Can some automation geniuses explain how they deal with these micromanagement issues?

[stylish gibbon]

Looks like many god gamers on these forums know how to effortlessly make a colony run itself efficiently and completely autonomously with 0 input or micromanagement on their part, so I guess someone can answer these questions?


Why do pawns take whatever meat/insect jelly they can get their hands on to train bears even if it's a scarce resource and there's 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do pawns sometimes feed luxurious meals to downed pets when there's some of that meat and the same 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do we have no control and cannot place any restriction over what the pets can get fed with by pawns in general?

Why do pawns keep said meat in their inventory for days until it rots and you have to hope they will use it up before that happens?

Why do pawns automatically decide to take spare meals or pemmican when they feel like it only to later eat it in the middle of a field on inside a dark filthy barn without a table
when there's an ultra luxurious dining room with the best tables, seats and food within 10 seconds of walking from where they're at?

Why do you have to keep a workbench on 24/7 in order for colonists to use it when they need to?

Why can't they turn it on when doing bills and automatically turn it off when they finish?
Even the simplest of automatic settings would to the trick, like turn workbench on when there's bills to make and turn it off when all bills are grey.

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Why do colonists eventually start queuing hauling meaningless stuff like going to the other end of the colony to re-order a 1/48 granite block into a nearby 74/75 granite stack,
when there are way more important things to do, like starting to clean up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kitchen?

Why do pawns queue hauling independently from one another resulting in your entire colony rushing halfway across the map, each idiot reserving
to haul a separate stack of 4 ambrosia while preventing that 1 dude on the spot who just harvested it all to easily pick it all up in one go.

Why do pawns not prioritize properly between level of injury that they have to heal first?

Why do pawns choose to tend a pet with a 2 injuries first, instead of a nearby pet with 20 critical injuries that has 1 hour left to live?

Why do doctors with 8 skill reserve to go for critical injuries and installing archotech legs, while doctors with 20 skill go for tending bruises and treating asthma?

[Hoki]

with everthing out of your system: feeling better now?

#1 handlers pick appropiate for the animal they are trying to train/tame. IIRC bears dont eat plants hence its gonna be meat or insect jelly (which is treated like meal i think).
#2 pretty much the same thing
#3 restrictions are somewhat limited by the animals themselves. meals, pemmican and kibble are treated as an universal food. for more control you either turn to modded or use areas to limit the spots handler can get food from.

#4 what pawns carry around can be set in the drugs policy afaik
#5 table is too far away therefore food on the go

#6 because power is VERY simplyfied
#7 kinda #6 but also: that would add more workto the taskgiver slowing down the entire game in the long run

#8 again: vanilla is a simplified system. modded offers mod that either have them clean prior to tasks (common sense) or define cleaning zones (priority clean)
in addition: for deciding what to do pawns wont care about rooms and stuff. thats only regarding mood

#9 that sounds like a you problem to be honest. hauling is higher priority than cleaning in the thinktree. if you want it to be different adjust the priorities or get dedicated staff for either.
#10 because vanilla only allows pawns to pick up a single stack of items.

#11 because the other patient is either further away or already reserved by another doctor
#12 because both have the qualification to do so? its simply: first come first serve.

i think that got them covered

[Masshiron]

If you want zero input from yourself, perhaps an ant farm would be more interesting to you than a game. Fair warning, I think even that requires some management.

It won't kill you micromanage your doctor in a pinch to make sure he takes care of the most pressing matter first. It's normal to tell a cleaner to drop what they're doing and focus on the kitchen. You can get to a point where a colony runs mostly on its own, but there's a reason you have the option of forcing pawns to do things right away.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by whimsic:

Looks like many god gamers on these forums know how to effortlessly make a colony run itself efficiently and completely autonomously with 0 input or micromanagement on their part, so I guess someone can answer these questions?


Why do pawns take whatever meat/insect jelly they can get their hands on to train bears even if it's a scarce resource and there's 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do pawns sometimes feed luxurious meals to downed pets when there's some of that meat and the same 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do we have no control and cannot place any restriction over what the pets can get fed with by pawns in general?

This is a problem in rimworld indeed but having a shelf with kibble nearby your animal beds usually reduces this a lot. This also makes dogs waking up eat the kibble instead of your meals.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns automatically decide to take spare meals or pemmican when they feel like it only to later eat it in the middle of a field on inside a dark filthy barn without a table
when there's an ultra luxurious dining room with the best tables, seats and food within 10 seconds of walking from where they're at?

