Pawns can get stuck on 0 level skills

[puschit]

I experienced the following:
So I planned a row of fences and I drew the line over rocks and trees. This is usually not a problem because pawns realize there is something in the way and haul the rock or cut the tree in order to make room.
However, in this cases the guy that is supposed to construct the fence happens to have a plant skill of 0, so he is incapable of cutting trees. Yet, when tried to construct the fence on a spot that had a tree on it, he tried to cut the tree even though he isn't asssigned to tree cutting at all. So he was cutting the tree all day until I realized what was going on and priotized something else for him, Haven't tried out to see if he would abort at some point or if he would starve to death because it's my very first game and he is my only contruction guy.

So, is this a bug? As I understand it he should not have begun to cut the tree because his assignment forbids him to do so. Seems like the tree cutting is treated as part of the construction job.

[The Yeen Queen]

Skill level 0 should still be able to cut trees, just really slowly. Not "all day", though. But, yes, if a tree is in a spot where he's set to build a structure the pawn will attempt to cut the tree whether he's assigned to cutting or not. What you can do is manually designate the trees to be chopped and set one of your plant specialists after them before the builder starts on the structure to clear them faster..

[Astasia]

They will chop them in such a case even if incapable, which counts as having 0 skill whether it shows up or not. At 0 skill and 100% manipulation a colonist has 8% plant work speed, so it takes them about 10 times as long to chop a tree as a colonist at 8 plant skill. It's definitely not ideal and manually giving a cut plants order to have your growers take the trees out quickly beforehand is a good idea, but ya even at 0 skill they can chop a tree, it's a bit slow but still gets done and isn't something to worry about.

[hardy_conrad]

Makes a big difference the type of tree as well. If it's a regular tree it'll be really really slow at skill zero / incapable. If it's like a fully grown teak tree on the other hand, yeah very possible it could take a day... I've noticed similar things with animal handling, when someone at very low level tries collecting alpaca fuzz.

[puschit]

I still think it should not even start to cut the tree if my settings say explicitly that he should not do this type of work

[Astasia]

He's not doing a plant cutting task, he's building and in this case that requires clearing the area. Plant cutting is when you manually assign a plant to be cut. There's no way to have a hybrid job that somehow checks two different work priorities, the options are builders never clear plants and plants that are in the way get assigned to be plant cut, or builders clear it themselves so they can do their job. In most cases the later is preferable, cutting a tree is pretty quick even at low skill. If it's a teak/cypress tree and you don't want your 0 skill builder spending 8 hours chopping it down, then mark it to be cut before building it.

This is BTW an intentional downside of the Production Specialist role, they become much better at building/crafting but their plant skill becomes effectively 0 and they will regularly spend far too long chopping trees in the way of their builds. That's an important factor to consider when assigning colonists to that role, and a strong reason to not assign all your builders to it.

[puschit]

I understand that the game won't do hybrid tasks but as I see it (or let's say how I would have implemented it) it should go like this: I lay down the blueprint for what I want to build which does two things: A) Assigning a task for pawns with construction enabled and assigning a task for pawns with hauling/tree cutting enabled if something is in the path. Just two seperate tasks instead of a hybrid one.

And sure, now that I know this I can work around it but it just isn't intuitive that people do things automatically that I specifically diasallow them to do. I mean these guys faithfully stave to death if I don't allow them a food type that sits right next to them but they start cutting trees when that is forbidden as well? I would not have said anything if I had set my construction guy to low prio plant cutting.

[Astasia]

So then when a hunter kills an animal they should just leave it on the ground and create a hauling task? Crafters who want to make something on a workbench need to create hauling task first to move the items to the workbench for them to craft with? You don't want colonists not assigned to hauling to be moving things around after all, right?

At the end of the day this is a fringe case and 99% of the time you would be happy with the builder just instantly removing the plant instead of stopping and walking away and waiting for a grower to come over and do it for them. You don't necessarily want your low plant skill builders set to plant cutting even at a low priority because when you want to do an early harvest of a field or something you don't want them wandering in and botching everything. Removing a tree from a construction frame is something they can always do because chopping can't be botched and the only downside of low skill is more time spent. For something like a cactus or poplar a 0 skill plants builder can clear it in a very reasonable amount of time.

There's always mods though.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1539025677

[puschit]

I understand you stance and just don't agree, so let's leave it at that. If this is intended behaviour, so be it. Unintuitive but intended.

[Steelfleece]

As someone who sometimes uses the misc. robots mod's bots and has the hauler drones sometimes carrying materials to a construction site and then decide they're going to spend several hours fruitlessly (literally with fruit trees) try to cut down a tree in the way... I kind of got used to either manually sending someone else to cut the plants while the hauler hauls, or forbidding a project until everything's cleared. Just a little micromanagement is all..