How to form a caravan, (newbie tutorial, please)

[tailings]

Is there a tutorial for how to form a caravan? Like, an actual, step by step tutorial, not a data entry like the wiki.

I have received my first quest, a gift left for me in another sector. I have created waypoints between my home base and the money bag on the world map. And.........., what next?? I never get prompted to add colonists or gear or animals, etc. I get no further prompts. If I press 'ESC", the way points disappear. If I press the World button again and return to my base, the waypoints also disappear when I return to the world map. Clearly, I am missing some key step, but sadly the game isn't guiding me towards that necessary step.

Help, please, for the unlearned.

[Zane87]

A caravan needs not much. The basic approach is:
- you click world, select your colony, select form caravan, click the destination (right click iirc), next, select which pawns and animals to include, then which goods you want to include, finally on the third tab include medicine and food and hit done.

The rest is done by the game. Buuuut, it's unfortunately not very well implemented at the moment. Reason and workaround I'll shamelessly paste here as well cause I already wrote about it and I'm lazy ^^:

Originally posted by Zane87:

I had 2 colonies so far and both tried pack animals. One went down in flames and the issues you have with pack animals (and the lack of supplies therefore) was part of the reason for the downfall.

My current colony took trading and the new pack mechanics into account and it goes way better now.
So here is what I do:

To form a caravan, all steps are fulfilled cascadingly, so A has to be fulfilled before B.
A - all pawns assigned to the caravan will rope the animals to your caravan packing spot
B - all pawns of that caravan and all free haulers will haul
C - the pawns of the caravan rope all animals and go to the edge of the map
D - when all caravan pawns+ animals are at the edge, even when sleeping, the caravan moves.

Pawns and animals during caravan formation are frustratingly stupid, refusing to fulfill their needs until last second often resulting in them collapsing, which just makes the whole process tedious. And pray to your ideologies god that no one gets a mental break...

You can remedy that by optimizing your layout:
For phase A:
- pens close to your stockpiles, sleeping spots in that pen as close to your stockpiles as possible, consider having a small side pen just for that purpose so animals can be moved there in advance
- if the sleeping spots are close to the stockpile and all adjacent to each other, consider starting the caravan formation while all animals sleep (adjust pawn sleep schedule). They all are at one spot, and that makes roping them MUCH MUCH faster
- consider adding more pawns to the caravan than you intend to send. They Speed up the formation and can be safely removed during Phase B

For Phase B:
- usually you have 2 main stockpiles, one for food and one for the rest. Have them close, ideally adjacent to each other, make the caravan spot in/just outside those stockpiles (animal filth)
- if you only sell specific things (apparel, drugs) consider having a special stockpile just for that close to your caravan packing spot. Still consider food and sleeping bags that need to be hauled
- increase the hauling priority of non-caravan pawns to speed up the process. Hauler animals can and will help too
- if you added more pawns than intented for the final caravan, remove them just before everything is packed
- consider smaller, more frequent trade runs

For C:
- every pawn assigned to the caravan will rope some animals and go to the edge of the map. If you remove pawns now, game seems to bug out cause your remaining pawns won't rope the remaining animals. Thus you can only remove those from the caravan too
- if you are not opposed to mods, there are some that lets you place a marker where your caravan should leave/enter. I recommend that. Otherwise make sure the fastest way has roads and it's somewhat protected in case of raid happening
- your caravan is very vulnerable in this phase, as they will constantly collapse if the formation took too long so make sure that you optimize your formation speed or you can defend them


Sorry for long post. The important bits are the placing and using more pawns initially to help forming. If you didn't optimize your layout, forming huge caravans right now is a nightmare. With a good layout it's manageable. Worse than in 1.2 but still manageable.

[tailings]

TY. I figured out the first step; chalk it up to human error. I had created waypoints, but I hadn't actually created the caravan (H).