This should not happen. Pawns have a maximum distance to go to a table to eat and will only do stuff like this if it's out of reach. It's to not have situations like: walking through half the map to eat 1 meal and then walking back to continue working. There has to be a number to reduce this. If your dining room is too far away, you can set up random tables in smaller areas throughout your base.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do you have to keep a workbench on 24/7 in order for colonists to use it when they need to?

Why can't they turn it on when doing bills and automatically turn it off when they finish?
Even the simplest of automatic settings would to the trick, like turn workbench on when there's bills to make and turn it off when all bills are grey.

This would make the game much harder on energy consumption calculations and in general would need to be accompanied with an increase in energy consumption while on to keep the same balance. That would in turn need you to have much more batteries and really early on too, which would bring it's own problems. There is a popular mod for this though, if it feels too unrealistic for you.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Becasue that would again make things more complicated. If you have rooms drowning in filth at the same time, you likely have filth sources you can avoid (From another post of yours it sounds like you are using bears for hauling. Those create a lot of filth.) or are not cleaning a lot. Filth gets dragged around. If a problem like this comes up, having your people work harder/smarter is maybe a worse option than reducing the problem. The pathfinding an priority system in Rimworld is not the most complex and increasing the complexity would cost fps.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do colonists eventually start queuing hauling meaningless stuff like going to the other end of the colony to re-order a 1/48 granite block into a nearby 74/75 granite stack,
when there are way more important things to do, like starting to clean up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kitchen?

The cleaning job is behind the haul job. If you want someone to do cleaning before hauling, you can change that in the manual priorities. Reordering items in the storage is the last job for hauling. This combined with what you said before sounds like you have too much haulers and hardly any cleaner. It can be very beneficial to have at least 1 colonist do hauling before cleaning. A cook is often a good one for this, because they usually don't work all day long and would start cleaning the kitchen after they are done with meals, because that's where they are when they stop their cook job.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns queue hauling independently from one another resulting in your entire colony rushing halfway across the map, each idiot reserving
to haul a separate stack of 4 ambrosia while preventing that 1 dude on the spot who just harvested it all to easily pick it all up in one go.

That sounds again like you have too many people doing the same job. If they really rush across the map to haul, they have nothing better to do in their priority list, which is something to have a look at. What else do you want them to do? It's basically one of the lasts jobs to do and if it's really across the map, they don't even have any meaningful other stuff to haul, so would basically not haul anymore after that. If you want them to clean instead, put that up higher.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns not prioritize properly between level of injury that they have to heal first?

Why do pawns choose to tend a pet with a 2 injuries first, instead of a nearby pet with 20 critical injuries that has 1 hour left to live?

Afaik they do go after "who bleeds out first" or how severe the blood loss is. I do not know the exact system though, but it seems "kinda smart" sometimes. It's still better to micromanage critical moments. It's not something you have to do all the time, just really really rarely in one of those life/death situations.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do doctors with 8 skill reserve to go for critical injuries and installing archotech legs, while doctors with 20 skill go for tending bruises and treating asthma?

Having operations up while there are critical injuries is a thing that confused me a bit. For skill vs injuries: Doctors go for the most critical injury. They do not go "let's wait a bit. Maybe a better doctor will take the job in a moment". That would either need a very complex system of priorities, colliding with the rest of the system or create moments where you pawns could bleed out, because your low skill doctors were focusing on non-critical pawns. You probably don't want that either.

Apart from some critical moments or some rare micromanage moments, most things should be able to be done with manual priorities. If you see a job not getting done and another too much, shift priorities of some pawns towards the job you want done more from the job you want done less. Rimworld pawns aren't the smartest or most efficient, but they usually get the job done, apart from those critical moments. Then it's good to take over.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns take whatever meat/insect jelly they can get their hands on to train bears even if it's a scarce resource and there's 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do pawns sometimes feed luxurious meals to downed pets when there's some of that meat and the same 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do we have no control and cannot place any restriction over what the pets can get fed with by pawns in general?

Why do pawns keep said meat in their inventory for days until it rots and you have to hope they will use it up before that happens?

