Advice on avoiding "Long Commutes"?

[TGI]

Hey guys. I've been playing ONI on and off for about a year now but recently got back into it. The problem I'm consistently facing is I get the "Long Commutes" warning message and I think I've reached a point where it's actually become a problem. (Tasks aren't getting completed fast enough, which is causing long term issues)

Anyone have any advice on how to avoid this aside from building transit stuff? I'll be honest in the fact that I haven't touched automation yet. Working towards it slowly though as the last time I played it was a brand new update. LOL

Here's a pic of what I have going on as far as base design goes. I have more stuff going off in every direction, too.

[Smithe37]

Don't more than three dupes and never leave the starting biome.

For real though, optimizing your base for movement and layout would help however any decently sized late game base will have issues with travel time. The warning is just annoying and probably worth ignoring if your base is still running fine, dupes are fed and nobody is dead.

[Guest]

You can use door permissions to keep dupes in certain areas, or rather keep them out of areas they do not need to be in. Adjusting dupe priorities may help with this too. If dupes are ping-ponging around doing supply or storage, maybe specialize a dupe and reduce the other's priority.

Not sure where your water supply is, but the first thing I see is put your blossoms in hydroponics so you dont have to run water to them.

[Nebbie]

You've got tons of uneven flooring (increases time to get across because hopping across is free but going up and down is not) and no fire poles to speed up movement downwards. I strongly recommend you put a fire pole to the right of the ladder right of the printing pod, so that duplicants coming down from upper areas can do so faster. I also recommend building washrooms 4 tiles high instead of 3; you're not really saving much since you have to encroach on the level below where showers are anyways with your design; if you had simply kept the floor with the printer 4 tiles high in both directions, you would've had floors lined up I think.

[QuQuasar]

• Fire poles are extremely fast in the downward direction. Anywhere you've got a particularly long ladder, coupling it with a fire pole can help.
• Storage compactors and refrigerators can be used to stockpile resources where you will need them and reduce delivery times. Algae next to deoxidizers, ingredients next to food preparation buildings, dirt next to mealwood, etc.
• Most of those pneumatic doors can be permanently opened, excluding the ones keeping animals in the farms and ranches.
• Dupes slow down when they change direction. Building consistent floor heights looks less interesting, but it can save duplicant time.

All of these are microoptimizations, however. Realistically, door permissions and duplicant priorities are the way to go.

[bobucles]

For the most part, you're stuck with long commutes forever. Maps are big, and dupes spend more time running to jobs than they do working jobs. Here are a few tricks to cut down those long commutes:

- Supply skill. The default 200kg capacity is only adequate for moving food, supplying farm materials and filling algae distillers. Every other job massively benefits from moving more material. Dupes will try to service clusters of tasks, so make sure they have the carry capacity to do it in one trip. Pick up this skill for everyone, they all can use it.

- Sweeping. Dupes will only look immediately around them when choosing a job. If there's 5kg of algae next to them, they'll run a full map marathon to move 5kg of algae. Concentrate your resources into small piles, such as by using the ore dropper.  Now instead of dupes running 50 trips of 5kg, they will run 1 full sized trip. You don't need to haul everything inside the base, but after digging out a major area be sure to sweep it together.

- Farm auto sweeping. Farms generate a huge number of tiny jobs. Every single farm task can be a marathon across the map. Don't let your dupes waste their time. Set up autosweepers to pick up crops, drop the food into storage and keep the farm areas clean. More clever designs can use sweepers to fertilize the farm areas as well.

- Industrial autosweeping. Autosweepers massively help out the kiln and filtration machines. Fill up a local storage bin (use those supply skill talents!), lock the room and let the sweeper do all the grunt work. Coal generators love autosweepers and any machine that doesn't require direct dupe operation will hugely benefit.

- Door permissions. If a dupe can't access all of the map, they won't run across all of the map. Lock a few dupes inside the base and give all their related jobs low number priority. They'll be stuck and those are the only jobs they can do. The duplicants who can leave the base will run outside to perform higher priority jobs.

