each time but nothing works. I don't see why making caravans should be sooooooooooo much more difficult than before 1.3. I have a stable, happy organized colony on peaceful, I can't imagine how impossible it must be for ppl playing adventure...

[Hykal]

The problem with pawns sleeping is that it'll take LONGER to load the caravan. All the complaints how caravans take long to set up? Sleeping makes it longer. The issue is players not setting up a caravan early in the morning after breakfast, having too few pawns hauling to the caravans (this is why you set Haul to 1 to fix this either manually or via Better Pawn Control), or not setting your stockpiles properly.

People who say caravans are broken are wrong. But people who say caravans are perfect aren't right either.

Originally posted by marijn211:

Unloading is also slightly broken seemingly, with my colonists unloading even if the animals are on the edge of the map and should really be roped first

You should probably note that problem in the official RimWorld Discord in Bug Reports. The devs don't really read the Steam forums.

[ichifish]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by ichifish:

Astasia, Zane, others, just because you don’t have a problem with your setup doesn’t mean caravanning works.

I really feel that it does. To me this is like when people complain about cooking taking too long, and how they need multiple chefs cooking all day long to keep just a few colonists fed, because they are storing ingredients several rooms away and delivering meals to the other side of the base.

No, it's not at all like cooking, because once you've got a system running cooking is entirely predictable and doesn't require constant attention. When you caravan the leave times changes depending on how many people, how much stuff, and how many animals are going With the 1.3 changes it also depends where the animals are and how long it takes to rope them. Sometimes the pawns will rope 3-4 at a time, other times just one.

And if something happens that interrupts cooking you don't lose a lot of time. Example: when you accidentally add a gimped donkey, but the whole caravan gets packed and you either have to leave behind the stuff packed on the donkey, wait hours to get off the map, or cancel it. Example: when you are loading a bunch of junk weapons into the caravan and one of them happens to be on the other side of the base, but you don't notice until the entire caravan gets held up, and then pawns are grumpy.

Originally posted by Astasia:

You can make a pen in a small closet with a hay stockpile fed by a few hydroponics with a trivial amount of colonist effort.

Yeah, let me get my tribals busting out that hydroponics. Should be no problem by year six. Then I'll just have them grow rice and carry it to closet as a workaround for the brand new pen system. Seems to prove my point.

Originally posted by Astasia:

There is no situation where you "can't" create an optimized scenario for caravan loading. If you don't do a lot of caravans, keep your animals in a pen somewhere else to graze, then before you decide to start packing for a big caravan trip move your pack animals over to a loading pen. If you don't do it often this "extra step" really shouldn't have much impact.

No you can't optimize for everything unless you're playing a temperate forest. I'm on arid shrubland. My best defense is in location A, best soil is location B, and the anima tree is location C. So my pen is location D, as close to my workshop as I can make it, but still relatively far because I need the only patch of good soil for farms. I have to have a large pen because there's not a lot of good soil, and that allows a lot of the animals to roam to the opposite side.

Yes, of course I have a special pen for caravan loading, and I even put hay in it. And guess what happened in my last caravan? Got a breach raid after I moved the animals to the loading pen and started packing, then after the raid got taken care of the animals (many young ones that I hoped to turn into insanity lances) were all exhausted. So I had to cancel the caravan, unpack everything, and then start over the next day.

Originally posted by Astasia:

I have never in all my time playing this game had a caravan take more than a few game hours to load.

I frequently have dozens and dozens of items to load: textiles, raider weapons, raw resources, travel supplies. I frequently have hundreds of kilos, the majority of which is packed into a small area thanks to LWM's Deep Storage. I've done two purely nomadic runs and in the last 4-5 runs spent the first 2-3 years nomadic. I am very, very practiced at caravanning. It takes more than a few hours unless you're just going out on a raid.

Originally posted by Astasia:

I've never had a mental break happen, I've never had people fall asleep on the ground while forming a caravan. These are all things you can avoid, and it honestly sounds absolutely ridiculous to me that anyone is running into those problems. Like I just legitimately don't even understand how you can do that.

Maybe it has to do with playing at a higher difficulty level? I don't have people fall asleep, but I have plenty of misfit pawns, especially early game. I manage mood very carefully, but, as an example, my only good social pawn in my current playthrough is a pessimist whose raider mother got whacked and when one of my earlier caravans got delayed until night time he went into major break risk at the edge of the map because of the darkness. Luckily he was carrying ambrosia or it would have tanked the whole trip.

Originally posted by Zane87:

As I said multiple times over multiple threads now: caravans still work but you have to adapt.

