Goods distribution beween warehouses?

[Azura]

How are goods distributed between the warehouses? Do the workers picking up the goods from the other warehouse back and forth or are they smart enough to divide it fairly?

[Maehlice]

No. When a villager picks up materials, they pick up everything they can fit at their workplace with no consideration of others.

Also, a transporter will not pull from another warehouse unless you set them to max fill and empty respectively.

[Maehlice]

See also

https://steamcommunity.com/app/690830/discussions/0/600770111531434621/?tscn=1739271255

[Ninjafroggie]

warehouses have a 150m 'range'. For reference thats slightly over 6 default paintbrush widths. Within this range, they will go and retrieve output from any industry buildings that they have space to hold the goods in automatically (have have to assign a slot to hold planks for example, then as long as there are less than 100 planks there the transporters will continue to go get more). Again, this only works within a certain radius, so if the sawmill is too far away, they wont go get planks. Now, you CAN somewhat extend how far you can move industrial goods, but not by a whole lot. Continuing off my example, If you build a 2nd warehouse that's within range of the first warehouse, but not within range of the sawmill, it will not go gather planks normally. If, however, you change the setting on that 2nd warehouse to 'stock max', then the workers will go pull supplies from the first warehouse, which will in turn then go pull more from the sawmill.

The limit is that warehouses can only pull from other warehouses that are NOT set to stock max, so your production that uses that resource needs to be near enough to move the resources to, you cant move warehouse materials all the way across the map. You can extend it further for each additional step in production, let's look at an example again with our planks. Let's say we want to turn those planks into common goods, so we can go one range step by having warehouse 1 just close enough to the woodcutter to go gather logs. We can go a 2nd range step with warehouse 2 requesting logs, which it gets from warehouse 1. The sawmill is located next to warehouse 2, so the workers can swiftly get stock and get back to work. We can go another step at this point by having warehouse 3 be just within range of the sawmill to collect the output normally, and then we can go one MORE step by having warehouse 4 within range of warehouse 3 set to request planks. At this point we've reached the limit of how far we can move those planks, so at some point along that chain the iron has to join the chain, it can be at the start and run in parallel or it can join together at warehouse 4, so you can have wood coming from a decent, but not unlimited distance from your iron source and still make goods efficiently.

Granaries work much the same way with the 'stock max' function to pull in supplies from other storages, but it IGNORES the range limit when set to stock max and will pull from ANY available storage or producer on the map, priority to the closest source. You have to be careful with this, because you can easily make your granary useless if your guys are spending too much time walking all over the map, so instead what you want to do is move goods in split stages, similar to the range extension trick above but without range limits. Lets say you build a cluster of dairy farms, you want a granary there to collect the milk. You dont want your granary that services the market to request milk, because that would take up their time walking all the way out to the farms to get it. Instead you have another granary located by your cheesemaking, and much closer to the town core, request the milk and store the output cheese normally, and then have the granary by the market request cheese. Have multiple markets? That's fine, they'll all pull from that cheese output. You can even set up multiple cheesmaking areas by having several granaries requesting milk, and in turn their output will go into feeding any market granarys that are set to stock max as well.

Even better is the city market monument building, because it can ignore range limits by setting 'stock max', and it has several advantages over the granary. It has a built in granary/warehouse function for all 13 sellable goods if you add a belfry subbuilding to it (2 halls in the belfry, each hall has 6 storage slots), with double stack size and WAY more transporters to go fetch the stock, and it can pull the warehouse sale goods like common goods, clothes, and candles from the warehouses regardless of range too. The market stalls can be integrated into the building so the stalls restock instantly from the building storage and the stall never goes unmanned. And you get a happiness bonus from the belfry tower too!