Autosweeper priority

[Blodo]

I still find it strange that the autosweeper, a tool primarily meant to reduce the amount of store/supply tasks, does not always get priority over manual dupe pickup of an item that it has inside of its area of effect. While I understand in many cases the workaround involves denying dupes access to an area where the autosweeper is operating, this is not always easy nor desirable. One good example is with ranching: a setup that automatically collects eggs via autosweeper will sometimes be interrupted because a dupe will decide at that moment to hand deliver an egg to an incubator that has been set up in such a way that eggs are only supposed to be delivered to it by automation/shipping, and you can't restrict access to the incubator if you want eggs to get the lullabied buff or for dupes to be able to deliver critters that hatched to where they need to go. Another example is metal smelting where you can theoretically set up the work area so that an autosweeper keeps adding more material for uninterrupted work. Sometimes though that won't happen, a dupe will start running from the other side of the map to deliver some ore from a container that is adjacent to the smelter thus interrupting the dupe operating it, even though the autosweeper could get this done in less than a second without interruptions. This is an issue with any setup that must run with dupe interaction involved where you can't just rely on blocking off the area from dupe access.

I think there should be an option on the autosweeper (say a checkbox, like the manual operation one on the conveyor loader) that when set always gives it priority to pick up any items in its area of effect over dupes, effectively pushing its own task to the top or cancelling the dupe task so the autosweeper can do it. E.g. when there is a conveyor loader within the autosweeper's AoE that accepts an item that can be grabbed, the autosweeper should always get the task priority over dupes to pick that item up, even if dupes are currently standing around idle, as opposed to current behaviour where dupes can be summoned from across the map to do the exact same task. Alternatively it could pick up the item regardless of whether a dupe has a task assigned to it, which should autocancel the dupe task since it is no longer reachable.

[Sasza22]

Some dupes already push others from certain tasks if they can do them faster. I think it works for research stations. Wouldn`t hurt if auto sweepers did the same with sweep tasks in their range.