Workers are idiots

[RogueSeraph257]

Here is one of many examples. I have a chemical plant right next to a greenhouse gas factory and two workers, plus a few other buildings in the same area. The workers will take the chemicals and move them to all the other buildings, but not to the GGF.

Another example, I have a polymer factory next to a maintenance node, the workers will take the polymers everywhere except to the MN. Why do the workers not take the resources to the nearest building first?

Or they will bring resources to a landing zone even if it is needed in a building close by. This is really irking me, and I probably won't play unless this gets fixed.

[unca.alby]

probably need better placement for worker hubs, otherwise, I dunno.

[Panterich]

The composition of game mechanic decisions and their implementation in regards to workers is plain bad. It works well with small outposts, but things quickly get out of hand with larger distances and volumes. It ensures stuff is moved around most of the time, but with very low efficiency. So the game forces you to wait as much as possible while it keeps breaking your buildings and workers. By all means this is the way it was designed, so i don`t see why you would expect it to be fixed - it is "not broken".

The way transportation works is with demand orders. A building puts a demand order in a list and workers go through this list. Distance doesn`t matter, not for priority and not for route. If source and target are not located at the same worker area, or if another worker picks up the order, then the resource is moved from hub to hub. All of that generates a lot of excess traffic that usually takes the longest possible route all around the planet.

Originally posted by RogueSeraph257:

Another example, I have a polymer factory next to a maintenance node, the workers will take the polymers everywhere except to the MN. Why do the workers not take the resources to the nearest building first?

If you have a storage, it will constantly generate demand orders for resources. If you have resources in storage, MN asks for those resources. The only way to force resources to nearest buildings is to turn off your landing site.

Originally posted by RogueSeraph257:

Or they will bring resources to a landing zone even if it is needed in a building close by. This is really irking me, and I probably won't play unless this gets fixed. :cfacepalm: :trainbowbarf:

When building has no resources at all, it should take over landing zone order. However, if it has something already, or if there is another resource in landing storage, resources will keep traveling the way you see. This is intended.

[RogueSeraph257]

Well, it's still infuriating watching my resources skirt around buildings that need it.

[mreed2]

Full disclosure: While I'm not associated with the dev team, I have written a guide for this game that discusses the logistics system in great depth.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2319632408

The below information comes from the research that I performed to write the guide.

Originally posted by Panterich:

The composition of game mechanic decisions and their implementation in regards to workers is plain bad. It works well with small outposts, but things quickly get out of hand with larger distances and volumes.

In my opinion, this is overstating things by a lot. The system does work, but you need to give it enough worker drones to work with -- ~50% of your total buildings being worker hubs seems to work well, although aggressively pruning "used to be useful but aren't any more" worker hubs might get you down to the ~30% mark. There is no reason not to have 50% worker hub buildings, as the building limit is generous enough to allow you to fully occupy Mars without exceeding the limit.

It ensures stuff is moved around most of the time, but with very low efficiency. So the game forces you to wait as much as possible while it keeps breaking your buildings and workers.

If you are spending large amounts of time waiting, especially at the 16x speed, then you almost certainly don't have enough worker hubs.

By all means this is the way it was designed, so i don`t see why you would expect it to be fixed - it is "not broken".

I absolutely agree with this -- the game is meant to be a homage to Settlers 2 which had a similar logistics system. Even if it would be prudent form the perspective of "user experience" to switch to a more traditional point-to-point logistics delivery system, this isn't going to happen.

The way transportation works is with demand orders. A building puts a demand order in a list and workers go through this list.

This is misleading enough to be incorrect in my opinion.

Whenever a building has an empty input slot, it searches the map for a good to fill it. It does favor closer goods, but... It only looks at goods that actually exist at the moment that it does the search.

If it finds a good, it "tags" it for delivery, and... At this point, as far as the demand source is concerned, the demand has been satisfied. It will happily sit for the next 2 hours waiting for the tagged good to be delivered. This produces... Counter-intuitive behavior, to put it very mildly.

As a consequence of the above two points, if (at the moment that demand is generated) the closest source for a good is the other side of the planet, then it will tag that good and not notice that the mine next door produces the required good 0.01 seconds later. It wasn't there at the moment of the search, and the distant good was, so...

Distance doesn`t matter, not for priority and not for route.

This is correct in the sense that "there is no maximum range for a good to be tagged for delivery to a demand source." It is incorrect in the sense that "If there are several instances of a good that satisfies a demand, it chooses the closest one".

Goods stored in Storage Centers used to work very oddly. Hopefully, the developers corrected this, but as of version 1.1 (several months ago, and prior to the "Storage center rework"), Storage Centers hated to release goods once they made it into storage. I won't go into the rules here, because they may be out of date, but suffice it to say it made Storage Centers a trap in most cases.