Why do pawns automatically decide to take spare meals or pemmican when they feel like it only to later eat it in the middle of a field on inside a dark filthy barn without a table
when there's an ultra luxurious dining room with the best tables, seats and food within 10 seconds of walking from where they're at?

Insect Jelly can't be used for training. Meat isn't meant to be a rare resource, colonists just grab whatever is nearby to use for taming/training. They keep it in their pockets so they don't have to take as many trips to food storage while doing their job, and it's a fairly small amount so it doesn't matter if it spoils or not.

Colonists tend to feed higher nutrition foods to pets because they are usually more efficient than raw vegetables. There's not a lot of control over it likely because it's not a very common situation and probably not worth the developer effort to add. Animals rarely get sick and those that do get sick are rarely worth tending. If an animal isn't laying in an animal bed it wont be fed by colonists.

Colonists carry a meal with them so when they are on the opposite side of the map and get hungry half way through the day they don't waste a lot of time walking all the way back to eat. The dining room buffs last 24 hours so they only need to eat in there once a day for the benefits, and the eating on the ground debuff is trivial. You can "solve" it by adding tables around your base/map for mid-day eating.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do you have to keep a workbench on 24/7 in order for colonists to use it when they need to?

Why can't they turn it on when doing bills and automatically turn it off when they finish?
Even the simplest of automatic settings would to the trick, like turn workbench on when there's bills to make and turn it off when all bills are grey.

The table power costs are balanced around being on all the time specifically so you don't have to micromanage them. If they only toggled on while being used the power costs would be much higher and would lead to power bottlenecks when using multiple benches at once.

An example of this is sun lamps, during beta they had a cost of 1600w and were on 24/7. People kept asking for it to toggle off automatically at night and so the dev finally gave them what they were asking for, he doubled the power cost and made it turn off at night.

The various work benches have a very small power cost, don't worry about turning them off, if you are short on power just build another generator.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Asking those questions just means you don't have enough cleaners. Priority doesn't matter if everything is always clean, and you do want everything to be clean because filthy surroundings is a negative in more than just those few rooms.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do colonists eventually start queuing hauling meaningless stuff like going to the other end of the colony to re-order a 1/48 granite block into a nearby 74/75 granite stack,
when there are way more important things to do, like starting to clean up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kitchen?

Tidying stacks in stockpiles is a lower priority hauling task, but it's still a hauling task so if hauling is set to a higher priority than cleaning they will tidy stacks before cleaning. Adjust your job priorities based on that information. Again, cleaning is important, you will eventually have one or more colonists with cleaning as their highest priority. I tend to use researchers for this.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns queue hauling independently from one another resulting in your entire colony rushing halfway across the map, each idiot reserving
to haul a separate stack of 4 ambrosia while preventing that 1 dude on the spot who just harvested it all to easily pick it all up in one go.

Because you have too many haulers. If multiple pawns in your base are rushing halfway across the map to haul something, then you've satisfied all your hauling tasks and could probably assign them to do something else on a higher priority instead, like cleaning.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns not prioritize properly between level of injury that they have to heal first?

Why do pawns choose to tend a pet with a 2 injuries first, instead of a nearby pet with 20 critical injuries that has 1 hour left to live?

Why do doctors with 8 skill reserve to go for critical injuries and installing archotech legs, while doctors with 20 skill go for tending bruises and treating asthma?

Don't automate doctoring unless it's just bruises, there are too many factors you need to consider and an AI algorithm constantly scanning and doing that much "thinking" to try to do it as efficiently as possible would be pretty performance impacting, and would undoubtedly not be considered optimal for everyone. Look through your injuries after a fight and order your doctors to tend them based on severity, even with minor cuts you want to manually prioritize them to make sure they are taken care of quickly and don't cause infection.

Combat is manual for similar reasons, doctoring after combat is an extended part of that.

[stylish gibbon]

Originally posted by whimsic:

]Why do pawns automatically decide to take spare meals or pemmican when they feel like it only to later eat it in the middle of a field on inside a dark filthy barn without a table
when there's an ultra luxurious dining room with the best tables, seats and food within 10 seconds of walking from where they're at?

Originally posted by glass zebra:

This is a problem in rimworld indeed but having a shelf with kibble nearby your animal beds usually reduces this a lot. This also makes dogs waking up eat the kibble instead of your meals.

