Worker Hub placement vs work area scope

[MIYUKI]

Hi, i'm a bit confused about this.

If I place a worker hub, will the worker drone conduct work everywhere? Local area only? Nearer work first?

I prefer to have 1 central factory and storage area (starting landing area) and expand from there, with very long veins of buildings leading towards resource clusters. Even if I expand with Worker Hub > Worker Hub > Wind Farm + Maintenance, this pattern still appears to leave very low reaction to subsequent new buildings (even when i've linked the Hyperlink nodes). For distant expansions, I see at most 2 or 3 workers ferrying resources to multiple new constructions, despite having 8 stockpiles full of the required materials and hundreds of workers built.

Advice?

[inkling]

Worker hubs move resources within their own area as well in all adjacent areas. Sectors two or more steps away from a hub will not benefit from that hub’s worker.

Having hundreds of workers in a centralized area won’t improve the efficiency of your outer mines / research outposts as they’re only able to work within the sectors they immediately touch and their own

[mreed2]

Press <F1> and look at the worker territory map view -- each staffed drone hub will have a territory marked, and will only service jobs within that area and the nodes immediately adjacent to it.

The game assigns territories automatically and the territories are roughly centered on the drone hub, so having a large number of workers in one area is only helpful to service local jobs.

[bufs96]

Only one worker can be on a street/hyperloop at a time. One central hub is fine for awhile but once you get further away you bottleneck yourself. Workers will be doing nothing because they have nothing to do while they are waiting for resources to arrive.

[Everything]

so having a bunch of worker drones at one spot is unbenificial ?

[inkling]

Originally posted by Everything:

so having a bunch of worker drones at one spot is unbenificial ?

Pretty much. You shouldn't really be clumping your factories / mines together and instead spreading out as much as possible. Otherwise the adjacency area is so small that workers struggle to move resources across your space.

It seems like it shouldnt work that way, but because workers only move things from their area to adjacent areas, having a bunch of workers all in one spot means more handoffs, which introduces delay

[mreed2]

Originally posted by bufs96:

Only one worker can be on a street/hyperloop at a time. One central hub is fine for awhile but once you get further away you bottleneck yourself. Workers will be doing nothing because they have nothing to do while they are waiting for resources to arrive.

Incorrect -- I have resources being gathered across the entire world, all connected via hyperloop, with no issues.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317222704

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317223263

It is 100% possible to have centralized production with all resources brought in / sent out via hyperloop without saturating the hyperloop. There is a limit -- you can fully saturate a hyperloop terminal. But you'll only run into this limitation with storage complexes (6 storage / 6 drones) will saturate when enough output demand is created (e.g. you start 12 space elevators at once, and all of your carbon is stored in this complex). It isn't a big problem, though.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317226245

Edited to add -- it is more efficient to place production buildings next to resource generators. However, the need to continually exploit need production fields necessaries moving your factories over and over and over again, which is a big hassle.

[mreed2]

Originally posted by Cuttlefish:

Originally posted by Everything:

so having a bunch of worker drones at one spot is unbenificial ?

Pretty much. You shouldn't really be clumping your factories / mines together and instead spreading out as much as possible. Otherwise the adjacency area is so small that workers struggle to move resources across your space.

It seems like it shouldnt work that way, but because workers only move things from their area to adjacent areas, having a bunch of workers all in one spot means more handoffs, which introduces delay

This is incorrect, you want lots of hand-offs. Its the same principal as with a bucket brigade when fighting a fire -- 20 people, each of which travels to and from a common well is far less efficient with moving water than 20 people in a line, with one person pulling water from the well and one person putting water on the fire.

Now, there are bugs and that changes matters a bit -- sometimes workers (and hyperloops) will bounce resources back and forth between two nodes, making no progress. The patch today much improves this behavior, but its still a problem. But this doesn't really change the math -- more drones = more transport capacity, but only if the drones are distributed evenly across the map.

[Galroche]

why does it feel so much like surviving mars without shuttle and all the boring stuff related to not having any handover of drone across multiple hub ...

[inkling]

Originally posted by mreed2:

This is incorrect, you want lots of hand-offs. Its the same principal as with a bucket brigade when fighting a fire -- 20 people, each of which travels to and from a common well is far less efficient with moving water than 20 people in a line, with one person pulling water from the well and one person putting water on the fire.

While you obviously want more coverage from drones in high traffic areas, this only increases efficiency up to a point. An excessive amount of drones slows and even prevents the delivery of materials.

Imagine you have aluminum that needs to go to a factory. If you have three drones in the area between the mine and the factory, the first drone takes it from the mine to a facility in the second area, the second drone into the third area, and the third drone to the factory.

Now imagine you have ten drones between the mine and factory. Because each area can only deliver to adjacent areas, the drones are constantly shuffling materials between their adjacencies, barely moving the materials at all. The odds that a material gets misallocated are incredibly high, as drones haphazardly move it from adjacency to adjacency. And because of the way material allocation works, once the factory flags the aluminum as the aluminum it needs, the system considers the needs of the factory met. So now your factory isn’t making anything while the aluminum sits in a solar panel four adjacencies away

[BobthenotsoGreat]

Try to think of it like this. When placing drones it's like you have worker drones and transit drones. Worker drones work in and around factories and such and should be boxed in by transit drones. Transit drones pick up and drop off only. So worker drones need to be placed in numbers where the action is happening. Transit zones can be spread out quite far initially. As your network grows and you find more out of reach resources your transit network extends but your worker drones don't have to as they operate locally. So later you place a mine or 2 on a transit line slap a drone hub in to compensate. Over time though, these lines will get busier so you then place a drone in between the longer line to compensate.

This is until you get hyperloop network going. Then its a slightly different strategy as you move to hubs and spokes..

[psycohbilly 【ツ】]

i like this thread. very much.

[bufs96]

Originally posted by mreed2:

Originally posted by bufs96:

Only one worker can be on a street/hyperloop at a time. One central hub is fine for awhile but once you get further away you bottleneck yourself. Workers will be doing nothing because they have nothing to do while they are waiting for resources to arrive.

Incorrect -- I have resources being gathered across the entire world, all connected via hyperloop, with no issues.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317222704

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317223263

It is 100% possible to have centralized production with all resources brought in / sent out via hyperloop without saturating the hyperloop. There is a limit -- you can fully saturate a hyperloop terminal. But you'll only run into this limitation with storage complexes (6 storage / 6 drones) will saturate when enough output demand is created (e.g. you start 12 space elevators at once, and all of your carbon is stored in this complex). It isn't a big problem, though.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2317226245

Edited to add -- it is more efficient to place production buildings next to resource generators. However, the need to continually exploit need production fields necessaries moving your factories over and over and over again, which is a big hassle.

You're not running one central location for all your factories, you're spread out in hubs.

I read the op as wanting to have all their factories in one location and just ship the raw materials to that one spot. This can work, but you'll need to have all your people in that one area too. Not out exploring the research centers. Food is just too of much of a pain to move all over the map.

[MIYUKI]

Thanks everyone. I can confirm that mreed2 response is working to resolve my issues.

I had previously not tried to look at that overlay, so I didnt understand its importance in optimization.

As for MuskyLoops, yeah, I think it makes it so the exit point area is also considered nearby.

I am fairly sure most everyone uses them when possible, considering how slow the drones move otherwise. I find that taking 3 exit points in my main base, with V shaped paths spreading roughly in 6 equal directions from the centerpoint of my base has worked well for me, adjusting slightly for large resource patches.

Can I trademark the new term MuskyLoops? :P