Pawns prioritizing walk speed over distance

[Negative Velocity]

I've got this issue in my game where pawns will prioritize stony soil (87% walkspeed) over lichen-covered soil (81% walkspeed) to the point where they will travel twice as far to reach something just to avoid the 6% walkspeed reduction. Anyone know a mod or fix for this other than placing floors down everywhere or manually making paths with the path avoid mod?

[Jigain]

It's not really an issue. Unless you have a mod that interferes with it, pawns are specifically designed to calculate the quickest path to their goal based on tile walk speed. If they travel twice as many tiles, it's because those tiles offer 100% or more faster walk speed than the shortest path. If they react any different in your game, uninstall the mod that changes their pathing priority.

[Negative Velocity]

Normally I would agree, but in my case I don't have any mods affecting pathing right now. I probably should have been more specific about the distances I'm talking about. There's a cave on my map that has an entrance near my base, and at the mouth is a five tile wide patch of lichen-covered soil. My pawns refuse to walk over that patch to reach things right on the other side of it, and instead will walk 50 tiles out of their way to reach a different entrance, then wind their way through the caves to get back down to right next to where they started. On the way back though, they're more than happy to path over that patch of soil, so I don't understand the inconsistency.

[TwoTonGamer]

Maybe check their zones? Perhaps they are assigned to a zone that is disallowing them to walk over that small patch?

Vanilla pathing will not cause a pawn to behave the way you are describing; to walk 50 tiles out of the way to avoid a spot of lichen.

[The Great Glumbini]

I've noticed this behaviour as well, it's a good reason to actually build roads. I find that's the easiest way to overcome this issue and also increase productivity overall, but it does take some time and resources.

This behaviour can also be used to your advantage against enemies, as they too will prefer to walk on "fast" ground whenever they can. You can set up a minefield with IEDs, then put 1 tile floors directly under each of the IEDs and this will actually draw enemies to walk over them instead of around, especially if the ground around them is grass or sand. I know it seems kind of silly to "highlight" your mines with floors but most enemies can't actually see IEDs, so don't worry too much about that.

Also, there's another advantage to putting flagstones or concrete under your IEDs out in a minefield. If you don't want to always go out and rearm them or you don't want to set up a home area outside of your base to automatically do it, the floors can act as markers for you to replace them in the proper spots when necessary.