Problems with priority management and build times

[Greybear]

So I've created this huge base because some evil developer made an achievement for having 20 duplicants, and now that I finally set up a core and an airlock - I'm trying to start som industry outside my base. The problem is it takes forever for the duplicants to get anything done. They deliver very small amounts of materials, sometimes even just to a single piece of wire. Other times they just run all the way out to build a single piece and then run back in. Is there anyhting obvious I'm missing here? IS having too many duplicants the problem? Stealing the tasks from each other? Do I need more atmo suits (have 3)? This part is getting extremely tedious, but I really want to push into steel production for once...

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Prince Mandor]

Do you have 'Proximity' setting ON?

(It is in Priority screen)

[qda]

Priority 9 gaming is the answer, the only answer, ever.

Joke aside, there is a large number of factors involved in this kind of situation, so here are some potential improvements :

The outside atmosphere seems to be mostly oxygen, and judging by the surrounding biomes, you shouldn't have any temperature issues as long as you mop cold water in the ice biome. If so, I would then advice to disable your atmo suit checkpoint and let everyone get to work together, which may potentially be multiple times faster.

On the other hand, if you really wish to use those atmo suit right, you can use a door to only let relevant-to-task dupes go outside, in this case, supplying, digging and building dupes. With only 3 dupes allowed to be outside at a time, there is most certainly at least one dupe at all times (which means one third of your manpower) which does not contribute to your building but is instead sweeping, storing, harvesting, anything really.

There also may be some tweaking to do about either dupe priorities or colony priorities. The building task is composed of two phases, the supplying part and the actual building part. Should a single dupe complete those two phases, it will, at most, supply materials for a few tiles/buildings, and then start to build. Instead, with that many dupes, having multiple (4 to 6) dedicated suppliers will ensure the supplying part is done on a large scale, letting building dupes doing only what they do best, building.

And fire poles can save some time, not a crazy amount obviously, but decent enough to feel it has some impact on your tasks.

[Prince Mandor]

If you have some free dupes, you can make one of them delivery-man. Just increase priority of his delivering jobs, and prohibit building. So he came with ton of iron to all your wire

[Greybear]

I set up the door, and only allow a dedicated builder-, digger- and delivery-dupe. I think the huge problem right now is ladders - there are only a few reachable builds available at a time.

[goboking]

31 minutes ago, Greybear said:

I set up the door, and only allow a dedicated builder-, digger- and delivery-dupe. I think the huge problem right now is ladders - there are only a few reachable builds available at a time.

If you have your digger dig up or down in a snaking pattern then the digger and supplier can work ahead of your builder, alleviating a bit of the logjam that forms when constructing ladders one tile at a time.

[Prince Mandor]

33 minutes ago, Greybear said:

I set up the door, and only allow a dedicated builder-, digger- and delivery-dupe. I think the huge problem right now is ladders - there are only a few reachable builds available at a time.

On exploration phase, you can try Dig area leaving undigged cells in Knight-move pattern, so dupes can climb without ladders, and build ladders after that - this makes entire ladder accessible for building

[bobucles]

A little understanding of how duplicants work can help you get the most out of them instead of watching them run circles all day.

The first and most important thing is that duplicants will only consider jobs they can immediately physically access. It's one of the reasons ladders are so slow to build. The duplicant can only touch one ladder tile at a time so they will supply it, dig it, and then the next ladder becomes a new job for a new duplicant. The new duplicant may be way across the map so you have to wait for it to run the marathon to build the next ladder tile. There are tricks such as excavating an S shape so dupes can climb as they dig and stay on task.

Once duplicants choose a job, they will immediately grab whatever is closest to them at that point in time. So if a duplicant is standing standing next to germy material, they'll grab it. They will also grab any materials within a very short reach of the first item so they can usually grab 3 or 4 more things. So if a 2kg block of algae is sitting alone on the ground, the dupe will spend his entire job moving 2kg of algae. Sweep your messes into larger piles so that duplicants have access to large stacks of materials.

Be aware of how duplicants choose priorities. Dupes will obey yellow alert commands, then the arrows on the priority screen, then the numbers. An up arrow + priority 1 will always be more important than no arrow + priority 9. Some jobs happen kind of randomly so for example be careful of a duplicant that has high priority farming and low priority digging. They will frequently run across the map, dig one tile, then run back to base to harvest a ripe plant, and spend all day running around like that.

Be extremely careful of the supply task. Supply jobs are basically scattered all over the map. A critical supply job- placing your food into storage- is supply ONLY and it competes with all the supply jobs. If your food is rotting on the ground this is why.

Duplicants trapped inside a work area are EXTREMELY efficient. Once trapped they will no longer consider any tasks scattered across the map and duplicants outside the area won't queue up tasks from 9000 miles away. This is a very hard thing to automate, but take advantage of door settings to slave drive your dupes at a work site.