Tips and tricks for caravans ?

[gandalf]

I am mid game. Forming caravans (gathering my horses and items) takes forever. Is there something I am missing ? I seem not to be able to start my caravan before my pawns have mental breakdown.

[brian_va]

you can place a caravan spot somewhere central to where the stuff is you want to take, perhaps even inside the warehouse holding the stuff. you could also place a stockpile for what you want to take and have stuff hauled there prior to forming the caravan. loading is a hauling task, so if you send one guy and have no other haulers its gonna take a while to load them up.

maybe try and hold off on forming the caravan until after those you are sending are able to sort out their needs, they will only eat while forming the caravan. even specifically schedule rec and sleep to support the caravan process.

[Veylox]

I have so many mods for caravans I tend to forget how it works vanilla, the whole feature feels unpolished

Either way forming caravans shouldn't be long enough to send people on mental breaks, but it WILL take longer if you don't have some sort of carry capacity mod, because IIRC vanilla pawns never use their full inventory size to carry stuff

[Astasia]

Caravan animals should be in a very small pen (like a 9x9 room with a hay stockpile) near your main storage, with a caravan packing spot right between them. Do not rely on large range grazers as pack animals because gathering them takes too long, unless you are using elephants which don't need to be gathered. Start forming the caravan early in the morning. Don't pack a bunch of low value heavy items, things like low/mid quality weapons and armors should be smelted/destroyed, not loaded into caravans. Don't try to bring corpses or chunks or buildings (other than art or bedrolls) on caravan. Don't take more animals than absolutely necessary. Upgrade to transport pods when you can to deal with moving things off mission maps instead of bringing a silly amount of animals with you, if you really want to use animals regardless again go with elephants. Pay attention to mechanoid energy levels when forming, don't try to bring low energy mechs, if they run out of power the caravan packing stalls.

Originally posted by Veylox:

IIRC vanilla pawns never use their full inventory size to carry stuff

They can actually use significantly more than their inventory capacity for caravans. When forming the caravan the game is mostly concerned with the combined total capacity of all members, not any individual's capacities, so you can often end up with pawns holding like 50kg out of their 35kg capacity.

[Triple G]

Imho forming caravans, and their pace, depends mostly on how You set up Your storage. I usually have the freezer, the general storage and the equipment storage close to each other and use shelves - so i don´t need to build it too wide. Also use the caravan spot to have the animals near to it, so it doesn´t matter where they are. I personally wouldn´t do some 9x9 spot next to the storage, as i need other stuff next to the storage constantly, and i guess i never set up a caravan without that spot, so i don´t know how that works out. Also they will grab multiple animals if they´re somehow close to each other (in my case by luck as i like to have them able to grass somewhere instead of delivering hay grass constantly.)

What imho takes long is to unload everything when they come back, but that wouldn´t change my habit to have the animals at the outer side of my villages or bases, as i usually do caravans, or animal breeding, when i have nothing dramatic to worry about. Also elephants may be nice, but horses are the best caravan animals, because of speed buff and they need less food. :o) Or alpacas or muffalos will provide You with further resources, when they´re not needed by the caravans.

Else i guess everything was already said.

[Feyda]

Assign the entire colony to go. Once they pack and do that little pause before moving to the exit, select everyone you don't want going and remove from caravan.

[White Rider]

Originally posted by Feyda:

Assign the entire colony to go. Once they pack and do that little pause before moving to the exit, select everyone you don't want going and remove from caravan.

Nice tip actually. One thing to note with this though is that the food packed will still be the same as if the whole colony was going on the caravan. That's not necessarily a problem depending on how much you have stored, but just be careful you don't take too much. Manually drop items from the pack animals before they leave if you need to.