Sweeping Overhaul Suggestion

[Nico_e]

Hello,

I'm finding manual sweeping errands(and sweeping in general) in the game quite frustrating. I've done some experimenting and I've come to the following understanding. Please let me know if I've got the function all wrong:

Problem:

According to the game tooltips, Sweeping falls under two errands, TIDYING and SUPPLYING(already here it's starting to cause a headache). In fact, I think it's a hidden priority under STORING as well. Because you see if you have a dupe set to TIDYING only, it will actually ignore all sweep commands UNLESS you have SUPPLYING and/or STORING enabled in the priority screen for that dupe as well. Because you see a duplicant can't tidy something up unless it can store/supply as well it seems. Yes, this is somewhat logical, but from a gameplay perspective, it's unintuitive.

Solution and Suggestion:
Sweeping should be under one thing only: TIDYING. And the act of Storing the swept-up materials should be BAKED INTO the Sweep job. So if I set a manual sweeping job on the ground, the dupe with TIDYING errand enabled will sweep this up AND store it automatically in a container. Same for bottles: sweep it up and bring it to a bottle emptier.
A sweep job should NOT consider if a dupe has STORING/SUPPLYING in their job priorities. Again, it should be BAKED INTO the sweep job from the get-go.

Now you might think "but what about the STORING of stuff lying on the ground then?". Well, you could add the ability to set priorities with the priority tool directly on debris lying on the ground. Yes, that would add a ton of numbers on the screen when you have the priority tool open. But I'd rather have that, than the current state of sweeping.
STORING is now seemingly happening either automatically(dependent on dupe's storing priorities AND storage bin priorities) or through manual sweeping jobs. And you know what I think about the latter.
One solution might be to remove STORING from Errand Types in the game and instead add the sub-errand "Storing" under the TIDYING errand type instead. Because right now, according to the STORING in-game tooltip you only have "Delivering" and "Store Materials". "Delivering" would fall under SUPPLYING(which is seemingly already happening in-game), and "Store Materials" would fall under TIDYING. 
So from this point of view having STORING as a separate errand type does not make sense.

I think this might be a viable solution. However, I might not have covered all grounds here and overlooked something making this not doable/unpractical from a game developer perspective.

BTW, manual Mopping works perfectly as the guys with TIDYING just leaves the bottles on the ground. But if I put a Sweep job on those bottles? That's a whole another matter

BUG
Also, there seems to be a bug in the "errands" tab on debris lying on the ground, making it very hard to troubleshoot: 
If you put a sweeping job on a bunch of Sandstone on the ground it will NOT show anything under the "errands" tab on the Sandstone. So we cannot see if someone is coming to sweep it or not. You have to manually click through your dupes and see if anyone is on their way to the point of the sweep job. And if you do find a dupe that's on their way it won't show up as Sweeping on their "To-do list". It will show up as "Storing Sandstone", and not "Sweeping Sandstone" as it in my humble opinion it should. This makes it very hard to find out what's wrong. I will post this in the Bug-Tracker forums as well.

I'm not a game designer AND I get that it is complicated to create a game like this, but I think this one deserves a bit of an overhaul.
And again I might be missing something, making my so-called solution undoable. If so please leave a comment.

Regards,

Nico

[Sasza22]

The delivery errands are all sorts of weird. Mostly the supply errand that is super unintuitive as half of the time supplying the materials to the building requring it goes under a different priority like cooking or tinkering. Basically it should either be unified so all deliver tasks are supply priority or just outright removed and baked into storage and life support for sweeping and power gens respectively.

Now lets jump to the end for a second. The bug you are referring to is not actually a bug. A storage task doesn`t originate from the debris but from a building that accepts those (storage bins for example). Click the storage bin that accepts sandstone and check errands there. It`s a 2 step job which causes the weirdness. Also you always need a free supply bin and it`s easy to miss when all are filled up.

For bottles it`s a bottle emptier. This one is easy to troubleshoot. The thing accepts one bottle at a time. So if you got 20+ lying on the floor you will have to wait for each one to empty itself before a new is picked up. It`s a common problem. Best to build 3-4 emptiers and set to high priority and all bottles are gone pretty fast.

[Nico_e]

Glad I'm not alone

Yes, you can check containers. However, chances are you have more than 1 container that allows Sandstone. I probably have over 30. clicking through 30 bins that stores sandstone to find out if my sweeping job is being done is quite impractical. Just clicking the debris in question is the quickest way 

The debris does have an errand tab on the object and so should display what errand the debris is linked to, whether it's sweeping, storing, supplying etc. The game does this exact thing for everything else, but not debris. I have yet to see anything show up under the Errands tab on debris. Hence the "bug". Maybe it's not supposed to show anything there, but then there shouldn't be any errands tab on debris in the first place. But I'd rather it displaying what errand it is involved in. That way you can always confirm at any given time whether or not the debris in question is on a duplicant's to-do list, in any shape, way or form.

Example: "Meep - Priority 7 - Sweeping Sandstone". Just like it displays under the Errands tab on everything else in the game.

As for the bottles I figured out the bottle emptier thing a while back. I usually have 4-5 emptiers over reservoirs  BUT come to think of it bottles do have more destinations than just bottle emptiers(research, farming, food supply etc), so that would complicate my suggestion of baking bottle-emptying into the Sweeping job. A solution to this could be to change the game so that duplicants doing manual water deliveries(i.e. not through pipes) can only do so from a bottle well. Which means that all single bottles scattered around the base MUST be emptied in bottle emptiers, and cannot be used for supplying. This would make things a wee bit less efficient at times, but more tidy and simple. Also, sometimes it's better to take one trip to the well, than taking 5 trips back and forth to pick up semi-empty bottles on the ground for supplying purposes.

[bobucles]

8 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

ked into storage and life support for sweeping and power gens respectively.

The "life support" errand is vastly under used. I think only the algae deoxidizer has it? It seems like the kind of task that should cover oxygen or electricity production.

[Sasza22]

21 hours ago, bobucles said:

The "life support" errand is vastly under used. I think only the algae deoxidizer has it?

Pretty much the only the oxygen production machines (algae and rust). I think manual and coal gens should count as well. Then moving all the deliver tasks to their associated job (most of them already are there) and sweep tasks to storage only. Also clean up the tasks that need 2 different priorities like repair (storage and tidy, srsly that`s so uninuitive).