If source and target are not located at the same worker area, or if another worker picks up the order, then the resource is moved from hub to hub.

This is kinda true, but misleading in my opinion. You are condensing three discrete operations (the generation of the demand, tagging the goods for delivery, and the movement of these goods to the destination) into a single operation, and that's not how the game handles it.

Once a good has been "tagged" for delivery to a particular destination, a task is added to the worker hubs (and hyperloops) that could potentially move the good. There is one task list per worker hub, and the order of the list is determined by the destination (colony vs factory, for example) and whether or not the destination is prioritized. Once these new tasks have been added to the nearby worker hubs, nothing happens for a bit.

When a worker finishes its current task, it consults its local task list and starts work on whatever task is at the top of the list. There are some "smarts" involved here -- it prefers to move goods stored in whatever building it is currently stationed at (to avoid making a trip while empty) so it isn't strictly based on the order on the list, but its close.

Whenever a good is dropped off by a worker, new tasks are added to the queues of the newly accessible worker hubs as described above.

Note:

1. At no point in this process is there any opportunity for the good to change which destination it is going to.
   
2. The state of the destination (especially whether or not it is prioritized) only impacts the tasks added to the worker hub queues after the good finishes moving. Once the task has been added to the local queues, that's the end of that, and prioritizing the destination will have no impact.

All of that generates a lot of excess traffic that usually takes the longest possible route all around the planet.

I've never seen a good take a longer route to its destination than was necessary -- and I've spent lots of time staring at this game tracking goods as they move across long distances. The pathfinding algorithm is very good. It even has anti-congestion logic, so it will take a slightly longer route if it is less congested.

Note that I'm talking about movement of goods to their assigned destinations. Obviously, the process of matching goods with destinations introduces large inefficiencies into the process, but that's a different complaint.

Originally posted by RogueSeraph257:

Another example, I have a polymer factory next to a maintenance node, the workers will take the polymers everywhere except to the MN. Why do the workers not take the resources to the nearest building first?

If you have a storage, it will constantly generate demand orders for resources. If you have resources in storage, MN asks for those resources. The only way to force resources to nearest buildings is to turn off your landing site.

Demand is generated to the closest instance of a good at the moment that the demand is generated, as described above.

In the specific example given by RogueSeraph257, at the moment that the maintenance tower has an open input slot for polymers it tags the closest good for delivery. If the adjacent polymer factory has a good sitting in its output bin, it will tag that good. If it doesn't, but one on the other side of the planet does, then it will tag that good instead. The fact that 1 second later the adjacent polymer factory produces a new good is irrelevant -- the demand of that particular maintenance tower has been satisfied.

And yes, if a maintenance tower on the other side of the planet generates demand for polymers, it might tag the just produces polymer. In that case, you'll have the (very frustrating) joy of watching a worker move a polymer "west" and then immediately pickup a polymer and move it "east", making it look as if the worker is simply shuffling resources back and forth. It isn't -- each good is moving towards its individual and fixed destination.

On the subject of storage, it used to generate only very low demand for resources, and only 1 / valid resource type (e.g. 1 iron, 1 carbon). Unlike most demand, goods destined for storage where subject to being "stolen" by other sources of demand while in transit -- in effect, a good that was sitting in a building awaiting transport to storage was treated as if it had no destination assigned, and could therefore be tagged for delivery to somewhere more important.

However, all the Storage Center stuff here is dubious, because its 1.1 information. Its possible that the devs changed it so that demand prefers to pull goods out of storage to satisfy demand rather than "loose" goods. I can even see how this might be an improvement over the prior system. But if it is preferring goods in storage over closer "loose" goods, then that is incorrect.

Originally posted by RogueSeraph257:

Or they will bring resources to a landing zone even if it is needed in a building close by. This is really irking me, and I probably won't play unless this gets fixed. :cfacepalm: :trainbowbarf:

When building has no resources at all, it should take over landing zone order. However, if it has something already, or if there is another resource in landing storage, resources will keep traveling the way you see. This is intended.

Note that there have been many, many reports of workers simply refusing to move goods to a particular destination. This is a bug, and should be reported as such if it occurs.

You've run into this bug if and only if:

1. When you click on the building that is waiting for resources you see a silvery grey line extending from the building to another building. This means that a good has been tagged for delivery -- if the line isn't present, then the building can't find a resource anywhere to satisfy its demand, and while that might still be a bug, it isn't this bug.
   
