Is there a way to force dupes to pay more attention to one sweeping errand over another?

[Frustrated]

I have harvested bristle berries and wheat grains that are sitting on the floor, at top priority, and they gleefully ignore them to gather coal and gold while the storage bins for said coal and gold are at lowest priority.  WHHYYYY??

Edited February 10 by Frustrated

[myxal]

1. Priority of the storage overrides priority of sweep errands -> what's the priority of the storage bins where gold is collected vs fridge or wherever you're collecting food?
2. Can dupes actually make their way from the berries to their respective storage? Game will only show "storage unavailable" if the matching storage doesn't exist, or is reachable by no one. If you split your colony with storage and items in mutually-inaccessible parts, the sweep flag will remain white even if no errands will ever get issued.
3. Recurring storage jobs should not rely on sweep errands to begin with. There should be no "priority on wheat grains and bristle berries".
4. Know the difference between errand types and check your dupes' priorities for appropriate categories: storing vs supplying vs tidying.

Edited February 10 by myxal

[Frustrated]

It's most likely 1, which I've corrected.

 

2.  The plots and the grill are both next to ladders that both lead up to the platform where the fridge is.

3.  You're absolutely right.  They shouldn't.  I was panicking because they weren't picking any berries up.

4.  Almost everyone had high priority to store and supply.

 

Thanks for the assistance.

[Frustrated]

Oh my god, this is so frustrating.  I'm trying to get someone, ANYONE, to run construction errands for my conveyor belts.  I have the belts themselves set to priority 9, I have multiple dupes set to building as highest priority, all of the belts already have resources in them.  So what do they do?  Retrieving seeds and stuff.  I had to go Yellow Alert to get just one of them (not even any of my best builders, by the way) to do something about it.  And he doesn't even have building as a high prio!

Edited February 17 by Frustrated

[Alexander Block]

@Frustrated Profession priority is more important than task priority. An agronomist will perform gardening work with priority 1, rather than construction work with priority 9.

[Frustrated]

I have my original builder (let's call him Steve), an even better builder (let's call him Travis), and they both have double-digit stats in Construction as well as all three building skills.  I also have a primary digger with a decent Cons stat and 2 of the three building skills.  None of them performed any of the building in question.  It was done by my Operator, who has zero building skills and a fairly mediocre Construction stat.

[myxal]

1 hour ago, Frustrated said:

I have my original builder (let's call him Steve), an even better builder (let's call him Travis), and they both have double-digit stats in Construction as well as all three building skills. 

You do know that constructing rails (and sweepers, loaders, etc.) requires mechatronics engineering skill?

Quote

 It was done by my Operator, who has zero building skills and a fairly mediocre Construction stat.

Yep, mechatronics is an operating skill. Maybe try inspecting the build order's errands tab next time, if dupes are not coming to the task it will tell you why.

[Frustrated]

Wait, so building rails is an Operator action?

[Alexander Block]

@Frustrated I meant it

7 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

Wait, so building rails is an Operator action?

This a building action, that requires operator skill.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 2/17/2026 at 9:44 AM, Frustrated said:

Wait, so building rails is an Operator action?

Yes. It requires a dupe to have Mechatronics.  It also requires the dupe to have the build skill.  So if your dupe with mechatronics can't build, they'll never get done.  Another issue is that dupes with Mechatronics are Operators, and likely have been set with high Operator priority.  Building rails is a Build task, so you have to lower the Operator priority and raise the Build priority on the dupe with Mechatronics.  At the same time, you don't want the mechatronics dupe building OTHER build tasks, so you need to set the actual rail/sweeper/etc tasks at a higher build priority than other build jobs.  ... It can be obnoxious if you're running with a small number of highly specialized dupes.

[Frustrated]

I see.  Thanks for the very helpful explanation.  On a similar note, how do I make conveyor receptacles work?  I know they drop off solids from a belt, but from what building does that belt start.  It's not exactly clear to me in the tooltips.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Alright.. I'll kinda give an overview of how things work.  The Auto-Sweeper picks things up and delivers to another area inside its "green" area.

Spoiler

A conveyor loader puts things onto a rail.  Unless a box is checked, they will only be used by auto-sweepers.  So you want it somewhere inside the "green" region.

