Dupe working prioritys

[Rainbowdesign]

I have seen it again:

A Dupe comes from the other end of the map, digs a tile and moves on to mop something or do some other crap also preferred far away.

It would be really nice if a dupe would stick with what he does for maybe 10-20 operations or till nothing similar he can do is close by any more.

[Asteru]

Click the gear icon in the top right of the priorities screen and enable proximity. 

Whatever priority jobs they’re on, whether it’s up arrow, double up arrow,or dash, it will do other close by jobs of the same priority level as well. 

[Rainbowdesign]

Actually it was enabled when i have seen the dupe doing this i wonder since several versions if its making a big difference...

[bobucles]

Duplicants don't care about distance when choosing priorities. There is a "proximity mode" which is supposed to help, but I haven't seen any hard testing on how it works.

Duplicants have two normal tiers of priorities. Duplicants will first choose the highest arrow tasks set on the priority tab. Lower rank tasks will be ignored until all the high rank tasks are done. They will then look for the highest number priority inside that tier. Be careful of setting different numbers on a single job type. Dupes will run across the map to hit a +1 priority job, and will better service local jobs if everything is at the same number. There's also yellow alert and red alert, use them sparingly because dupes will kill themselves even more than normal.

Ladder building is its own beast. It is actually split into three tasks- supply, dig, build- and duplicants can't really chain the tasks back to back. As you can guess, arrow priorities completely screw up ladder building. But even in a good situation they will screw up. The working dupe doesn't actually reserve the next step so it's a free for all.  First he supplies, recovers, and another duplicant steals the next step while the first one regains their footing. So you see dupes run three marathons across the map for every single step of ladder. There are two major solutions to help:

- Lock the dupes in the work area. If they can't run away, they'll focus on the job in front of them. Play with door access settings.

- Perform one step of the job at a time. First dig out a tunnel the dupes can climb (an S shape works). Fill up a storage container with ladder materials (big supply hauls).  Then build the ladder.

[EnderCN]

If this dupe is supposed to be taking care of your base turn your dig and build priority down 1 peg or even turn them off completely.  You can also mess with door permission.   This won't completely get rid of this but it will minimize it some.

[SharraShimada]

Proximity works the other way around. It does not matter how far away the task ist. But they will do realted jobs there, if possible. Its just zo prevent them to do one task there, move back, and let another dupe do the other task there, when the same dupe could do it.

[Lilalaunekuh]

Just to clear things up:

There is a "hidden" priority system:

• If you use sub-priority 5 for everything duplicants will do tasks from left to right in the priority overlay.

=> Duplicants will always tidy (mop) before they try to dig ...

(If everything is priority 5, storage will have the lowest priority, which is good.^^)

 

Proximity mode on the other hand just removes that hidden system:

• If you use sub-priority 5 for everything duplicants will just move to the closest task.

(Sounds good on paper to reduce travel times, but if your priorites are not well set your duplicants could never do critical tasks.)

 

Spoiler

Most of the time the hidden system is good and most of our "systems to prioritize work" are increasing the priority for tasks on the left and lowering them on the right.

(Most of us will set attack on a higher priority and storage on a lower one, which is the same as ONI does out of the box.)

 

=> If you adapt how you use your sub-prioities you can achieve the same working order with or without the proximity option

 

 

[Rainbowdesign]

You can test the system if you want to see what dupes are send from where to where:

Give your colony the order to kill a wild shove vole and enjoy randomly popping up alerts about dupes attacking - those dupes are usually VERY far away you can click on the alert and know from where they will come to kill the shove vole.

 

 

Proximity mode on the other hand just removes that hidden system:

• If you use sub-priority 5 for everything duplicants will just move to the closest task.

Not even good on paper... The hidden system is used in the rarest cases so thats the reason the button does nothing.

Proximity should prioritze by location giving a task that is close by + 3 or so levels of priority to the priority it has with the dupe (except disabled tasks) and then fall off and things on the other side of the colony should be deprioritized till they are disabled. The button proximity should be replaced by a number selector where you can choose on how much the close location is prioritized.

[bobucles]

22 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Proximity mode on the other hand just removes that hidden system:

• If you use sub-priority 5 for everything duplicants will just move to the closest task.

Wait, what? C'mon Klei! There's no possible way we could know this by default.

[secondcircle]

This is interesting, I always thought that everything is prioritized left to right assuming the same upticks or down-ticks, then afterwards is done in order of the 1-9 priority you assign to a task.

 

IE, It will start with all errands that have categories for the dupes double priority uptick box, order all those in descending order, then pick the highest one, if there are none or they are all completed, it then goes down to a single priority uptick box order all in descending order by the actual errand priority, then do those etc so on, and so on, Is this not how it works?

[Gurgel]

36 minutes ago, secondcircle said:

Is this not how it works?

You can actually see what a dupe has in its priority queue on their info-screen. I recommend just spending a few minutes on that. Pretty illuminating.

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 hour ago, bobucles said:

Wait, what? C'mon Klei! There's no possible way we could know this by default.

Can´t play right now, but if someone else could post a screenshot of the info that appear if you hover over the proximity option.

(There is a nice info box explaining everything about the priority system.)

Spoiler

After I came back to ONI I missed to use the proximity option till I saw this thread^^

=> The options has an info that explains everything, but finding the option in the first place ...

 

 

[JohnFrancis]

If memory serves a a default command of any type set to default priority 5 will have a value of 35 plus a fractional modifier. So life support stuff with be 35.20 and dig with be 35.12 or something like that. The fractional modifier is to ensure that for equal priority commands dupes will carry our the more "important" tasks first, this is useful early game in a small base but becomes problematic as travel distances increase. To turn of the fractional modifier turn on proximity, now all commands are only valued by whole priority number.

The priorities system has up down arrows increasing/decreasing the priority of that task type (hover for details) for that dupes by 10+/-. Example : dupe with -2 priority to digging and a priority 5 digging command is issued will value that command at 5. (assuming proximity is on) The main thing to take away from priorities is if a dupe has +2 up arrows in any tasks they will only do those tasks until they are all complete. Then they will do all +1 tasks, then unmodified tasks etc.

Exhaustive priorities tutorial in spoilers below.

Spoiler

 

 

[bobucles]

7 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Can´t play right now, but if someone else could post a screenshot of the info that appear if you hover over the proximity option.

(There is a nice info box explaining everything about the priority system.)

Attached.  "Helps ... in areas with lots of high priority errands". If it does nothing for 5+ priority errands then the tooltip is completely misleading.