QOL - Dupe activity

[Sol_Armande]

So...one of the most frustrating things I've come across in this game (aside, perhaps from random idiosyncrasies with fluid flow/gas deletion stuff that one can simply look up) is dupes digging or building themselves into a spot with no oxygen, or that they cannot get out of.

It would be really spectacular if the pathing prevented dupes from doing this, at least when there aren't priorities that override that option - I had a clear path set out to build recently, and my dupe chose to instead tunnel upwards, and then build tiles to trap itself in an area with no exit and no oxygen.

I get that they're stupid, but wow that's frustrating, even when manually assigning them a path out they didn't have enough time to make it to oxygen.

Also, it seems like their apparent preference for digging the tile out from under their feet and then climbing up a 2-tile wall is a big part of this issue, if they simply could not do that (like, if they just fell down to the lower level immediately or treated the 2-tile wall as 3 tiles tall after they dug the one out from under their feet) then this would happen less.

Cheers, and thanks for yet another extremely fun (if sometimes frustrating) experience in ONI!  

[Lawnmower Man]

I totally agree that greedy digging is the root of many stranding problems.  You can help the automation by using the priority system.  When you need them to dig a path in a certain order, you set the first blocks to 9, the next ones to 8, etc.  This works pretty well if you only need to order about 4-5 layers.  More than that, and they will never get to the last dig orders, because the default is 5 and odds are, you have another default dig order somewhere else.  It would be really nice if you could draw an exact dig path for them to follow so they always dug out the blocks in a well-defined order.

I encounter these problems the most when I want them to dig out a section entirely, but do it top-down so that I don't have to build extra scaffolding for their reach.  The layers work fine if the block is solid, but when it gets near a ragged bottom, then micro-managing is required to avoid ladders.  If we had a "dig path" tool which made them dig in the exact order of a line left through all the dig tiles, that would be amazing!