"Disable Delivery" and autosweepers in general.

[Leonard_]

So I noticed something peculiar about the rust deoxidizer:

What's the purpose of that duplicated button?

I have never seen it anywhere else before.

I tested it in debug mode and it seems to only stop salt delivery to the machine. Rust is still delivered, either by autosweeper or duplicants.

What would be the purpose of only delivering rust? And even if it disabled all deliveries, I usually just use "Disable building", the automation port or even cut off power for this purpose.

 

To be honest, the very first time I saw these strange buttons, I was really hoping it was some forgotten or scraped feature that would only disable deliveries by either duplicants or autosweepers.

In general, trying to automate things using autosweepers can become very problematic simply due to the fact that duplicants will also look for any excuse to perform the errands themselves rather than let the automation system you designed and built specifically to avoid this do it.

Someone might think "well just restrict duplicants' access to the machines to which you are delivering" and that might work in some cases such as the rust deoxidizer, but won't be an option for others.

As an example, the plants in my glossy drecko farm. My duplicants have to be able to come in and groom the dreckos. But that means they also have access to the plants.

A friend of mine once blew my mind by reminding me of the "disable autoharvest" tool/button. My rancher had exclusive access to that ranch and was forbidden from harvesting anything in the priorities window. I was so used to the fact that working with autosweeper was a hassle that I expected this was the only solution. It would mean he couldn't harvest anything ever, even if he had nothing better to do. That's a compromise I shouldn't have to make, and I didn't because the disable autoharvest feature solved this problem for me.

I really wish a "disable delivery" button and/or tool was actually implemented and would fix the exact same problem with autosweeper deliveries.

Someone might also think "just set the priority extremely low and the sweepers will be left alone to take care of it" and that's what I did for the fertilization of my ranch's plants. However, if my duplicants are ever left with nothing to do, they will start doing it themselves and the "Idle" notification won't show up until much later (which would have alerted me to the fact that they have completed all the other, more important tasks).

 

I recently reached a point in my current colony where I have access to a good source of water and wanted to upgrade my main food to something better.

The ideal solution for me would be bristle blossoms as I would then be able to gradually upgrade my farming in the future to get even better food.

On an older base I had successfully automated mushroom deliveries by using a very neat trick I discovered myself which was to simply use planter boxes.

Duplicants are only able to reach/do things 3 tiles down. The dusk caps would be exactly 3 tiles down from the duplicants, they could therefor harvest them and once that was done, the mushroom would fall one tile down (because of the planter box) and the duplicants would not be able to reach it.

As such, all my duplicants had to do was periodically go and harvest the dusk caps and not worry about anything else, the autosweepers were taking care of both fertilization and delivering the shrooms to the kitchen for later cooking without any interference from my duplicants.

Spoiler

And in case anyone was wondering, the reason I am still letting duplicants harvest my plants despite automating everything else is this:

However, bristle blossoms require irrigation on top of fertilization. There is no way to automatically bottle up fluids for sweepers use. As such I am forced to use a proper farm tile (instead of having my duplicants do it themselves). Because of this, this whole planter box trick no longer works and autosweepers/duplicants interference may happen again.

 

This is what really prompted me to make this thread. I am at a point where I'm going to start designing my farm, and I can properly automate plants that don't require irrigation or are upside down, but not this case.

Having to work around this autosweeper/duplicants interference strongly reminds me of data races in multithreading. If this button had existed, so many headaches would be avoided and designing autosweeper automation would be so much easier.

The fact that you have to come up with so many tricks/compromises to work around this limitation makes me feel like I'm working against the game and that there is a clear missing feature here.

Not to mention there is now an achievement that checks if autosweepers outperform duplicants. If you set up lots of autosweeper automation for the purpose of this achievement but leave your dupes with not much to do afterwards you might just not get it, not because you didn't automate enough, but because of this interference.

 

Anyways, that was my 2 cents/rant regarding autosweepers.

Anyone have any idea on how I could farm bristle blossoms with the only duplicant work being the harvesting itself?

[Yoma_Nosme]

3 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Anyone have any idea on how I could farm bristle blossoms with the only duplicant work being the harvesting itself?

