Priority Level Zero (aka "Never Mind")

[c-lipka]

There are situations when I want to plan some constrution ahead of time, but do not want my dupes to actually execute the respective errands just yet - e.g. because some particular portions of the build aren't safe to work in yet. Or I want to toy around with the layout of some machinery without pausing the game. (Also, sometimes I just want to place a tile somewhere as a design reference, but don't want that tile to ever actually be built.)

There are also situations when I notice that dupes aren't executing build errands in the order I had planned (despite me having tried my best to guide them via assigning different priorities), and are about to trap themselves or make some other portion of a construction inaccessible, and I need to stop them from doing that - but just canceling and then re-issuing the construction they've chosen to prematurely work on may not be an option, as they might have already supplied valuable materials, and I don't want to see those drop into the pool of lava below.

I therefore propose a new priority level: Zero.

This priority level would at a minimum have the following behavior associated:

• Dupes will never consider work errands marked with this priority, and rather stand around idling.

• In a similar vein to Top Priority ("!!"), setting an errand to priority Zero may cause dupes to immediately reconsider their life choices, except in just the opposite way: Any dupe currently busy with the work errand will immediately cease that work, and find other stuff to do instead.

I think this shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

The following would be nice to have in my opinion, but some of it might be controversial, and some might turn out to be prohibitively difficult to implement:

• If a dupe finds that the only errands left for them to do are Priority Zero errands, a warning might be useful (but maybe offer an option to suppress the warning).
• Issuing a construction order at priority zero will not allocate any materials yet, and changing an order priority to zero will release any currently allocated materials except any that have already been delivered.
• When issuing construction orders at priority zero, the choice of materials is not limited by current availability. Instead, any discovered materials can be chosen.
• Give Priority Zero construction errands a differently-colored outline (blue - as in "blueprint" - might be an obvious choice).
• Priority Zero construction errands can be placed on top of existing buildings (but their priority can't be changed in that case, until any and all existing buildings they interfere with are demolished; also, they can't be placed on top of other construction errands, regardless of priority).

 

[TuxSam123]

On 12/8/2024 at 1:00 PM, c-lipka said:

If a dupe finds that the only errands left for them to do are Priority Zero errands, a warning might be useful (but maybe offer an option to suppress the warning).

Love the idea! On another note, isn't that the idle warning?