I don't have any problems with pets eating things they shouldn't because I simply forbid them the area those things are in. Why do my pawns specifically decide to pick up a lavish meal instead for corn to feed a downed bear pet? Why is feeding a lavish meal to a pet a possibility to begin with when there are plentiful other cheap and accessible food sources nearby that the pawn can choose from?

Originally posted by glass zebra:

This should not happen. Pawns have a maximum distance to go to a table to eat and will only do stuff like this if it's out of reach. It's to not have situations like: walking through half the map to eat 1 meal and then walking back to continue working. There has to be a number to reduce this. If your dining room is too far away, you can set up random tables in smaller areas throughout your base.

Okay so when the pawns decide they need to walk to the other of the end of the map back and forth to reorder a granite block, they can of course queue such an action regardless of the distance, time, food and recreation impact it would cost them to undertake such a stupid endeavour, meanwhile if the distance to the luxury table and luxury meals is little more than the bare minimum the are willing to walk, then they are more than fine to eat whatever garbage they have on hand, in the dark, wet in the rain and without a table, denying themselves the food bonus, dining room bonus, comfort bonus, psychic soother, beauty bonus etc if only they were willing to walk a couple feet more? Makes perfect sense.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Becasue that would again make things more complicated. If you have rooms drowning in filth at the same time, you likely have filth sources you can avoid. If a problem like this comes up, having your people work harder/smarter is maybe a worse option than reducing the problem. The pathfinding an priority system in Rimworld is not the most complex and increasing the complexity would cost fps.

Come on, you can't tell me something that simple like a room cleaning priority list would complicate things by forcing your pc to explode from the billion additional computations. That's like the simplest qol for this game and I'm astonished to see that after all these years since the game released, pawns still decide to clean random caves and fields instead of base proper just because they're closer to there and it's under the "home" area.

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Apart from some critical moments or some rare micromanage moments, most things should be able to be done with manual priorities. If you see a job not getting done and another too much, shift priorities of some pawns towards the job you want done more from the job you want done less. Rimworld pawns aren't the smartest or most efficient, but they usually get the job done, apart from those critical moments. Then it's good to take over.

That's exactly what I've been doing for the latter part of my playthrough, but at the same time eventually it all starts adding up and the game becomes a micromanagement nightmare when your colony is large enough. But then you've got people coming in and saying there's no micromanagement because you can automate it all no problem.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by whimsic:

I don't have any problems with pets eating things they shouldn't because I simply forbid them the area those things are in. Why do my pawns specifically decide to pick up a lavish meal instead for corn to feed a downed bear pet? Why is feeding a lavish meal to a pet a possibility to begin with when there are plentiful other cheap and accessible food sources nearby that the pawn can choose from?

Astasia's answer is pretty good here. I did raise this in the past in the forums and it's really just a rare thing. I remember having a situation where I had 5 sick chicks and all of them got feed lavish meals, That got changed though, but pawns will still give the food they are carrying first. This really should not cause much issue.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Okay so when the pawns decide they need to walk to the other of the end of the map back and forth to reorder a granite block, they can of course queue such an action regardless of the distance, time, food and recreation impact it would cost them to undertake such a stupid endeavour, meanwhile if the distance to the luxury table and luxury meals is little more than the bare minimum the are willing to walk, then they are more than fine to eat whatever garbage they have on hand, in the dark, wet in the rain and without a table, denying themselves the food bonus, dining room bonus, comfort bonus, psychic soother, beauty bonus etc if only they were willing to walk a couple feet more? Makes perfect sense.

The first thing of that is the work they do. If this would be restricted by distance, you would never see certain work being done. Eating food somewhere once a day has hardly any impact. Those 2 things are a bit off in comparison.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Come on, you can't tell me something that simple like a room cleaning priority list would complicate things by forcing your pc to explode from the billion additional computations. That's like the simplest qol for this game and I'm astonished to see that after all these years since the game released, pawns still decide to clean random caves and fields instead of base proper just because they're closer to there and it's under the "home" area.

