Priority Confusion/Solution

[Espii]

I set up 6 biodistillers in hopes of creating algae fast enough to sustain my colony with oxygen. I built 1 in my previous play through and it wasn't enough.

Because i wanted to focus on algae generation for a while, I set the biodistillers and the slime mining priority to 9 in hopes that my dupes focus on this.

Problem I encountered from this was that my dupes would mine a slime tile, grab the slime, and run straight back to deposit the slime. This is far less efficient than the dupes mining as much slimes as it can carry and returning to the distillery

After screaming at the dupes for a while, I realized the problem.

After the dupes mines out a slime tile and pick up  1 slime, it would see that the distillery has priority 9 and it is holding something that this priority 9 building needs. So, it decides that it must stop all other actions and turn in that 1 slime in it's inventory

The solution was to put mining priority higher than the distillery priority... To bad, I found this out AFTER my dupes obtained 100% stress and so there was no going back.

[DoctorOverlord]

I'm also beginning to realize the subtleties of the Priority system.  It seems like it could be an elegant way of micro-managing your Dupes' behavior without needing to click on each one individually (which is such a relief compared to other management game mechanics).  That alone makes me think it could really result in some interesting uses, though one does currently need to experiment to figure out how Priorities effect Dupes' actions.  

For example, I wondered why the Sweep mechanic did not seem to allow a Priority set to it, then I stumbled across how setting a High Priority to a Storage locker does that instead.  Really clever but it took a little while for me to realize that was how it worked. 

[Lothalin]

Yeah, for some reason I see a lot of people just instantly jump things to priority 9, a lot of streamers do the same thing.  Honestly when you start, if you want something done just setting 6 is enough, then if you want something done before that finishes you have the option to set it to 7 rather than both being 9 and having dupes struggle to determine what you want them to do.

Also, when you want a spot mined out faster, in addition to setting priority high on it, you can quickly set X number of dupes to mine only, then they will clear it out quick.

[Zervo]

i tend to ticked out the sweep, compost, and delivery job for my dig (& build) dupes.

and let certain dupes with high athletic & strength stat to do the heavy lifting, it's like they are the delivery boy or somesort.

 

the problem is, sometime my dupe will be idling there waiting for the delivery dupe to deliver building materials.

i hope they'll change this delivery job to something like compost, where it's meant for delivering certain material to a working building.

while delivering material to make a building/utility is under the build job list