Have an option to force duplicants to wait until enough material for a full load exists.

[Profit]

The duplicants are mind numbingly exact in their orders.   If you have 500 grams of slime in piles from that one creature and your biodistiller needs 200 Kg's they will make 400 separate trips to fill it...  150kgs of water.... 150 trips from 1kg puddles...  Do you have a air filter making clay? they will sit there and constantly run it to the cabinet. 75KG of algae? 75 trips to the biodistiller. 

There are a couple ways to go about it... Possibly the easiest way would be to make a buffer in the objects and then release them in much larger blocks... but... it will not work with small water flows..   

Perhaps deal with liquids by accessing the entire water source at once from the tile, but that does not cover other things. 

I was thinking the best way is to have an option to set the duplicants to wait until XX% of the requested item is available to gather and then they go to the spots and gather it, but that requires more programming (Every demanded item source would have to be stored in an array and updated or locked as other duplicants grab them) 

[Hexicube]

I've actually seen Duplicants collect multiple piles of items to fill one thing up, but not fluids.

[Profit]

6 hours ago, Hexicube said:

I've actually seen Duplicants collect multiple piles of items to fill one thing up, but not fluids.

I have as well, however they usually only do that if the second pile is within range of of the duplicant as they grab the first pile. 

 

[Scubafrog56]

I would like to second this idea.  My colony was basically destroyed as soon as my dups started collecting a million tiny water bottles from a small flow.

[IvanX]

That's a pretty major issue, the only way to avoid that at the moment is forcing zero priority manually on all such sources. Especially bad when you run out of water, but you still have a contaminated pool, entire colony goes on to gather 1000g of water in a go. All material sweeping is bad later game, as it takes too much time, should join operations on sweeping supplies, as well as reduce time sweeping takes, also could be nice to have some sort of an automated sweeper, for example if you have a few mobs pooping slime, you can't waste half a day gathering 1000g's of slime for the machine that would require 200 kilos to supply you with oxygen for a day.