No, but if you would just add the system in a simple way it would create things you called stupid in your posts yourself. People would clean the hospital, walk over to the kitchen to start cleaning, then 1 spot of dirt would come up on your hospital and they would stop cleaning the kitchen and walk over to the hospital again for 1 spot. If you want to make it more efficient by giving some kind of treshhold etc... you could do that. But just having a single person on cleaning duty should usually keep your whole base clean BECAUSE they are not following priorities. They will clean a whole room, then move over to the next. This makes sure they are working rather efficient (ignoring the clean path in the room) and also that the room they just cleaned is not the source for more filth to drag around. Moving around in between rooms will both cause the pawn to just spend more time on getting the filth out that is currently there, while also increasing the filth spread. On top of that: This is something the player can just fix with usually 1 pawn on cleaning duty and maybe a short micromanagement when the hospital gets flooded in blood from a recent raid. You can put this duty on the game or you use the system at hand. Having the people following your exact priority makes sure you have your people under control. Having people on higher hauling duty and they are cleaning would take away control from the player and make the system much harder to understand. What you are asking for is basically "smarter people" but this would always make more of a black box and less of a colony manager.

Originally posted by whimsic:

That's exactly what I've been doing for the latter part of my playthrough, but at the same time eventually it all starts adding up and the game becomes a micromanagement nightmare when your colony is large enough. But then you've got people coming in and saying there's no micromanagement because you can automate it all no problem.

You can usually automate all "day labour" and just need to micro manage critical situations. Of course you will always get people who are like "you just don't know how to do it, git gud", but a lot of people are interested in understanding your problem and trying to help too. The people who are not are usually best to ignore. Sometimes there are just a few, sometimes there are a lot, but a lot of people stay here to help. With that said, we all have our bad days.

I am not sure what "large enough" is for you and can not speak for colonies with 50 people with a base build on 70% of the map space, but my "end game" colonies work for the most part fully automated and I just tighten some screws and add some stuff when things are running low. For the most part, I am just trading my excess and increasing my quality. I never have to micromanage basic stuff in late game. That does not mean that you have to play exactly as I do, but that there is probably some way to fix the problems you are facing. Some people also just resort to mods. If you find something the veterans are blind to because it became 2nd nature, Ludeon is often willing to help/fix things, but so far it sounds like stuff that can (and in my opinion should) be fixed on player side or has too little of an actual impact to be changed.

A lot of the things you call qol I would call reducing efficiency and removing player control.

[stylish gibbon]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Meat isn't meant to be a rare resource, colonists just grab whatever is nearby to use for taming/training. They keep it in their pockets so they don't have to take as many trips to food storage while doing their job, and it's a fairly small amount so it doesn't matter if it spoils or not.

First of all meat can be a rare resource, there may be no animals on the map to hunt or pets to slaughter for a variety of reasons. If you play on maps with constant summer and endless fields of grass, this doesn't mean it's the same for everybody else.

You have a tendency to arbitrarily belittle certain aspects of the game when it suits you. The reality is that whether its a lost stack of 50 meat or a temporary mood penalty they can be very expensive mistakes and have a large impact on the game overall if the timing is right. Ever heard of butterfly effect?

Originally posted by Astasia:

Colonists carry a meal with them so when they are on the opposite side of the map and get hungry half way through the day they don't waste a lot of time walking all the way back to eat. The dining room buffs last 24 hours so they only need to eat in there once a day for the benefits, and the eating on the ground debuff is trivial. You can "solve" it by adding tables around your base/map for mid-day eating.

When the pawns decide they need to walk to the other of the end of the map back and forth to reorder a granite block, they can of course queue such an action regardless of the distance, time, food and recreation impact it would cost them to undertake such a stupid endeavour, meanwhile if the distance to the luxury table and luxury meals is little more than the bare minimum the are willing to walk, then they are more than fine to eat whatever garbage they have on hand, in the dark, wet in the rain and without a table, denying themselves the food bonus, dining room bonus, comfort bonus, psychic soother, beauty bonus etc if only they were willing to walk a couple feet more? Makes perfect sense.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Originally posted by Astasia:

Asking those questions just means you don't have enough cleaners. Priority doesn't matter if everything is always clean, and you do want everything to be clean because filthy surroundings is a negative in more than just those few rooms.

Okay what if I do in fact not have enough cleaners, only one to be exact. Why does he clean the nearby barn instead of the dirty kitchen so that the colonists don't get food poisoning or the hospital so there's a better surgery chance?

