Help with priority.

[spike4597]

so essantially what happens when i start a new colony:

everything is going fine, i only use 5 and 6 priority.

i get something important, but even with 7 it doesnt get done fast enough, so i set it to 9.

then repeat, and repeat again, and eventually everything is 9 and i have nowhere to go...

except yellow alert.

so i use this, and byt the time i make it to cycle 400, i average 35 yellow alerts, and by cycle 600(farthest i've ever made) i average 180.

i have improved, and i am doing much better.

i do change duplicant skills, but i just dont have enough duplicants for everything.

Help?

[gabberworld]

priority can be done 2 ways either increase numbers or setting up at inside priorities menu

there is also you may think off level up dupes runspeed by using manual generator

[NewWorldDan]

The best advice I can give is specialize your dupes.  Like, have a farming specialist that is only allowed to farm.  I built a colony around this once - everyone was locked in their own area of specialty.  The farmer was locked in with a small bedroom, bathroom, dining room, and 2 greenhouses.  Nothing else.   Same thing with ranchers.  And the refinery.  And the kitchen. Food was shipped around the colony on conveyor rails.  Haulers and builders had the run of the place.  Most of my dupes were idle 50% of the time.  Productivity was through the roof.   Most things are done with a priority level of 5.  Some rocket logistics get a 6.  I like to queue up things like large scale sweeping as a 1.  Use strategically located storage bins.  Like, put a bin with a priority of 4 or 5 filled with dirt next to the basic research station. 

Automate things.  See my thread on water boiling - anything that takes dupe labor out of the equation is a good thing.  The water boiler may consume some power, but there are no deliveries of filtration medium, no desalinator to service.  It just works.  Use autosweepers to deliver dirt to your farm plots.  Ship the harvested plants directly to your kitchen area.  Once you get ahead of the curve, you'll look around wondering what to do to keep your colony busy.  

[gabberworld]

9 minutes ago, NewWorldDan said:

Most of my dupes were idle 50% of the time.

 

yeah that happens only if you have allot dupes. that needs also high end pc as how they coded game , you lose allot performance by only own them allot

[NewWorldDan]

Here is an example of my auto-farm.  It produces berry sludge for 8.  Fertilizer synth shuts off when there is 1000kg on the weight plate.  It gets delivered directly to the farm station.  Berries and wheat are sent directly to the microbe mushers.  When dupes are idle, they go to the gym and work out - manual generators hooked up to a light, set at priority level 1.

When building large structures, set up storage bins nearby with the required materials and fill them first.  If you haul 5 tons of steel to where you need it first, dupes won't be making long trips back and forth hauling 200kg at a time.  Select build materials carefully.  Don't build sandstone ladders in the badlands, use granite or igneous rock instead.

[darknotezero]

also, in case you're not aware, priorities are set up in a hierarchy as "dupe priority set up" first and then "task priority number" second.

As an extreme example, If you have a switch that needs toggling but you have Toggling X'ed out for all of your dupes, that switch will not get toggled even on yellow alert.

As a less extreme example, say you only have one dupe on your colony, that dupe has "very low priority" on Toggling but "very high priority" on everything else, everything else will happen first. A task set at priority 5 will be done before a priority 9 if the 5 task is set as "very high" dupe priority and the 9 task is set to "very low" dupe priority.

Something that makes this clearer is if you click on a dupe and look at their task list. If you click on the task itself and switch to the 'errands' tab, you'll also get a picture of where that task ranks for each dupe.

[spike4597]

3 hours ago, NewWorldDan said:

Don't build sandstone ladders in the badlands, use granite or igneous rock instead.

 

Why would it make a difference?

[thegroundbelow]

1 hour ago, spike4597 said:

Why would it make a difference?

Because the badlands doesn't contain sandstone, it contains granite and igneous, so your dupes can just pick up debris off the ground without having to run a long way to find some sandstone.

[Gurgel]

On 10/28/2021 at 4:59 AM, spike4597 said:

so i use this, and byt the time i make it to cycle 400, i average 35 yellow alerts, and by cycle 600(farthest i've ever made) i average 180.

You need to give the dupes a bit more time. You may want to occasionally have an idle dupe, then you are doing things right. If you always rush them, the backlog will grow and grow, as you have experienced.

[Orzelek]

There is an errands alert in alerts menu. It has a nice graph there but for some reason you can't pin that graph to main section (trying to set it to always show does nothing).

[Sasza22]

I had the issue of the priorities creeping up to 9 where nothing was getting done. Sometimes i wished i had a button to reduce all priorities by 1.

Then i started looking into what is causing the issues. Most common problems were:

1. Manual farm delivery, especially water. Takes so much time if you don`t automate it.

2. Algae terrariums. Those things take a lot of work if you use them as the main oxygen source.

3. Sweep commands and storage bins. If storage bins are not on sweep only dupes take forever to clean all the stuff up.

4. Low oxygen and dupes losing breath during work. Made them start over or drop resources down the ladder.

In the end the issue wasn`t the priorities but inefficient work. After making my base more automated and getting 4-5 dupes specialized in building + mining most stuff gets done pretty fast even at priority 5-6. Still projects further away need more time but you can speed them up by making storage for resources used near the project so dupes don`t run all the way to base for 5 kg of copper over and over.

[goboking]

If everything is priority 9, then nothing is priority 9.

The way I handle priorities is to designate every task as urgent (tasks that need to be done ASAP, such as outhouse cleaning or generator tune-ups), standard (sweeping, mopping, constructing, etc), and busywork (storing debris in compactors, foraging wild food, etc).  I'll assign urgent tasks a 6-8, standard tasks a 3-5, and busywork a 2.  9 is reserved for quick tasks I want done now and 1 is reserved for manual generators, ensuring dupes are never truly idle.

I also specialize most of my labor, so my researcher doesn't waste time cleaning outhouses and my groundskeeper doesn't prevent my researcher from accessing research stations.