2. When you click on the building that the silver-grey line points to, there are only a small number of goods present in the "transient goods" section of the building information (this appears at the bottom of the info panel). Small number means "less than 5 in total". If there is more than that, you've just identified a bottleneck and need to construct additional worker hubs (that can service the building that you are looking at) to expedite the movement of the goods.
   
3. When you allow time to advance, other goods move but the particular good that you are interested in doesn't. You should click back to the destination building periodically to ensure that the silver-grey line is still pointing at the same building. If no goods are leaving the building at all, then you need to check to see if the adjacent worker hubs have worker drones, and what those worker drones are doing.

If all three of the conditions are met, then, yeah, you've run into this bug. Most of the time, turning power off in the destination and then back on will fix it, but not always. Reporting it (with a save) via the instructions in the pinned comment is a good idea.

Note that #2 is the source of 95% of the complaints about this game. That is, in fact, why I'm not playing the game -- the game desperately needs the ability to see without zooming into an individual building, how many goods are waiting further transport in a particular building. As it is, you can have 100 goods all sitting in a single building waiting for transport (to a wide range of destination) and its very, very hard to realize why your colony has ground to a halt. After all, each of those 100 goods represent an input slot that won't be filled until that particular good makes it to that particular building, but that might take hours. If you have some buildings prioritized, it might never happen, as 100% of the available worker time is spent moving prioritized goods.

If / when that feature is added, I'll play again -- otherwise, I'll check in once a month or so and see what's happening.

[Panterich]

I`ve read your guide previously, it is a nice one, although feels overloaded with two separate topics. I also consider it outdated on hyperloops, as my observations and experiments don`t coincide with yours.

I never meant system doesn`t work. In fact, i`m saying exactly that it does work. But doesn`t try to be effective. And i had ~50% of my structures as hubs, which is definitely important, but doesn`t change my opinion.

Funny you mention x16 speed, as it takes considerably more in-game time to move stuff around at higher simulation speeds. In my experiments, transporting something with just a couple of structures in sandbox will take ~15% more time on x2 and ~50% more time on x4.

As for Settlers, consider taking a look at the game The Colonists. It uses same way of moving stuff, and it faced the same problems. However it doesn`t uncontrollably spam roads, and specific settings were added to counter the problems. It didn`t solve everything, but made it work much much better.

Say what you will, my observation shows that goods are picked in accordance with internal list order, which has nothing to do with distance. Scrap&rebuild something, and you will see how your resource is assigned to another sector, while same resource is ordered from the fartherst storage, despite having thousands available in multiple storages nearby. It is hard to say 100% nothing else is at fault there, but it keeps happening again and again.

Originally posted by mreed2:

If source and target are not located at the same worker area, or if another worker picks up the order, then the resource is moved from hub to hub.

This is kinda true, but misleading in my opinion. You are condensing three discrete operations (the generation of the demand, tagging the goods for delivery, and the movement of these goods to the destination) into a single operation, and that's not how the game handles it.

I just meant to say that goods can travel through hubs despite having a direct connection in specific situations, without going into too much detail...

Originally posted by mreed2:

Note:

1. At no point in this process is there any opportunity for the good to change which destination it is going to.
   
2. The state of the destination (especially whether or not it is prioritized) only impacts the tasks added to the worker hub queues after the good finishes moving. Once the task has been added to the local queues, that's the end of that, and prioritizing the destination will have no impact.

All of that generates a lot of excess traffic that usually takes the longest possible route all around the planet.

I've never seen a good take a longer route to its destination than was necessary -- and I've spent lots of time staring at this game tracking goods as they move across long distances. The pathfinding algorithm is very good. It even has anti-congestion logic, so it will take a slightly longer route if it is less congested.

1. Is incorrect. Unless i misunderstand the meaning of "process" there. Goods can change destinantion at each drop-off.
   
2. Unless you turn destination off and on again.

Maybe you didn`t spend enough. Maybe later patches changed things. Maybe you place buildings the same way as pathing works. Maybe you upgrade important roads. In my experience, distances have no meaning. The very first time i took notice, i had a spaceport immediately on top of starting landing site in campaign (connected by road). And all the goods were taking 300° route across whole settlement, while workers were returning by the remaining 60° shorter route (so the shortest route wasn`t used at all).
I have no idea what you mean by congested routes. It only makes sense (and does work) with hyperloops.

Storage without custom setup will generate 1 order per type, but only 1 order per source. So it can pull resources from different mines at the same time, but won`t work fast with something like a full spaceport. Storage with minimum setups will order everything at once. I think non-storage goods are always preffered, though i never specifically tested it. Resources pulled to factory from mines in another sector while nearby storage is full of those is a common sight.