I haven’t seen this anywhere yet but I may have missed it.
When you spread out to access outlying resources the villagers and carts still seem to use random stockyards, storehouses etc. for fetching or depositing products/raw materials instead of closer ones. This leads to lack of, for example coal and metal ore in a blacksmith or smeltery, when there is a coal and iron or gold mine close by. So the coal is stored in storage A other side of the town, the metal is in storage B elsewhere and finished product is in storage C in another galaxy far, far away. This results in delays in production which even Vader cannot solve due to villagers and carts careering all over the place fetching and carrying. Even if you build storage right close by which the villagers disdainfully simply ignore.
Can a mechanism be implemented whereby the fetch and carry donkeys identify the closest storage area to offload at or fetch from?
Please
They actually already do this. However, if it isn’t set up quite right, or one is empty, then funky things will begin happening. The best approach to insure things remain running smoothly is to remove chance and make sure there is only one storage location available for any good.
Even for a large town there is really no need to float more than an upgraded stockyard worth of any one material, just set that as your production cap so that when it is full workers will go off to do something else useful, and enjoy the benefits of sensibly flowing resources. If you really need more, then just put them next to each other.
Several of us have pounded on this point over the months:
Travel Time is the greatest source of Inefficiency in your Town.
IF there is more than one place to take something, the carts and people will inevitably take it to the place least available to the buildings and workers that need it. When travel time to get and deliver goods takes up over 60% of the worker’s time, that all comes out of time to produce anything.
That means, as @Meowbeep said, keeping the storage allotted to a given good down to a minimum: preferably one stockyard, storehouse, root cellar or granary. IF you have to have more than one, keep them close together to avoid carts wandering all over the map.
Second, though, it also means putting the buildings that actually use to materials as close to the storage as you can: a stockyard full of timber/wood should be as close as you can put it to the Sawmills and Firewood Splitters. The stockyard designated for Coal should be near your Brickyards and Foundries, etc. IF possible, a central root cellar/warehouse combination should be designated for all the food and luxuries needed that is as close to as many Markets as you can put it. And do not allow milk, raw meat or fish into those, because milk should only go to a storage right next to the Cheesemakers, and raw meat and fish to a root cellar right next to the Smokers.
It takes some serious planning, and sometimes just a lot of trial and error, but properly planning the locations of storage and production and consumption buildings can make more difference in how well the town works than having infinite numbers of Mines providing resources: if they have to be dragged all over the map, those resources will largely be wasted.