- Work areas. With the magic of door permissions, dupes can be locked into small areas to focus only in that zone. Small work areas are far more dupe efficient than giving full access to the map at all times. With automation, dupes can be trapped inside work areas for the entire work day and only be allowed to leave at the end. Experiment!

[Gurgel]

Apart from the advice already given, just ignore the warning. For tasks not getting done, give the dupes some time by not setting new ones for a few cycles. You can queue up a lot and then things take forever to get done. If you have a stable base that can run without you for a while, just let it run and do something else for an hour or so.

[Qubit]

And there's a mod to make it easier to ignore.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1725950119

[EnderCN]

You can't realistically play the game and not get this message.  Fire poles are the obvious thing missing from your base.  Automation can help with this as well.  Most people like to have 3 tile wide vertical corridors.  This allows for better air flow, it makes room for a ladder and fire pole and it gives you more space to run pipes and wires without them being quite as ugly.

If you click on reports and look in there you can see a breakdown on what work each dupe is actually doing per day.  Look for ones that aren't doing much and figure out why they aren't.  Sometimes going into the priorities tab and clicking on proximity will make things better.  I haven't taken the time to really study what it does, but you can try it for a cycle or two and see if your production is getting better.

[Dracian]

As said before, I think this message is unavoidable, no matter how you play.

I'll tell you pretty much the same as the previous users. I'll add that : try to regroup interdependent 'stuff'. For example : regroup all your cooking machinery in one room (including a refrigerator) and place your Mess/Great Hall next to it. In the same fashion, place your showers next to your Barracks/Bedrooms and build as much of showers as the maximum number of Dupes in a given shift (build 8 showers if the highest number of Dupes in your shifts is 8).

Another thing useful : priorities. When you are building a big project for your colony, do not hesitate to increase its priority. This will prevent Dupes starting to build your project, then going to help your Chef to cook something, and then going back to build the project, etc, etc..

Once you have a reliable and durable power source as well as access to a large quantity of plastic, you can also build transit tubes, but they are really interesting only for long travels (ie : up to the surface or down to the oil biome).

[Lilalaunekuh]

Ok, if you're late in the game and are not short in duplicant work time, just increase the "down time" on the schedule.

Long commutes just compares the total travel time to the cycle length.

Keep in mind that the travel time is a portion of the "work time", so reducing the total work time will reduce the total travel time as well.

 

For real efficiency and low travel time, it mostly about how you use the priority screen and specialize your duplicants.

[situpc]

What most people in this thread are ignoring is the fact that message will not go away once you get a decent-sized base. You can have plastic ladders, fire poles, transit tubes, doesn't matter. Sure in your specific base you could optimize some things. But don't do it because of a useless "feature", only do it if you're having issues getting tasks done. And oftentimes that has nothing to do with transit at all.

[Dosephshih]

As this message is easily appear when the travel time is more than 40%, instead of avoid this message completely, i will check the % of the travel time. I set myself the target to be 50%, and i find it is acceptable for my previous base at Cycle 500 with 16 dupes.

When i find the travel time more than 50%, i will try to add firepoles, tubes and relocate some buildings if necessary.

[oosyrag]

Good use of job priorities can mitigate a huge amount of travel time as well.

[Yoma_Nosme]

One advice that has not been mentioned. Pretty obvious imo but doesn't hurt to mention it.  

Use the materials that are at the location.

In more words. For example you dig down and build ladders. If you've dug through sedimentary rock use it to build the ladders. Otherwise dupes will run to and fro to deliver sandstone or something else

[Beercules]

On 7/7/2019 at 12:32 AM, TGI said:

Hey guys. I've been playing ONI on and off for about a year now but recently got back into it. The problem I'm consistently facing is I get the "Long Commutes" warning message and I think I've reached a point where it's actually become a problem. (Tasks aren't getting completed fast enough, which is causing long term issues)

Anyone have any advice on how to avoid this aside from building transit stuff? I'll be honest in the fact that I haven't touched automation yet. Working towards it slowly though as the last time I played it was a brand new update. LOL

Here's a pic of what I have going on as far as base design goes. I have more stuff going off in every direction, too.