Spoiler

A conveyor chute will drop the contents of a box from the rail onto the floor.  The conveyor receptacle, directly under the sweeper above, does not.  It fills up with a small amount of material (100kg, maybe?) and the auto-sweeper can then collect from there and deliver.  In this case, sand is being delivered to the receptacle so that the auto-sweeper can deliver to the deoderizers as they need it.  The sweeper also picks up the clay the deoderizers drop and puts it in the loader that ships it off to be used in some kilns down the line.

Spoiler

Dupes will not gather materials from receptacles unless you check the box to "allow manual use."  However, if you have a loader that allows manual use, and a receptacle that receives material from that loader, then dupes will happily gather from the receptacle and deliver to the loader, which will send it back to the receptacle and ... Yeah, experience speaking here.  

A conveyor meter will dole out a specific amount of material and stop until reset.  You can use it in a variety of ways.  My favorite way is to run the automation wire from its own signal port to its reset port to send a limited amount of material per box.  For example, here it is set to "Limit: 2 units" which I think is 20kg.

Spoiler

So the sweeper picks up the metal from the volcano when it solidifies (steam atmosphere) and delivers it to the conveyor loader that sends it out in whatever chunk size was delivered.  The rail delivers it into the meter, which sends it out in 20kg packets where it circulates around until its temperature drops below 410F, at which point the conveyor shutoff is turned on and opens up to let the packet out into the turbine room above.  The turbine kicks on to produce power at 394F and shuts off at 380F, so the metal packet leaving on the rail will always be in that temperature range.  Off screen there's a stretch where the rail transfers heat to a pipe from the aquatuner to drop the temp the rest of the way down before it is unloaded.  Material that is still too hot when it reaches the temp sensor gets dropped out the chute, reloaded, and goes around again. 

Spoiler

I actually have two volcanoes right next to each other and this setup works mostly OK, but if both come out of dormancy at the same time, then the bottom one gets almost too hot.  On the other hand, it does mostly power itself and sometimes sends extra power to the grid.  The only time it draws power from the grid is when both hit dormancy at the same time because the aquatuner will need to keep cooling the bottom chamber until there's liquid water again or it will overheat during its active period.  Meh. Its a work in progress.

Spoiler

 

[Frustrated]

You're all so very helpful.  I'm sure I'm being annoying asking so many questions and posting so many issues I'm having that I could probably just google, but it's so much easier talking to an actual person.  So, let's say I'm using this setup for an auto-ranch

 

The farm plots will be 3 meal lice, a wheezewort, then 3 more meal lice.  It's to develop a drecko ranch into a glossy drecko ranch.  Do I connect the receptacle to a loader that will send dirt and phosphorite to it and, if so, will I need a solid filter?

[KittenIsAGeek]

49 minutes ago, Frustrated said:

Do I connect the receptacle to a loader that will send dirt and phosphorite to it and, if so, will I need a solid filter?

So a receptacle will only hold one material at a time.  So you want the loader that sends material to your receptacle to only be set to the resource you want at the receptacle. You also do not want a sweeper that is in range of a loader and a receptacle that take the same material because the loader will pull from the receptacle and put it in the loader which will be a waste of power.  Additionally, the receptacle holds only a small amount of material, so whatever you're putting in is going to be backed up to the loader.

this means a solid filter won't work if the line gets backed up.

One method I've used is to put the sweeper and receptacles under the farm tiles where the loaders cleaning up dirt and phosphorite can't reach the receptacles being used to fertilize the farm tiles.

[Frustrated]

I guess phosphorite isn't a huge deal, since the dreckos will poop it out anyway and the sweepers will probably move the minuscule amount the weezewort needs before they get shunted to the far bottom left.  I'm just trying to figure out how to use the setup I've got to keep the receptacle holding dirt for the lice.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Set the conveyor loader for phosphorite to like 1 or something.  That way if the weezewart needs to be fertilized, the auto sweeper will fill it up first.  Though, you'll probably find your dupes handling the fertilization unless they're completely banned from that room.  Alternatively you can use a timer automation to turn the loader for phosporite on only periodically.  There's a lot of ways to handle the problem.

[Frustrated]

The bottom left is just a chute for everything that doesn't stay in the incubation rooms.  The planned rails will carry everything away towards that point.  Eggs will stay in that little pool to crack, meat will (eventually) get sent away to my grill, reed, plastic and shells will go elsewhere.

Edited February 19 by Frustrated