You praise the pawn ai when it suits you by saying that they can decide to feed their pets more nutritious food because its somehow more efficient. Or that they carry meals with them and eat them in the middle of the field at night in the rain because its somehow more smart or efficient because they don't "waste their time walking back"? But then for other stupid pawn behaviors it's suddenly somehow too unimportant and not worth the developer time to look into? Come on.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by whimsic:

First of all meat can be a rare resource, there may be no animals on the map to hunt or pets to slaughter for a variety of reasons. If you play on maps with constant summer and endless fields of grass, this doesn't mean it's the same for everybody else.

It can be harder to get in certain biomes, but that doesn't make it important. You can make fine/lavish meals with just vegetables now. Meat is never really rare though, even on extreme maps you have manhunters, human raiders you can butcher, trade ships and caravans.

Originally posted by whimsic:

When the pawns decide they need to walk to the other of the end of the map back and forth to reorder a granite block, they can of course queue such an action regardless of the distance, time, food and recreation impact it would cost them to undertake such a stupid endeavour, meanwhile if the distance to the luxury table and luxury meals is little more than the bare minimum the are willing to walk, then they are more than fine to eat whatever garbage they have on hand, in the dark, wet in the rain and without a table, denying themselves the food bonus, dining room bonus, comfort bonus, psychic soother, beauty bonus etc if only they were willing to walk a couple feet more? Makes perfect sense.

You can control when a colonist does a certain job and on what priority. If a colonist is doing something like mining on the other side of the map they shouldn't have hauling on a higher priority because as soon as they mine one thing they are just going to haul it back. So you can easily prevent cases where they stop what they are doing to go sort bricks.

You can't autonomously control when colonists eat, it's not a factor of any of the schedules and you obviously can't change the priority of eating. So there is no way to have them keep working and only go back to eat when they are done without manually prioritizing the tasks. Hence by default the game has a solution for this in how colonists will carry a meal with them to not interrupt work. There is a way to stop this, if you put your colonists on a nutrient paste diet they will not carry meals with them and will always return to base to eat.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Okay what if I do in fact not have enough cleaners, only one to be exact. Why does he clean the nearby barn instead of the dirty kitchen so that the colonists don't get food poisoning or the hospital so there's a better surgery chance?

You praise the pawn ai when it suits you by saying that they can decide to feed their pets more nutritious food because its somehow more efficient. Or that they carry meals with them and eat them in the middle of the field at night in the rain because its somehow more smart or efficient because they don't "waste their time walking back"? But then for other stupid pawn behaviors it's suddenly somehow too unimportant and not worth the developer time to look into? Come on.

They clean whatever is closest to them when they decide they should be cleaning. There is no AI (or to be specific "thinking") to it, much like there is no AI when it comes to them feeding animals or carrying an extra meal around. Those are static scripts that always function the same way.

I don't think I have ever praised the AI in this game and probably will never do so. It is intentionally very simple for performance reasons in all areas, but that simplicity also makes it easy to work with usually since you always know how a pawn is going to react in any given situation and the game gives you the tools usually to make things work the way you want them to.

[psychotron666420]

Ma'am, this is a Wendy's

[AngleWyrm]

In the vein of zero knowledge proofs, these are how to fix rather than why they happen:

1). Pawns feeding animals with meat
Make Kibble at butcher table

2). Pawns carrying food that rots
Make pemmican or packaged survival meals. They don't give mood penalties for eating without table.

3). workbench on 24/7
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2584269293

4). no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2018316486

5). multiple tiny hauling jobs
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2034960453

6).Why do pawns not prioritize properly between level of injury that they have to heal first?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2534081379
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2575962748

[Bababooey]

Originally posted by whimsic:

Originally posted by Astasia:

Meat isn't meant to be a rare resource, colonists just grab whatever is nearby to use for taming/training. They keep it in their pockets so they don't have to take as many trips to food storage while doing their job, and it's a fairly small amount so it doesn't matter if it spoils or not.

First of all meat can be a rare resource, there may be no animals on the map to hunt or pets to slaughter for a variety of reasons. If you play on maps with constant summer and endless fields of grass, this doesn't mean it's the same for everybody else.

You have a tendency to arbitrarily belittle certain aspects of the game when it suits you. The reality is that whether its a lost stack of 50 meat or a temporary mood penalty they can be very expensive mistakes and have a large impact on the game overall if the timing is right. Ever heard of butterfly effect?

