Storage Tile and Bin Behavior

[Kderosa]

What is the intended behavior for storing items having weights greater than 1 kg?

If I want to store 5 Atmo Suits (200 Kg/each) in a storage tile and select 1000 kg as the capacity, the dupes will dutifully load every available Atmo Suit in the base in the tile, far exceeding the weight capacity.  The game seems to treat the capacity as the number of items. Fine, so I switch the capacity to 5 (kg?) and the dupes will load up 5 Atmo Suits like I want. But then at some point, the game switches back to weight (usually when I travel to another planet and return) and the dupes refuse to reload any additional Atmo Suits into the storage tile which only indicates a capacity of 5 (kg presumably). 

The behavior can be reset by selecting a different item, having the dupe toggle the new selection, switching back to Atmo Suits, and having the dupe toggle again. This issue is likely present for all items, but more noticeable for atmosuits which get worn unloaded, become worn, get repaired, and then never returned to their storage tile.

I've noticed similar behavior using Storage Bins and items - notably with power packs, gunk, and boosters since the Bionic Power Pack DLC.

A related issue is transporting seeds to another planetoid. Put some thimble reed seeds in a storage tile in a rocket for transport to another planetoid for planting.  Build hydroponic tiles.  Try to select seed for planting - no seed available. drop seeds from tile - no dice.  You have to relocate the seed from the rocket to the planetoid before the seed can be planted. And, on that note, is there a command to relocate a specific number of items, relocate all, and/or relocate at a priority that isn't 5 by default?

Another related issue is the inability to store bottles of liquid and canisters of gas in storage. Not only do they have to be relocated individually, since they can't be stored, their access can't be restricted so a dupe can remove the bottle/canister if needed elsewhere.  The introduction of the bottle/cannister emptiers has made this problem worse since they generate tasks.    Just try to make a liquid lock by relocating and emptying your last 36 kg of naphtha while a bottle emptier has a task outstanding.

As the game becomes more complex with DLCs the lack of fine control over items is becoming more of an annoyance.

[NeoDeusMachina]

As far as I understand, at the moment a dupe gets the errand, it will count those items as 1 unit of 1kg, so if you want 5 suits you should set it to 5kg. That will work only if a dupe can grab all 5 suits at once. Once stored, the storage will count the actual mass of the items, so the 5 suits will take 5x200kg=1000kg of space in the storage.

Then, say a dupe picks 2 suits and stores them before another dupe can pick the missing 3, you will be screwed as the bin will count 400kg/5kg and consider itself full. No more suits will be delivered.

It's the same with all the items that have a unit when errand is picked up by a dupe vs mass (suits, gear balm, power banks, etc.) It's quite frustrating.

The one workaround I found is to set them to a large capacity and then sweep only. But then you need to manually sweep what you want loaded every time, which is quite tedious.

So yeah, I agree. It's not coherent. Dupes should consider the actual mass of those items picking an errand that stores something in any storage, not the unit. It would save a lot of painful micromanagement. It might make it hard to store large items in storage tiles (like suits), but we could use normal storage bins instead.

 

[Kderosa]

This is what I was thinking as well, but the storage tile always seems to get filled to the selected number of items initially, even if all those items aren't available and no task generated initially (such as when you are still fabricating the suits), but then at some point thereafter the weight seems to control. It makes rocket travel tedious since you have to micromanage restocking in between trips and the visual gauges are unreliable to boot due to this issue.

[VSutra]

I just bumped into this issue and it was annoying the heck out of me. Did a google search and thank you Neo for breaking it down! Fortunately I only need 1 atmo suit into a storage bin, so hopefully it will consistently work if I set it to 1kg.