Yeah, I've actually enjoyed adapting to the new mechanics over the years and I don't mind the new pen system (although it's certainly not what I wished the developer spent their time on), but they didn't put enough effort into caravanning, especially since it already had issues (like not being able to choose your exit point).

[GoblinCookie]

Loading up caravans presently = the single most stressful part of Rimworld. I play games to add some more stress to my life so I feel we should keep the caravan mechanics exactly as they are.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by ichifish:

No, it's not at all like cooking, because once you've got a system running cooking is entirely predictable and doesn't require constant attention. When you caravan the leave times changes depending on how many people, how much stuff, and how many animals are going With the 1.3 changes it also depends where the animals are and how long it takes to rope them. Sometimes the pawns will rope 3-4 at a time, other times just one.

And if something happens that interrupts cooking you don't lose a lot of time. Example: when you accidentally add a gimped donkey, but the whole caravan gets packed and you either have to leave behind the stuff packed on the donkey, wait hours to get off the map, or cancel it. Example: when you are loading a bunch of junk weapons into the caravan and one of them happens to be on the other side of the base, but you don't notice until the entire caravan gets held up, and then pawns are grumpy.

It's exactly like cooking, the more I think it about it more perfect I think that analogy is. Caravan packing is entirely predictable and once you have a good design for it it doesn't require any extra attention. You set the loadout and go and it just happens. It doesn't take any noticeable amount of time, you aren't watching and waiting, colonists just get up and do it and are off the map, because it's all right there ready to go.

Originally posted by ichifish:

Yeah, let me get my tribals busting out that hydroponics. Should be no problem by year six. Then I'll just have them grow rice and carry it to closet as a workaround for the brand new pen system. Seems to prove my point.

First, you can get hydroponics by your first winter with a tribal start, I have done it before. You throw a couple tribals on research right away and they get things done just as fast as a normal crash landing start. If you are intentionally handicapping yourself by playing a long slow tribal game where you avoid teching up for as long as possible, then that's going to come with consequences you need to deal with yourself. Second, replace hydroponics with nutrifungus, done.

It's not a workaround, it's what you mostly need to do on anything other than a year around arid shrubland anyway. Animals can't graze year round on most maps, you need to be growing and hauling to feed them a significant portion of every year. Switching just the pack animals you regularly use to a year round packing closest with food delivery is a minimal difference in colonist work requirement.

Originally posted by ichifish:

raider weapons

You mentioned this a few times, why are you packing and moving raider weapons around on caravans? You keep them on your map until a trade caravan comes to buy them from you, or you do something more useful with them like smelt them down. There's a reason they have such a huge market value penalty. Unless you are saying you are getting dozens of triple rocket launchers and charge lances before you have hydroponics on your tribal playthrough.

I think a lot of the issues some people have are because they are just trying to load too much garbage into a caravan and really need to step back and consider if it's worth the time and effort to move that around. This is unrelated to any recent changes, the pen mechanic just means you have to rope the animals, it doesn't change the fact that loading a hundred junk weapons and 50 partial stacks of different leathers onto your pack animals is a waste of time. Watching your colonists run back and forth wasting their time after you ordered them to waste their time doing it doesn't mean the caravan packing system is dumb. It's not like the devs are going to make all the items teleport out of your base like a mission map.

Originally posted by ichifish:

Maybe it has to do with playing at a higher difficulty level? I don't have people fall asleep, but I have plenty of misfit pawns, especially early game. I manage mood very carefully, but, as an example, my only good social pawn in my current playthrough is a pessimist whose raider mother got whacked and when one of my earlier caravans got delayed until night time he went into major break risk at the edge of the map because of the darkness. Luckily he was carrying ambrosia or it would have tanked the whole trip.

Not likely. I just wouldn't have assigned somebody with severe mood penalties to a caravan trip unless it was an emergency. If somebody has had a close family member killed I generally put them on a full rec schedule and keep them in the base until they get over it. There are very few situations in this game where you "need" to run a caravan anywhere, it's an optional side system that is still mostly just tacked on. There are benefits, like visiting a few outposts to round up some luciferium or extra components early on, but there's no reason to send a mental break risk on caravan run to sell off your useless trinkets unless that's the kind russian roulette you enjoy (and I know some people do).

Last note I will make, if it really bothers you, just use elephants. They haven't changed, they were the best pack animals before, they still are.

[jerrypocalypse]

I haven't had an issue forming and sending out a caravan. My horse pen is relatively close to my food storage. I can take 4-5 colonists, an equal number of horses, and a bunch of supplies, start in the morning after they wake up, and they're packed and off the map by 8-9am or so.