Originally posted by Astasia:

Colonists carry a meal with them so when they are on the opposite side of the map and get hungry half way through the day they don't waste a lot of time walking all the way back to eat. The dining room buffs last 24 hours so they only need to eat in there once a day for the benefits, and the eating on the ground debuff is trivial. You can "solve" it by adding tables around your base/map for mid-day eating.

When the pawns decide they need to walk to the other of the end of the map back and forth to reorder a granite block, they can of course queue such an action regardless of the distance, time, food and recreation impact it would cost them to undertake such a stupid endeavour, meanwhile if the distance to the luxury table and luxury meals is little more than the bare minimum the are willing to walk, then they are more than fine to eat whatever garbage they have on hand, in the dark, wet in the rain and without a table, denying themselves the food bonus, dining room bonus, comfort bonus, psychic soother, beauty bonus etc if only they were willing to walk a couple feet more? Makes perfect sense.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

Originally posted by Astasia:

Asking those questions just means you don't have enough cleaners. Priority doesn't matter if everything is always clean, and you do want everything to be clean because filthy surroundings is a negative in more than just those few rooms.

Okay what if I do in fact not have enough cleaners, only one to be exact. Why does he clean the nearby barn instead of the dirty kitchen so that the colonists don't get food poisoning or the hospital so there's a better surgery chance?

You praise the pawn ai when it suits you by saying that they can decide to feed their pets more nutritious food because its somehow more efficient. Or that they carry meals with them and eat them in the middle of the field at night in the rain because its somehow more smart or efficient because they don't "waste their time walking back"? But then for other stupid pawn behaviors it's suddenly somehow too unimportant and not worth the developer time to look into? Come on.

People have been helpful and given you solutions. It looks like you don't want solutions and want to complain. Go code the perfect game if this one is 2 hard for you.

[Optic Ordeal]

Originally posted by Hoki:

with everthing out of your system: feeling better now? :Amane:

#1 handlers pick appropiate for the animal they are trying to train/tame. IIRC bears dont eat plants hence its gonna be meat or insect jelly (which is treated like meal i think).
#2 pretty much the same thing
#3 restrictions are somewhat limited by the animals themselves. meals, pemmican and kibble are treated as an universal food. for more control you either turn to modded or use areas to limit the spots handler can get food from.

#4 what pawns carry around can be set in the drugs policy afaik
#5 table is too far away therefore food on the go

#6 because power is VERY simplyfied
#7 kinda #6 but also: that would add more workto the taskgiver slowing down the entire game in the long run

#8 again: vanilla is a simplified system. modded offers mod that either have them clean prior to tasks (common sense) or define cleaning zones (priority clean)
in addition: for deciding what to do pawns wont care about rooms and stuff. thats only regarding mood

#9 that sounds like a you problem to be honest. hauling is higher priority than cleaning in the thinktree. if you want it to be different adjust the priorities or get dedicated staff for either.
#10 because vanilla only allows pawns to pick up a single stack of items.

#11 because the other patient is either further away or already reserved by another doctor
#12 because both have the qualification to do so? its simply: first come first serve.

i think that got them covered

@hoki. i think 12 applies to all of those, or at least half

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by whimsic:

Looks like many god gamers on these forums know how to effortlessly make a colony run itself efficiently and completely autonomously with 0 input or micromanagement on their part, so I guess someone can answer these questions?
...

Just adding something:

In any case where there is a player-managed solution, the game's design default is to prefer that solution.

Always.

Because... "game."

Balancing efficiency vs desired behaviors and costs is Rimworld's "meta." And, in nearly all cases, they're all unstable and subject to breaking down or doing something you don't want. Why?

Because... "game."

I'm serious. I'm not mocking you. This is part of Rimworld's design. You are not only supposed to interact with its fiddly-bits, you are going to be prompted to interact with its fiddly-bits. It is why after one decently long and engaging playthrough you are not going to be surprised by some "unknown mechanic" in the next playthrough- You will have already engaged with that, even if you weren't paying much attention to it and forgot how it works...

So, the first thing you have to do when you encounter a particularly irritating habit is ask "What tools are in this game that will solve that problem." And, if you see a way that really solves that problem, then... that's probably the way that problem is designed to be solved. :)

Pro-Tip: With every new recruit you get, everything in regards to the operation of the base becomes easier. PawnPower>All

[Vermillion Cardinal]

You know, that's why mods on the workshop exist; an issue that annoys a player crops up, the player finds a mod to get rid of it and goes on with their day. AngleWyrm has listed quite a number already, to which I'll add Animal Controls to deal with the animal food restrictions issue:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2426119067

With that, your only problems will be to spend time setting up what's allowed, and occasionally beating your head against the wall when you forget to allow a specific food type and your animals starve or return to the wild. In the latter case at least then it's user error rather than game design issue.