Well...pips

[bobucles]

3 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Anyone have any idea on how I could farm bristle blossoms with the only duplicant work being the harvesting itself?

Bristle blossoms only need water, and stashing food is a supply errand. Don't give the farmer access to ANY water pumps, and lock out their supply job. Hydroponic tiles should be locking out water errands by default.

Fertilizing is a farming errand. The only way to deny it is to lock out the storage. I recommend an ore dispenser pit, dirt falls in, but dupes can't reach it. Naturally your farmer must ALSO be excluded from pip pens and composters.

[Sasza22]

4 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

What's the purpose of that duplicated button?

I guess it`s duplicated beacause of 2 different resources (salt and rust) can be delivered. I didn`t notice it had such a button before though. Might be some feature planned, scrapped or used for debug. Can`t be sure though.

[Miravlix]

Trying to do anything with the priority system in regard to stopping jobs, is nearly impossible, a errand covers many priority categories, so you have to turn off vital categories.

 

The only real solution is to deny dupes access to the resource, like putting all lumber in a "off the grid" storage center, while a dupe may occasionally pickup lumber from the tree farm and deliver it to a machine, automation should reduce the number of jobs by a huge margin.

 

Though with lumber you can harvest tree's and have the wood fall into a "off the grid" location only automation can access. Since it's rare to use fertilization with growing stuff you don't really need it to be a room and can design some things with ladder-Ladder-Farm-Ladder-Ladder designs.

 

hatches and coal is harder, because you usually want to groom them and for that you need some access and it limits the size of rooms. What we need it conveyor belt like factorio, though automation will usually reduce the number of times dupes pick up coal, but they will grab coal occasionally. (You could deny access to generators, but I do like to use all that stupid lead to tinker with generators and make more power out of the same resources)

[Steve8]

40 minutes ago, Miravlix said:

hatches and coal is harder, because you usually want to groom them and for that you need some access and it limits the size of rooms. 

I saw something where someone put them on horizontal pneumatic doors and the coal falls through when they poop it. Not sure if that still works. And I generally don't like abusing doors too much. Already too many weird, unintuitive things you can do with them

[Miravlix]

3 hours ago, Steve8 said:

I saw something where someone put them on horizontal pneumatic doors and the coal falls through when they poop it. Not sure if that still works. And I generally don't like abusing doors too much. Already too many weird, unintuitive things you can do with them

 

You can't build everything on top of pDoors, so part of the floor has to be solid. While pDoors is most likely reducing the chance of dupes picking up coal, it can't remove the problem.

 

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

If I want autosweepers to do a job, there is just one good solution:

=> Block the duplicant access

 

 

PS: Was anyone able to complete the "Easy livin" achievement ?

[Leonard_]

On 8/27/2019 at 5:44 PM, Yoma_Nosme said:

Well...pips

Yeah I guess that's a solution though the natural tiles requirement does bother me a bit.

On 8/27/2019 at 6:34 PM, Sasza22 said:

I guess it`s duplicated beacause of 2 different resources (salt and rust) can be delivered.

That's a good guess but I did test both of them and they both only disable salt delivery.

They also seem to initially make the status category display the wrong resource needed until you unpause the game.

It's worth noting that when activating one, both of the buttons will change state (ie displaying "Enable" or "Disable").

So it looks like it's literally one button that got duplicated somehow.

On 8/27/2019 at 6:37 PM, Miravlix said:

Trying to do anything with the priority system in regard to stopping jobs, is nearly impossible, a errand covers many priority categories, so you have to turn off vital categories.

That's a good point to make because it means I can't even use the "dumb" solution of setting a very low priority like for my ranch's plants.

Doing so would mean my chef would never actually cook my bristle berries.

Even if I set his cooking priority high it will still make him supply to the grill everytime the plants get harvested, reducing the problem to only one duplicant but still not solving it completely.

This reminds me of my kiln issue, I have my kiln set to make ceramic forever on very low, but because for some reason the kiln is considered both supplying and operating, my engineer/operator is delivering to it non-stop whenever I dig out clay.

This is very dumb. I wish multiple errand types had separate priorities per building. I understand if the devs don't want to clutter the ui and/or overwhelm players with too many buttons, but perhaps the errands tab could be used for this and provide a way to override general priority.

