How to debug a slowdown

This is really short guide on how to find out why factories aren't running and where to look to find the problems and how to fix them.

Jamshackled again

Websters tells me there is no such word as Jamshackled. It tries to recommend Ramshackled, but that's not the word I'm looking for.

In The Colonists there is going to come a time when you are looking at a factory and seeing a full load of material just sitting there and if you click on the robot, a message will explain "Export Full" meaning there is no where for this material to go. In our example, this is a surface mine full of iron ore.

And then right next door to this, you have a blast furnace that is not producing and when you look at it, it shows you that it is lacking iron ore.

You look at the surface mine, you see the stacks of ore, you look at the blast furnace and it has nothing. WHY ISN'T THE IRON ORE MOVING FROM THE MINE TO THE FURNACE!!! you ask yourself.

Ok, this really happened to me and I filed a bug report and the developer Rich was very kind and explained it to me so I'm going to save Rich a few extra bug reports and make this guide in penance for not fully understanding all the data the game gives you to diagnose & repair this.

How to examine your buildings

So, when you click on your building, and then click on the snooze icon (ZZZ)



This shows you what it is missing. Note that the 0/1 for the ore. It needs ore to produce!

How to see where the building thinks the material is coming from

On the 4th tab over, this will show you the resources in transit - where they are queued up

In this screenshot, you can see that my material was in transit for 29 days!! Boy, this slowed me down a great deal. I wish I would have caught this earlier.

If you click on the material in that tab - it will show you precisely where it is at this moment. If it is still a long way away, you really should just delete it.

How to remove material that is in transit so closer material will be used

So in the queue of material in transit, you can click on that little tiny red X next to the material and delete it. The material disappears, but it will be much faster for you in the long run so go ahead and do it. Hopefully you recognize this problem when it hasn't been in transit for 29 days and only a few days.

Import rules for harbors

Import rules are really necessary to direct traffic of materials. It will keep things nice and orderly but some rules you create early on when you don't have all the material you're looking for need to be frequently updated or removed entirely once you are able to source your own material on the island.

When you first land you need everything - but as you establish a lumberjack hut, a forestry and a saw mill, there is no need to import planks anymore. So remove it!

In my case, I had iron ore on the island, so I had to add iron ore as an import blacklist so it wouildn't try to source it from somewhere else - as well as charcoal and coal!

Why doesn't the game constantly look for closer materials?

Per the developers, the game looks at material the instant it is requesting it and it then fulfills it wherever it can regardless of the distance.

The complexity of constantly re-looking and redistributing would be very taxing on the game not to mention the logic of what do you do with that material. It could conceivably have a never ending cycle kind of like when you have a storage yard and you see things get deposited only to be immediately taken out and moved somewhere else - but on a scale that would soon consume the game.

This is why it is so important to put rules on road posts and harbors because things will really slow you down.

You have a lot at your disposal - whitelists and banlists to allow / disallow material to flow. You can do it on virtually everything in the game. The thing is while you are learning, you're going to get yourself jamsackled like I did and over time you will come to recognize when you need to adjust the rules you've put in place.

Thanks to the developers, CodeByFire for such an awesome game!

[cool.m the youtuber]

yes thank you

[Tman]

Good point as Export rules are great for limiting travel. But in my experience, import rules are the only way to prevent pulling material from across the map. So in your example, the surface mine will only feed the blast furnace, but if the surface mine can't produce at the rate the blast furnace needs, the blast furnace will pull from the next closest source, which on island maps will still cause the problem.

So either you need import rules or limit the harbor rules as well.

[Seth of X]

Took me awhile to learn this, but to help prevent this issue, it's best to tell the building to export to only a few others (eg the surface mine to the blast furnace). I used this for food and water to make little "villages" but only expanded on other items more recently.

[fooey]

Nice one!