About these new bot commands...

[JC gracian]

So I've enjoyed playing this game for a while now and have been eager to utilize the latest update to its fullest potential. As you likely know, the recent update rolled out a number of new commands/ conditions for coding, which seem to offer a lot of potential solutions to problems I've encountered with improving the efficiency of bot scripts. I encountered the "unreserve" command today, and can't find any useful info on its intended function. I checked the change logs which simply stated "This allows a bot to unreserve something after it reserved it using a Find. Use with caution :)". Could I get some clarification? Sounds to me like it would be a powerful command. I'd really like to implement this if possible. I imagine I could use it to have a single bot search for multiple objects, or something such as that. Until I find out/hear more about it, I'll be experimenting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Egan Wolf]

Originally posted by JC gracian:

I imagine I could use it to have a single bot search for multiple objects

The other way round. It can be used to make one thing searchable by many bots at the same time.
When bot Finds something it also reserves the object. Reserved objects can't be Found by other bots. Thanks to this they don't race to the same stick or axe. But sometimes you only want to check if something exists in the area and use only Find. It would keep the object reserved so you can use Unreserve to release the lock. I think the most common use case is for builders bots which deliver materials to blueprint. Normally each bot reserves the blueprint and nobody else can add their materials. So stone builder blocks sticks builder. With Unreserve they can add together to the same blueprint.

[Geothermal1159]

To add another example for using the reserve code on top of what Egan provided would be to allow multiple bots that care for colonist in ways other than food to help streamline that the other other colonist needs are meet more efficiently.

I would be cautious about doing the same with feeding bots as it might lead more inefficiency with excess food being used on the same colonist depending on how you implement the code.