Noob Efficiency Question

[jonbrave]

I notice that a lot (say 50+%?) of my bots are shown with the "magnifying glass" icon, for "Find Nearest ...".

I know some is inevitable (e.g. "Repairer" bots). But is this (e.g. for the others, like food farming etc.) an indication that I am not being efficient enough? E.g. if a bot is often waiting for "Find a space to dig a hole" or "Find some berries/'rooms/'kins", does this suggest my crop growing area is not big enough? That sort of thing? Or is, say, 50% about what you would expect?

[Illuminia]

I had this same issue at first, and eventually changed the way i thought about managing the robot workforce. There's two different ways to think about "Efficiency" :

(1.) % of time each Robot is busy working (on any task). (which is what you're looking at).
At first, if I had a robot not busy part of the time, i would try to have it multi-task.
Often i had some robots that would search for robots to recharge in it's general work area; or collect different types of things, something like this:
(repeat forever
(repeat 1
(until hands full ( find mushrooms) -> until hands empty (store mushrooms) )
)
(repeat 1
(until hands full (find weeds) -> until hands empty (store weeds) )
) )

This kept the robot busier than if it was only (find mushroom->store mushroom), but sometimes lead to issues on save/load where it didn't always empty the mushrooms from it's hands before trying to pick up weeds, or the added travel time between the two work zones made the whole process take longer. (Also took a ton of memory and higher tier memory upgrade)

Sometimes I would have a bunch of mushrooms waiting to go to storage because the robots off playing with weeds.
Or it would have collected mushrooms in hand, waiting to put into a full storage, while weeds were running dangerously low since it wasn't stocking them.

What I found, while this kept the robot busy, trying to fix the programming to prevent any possibility of issue was a nightmare, and the travel time between multitasking two different jobs made it slower.



(2.) % of time each Robot is actually focusing on their primary task.
The key here is "primary task". While i could have created a 2nd robot to do the dual mushroom/weed collection task, that would not truly solve the issues i experienced.

Instead, i went back to basics and had 2 robots: one for mushroom collection, other for weed collection. That mitigated most of the issues i was having, although yes they did often have chunks of time they were just daydreaming.

The benefit of this however - as soon as mushrooms were used and dug up, they were collected and stored right away.... in the first example, even not counting the other issues, if the dual collector was gathering weeds, it might be a minute until he came back to start picking up mushrooms.


In the end, I found I preferred going with the "primary task" approach in most cases. If I did have robots who were daydreaming a majority of their time, I would have them also act as a Recharger for their general work area, using something similar to the dual-task approach above. This still let them mostly focus on their primary task, but gave them something else useful for those long periods where I stopped using mushrooms.

Bots are fairly cheap to make, so it ended up being easier to just create more and let robots daydream (of electric sheep) when their primary collection/crafting duty was at full storage.

[jonbrave]

Just to say: I had/have already settled on your approach. My scripts are simple, each bot essentially does one task. No chance of getting stuck on one and so not proceeding to the other. So it's not that for me.

For example, my "dig-in-soil" guy does just that. And he's on "Finding" idle a lot of the time, because there is no more room to dig holes at present. I'm just saying, looking around my world there are a lot of idle bots. I wonder if others play with "50% idle", or whether they build a bit bigger or more aggressively than I do.

[AlexMBrennan]

if a bot is often waiting for "Find a space to dig a hole" or "Find some berries/'rooms/'kins", does this suggest my crop growing area is not big enough?

Kinda. If bots are waiting for something then they could be doing more work if you were to assign them a larger area/provide them with more resources/use more of their output.

However, given that bots are cheap and that you can't assign half a bot to a given job I don't think that this is a practical approach to the game (e.g. your forestry area would have to be enormously big if you want it to be the area that can be dug by an integer number of bots, planted by an integer number of bots, chopped by an integer number of bots, and harvested by an integer number of bots without any of them ever going idle).

It's also inefficient in the sense that you don't need to redo expensive operations like checking if there are grown trees every tick which is why I liberally use sleep commands (chop all trees, then sleep 10s before checking if there are any trees, then repeat) but I couldn't say if that is strictly necessary.

[Geothermal1159]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

if a bot is often waiting for "Find a space to dig a hole" or "Find some berries/'rooms/'kins", does this suggest my crop growing area is not big enough?

Kinda. If bots are waiting for something then they could be doing more work if you were to assign them a larger area/provide them with more resources/use more of their output.

However, given that bots are cheap and that you can't assign half a bot to a given job I don't think that this is a practical approach to the game (e.g. your forestry area would have to be enormously big if you want it to be the area that can be dug by an integer number of bots, planted by an integer number of bots, chopped by an integer number of bots, and harvested by an integer number of bots without any of them ever going idle).

It's also inefficient in the sense that you don't need to redo expensive operations like checking if there are grown trees every tick which is why I liberally use sleep commands (chop all trees, then sleep 10s before checking if there are any trees, then repeat) but I couldn't say if that is strictly necessary.

I would say it is unecesary to make the chopper wait to chop.
Just make them not chop when the log storage is full.

The diggers and planters will be able to easily keep pace with the chopper bot assuming you have a big enough area that you always have a tree available to chop.
Main thing is to make the chopper stop chopping when you start to have too much wood that you can't use at that time.

[Arkana]

There's always going to be a bottleneck at some point. So if a bot is saying "Find a space to dig a hole" when it comes to planting trees, then that means you're either not cutting down trees or replanting them fast enough. No matter what you do, one of those three is going to be the slowest and have some amount of down time.
The only thing that really matters is if you have enough logs in storage. If you consistently have 0 logs, then you want to speed the whole thing up starting with that "weakest link" of whatever type of bot has the most downtime.