This one thing is making it extremely difficult to set up any kind of remote outpost. It wouldn’t be too bad if homes could be put out there and people actually find homes nearest to where they work but they don’t. But Temporary Shelter works well for workers to get food for themselves, but then they spend a bunch of time running back to their home to stock that with food, even though they don’t need food since they got it from the Temp Shelter. Depending on other residents taking some of the food or decay I’ve seen a miner run home then as they get almost to the mine turn around to stock their shelter again.
I’d like to see “Stocking Shelter” turned off for now if possible. That would go a long way in being able to settle further out.
Yeah, if I could get people to be in the right homes, you might be able to make a remote settlement work. But as you mention, the nightsoil harvester is likely going to be a problem still as he’ll decide to run all over creation. Change him to a rat catcher circle, or limit his maximum travel distance, shown by a large area of influence similar to a Theater placement. Do that and you might actually be able to make remote cities work.
I still worry that the workers will go running all over if you run out of an item they want at the local warehouse and they decide to take a journey to the other outpost to get some. Putting in some maximum distance limitation would be good.
I’m sure they know there is a lot of things to look at. But I think if they just are able to turn off that one call to stock the shelter that it would greatly reduce things while they work on it.
That would be the majority of it, but not all. If your worker in the Foundry doesn’t have any iron ore in the warehouse/stockyard, he’ll run all the way out to the iron mine, even if it’s across the map to get what he can carry. Same with the Smokehouse worker, if there is no raw meat/fish in the storage in town he’ll run all the way out to the hunting/fishing shacks.
So not just considering proximity, that needs to be there, but also needs to have a maximum limit. If each grid square is 5 meters, then if nothing is found within 500 meters (100 squares) for a worker they just go idle, even if there is an item in storage 800 meters away… or 3000 meters away.
I really think that they should just add the halo thing to every building. It’s a core mechanic so players know how to interact with it, its targetable, its easily visible. Perfect.
Build a house, it has a halo, inhabitants accept employment within that distance. That fishing shack a bit to far to the left? Select one house and move the halo. Shelter stocking? Only items within the halo. Wagons? I don’t know if there’s any helping wagons to be honest but otherwise, boom, mostly functional town.
What I’d like to see is the market jobs expanded and the people that work there also do the stocking of citizens houses so the people with other jobs don’t have to waste time doing it themselves.
I had a laborer carrying logs back to the stockpile and abruptly stop and drop their logs on the ground to “Stock Shelter”… even though the Stockyard was on their way to the shelter. So they dropped their logs, walked to the market to get supplies, walked back to their shelter to drop off, and then get reassigned a task and the logs stayed there until another villager picked it up.
Agreed it is annoying, especially when the domino effect of the dropped items comes into play. So in order to go and stock the shelter the worker drops the iron ore, which can’t then be used by the foundry to make iron, which delays the making of barrles to preserve food better… for example.