[GoblinCookie]

Originally posted by jerrypocalypse:

I haven't had an issue forming and sending out a caravan. My horse pen is relatively close to my food storage. I can take 4-5 colonists, an equal number of horses, and a bunch of supplies, start in the morning after they wake up, and they're packed and off the map by 8-9am or so.

And what happens when the caravan walks into danger because they ignore zone restrictions and you cannot control the exit point?

[UltimateTobi]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

Originally posted by jerrypocalypse:

I haven't had an issue forming and sending out a caravan. My horse pen is relatively close to my food storage. I can take 4-5 colonists, an equal number of horses, and a bunch of supplies, start in the morning after they wake up, and they're packed and off the map by 8-9am or so.

And what happens when the caravan walks into danger because they ignore zone restrictions and you cannot control the exit point?

You can, by choosing a different path out of your cell. If there's danger on the West part of your map, then let the caravan exit on the North, East, or South part and then have them move to their destination.

[jerrypocalypse]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

Originally posted by jerrypocalypse:

I haven't had an issue forming and sending out a caravan. My horse pen is relatively close to my food storage. I can take 4-5 colonists, an equal number of horses, and a bunch of supplies, start in the morning after they wake up, and they're packed and off the map by 8-9am or so.

And what happens when the caravan walks into danger because they ignore zone restrictions and you cannot control the exit point?

I've done a about 15-20 caravans and have not had a single issue with them walking into "danger". They always exit the map on the side the path to their destination is on. If you need them to exit a different side, set your first waypoint on that side of the map (my base is central on the tile I'm on)

[Siozen]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

Loading up caravans presently = the single most stressful part of Rimworld. I play games to add some more stress to my life so I feel we should keep the caravan mechanics exactly as they are.

And I've found the tedium and hassle of caravans mostly annoying and thus I've never bothered much with that aspect of the game. The new pen system just makes that worse and now I have less interest in running any sort of ranch. Apparently the old system of just using zone control (electric fences perhaps) and walls (or mods with fences) wasn't good enough role play for some.

RIP Uncle Sio's Boom-Apocalypse Ranch.

[[ Rizno . 雨 ]]

Yeah caravans stopped working properly for me. If I take animals sometimes the animals just wander around in circles and never come to the edge of the map to leave.

[GoblinCookie]

Originally posted by jerrypocalypse:

I've done a about 15-20 caravans and have not had a single issue with them walking into "danger". They always exit the map on the side the path to their destination is on. If you need them to exit a different side, set your first waypoint on that side of the map (my base is central on the tile I'm on)

It is called being lucky.

The waypoint is where the caravan gathers it's stuff together, it isn't where they exit. There is mod that I installed that allows you to control where they exit as well. The key thing here is that pawns on caravan ignore area restrictions and there is no way to set area restrictions for the caravan.

Yes you could set up right at the edge of the map, jeopardising your general security in order so you could make sure your caravans make a speedy exit without running into danger or anyone having a mental breakdown as they depart.

Originally posted by UltimateTobi:

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

And what happens when the caravan walks into danger because they ignore zone restrictions and you cannot control the exit point?

You can, by choosing a different path out of your cell. If there's danger on the West part of your map, then let the caravan exit on the North, East, or South part and then have them move to their destination.

It don't work that way sorry. Where the caravan is going has no relation to where they exit.

[UltimateTobi]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

It don't work that way sorry. Where the caravan is going has no relation to where they exit.

It does. They always exit the map in relation to where they need to go on the world map.

[VoiD]

I do have issues with caravans sometimes, but caravaning in general has always been a very painful experience in RW, which is a shame.

The item gathering process should be a LOT more efficient, and the UI specially needs a LOT of improvement, going through that massive mess of a list every time is not fun even if you know where items usually are.

Mods like trade Helper (I think) help a lot by highlighting certain words you're always willing to buy, like Bionic, Luciferium, etc.. But they can't do miracles.

[GoblinCookie]

Originally posted by UltimateTobi:

It does. They always exit the map in relation to where they need to go on the world map.

Perhaps, but I since play on mountains so they wouldn't be able to leave the map in the direction they intend to go so maybe not noticed. In any case, the mechanoids or bugs or whatever may well be in the direction your caravan need to go in, so it changes nothing of the issue.

[UltimateTobi]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

Originally posted by UltimateTobi:

It does. They always exit the map in relation to where they need to go on the world map.

Perhaps, but I play on mountains so they wouldn't be able to leave the map in the direction they intend to go. In any case, the mechanoids or bugs or whatever may well be in the direction your caravan need to go in, so it changes nothing of the issue.

If every exit point of your map is blocked by dangers such as mechanoids or insects, then nothing helps you except eradicating said dangers.