Even just the "Disable delivery" button I was talking about would fix this. Only let automation deliver to it and have duplicants use storage bins as an intermediate. This would at least fix the supplying issues.

Definitely wish this area of the game was improved a bit.

On 8/27/2019 at 6:37 PM, Miravlix said:

Though with lumber you can harvest tree's and have the wood fall into a "off the grid" location only automation can access.

Yeah, that's what I meant when I was talking about farming dusk caps. With planter boxes the shrooms could simply fall off and become out of reach for the harvesting duplicants.

But that's not possible with hydroponic farm tiles and I can't see any other tricks to solve this.

On 8/28/2019 at 1:04 AM, Lilalaunekuh said:

If I want autosweepers to do a job, there is just one good solution:

=> Block the duplicant access

Yeah as I said that's an option, but I don't really want to go there as not only would I have to keep irrigating/fertilizing/whatever the plant that I want during the remaining 4 cycles it's no longer growing but also apparently saving and loading the game may break this "automatically harvest/drop" state.

So not only would the harvest rate become kind of erratic, I might end up completely wasting a bunch of resources by loading at the wrong moment.

I'd rather spend the duplicant time instead.

 

By the way, that's a huge farm you've got going there. How many duplicants do you/did you plan on feeding with that? Impressive.

[ONIfreak]

Due to lack of this option for last 300 cycles i clean all the map and move every kind of debris to different room with no dup access - just auto sweepers. Dups will not "steal" autosweeper job if they will not have access to rss. I think this is so far the only option to prevent dups doing random stuff

[Lilalaunekuh]

5 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

This reminds me of my kiln issue, I have my kiln set to make ceramic forever on very low, but because for some reason the kiln is considered both supplying and operating, my engineer/operator is delivering to it non-stop whenever I dig out clay.

Here is my little solution for our killn problem:

The left 2 storage bins are for clay and coal.

The right most one for ceramic, so even if I block the access to this room completely my duplicants would still be able to reach this storage through the pneumatic door.

=> My duplicants see only storage tasks 

 

5 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Yeah as I said that's an option, but I don't really want to go there as not only would I have to keep irrigating/fertilizing/whatever the plant that I want during the remaining 4 cycles it's no longer growing but also apparently saving and loading the game may break this "automatically harvest/drop" state.

If you really want to go down that rabbit hole:

The farm I posted turns off the irrigation for the 4 cycles the plant needs to auto-harvest and the system will reset based on the power consumption of the auto-sweepers. [A trigger based system is immune to potential resets on save/load.]

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/103793-the-art-of-farming-12/

 

[My farm was scaled to feed 24 duplicants on ravanging/ravenous hunger]

[bobucles]

6 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

So not only would the harvest rate become kind of erratic, I might end up completely wasting a bunch of resources by loading at the wrong moment.

Bristle blossom can be easily synced up by turning the lights off. When the full farm is planted, hit the switch and let it rip.

The automated water farm looks pretty nice. It looks like the water flows in an endless circle for the plants. 40 blossoms will need 4800kg of water, and storage holds 5000kg. The storage fills up completely, cuts off, drains until empty, and waits until the sweepers get busy. nice setup.

[Leonard_]

14 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

Here is my little solution for our killn problem

I had forgotten I could just use the restricted access trick with the kilns unlike my farm tiles, thanks for reminding me!

I'll be sure to build something like that real quick.

14 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

If you really want to go down that rabbit hole:

The farm I posted turns off the irrigation for the 4 cycles the plant needs to auto-harvest and the system will reset based on the power consumption of the auto-sweepers. [A trigger based system is immune to potential resets on save/load.]

Oh so the plants do not need any further resources once you're waiting for them to auto-harvest?

I see now that I misunderstood the guidance provided by oni-assistant. I couldn't find any info about ripening on the wiki or anywhere else so thanks for informing me that I actually don't have to keep feeding the plants. That changes a lot.

So if I understand correctly all you have to do is send the exact amount needed to grow the plants for their normal growth cycle (6) and just wait until they ripe at which point you can detect if they have been harvested, avoiding any issues with the save/load setbacks and send over the same amount again. Could even turn off the lights by detecting if any liquid is remaining in the pipes.

