Derpy New Player Question re: Steel Hauling

[Saint Landwalker]

Just picked up this game and working on my very first colony (very fun so far), but am having a bit of a comprehension issue: I can't mark steel for hauling.

It isn't an issue of "Marked for hauling but nobody will do it." I try to mark it, and I get the message of "Must designate haulable items." I know steel can be hauled. I have a stockpile specifically for steel, and it has steel in it, which my colonists put there a while back from a different "steel mining" area.

It isn't an issue of this steel being outside an allowed zone, because I can mark the stone right next to the steel for hauling without any problems.

Can anybody help me out with this so I can finally build a gosh-darn stove?

[Shad]

Does the pile have a little red cross in the corner? If so it's forbidden, and you must select it and un-forbid it.

[Saint Landwalker]

Nope, the piles are not forbidden. I have also tried forbidding them, and then unforbidding them, to "reset" how they're treated, to no avail.

[CMierez]

That's... weird. First of all, make sure that the colonists is capable of dumb labour. If that is not the problem, the only other thing I can think of is that you might have forbbiden the steel.
If none of these is the case, would you mind sharing a screenshot, please?

[Shad]

Select a colonist with an allowed hauling activity. Right click the pile. See if that works.

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by CMDark:

That's... weird. First of all, make sure that the colonists is capable of dumb labour. If that is not the problem, the only other thing I can think of is that you might have forbbiden the steel.
If none of these is the case, would you mind sharing a screenshot, please?

All colonists except one are capable of dumb labor, and all (except that one) are set to perform hauling in the Work menu...

Originally posted by Shad:

Select a colonist with an allowed hauling activity. Right click the pile. See if that works.

Ah-hah! Fortunately, this worked.

(Edit: And all of a sudden they've spontaneously started hauling the steel anyway...)

[Skullywag]

You should have been getting "so and so is not a hauler" in the right click context menu if you were trying t use a non hauling pawn.

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by Skullywag:

You should have been getting "so and so is not a hauler" in the right click context menu if you were trying t use a non hauling pawn.

That's what I would have expected, but that wasn't my issue—only one of the colonists was a non-hauler, and I wasn't using that bozo for anything at the time. When I selected a "valid" hauling colonists, I could order them to manually haul the steel, but I couldn't use the Architect > Orders > Haul option to designate the steel as "Somebody please come haul this automatically, kthx" the way I could on chopped wood or stone (since I got the "error" stated above about it not being a haulable item).

Fortunately, for whatever reason, after ordering one colonist to manually haul some of the steel, a couple of others figured out that it was over there and went to carry it to the stockpile on their own. Not sure what was ultimately going on, but at least now I finally have that fuel-burning stove.

[Skullywag]

Does that tool work on items? I was under the impression it only worked on things like stone chunks...(it might even be ONLY stone chunks)

[Eretnek]

Originally posted by Skullywag:

Does that tool work on items? I was under the impression it only worked on things like stone chunks...(it might even be ONLY stone chunks)

You are right, dont worry

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by Skullywag:

Does that tool work on items? I was under the impression it only worked on things like stone chunks...(it might even be ONLY stone chunks)

Ah, if that was the problem, then... I guess it's not actually a problem, is it?

I've definitely seen it work on other items (chopped wood, for example, and I think it has also worked on other items lying on the ground), but maybe it doesn't work on steel going off the assumption of "if you mined some steel then of course you want to haul it, so we'll just skip that intermediate step." In which case, perhaps my colonists were just being lazy about finally getting around to it.

That would definitely clear up my confusion.

[Nellvan]

It works for Steel slag chunks as well. But yeah, you basically only ever need that tool to get chunks hauled. Everything else will get hauled automatically, as long as there is a stockpile to hold it.

It seems like an an priority / workload issue. Hauling is by default one of the lowest priority jobs, so they'l never get around to doing it if you keep on giving them other stuff to do.

If you haven't done this already, I'd suggest to look into manual job priorities. 1 is high, 4 is low, everything that has the same number still adheres to the left-to-right order.

[nazerick]

what nellvan said. if they have pretty much anything else to do, they won't haul.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

Originally posted by Skullywag:

Does that tool work on items? I was under the impression it only worked on things like stone chunks...(it might even be ONLY stone chunks)

Ah, if that was the problem, then... I guess it's not actually a problem, is it?

I've definitely seen it work on other items (chopped wood, for example, and I think it has also worked on other items lying on the ground), but maybe it doesn't work on steel going off the assumption of "if you mined some steel then of course you want to haul it, so we'll just skip that intermediate step." In which case, perhaps my colonists were just being lazy about finally getting around to it.

That would definitely clear up my confusion.

That tool should work only on Stone Chunks, and Steel Slag. Everything else is basically automatically treated as needing hauling automatically. From there it is just a matter of making sure that it is not forbidden (by zone restrictions or actually marked as forbidden), that there is a stockpile setup to receive that item, and then finally once a pawn deems that particular item his target for hauling, that last part seeming to be pretty arbitrary.