How do distribution offices work

[El Presidente]

I tried searching this forum but am unable to figure out how to get it working. I thought maybe if I setup a line but no. I have spent several days trying to figure this out. I am probably missing something that might seem obvious to other players and will do a face palm when someone points it out but right now I am stumped. Can someone please point me in the correct direction.

[Silent_Shadow]

Basically you assign buildings to a DO and it will see how full said buildings' storage is (including attached storages) and automatically fill it up or empty it depending on the % settings and the materials/goods checked. Options to check certain materials/goods will not appear until you have the required vehicle type (dumper, oil cistern, etc.)

For example, if I assign the customs house to a DO, check loading and steel, then assign an open storage yard to the DO, check unloading, and set it to 30%, then any open hull trucks in the DO will automatically go to the customs house to load steel and bring it to the open storage yard to unload it, so long as the open storage yard's storage for steel is less than 30% full (they stop bringing steel then).

If you want the DO to take from a building when it is "too full," then you can assign it to the DO and set the percentage above which the DO will take goods from it.

If you don't check any goods in the loading or unloading menu of the DO, then it will just take any goods from buildings with 'loading' checked as buildings set to 'unloading' demand, while DOs will attempt to fill buildings set to 'unloading' with anything they can get their hands on.

DO vehicles will load an amount of goods equal to the maximum storage capacity minus whatever tonnage the percentage of the storage it is set to, or the vehicle's cargo capacity, whichever is lower.

Distribution offices cannot work with containers or vehicles as a cargo. You will have to use regular lines for that.


Train distribution offices work the same way as road distribution offices, but they need a rail signal to function and you can also tell locomotive to load and unload vehicles there, which makes them un/load wagons there as if it were a rail yard.


With all that in mind, you normally don't need them (despite what some people say), but they can be useful for saving money on trucks if one could do the work of multiple different lines, or if you want to save space or slots for un/loading. They can also serve to even out the supply and demand of certain lines too.

Don't bother using DO for fields either (they are not better despite everyone saying so), as farm buildings are cheaper per parking spot and don't have a 20 task limit.

[XSDNAX]

I'm gonna give another answer that might not be as complete, but hopefully a little easier to understand.

Start with the situation - Imagine you have 2 wood chopping places and 2 saw mills (to turn wood into boards) and then 1 storage yard for the boards.

You can set normal lines to just constantly go from building to building, picking up whatever is there (or dangerously "wait until full" - which can cause traffic bother). This was the old way of doing things, before they added distribution offices. So same example as above, but forget lines.

Put the same lorries you used before, into the distribution office. You then need to tell the distribution office, where to "get stuff from" and where "to take stuff to". For example

To send a lorry out to the wood choppers, when it's over half full, and deliver that wood to the sawmill, you would do the following:

1) click distro office, then click to "add source/destination"
2) click on the wood choppers, set it to "LOAD" and set the item to "WOOD"
(note: think about it, you don't wanna deliver anything to the wood choppers, just collect their wood.)
3) What about percentages?? Think about efficiency here - sure you can send out a lorry when it's only 10% full, but is it worth sending a truck that can carry upto 10-30 tons, for a small bit of wood? No... Set it to 90% then.... but wait, the wood choppers will get full before the lorry gets there! Perhaps 50% is a good sweet spot for this specific example - this way, the distro yard will ONLY send a lorry, if wood chopper has 50% or more full of WOOD.
4) Why isn't it doing anything yet???
5) Coz the distro yard needs to know where to TAKE THIS STUFF.
6) Select distro yard again and select the SAW MILL - and set it to Drop off / Unload the Item WOOD - again setting percentage to be efficient. Let's say 50%...

In the above example, we set the yard to pickup wood from the choppers IF they are over 50% full of WOOD, but we also set them to drop off the WOOD at the Mill, IF they are less than 50% full of wood - it's important to understand BOTH ENDS of this equation. If the saw mill is full and can't move, then they are already over 50% full - so the distro office WILL NOT send a truck - even if the wood cutters are over 50% - it's smart enough to know, there's nowhere to take the wood.

7) Select the distro office again, and goto your saw mill, where you dropped the wood off. On the other side, where you can LOAD items - choose to load BOARDS and once again, set a suitable percentage (ie 50%).
8) With distro office still selected, find your Board storage place, add it as a source/detination, and set it to UNLOAD BOARDS - and up it to 90% - you may wish to use road depots for efficiency - so you can select a road depot as a source/destination, so long as it is connected to a suitable storage facility.

So with the above done, you have a working automated facility.
You may also wish to create a 2nd distro office, that will take EXCESS resources you produce, and export them. To do this is quite simple:

1 Set your main distro office for your own use to pick up resources IF the storage facility is 10% or more.
2 Set your XS distro office for export, to pick up resources IF the storage facility is 80% or more - and set the customs office as the destination.

