Selective manual sweep order.

[frogglebunwich]

The game has come a long way in the couple of years I have been playing it so congratulations to Klei on the release.

However   ... intuitively, given the current interface, I have long been expecting the ability to make a selective manual sweep to materialise at some point, like you can make a selective deconstruct order.

Since it hasn't and we are at release I will explain the idea in case it is not on the to do list.

Why? Simply, its a chore to work through piles of debris to make sweep orders for one item. This can happen when say you are building a tank for germy sewage and want to get valuable debris out before filling, e.g. dirt say for farming but dont mind leaving dirt where it sits elsewhere. Likewise in a hatch pen, you might want to take the dirt out of there as well to stop the hatches eating it but can leave the dirt sitting on the floor of the farm where it is, so you dont want to sweep all dirt debris, just dirt in one part of the map. Often you cannot dig down two blocks and tile over because hatch needs to burrow, or maybe the tank is above a bleachstone deposit or chorine cavity you dont want to breach etc.

How ? The way I expected it to come was by using the materials list on the right of the screen, select the material on the list, activate sweep and it would automatically sweep only the highlighted materials in the area you box select. Alternatively, activate sweep then go to the materials list which allows highlighting while sweep is active at the cursor.

Whichever way suits the program, it would be very handy to have selective sweep.

 

[bobucles]

If a floor item has no storage containers, then the sweep command won't do anything. It's a bit annoying to work around, though.

[frogglebunwich]

Thanks for trying to help, its worth discussing and I agree workarounds can be devised but it sounds like you agree that doesn't really solve the chore issue.  Here are a few thoughts about how not solved the chore issue is.

The problem is you often want to sweep things that you dont need to collect, so you might set up a sweep only compactor for say minerals and then when you have a mineral drop in a high decor hallway or barracks or anywhere you dont want it to be you can sweep it. So now when you go to the examples above and try to do a blanket sweep to get your dirt collected, the dupes will pick up the dirt but they are also transporting umpteen gazillion metric tonnes of sandstone and filling up the odds and ends sweep compactors, which is a big waste of time and storage.

If you want to stop that you either have to uncheck every compactor set up for sweeps other than the one you want to achieve and dump the contents on the floor, or have them behind locked doors in which case you have to compartmentalise compactors and micro the door permissions. Another version of that is to build a door to the location and revoke permissions to the rest of the base, trap some dupes there and build a compactor at the location with the specific request for the material you want then micro the compactor and doors again when the job is done.  

I think it would help the flow of gameplay quite a lot if we could do a selective sweep like we can selectively deconstruct is all.

All those in favour say aye!

[Slvrsrfr]

I have asked for this function specifically, a sweep for type drag(box), and drop feature. Sweep for dirt...sweep for etc.... Granted there are methods to achieve this. A a general sweep, with a selective menu similar to the compactor menu would be nice.