Balancing priorities (especially hauling and farming)

[Polysorbate]

I've played this game for like 300 hours but I still have a really hard time keeping a productive colony without a lot of micromanagement. The biggest issue is with farming - specifically, making pawns haul in the food that's harvested. The only way I've avoided having at least 3/4 of every harvest rot in the fields is by setting the whole colony's "haul" priority to maximum.

It really feels like the game would benefit from a button that temporarily tells the whole colony to override all their preset priorities and focus on one task for a set period of time.

Got any tips?

[climbingeastofwinter]

Instead of planting your desired field all at once, divide it 5 ways (and maybe expand those a little bit for a bit more padding) with sowing forbidden, then enable sowing one field at a time with maybe a day pause between them so when a crop is ready to be harvested, your colonists harvest a more management amount at a time.

Consider positioning storage closer to the fields, if not in the fields. Crops will not deteriorate if stored in shelving, so you can safely place a pair of shelves for 4 tiles of storage (300 units of raw vegetable) in or near a moderately sized field. Rice harvest 6 units per mature tile I believe, so that would be 2 shelves (2x2 tiles) for 50 tiles (~7x7 tiles) of planted rice field.

Staggering crops and setting up local storage to reduce hauling trip time can help. Trained hauler animals (I like dogs for this, because they also nuzzle and dogs are just the bestest) help here too. Leaving a good number of your colonists with a high priority on hauling isn't a bad idea either, as long as you are careful to manage the number of hauling jobs that get generated. If you flood your colonists with work, then you're going to have to micromanage with high hauling priority setup. If tasks don't get generated faster than they can reasonably clear them, the priority system will work better.

If you really want to get into macromanagement, you can try restricting your colonists to custom areas and include/exclude specific fields/storage areas for specific colonists to guide who has access to what farming tiles or storage sites. This is more of a hassle than it is worth imo, beacuse if a worker gets ill or tantrums or any of a number of things, you'll have to go through and give someone access to their areas to do the work they won't, so you aren't necessarily going to save any micromanaging assuming you want to save all possible crops/keep your fields in use 100% of the time.


The way you are currently running things is probably fine. You might look into crop timing, lowering the storage trip distances, and just overall being sure that you aren't placing unreasonable workloads on your colonists. Just a little bit of time saved here or there goes a long way to keeping the colony running smoothly.

[Raymond]

You can try farming by rotating cycle. Grow only small patches at a time, as long as all the plants in the patch will be ready for harvest almost at the same time (up to 3% growth progress difference). After you planted the first patch, wait for a few days (how many days you should wait depends on how much time your pawns need to do the harvest) before planting the next patch and so on. This way you can spread your farming-related tasks throughout multiple days instead of having your farmers go idle and get overworked in short period of time.
How your job priority should be balanced depends largely on how much manpower at your disposal. If you have less than 5 pawns, micromanagement is inevitable. If you have less than 8 consider having specialized pawns dedicated into doing very specific task while turning off other tasks (even with passion).

[BurlsoL]

Sounds like you are growing vastly more food than your colony needs. If 3/4 of the field is rotting, you likely need fields that are 1/4 your current sizes. Kidding aside, if you are leaving fields to rot, that really just means you are making your growers spend unnecessary time planting areas you can't harvest.

As for hauling, the trick is finding those recruitable prisoners who aren't particularly skilled anywhere, don't have too horrible of traits, but can still haul/clean. Keep 1 or 2 of them happy, and you'll have a better functioning colony. Slave labor also works if you have DLC, but that can be harder to manage long term than just recruiting the pawn.

Plant different crops. Break up planting plots into areas so you can have them sown at different times. This applies to harvesting too as you can control what plots to harvest when.

Setup temporary stockpiles nearby. This will reduce the distance haulers have to go between field and stockpile. Crops don't spoil very quickly, so as long as it is an enclosed space, it tends to be fairly safe to keep it there for a few days while you're clearing the field.

If you have enough colonists, setting dedicated planters, cutters, haulers instead of making 1 pawn do everything at once tends to work better. It creates a sort of neat assembly line as one pawn harvests, one plants, one hauls. Don't be afraid to shift job priorities around at harvest times.

[Wasted]

Sometimes its best to have dedicated haulers (only hauling set to priority 1) until you get other options. Ideology DLC adds something called Gauranlen seed/tree that spawns dryads you can use as haulers. I like to have some of those trees with dryads set to hauling and some trained Labrador Retrievers or Huskies that have been trained to haul. I have my whole map fenced in usually with lots of animals so traders usually only go around the outer border of the map so when I buy items they are left at the edge of the map. I usually have enough dryads and hauling pets that none of my pawns usually need to haul most of the time except for tasks like loading barrels of wort for beer and unloading the beer I need to do manually. I also use dryads and pets usually to bring in all my crops, stone chunk. steel slag etc. The secret is to make the dryads access zone unlimited and hauling pets zone the whole map + food coolers + butcher/animal carcass/kibble +item storage areas (the rest of your base should be off limits to all animals and pets so there is less to clean. you can accomplish this by using allowed zones and stockpile settings. I keep the coolers that have my meals in them off limits to pets, but i use other coolers that allow harvested crops so they can haul them there and not eat my meals. i usually have to make a lot of kibble for the hauling pets. you can just set butcher to dump kibble on ground and then allow pets to that area but make sure no drugs beer or meals is allowed in that area.

[glass zebra]

It's often enough not to overload your pawns with task so that they can get straight to hauling after they finished their main tasks. Animal handlers, farmers and sometimes cooks should be very capable of doing this. Corn will also cause bigger haul spikes than rice.

Dedicated haulers are usually only the animals, with dogs being easy to train and not making too much dirt. If you have this problem every time and stuff does actually completely rot away, you can also just reduce the field size or make fields with shifted sow times like people suggested.

The biggest issue are usually pawns doing too much, fields growing too much, not having animals or planting corn.

[Hoki]

for vanilla this is one of the reasons why corn is so viable. performancewise as good as rice but with higher risk.

one thing you want is to size fields according to your needs. if you start out you dont need fields that are like 60x60 for food.
another thing for priorities is to have a strategy that works for you (for me its for example fieldwork at 2 and plant cut at 1 so they do the plants i want them to do first)
next would be growing the colony to a size you can have dedicated haulers (pawns, animals, dryads)

for modded RW mods like "pick up and haul" and "while you're at it" are a great addition as well as those allow your haulers to more and a multitude of items at once according to their weight limit resulting in pawns hauling entire fields in one go.

[kevinshow]

There is indeed a mod that makes your pawns haul things right away.

But without mods, what you can do is, make 1-3 people focus on hauling. That is the main job , all day long. I usually pick someone who doesn't have any important major or minor interest in doing other things. (in a similar way, you can make 1-3 people be a cleaner also, so your pawns don't freak out at some dirt).

You can also train some animals to help you do hauling as well. I used to have a lot of animals helping to do that before when I wasn't as efficient about about prioritizing or limiting large jobs (such as harvesting and hauling that harvest)

You can also grow plants inside of a room with a sunlight. That way, they won't be exposed to the outside debuff even though you do still need to get them into your fridge/freezer at some point. If you go that route, you can either grow directly into the ground or you can use hydroponics bays. Just make sure you have enough power to run all those things.