As Silent Shadow has pointed out, the rail distro offices work exactly the same way, but I suggest you practice with the road distro offices until you get exactly how they work (once you "get it" - you'll wonder how you ever managed without!

[nekys]

Simple. You get the required vehicles in the DO. You designate several buildings, some to get resources from, some to drop resources to. Then it pretty much works on its own. Note that a Do can not target itself, so you will need another one to supply fuel to it. Note that if you target the buildings but do not have the right (or any) vehicles in the DO the pick up and drop off boxes will appear empty.

[Onbird]

One more thing. The unload % is what is known as a re-order point in real-world inventory management, i.e. when the level in the storage goes below that, a new batch is ordered. Or in this case, delivered by the DO.

The actual amount that the DO will bring isn't, however, just what's needed to bring the level back to the set percentage, but up to a full load of the vehicle bringing the stuff, as long as there is room for it in the destination building.

For instance, consider a gas station with a storage of 20 tons. And a DO set to deliver fuel to it, to unload at 50%. Let's say that the DO has a fuel truck with a capacity of 10 tons.

50% of 20 tons is 10 tons. In this case, as soon as the fuel level dips below 10 tons, a new fuel delivery is made to the gas station. Since there is now room for slightly more than 10 additional tons in the gas station, the fuel truck is filled up completely at the source building set for the DO (a building with a "load" setting), and takes the whole 10 tons to the gas station, which will now be almost entirely full. Maybe more full than you needed it to be.

However, consider the case where you have set the unload % to 100. This means that whenever the gas station is less than completely full, a delivery will be made to it by the DO. It will constantly get topped off, even if it means that a fuel truck will make a trip just to deliver a tiny amount.

Thus, if you want to make sure your vehicles don't waste fuel driving part-full loads, you should set the unload % below 100, low enough that the difference between storage size and threshold level is at least equal to the size of the largest delivery vehicle. So in the above example, 50% (or below) is optimal for making sure no part-full deliveries are made. Setting the unload % to be more than that is only worth it if you need to be certain that stuff doesn't run out in the time between going below the unload % and the arrival of the delivery.

[Nationality]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0vVcU6-qc
It is an older video but shows you the basics pretty well.

[equinox1911]

While we are on the topic of DOs, does anyone know how to set up a single train DO to distribute for exampple food from a factory to a warehouse at say 30% stock and also export from the factory at like 70%?
I have tried this quite a bit and i cant find a way to set it up. My current solution is to have a dedicated export TDO. But since setting this up costs hundreds of thousands its quite a decision if you dont start with the 10 mil and have to research good money makers.
(Wood industry is quite horrible btw)

[Beast of War]

All this said, i think assigning a DO to a fill a gravel processing plant coming from a depot with unprocessed gravel works very bad.

It sends 1 truck at a time ( and not full ) while the depot behind the processing plant is completely empty. One would expect all the truck to ride out. That is why i always had it backed up by a few trucks that are on a normal route. You could swear AI does not see what is behind the gravel processing plant and does not recognize capacity needed.

I also see capacity deficits in food distribution over say, eight large shopping centers and an odd Orphanage or Prison. Not anywhere near 20 destinations. A large DO seems overwhelmed by that ( does not fill the shops fast enough while set to 100 % ) while half the truck are just sitting there. And it is not traffic jams or unreasonable distances, and the food depot ( attached to a road distribution point ) is full. it does seem sensitive to truck cargo capacity ( that is logic ) but i haven't considered truck speed yet. Still this does not account for trucks not riding out while stores are low.

Maybe i should set target fill to lower then 100 % ?

The train DO drives around with single wagons a lot, but ia havent seen it failing in delivering the requested levels of supply.

[kyonkun]

Originally posted by Beast of War:

You could swear AI does not see what is behind the gravel processing plant and does not recognize capacity needed.

I would swear because that's exactly how it works. That's also why DOs don't support connections to conveyor engines nor pumps, the DO can't see any storage past the first connection. Set an aggregate storage for quarried stone to feed into the gravel processor and the DO will send all its vehicles but that's a pretty silly use for a DO overall. Moving one item type from A to B constantly forever is the optimal use case for a line.

Originally posted by Beast of War:

Maybe i should set target fill to lower then 100 % ?

You should never set a DO to 100% at the destination, that's pointless. Just use a line, don't even need to set "wait to unload", truck will just run back and forth forever with exactly the same efficiency as the DO set to 100%. I set my food distribution DOs to 60-80% and use small trucks so they always carry a full load of food.

[equinox1911]

Originally posted by Beast of War:

I have never seen a DO send more than one vehicle on a single route, or rather request (it can combine requests into routes). Pretty sure it just gets a request at % level makes a route and then hibernates the request until that vehilce returns.
I say that bc you can force two routes to exist by fiddleing with the options while a route exists and the vehicle has left the DO, it does send another one.