Pitcher pumps need better pathing

[regault]

That or the ability to limit what each pump is allowed to supply. I built a pitcher pump in the pool next to a walled off steam vent along with some ice machines in order to cool it and the dupes went and grabbed water from the bristle berry pump on the other side of the base.

I've also had many times where I've built pumps next to food stations or algae terrariums only to see them be ignored.

Either the dupes should use the closest pump to the target (Instead of the closest one to them when they pick up the task.) or we should be able to earmark what a pump can supply.

[blash365]

14 minutes ago, regault said:

 or we should be able to earmark what a pump can supply.

At least that part should already be possible by simply "disabling" the far-away pumps. It's not ideal, but might be a workaround for your case.

[impyre]

@blash365 "not ideal" is quite the understatement here. For 8 dupes (a reasonable number), playing at any speed, you'd need to constantly monitor the jobs queued and what order they're in. It's like trying to read minds. Not only that, but disabling a pump will cause the jobs for that pump to have to be re-configured (meaning the dupe may well decide to do other things first). I feel that turning pumps on and off to control which pump is used for what job is much closer to "not possible" than to "not ideal", which isn't to say that it's strictly speaking impossible... but I'm certainly not about to do that lol.

EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more, it's a fairly practical solution early game when you're likely to only have one or two pumps anyway and can turn one off without it having a huge effect on something critical like oxygen production. But somehow I don't think that this is the position the OP is in here. It sounds more likely they have several pumps, many dupes, and don't want to deal with them constantly running out of their way to move liquids for planned constructions/liquid locks/filling radiators, etc.

I kinda like this idea, it might also be a good idea to implement on fridges, food storage, and other storage containers as well.

Default configuration is range=0 ("Whole Map" or "infinite"). Which basically gives the behavior we have now. Changing the range setting to have a number value greater than 0 tells the pump how far away from a job giver/target it can be (in tiles) before it's allowed to be used. This means you won't have to do anything silly like try to associate it with each item you want supplied. It will automatically become associated with each object within it's supply range. Of course, this means:

• If you have a pump set to supply some terrariums with a range of 15
• And another pump further away used for cooking
• And the terrarium pump runs dry for some reason
• The terrariums will *not* be supplied from the cook's pump.

This behavior is expected though, and in fact may be the desired behavior. This would allow you to empty, say, a single pool into a specified reservoir, without having to worry about overflow, dupes draining other wells to move water around for no reason, etc.

If this were implemented for fridges/food storage you can set up raw food storage that does *not* have the range to supply your dining tables (preventing hungry dupes from eating inefficiently). And all without any change to default behavior.

[regault]

For illustration, I typically play with about 8 dupes and in my kitchen and terrarium areas build a water reservoir just large enough for a pitcher and a vent. I have experimented with flooding terrariums in the past but this is before atmo suits and the soggy feet penalty in morale and time gets annoying. (Even if you build ladders over the top of the terrariums they need to jump down in the water to plunge them.)

[CodexDraco]

The game needs an automatic bottler and assuming sweepers support bottles, you could completely automate water delivery. This would solve this issue, at least at mid game.