Now, I have a second problem. On the Form Caravan screen, it won't allow me to assign any colonists. I click the "X", but the box doesn't change to a checkmark.

The instructions above seen suited to forming a complex trading caravan or settler party, repleat with suggestions for making the process more efficient. I simply wish to send one colonist out to fetch a gift. There still seems to be some fundamental restriction.

[tailings]

Anyone? I began a new game but stll have the same problem. When I create a caravan, I cannot add any colonists. Clicking the red 'X", it changes to a green 'checkmark' briefly, then immediately reverts to the red 'X'. I suspect something fundamental is not yet researched/built/etc, but I have no idea what.

Thanks

[ᖇIᑎ]

Are you clicking too fast? Might be a bug? ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Here's a guide with pictures! https://www.setreadygame.com/games/guides/how-to-make-form-a-caravan-rimworld/

[Tiberius Rex]

Originally posted by tailings:

Anyone? I began a new game but stll have the same problem. When I create a caravan, I cannot add any colonists. Clicking the red 'X", it changes to a green 'checkmark' briefly, then immediately reverts to the red 'X'. I suspect something fundamental is not yet researched/built/etc, but I have no idea what.

Thanks

This lag when clicking on the X buttons happens to me because I have a crap computer. Is that your scenario too?

[tailings]

No, clicking too fast is definitely not the problem. How fast is a click? >CLICK<. If I click and hold a halfsec, same result: The "X" turns into a check, briiefly, then immediately back to an "X". And when I say 'briefly', it's like blink of the eye quick. There is also an accompanying error sound. Ultimately, same result whether I click fast or slow......

[ᖇIᑎ]

Then what's on your error log?

[tailings]

Sadly, no log file to be found either under /Rimworld or /ludeon.rimworld. Sooo...., no help there.

[Tiberius Rex]

Originally posted by tailings:

Sadly, no log file to be found either under /Rimworld or /ludeon.rimworld. Sooo...., no help there.

I'm still feeling like we're dealing with human error here. What you describe is happening to me ALL the time when the checkboxes are involved. The reason is because of my laptop overheating, I am keenly aware of it and have desktop software to monitor the heat. Even so it took me months of blaming various game software before I identified the issue is actually my laptop.

For some reason most of the game works well enough, but those checkboxes behave exactly as you describe. I almost always have to check them multiple times and do some Jedi mind trick to get them to stick. It's all related to the heat and the degraded performance ie. the way a computer behaves under these conditions. Not sure why it's tied to the checkboxes, perhaps some software framework that affects that particular module that way. I've worked software dev but mostly design so I'm a bit sketchy why this behaves this way.

Anyway, make sure to eliminate degraded puter performance as a reason for your issues.

[ᖇIᑎ]

Originally posted by Tiberius Rex:

For some reason most of the game works well enough, but those checkboxes behave exactly as you describe. I almost always have to check them multiple times and do some Jedi mind trick to get them to stick. It's all related to the heat and the degraded performance ie. the way a computer behaves under these conditions. Not sure why it's tied to the checkboxes, perhaps some software framework that affects that particular module that way. I've worked software dev but mostly design so I'm a bit sketchy why this behaves this way.

I have this problem with my laptop too. I don't do any Jedi mind tricks, I just keep clicking until it sticks :D

Originally posted by tailings:

Sadly, no log file to be found either under /Rimworld or /ludeon.rimworld. Sooo...., no help there.

If you don't have the Hugslib mod, you can find your Player.log over yonder %appdata%\..\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld by Ludeon Studios\Player.log

[schnappkatze]

Just because you haven't mentioned it I want to make sure: You did build/assign a caravan packing spot, right?

[Zzo]

Haven't checked if this also happens in vanilla 1.3, but I found that if the toggle for automatically assigning provisions is on on the supplies tab, then adding people and animals to the caravan will be very slow. Turning it off allowed the menu to work normally and then when you're done adding people it can be toggled or set up the supplies manually.