Producers and consumers ignore nearest stockyards and insist on house delivery.
This causes near 0% efficiency.
In my example, all coalminers walk a long road past two stockyards to hand deliver a couple of coals to the forge and glass factory.
And because that is not enough, those workers also keep traveling to the coal mine.
Consequently, the wainwrights almost never get to transport anything either.
This also happens with sand and maybe others.
This also seems to be an old issue that reoccurred or was never fixed:
Producers should always go to the nearest storage location, no matter if it is the inhouse storage, a stockyard or a consumer, if there is space available.
Wainwrights also seem to not keep restocking buildings properly.
If a building has less than 50% of a given resource, they should handle it immediately.
Together, that should fill the stockyard and allow wainwrights to actually do their job which then should stop consumers to restock themselves.
I’ve never understood this design decision by the game developers. I’ve watched groceries walk all the way to mines, farms and factories to pick up goods for their markets instead of walking to warehouses and storehouses next door. Then the delivery to each house? Why aren’t the citizens going to the markets themselves to stock their homes?
I hope this is simply a bug, because it doesn’t make sense at all.
But who knows. There still isn’t a minimap and I consider that a minimum requirement maps. All this scrolling feels awful, not to mention that the raid alarms are pretty buggy and lack information.
With this efficiency issue, I will put the game away again and check back in a few months.
Ugh, that is no good. I have been here, on Discord, and YouTube trying to figure out what I am missing about markets. I’ve tried all of the suggestions. I figured out yesterday the stockyard problem. Guessing because of the mechanics, you need more than just the one set of ox wagons. I went from one set who was mainly hauling only work camp stuff and clay though the stockyard is literally just 2 squares over across the road. I got frustrated because fish was far away and couldn’t get it to the smokehouse. If I build the smokehouse close to the fishing huts, then the market guys spent all day going between it and the market. So, I moved it closer and built a cellar that only houses the raw fish. I added 3 more sets of ox wagons (total 8) and now my satellite materials (coal, sand, iron, hawthorns, etc) and the fish are getting delivered to the stockyards/cellars in town and travel time went from red to yellow green. The only trouble is they won’t take their downtime in the winter to get a new coat and then give me a grumpy face.
Still fighting the market guys though and can’t get less than half of the houses supplied. Got 2 tier 2 markets fully staffed, one has about 30 houses the other has 10. I’ve unchecked all raw materials and put my cellars and wells next to the markets. Smokehouses, cheese, and preserves all within 25 tiles of the markets with usables about the same distance. The first one can’t keep up and they both refuse to use the cellars even if I turn the product on in the market. The second one won’t go get cheese, preserves or bread at all, but runs halfway across the map to get pottery and firewood, even though there is one only 10 tiles away. The only thing I have left is cobble roadways but hit a plateau and am getting plenty of births and only children growing up when an elderly dies, and trying to figure who can I spare to have enough workers to speed this up. I thought I would be clever and add another market, but they won’t service the houses already there. Plus the 10 houses on the 2nd market are all coming down with scurvy but they all have greens, fruit, and pickled veggies. The hospital has them too along with medicinal roots, herbs, and medicine, but they won’t get cured. Not sure what else to try except limit them to 4-6 houses per side of the market so they can keep up and turn off usables as well. If you foound a solution please share.
Guys, I must say that I dont have those problems.
Once figured out the way villagers behave, and the stock-limits problem with buildings, it rolls.
I don’t overcharge my people, and am patient.
Maybe the alarm for “unsufficient workers/builders” is set too late, too optimistic.