Very insightful thread by the way, though there's one part I'm curious about.

You say one row needs up to 5140kg of water total for one growth cycle and that one row contains exactly 40 bristle blossoms.

Yet when I do the calculation myself I get 4800kg of water needed (20kg a cycle, for 40 blossoms, for exactly 6 cycles).

Is this specific to your farm design? My guess is that the surplus is caused by the way your piping is set up? You do say further down that 340kg is "sacrificed" but I just want to be sure.

Theoretically, if I could perfectly split 4800kg of water and distribute it evenly across all plants (maybe by using a "recursive tree" pattern?) and simply detecting when all plants have been harvested to start the process again, would that be enough?

Thanks a lot for your help.

13 hours ago, bobucles said:

Bristle blossom can be easily synced up by turning the lights off. When the full farm is planted, hit the switch and let it rip.

You misunderstood, I was referring to the save/load setback problem which will delay the food yield of the plants, no matter if they are in sync with each other or not.

In theory it could even mean that if you save/loaded every 3 cycles your plants would never yield you any food. This kind of bothers me a bit however I usually play for far longer than 3 cycles at a time so that shouldn't be much of an issue for now.

Though using the lights to have all the plants begin their growth cycle at the same time is a neat little trick that I'll be sure to keep in mind.

[Satyrical364]

22 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

By the way, that's a huge farm you've got going there. How many duplicants do you/did you plan on feeding with that? Impressive.

I'm not OP but by my calculation you can feed 112 dupes with that many bristle blossoms by cooking them straight up.

Edit: Should be 88, actually... my math

[Lilalaunekuh]

7 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Oh so the plants do not need any further resources once you're waiting for them to auto-harvest?

Yes.

 

7 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Is this specific to your farm design? My guess is that the surplus is caused by the way your piping is set up? You do say further down that 340kg is "sacrificed" but I just want to be sure.

You can use a 12 tile long pipe segment for every hydroponic farm tile, but if you want a "reasonable" amount of plants that isn´t worth it.

=> I settled for a this pipe layout to trade some resource for space efficiency.

[480 pipe segments [not including the pipes leading to the shut off valves ...] and 40 shut offs just for one row (or 8.000kcal/cycle) ...]

 

8 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

Theoretically, if I could perfectly split 4800kg of water and distribute it evenly across all plants (maybe by using a "recursive tree" pattern?) and simply detecting when all plants have been harvested to start the process again, would that be enough?

A tree pattern wouldn´t do the trick cause not all packets would always take the righ way,

=> You could build an own buffer for each hydroponic farm tile using a seperate shut off valve.

 

8 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

In theory it could even mean that if you save/loaded every 3 cycles your plants would never yield you any food. This kind of bothers me a bit however I usually play for far longer than 3 cycles at a time so that shouldn't be much of an issue for now.

 

I hate this inconistency myself, but I build my farms to satisfy 100% of my need for food.

=> If I have any other food source, I will end up with a surplus which should act as a buffer for short save/load cycles.

 

6 hours ago, Satyrical364 said:

On 29.8.2019 at 10:21 PM, Leonard_ said:

By the way, that's a huge farm you've got going there. How many duplicants do you/did you plan on feeding with that? Impressive.

I'm not OP but by my calculation you can feed 112 dupes with that many bristle blossoms by cooking them straight up.

Edit: Should be 88, actually... my math

Like I said above: The farm is only capable of feeding 24 duplicants on ravanging hunger (or 48 duplicants playing a normal survival game).

It takes 10 cyles for a bristle blossom to grow and auto-harvest.

=> Each plant yields 200kcal/cycle if you go for gristle berries.

=> 240 plants yield 48.000kcal/cycle

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 8/27/2019 at 6:29 AM, Leonard_ said:

So I noticed something peculiar about the rust deoxidizer:

What's the purpose of that duplicated button?

I have never seen it anywhere else before.

The Rust Deoxidizer requires two materials to operate: Rust, and Salt.  You have a 'disable delivery' for each item that can be delivered.  You have the same mechanic on the algae terrarium.

It isn't obvious, but in the terrarium's case, one delivery is for clean water and the other delivery is for algae.