I agree with the others that stuff like doctor prioritization isn't something you want to leave to the AI, and arranging pawn priorities and allocating manpower/tables as appropriate are still management tasks a player has to oversee; this isn't a game where you can literally let it play itself unless you resort to mods (and maybe not even then). I'll not say much about the dining rooms and distance issue since I normally play small bases, and as long as a pawn has a table and chair nearby even if they don't dine at my wondrous cafeteria I'm happy enough to have one less mood debuff. (I also restrict their food types to cooked meals, which are usually fine meals, so they already carry only the good stuff with them as takeaway food anyway.)

In the end, none of us here are the game's developers; we can only offer you some ways to ameliorate game design issues, decisions, and limitations, and commiserate on a shared problem together. You can take them and move on, and/or you can send a letter to Tynan directly complaining about it; I wouldn't hold my breath about things being resolved entirely with the latter option though.

[Kaezeribato]

Originally posted by whimsic:

Looks like many god gamers on these forums know how to effortlessly make a colony run itself efficiently and completely autonomously with 0 input or micromanagement on their part, so I guess someone can answer these questions?


Why do pawns take whatever meat/insect jelly they can get their hands on to train bears even if it's a scarce resource and there's 2000 corn laying nearby?

Why do pawns sometimes feed luxurious meals to downed pets when there's some of that meat and the same 2000 corn laying nearby?
Why do we have no control and cannot place any restriction over what the pets can get fed with by pawns in general?

Why do pawns keep said meat in their inventory for days until it rots and you have to hope they will use it up before that happens?

Cose the AI is totally idiotic, you'll even have your colonist feed lavish meal to a friggin pet.
Putting a stock of food close to the place your pet sleep help a little.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns automatically decide to take spare meals or pemmican when they feel like it only to later eat it in the middle of a field on inside a dark filthy barn without a table
when there's an ultra luxurious dining room with the best tables, seats and food within 10 seconds of walking from where they're at?

Again dumb AI you can help this a little, by placing the dinning room in a central place were your colonist spend the most time, for exemple between their room and where you placed all you crafting bench.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do you have to keep a workbench on 24/7 in order for colonists to use it when they need to?

Why can't they turn it on when doing bills and automatically turn it off when they finish?
Even the simplest of automatic settings would to the trick, like turn workbench on when there's bills to make and turn it off when all bills are grey.

Cose the dev didnt want to bother, there is a mod for this.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why are there no priority settings for cleaning specialized rooms like kitchens etc?
I don't need my pawns to go halfway across the colony to clean animal filth from the barn while the kitchen and research room are drowning in sh*t

Why is there no automatic room hierarchy or prioritization for cleaning in general, it's either the entirety of home area or nothing?
It can't be that hard to set an internal tiered list of rooms that pawns should prioritize first doing cleaning work
Like Hospital 1 Kitchen 2, Research 3, Bedrooms 4, etc

The AI is dumb, and the dev dont seem to have any interest in making this better.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do colonists eventually start queuing hauling meaningless stuff like going to the other end of the colony to re-order a 1/48 granite block into a nearby 74/75 granite stack,
when there are way more important things to do, like starting to clean up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kitchen?

Why do pawns queue hauling independently from one another resulting in your entire colony rushing halfway across the map, each idiot reserving
to haul a separate stack of 4 ambrosia while preventing that 1 dude on the spot who just harvested it all to easily pick it all up in one go.

The dev also didnt want to bother adding this, there will probably soon be a 20 euro DLC for this since there is a mod that do it.

Originally posted by whimsic:

Why do pawns not prioritize properly between level of injury that they have to heal first?

Why do pawns choose to tend a pet with a 2 injuries first, instead of a nearby pet with 20 critical injuries that has 1 hour left to live?

Why do doctors with 8 skill reserve to go for critical injuries and installing archotech legs, while doctors with 20 skill go for tending bruises and treating asthma?

This still is in the "dumb AI" field. Better save this poor dog that hurt his toe than save a colonist that's bleeding and burning to death.