Not sure if someone mentioned it, there is a "Proximity task select option" in the priorities tab, under the gear icon in top right corner. This has help me a bit.

[lonelysquirrel]

My bases also tend to grind to a halt due to logistics issues.  My dupes to just stop getting things done, without any clear reason.

Debugging this for me has been about tweaking the errands tab for things I want to get done, and using the follow option to see what dupes are doing.  Usually I can see dupes being stupid and then I can figure out what I did to cause it.  It's always something I did.  And so here are some of the solutions I have noticed which so far haven't been mentioned:

• Storage bins should be all the same priority and sweep only.  Exceptions should really be for exceptional circumstances and temporary.  If you mess this up you will notice it fast.
• Certain priorities, like Digging and Construction, go together.  If a dupe has these at different priorities dupes can ping-pong between digging and building ladders.  In other words, if what you are trying to do takes 2 different task types, then you don't want to have 1 dupe doing half and a different dupe doing the other half, each waiting on each other.  They'll end up running across the map to find something to do.
• Therefore excavating an area before building in it can save time overall
• Ironically using too many subpriorities (i.e. numbers) and priorities can make things slower.  It can cause dupes to look for the most efficient thing or the highest priority thing on the map that they can do, instead of the nearby thing.  I've found better results trying to use priority 5 as much as possible. 
• Watch out for things like coal generators, algae oxidizers, and other important stuff being set above 5.  This means anyone with a supply priority (or life support priority) may drop what they are doing to run across the map to resupply it.  Again, door permissions, door permissions with clock automation, and auto-sweepers help.
• Supplying oxygen to new areas is absolutely necessary if you don't have exosuits.  Build a diving bell with an oxidizer or a terrarium if you need to.

 

[EnderCN]

6 hours ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

One advice that has not been mentioned. Pretty obvious imo but doesn't hurt to mention it.  

Use the materials that are at the location.

In more words. For example you dig down and build ladders. If you've dug through sedimentary rock use it to build the ladders. Otherwise dupes will run to and fro to deliver sandstone or something else

In addition to this if you don't want to use the materials close at hand for some reason, you can build a storage bin near where you are working and set it to a small amount of the material you want to use.  This allow the supply dupes who usually can carry a lot to deliver big chunks to the storage bin.  If they  supply straight to a build command they will only bring small amounts at a time.

[gbhil]

RE Priorities and skills:

If you have 4 dupes, 2 with high dig and construction skills and 2 with high supply skills, a job will go faster if you lock dupes out of tasks in the priorities screen.

Make supply very low priority for the diggers and builders, make digging and construction very low priority for the suppliers. A great example here is building a long ladder. While 2 dupes are digging one tile, 2 others are supplying the materials to build the ladder section. Your builders don't climb up and down to fetch materials after they dig out a square.

[TGI]

Oh wow thank you so much for the advice everyone! This is great.

For the most part everything in my base is fine, so I'm considering continuing it just to see what I can salvage from it. I'm trying to test all of the new mechanics out so I can get a grasp on them before the new update drops and I have to start all over. LOL.

Im definitely going to build a fire pole and try and move towards giving dups specific roles. Right now I currently have a bunch of dups that are specialized all over the place, and like someone mentioned, they do all have the bonus carrying skill. But some are like... Cook Builders and Farmer Diggers... So Im gonna try honing in on more specific stuff.

Thanks guys!

[KittenIsAGeek]

If it hasn't been stated before: Sweeping jobs will almost always trigger the "long commutes" flag.  Even if your'e sweeping an area  just a litle ways down a ladder, your dupes will be spending more time running to the material and back to the bin than they spend actually working -- and that's the mechanic that triggers the flag.