Procurement Job?

[DeCiBel]

There's a certain class of dupe that I try to make, one that only has the jobs DIG and BUILD - that way the other dupes maintain the base, while I have a couple dupes that are in charge of expanding my mines and making sure things get built, instead of getting bogged down by the ever-expanding list of chores as the base expands.

One problem is that a piece of the process is missing: DELIVER. 

The problem is that I want these dupes to be able to DELIVER building materials, but not get bogged down doing things like fertilizing or adding sand to filters and all that.

Maybe divide up the responsibilities covered by DELIVER into two sections: DELIVERY and PROCUREMENT - procurement being the responsibility of procuring building supplies?

 

Just a random thought that would make my life easier in the game.

[Kasuha]

The problem with delivery is that there's too much of it. Out of existing jobs:

Build couples with delivery of building materials (and digging to make room for new building)

Harvest couples with delivery of seeds to plant and delivery of fertilizer

Power couples with delivery of coal

HydroFan couples with delivery of water

Research couples with delivery of research materials

Compost couples with delivery of polluted dirt

Cook couples with delivery of cooking ingredients

For each of these, you may want to assign a group of dupes doing the main job, and a group of dupes doing delivery for it, but not other deliveries.

I almost think it should be done in the jobs table. Maybe each of the affected jobs should have two checkboxes, one for main job, and the other for its delivery. And the Deliver job would be just the "other" maintenance.

[Kasuha]

I mean, something like this. The small checkmarks allow delivery for that particular job.

[brummbar7]

13 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

I mean, something like this. The small checkmarks allow delivery for that particular job.

I don't know, how often do you really need to separate delivery and the job itself?   I think new jobs should be added, and have some overlap. 

So there could be a farming job, that will encompass harvesting, delivering fertilizer, delivering and planting seeds, and taking food to storage.  If they have the general delivery category checked as well, they'll do other delivery jobs.  But with farming checked and delivery not, they'll only do farm-related delivery. 

Then, slime refining.  A dupe with slime refining check, but not delivery, will still deliver slime to storage containers and distillers.  Due to pufts constantly generating slimeballs, and slime balls being noxious, this area could, I think, support its own job. As opposed to hatches and coal.  Hatches don't generate near as many tasks as pufts do, and coal does not give off noxious gases when lying around. 

Even cooking I think, should be fine doing both the cooking and delivery.  

It seems to me like most jobs can be planned to be fairly localized, so that doing the job and the deliveries for that job shouldn't be that huge a problem. 

Construction is a bit different though because it so often takes place very far away from the materials needing delivered, and that can't really be helped in a lot of cases.  In some cases like tunneling or laddering, separating the tasks won't really help because your builder will just spend time standing around or doing secondary tasks anyway, since there's only one or two construction tasks accessible at a time.  But other times I could see where it might be useful, when constructing large infrastructure projects in open areas.  But on the other hand, if there's not much digging to be done, diggers can do delivering.  And I want builders to dig if no building is accessible.  I think a lot of the problems could be fixed if Klei improved the task selection, or more prioritization options were provided in addition to allowing storage containers to have allowed users specified. 

 

[Kasuha]

Just now, brummbar7 said:

I don't know, how often do you really need to separate delivery and the job itself?

Well, don't forget they are already separated. It's more about putting them together in a controlled manner.

For instance for cooking and research I definitely want the dupe to do the cooking/research and not deliveries.

But for building or farming, I want the dupe to do all of it but not any other deliveries.

[brummbar7]

9 hours ago, Kasuha said:

For instance for cooking and research I definitely want the dupe to do the cooking/research and not deliveries.

But for building or farming, I want the dupe to do all of it but not any other deliveries.

Right, but once a dupe locks onto research, they do it till the task is done.  Other dupes automatically deliver materials in the interim.  I imagine most people have one or at most two dupes responsible for the task.  I feel research is already easy to control by making the machine high priority and limiting the job, because the task is long.

Cooking, The task is intermediate, but again, it seems to me pretty easy to lock in the dupes you want via the job limit, and high building priority.  Even if they do happen to run out of material and have to go grab some, they're probably immediately locked back in again, as I'd imagine most folks keep their food stored near their cooking station.  I think the situation is improved if you have it on continuous production, or fully queued, as it seems like that prompts delivery dupes to keep the cooking station full as possible, which keeps the cook on-task.

Farming is different though as it's composed of a bunch of short to intermediate tasks in small amounts at different buildings.  Harvesting, planting, fertilizing.  The harvesting is an intermediate task, but it occurs at a large number of tiles, so you can't 'lock' a dupe into it because they're constantly having to switch buildings, and each building has only one task, not a queue of tasks.  Fertilizer is constantly being produced and delivered to all these different tiles.  It's just an entirely different set of operations.

Slime farming with pufts to me is also unique, because it often takes place in a toxic environment, and the slime gives off toxic gases, which one may or may not want to minimize.  The slime is being produced constantly by pufts.  So it's never-ending tiny tasks, that can't be queued.  It would be best if the player could dedicate a specific dupe, probably with the disease resistance trait, rather than having a parade of dupes exposing themselves to the toxic environment.

I mean, yes, the sub-checks would serve to address the issue.  But I think if applied to any job which might have an associated delivery, they'd be superfluous in most cases.  I feel like it might be more elegant to simply define the jobs better, in combination with container privileges perhaps.

 

[Kasuha]

29 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

Right, but once a dupe locks onto research, they do it till the task is done.  Other dupes automatically deliver materials in the interim.  I imagine most people have one or at most two dupes responsible for the task.  I feel research is already easy to control by making the machine high priority and limiting the job, because the task is long.

I think you're missing point of this thread. Currently the delivery job is separate which means you cannot restrict dupes from doing certain types of delivery. The idea is to split delivery to multiple, giving some of the jobs their corresponding delivbery jobs. But if you just couple research with delivery for research, anyone not assigned to do research would not do delivery for it either. And your educated dupe would spend time running around collecting water and dust. That's why it's critical to be able to assign the job itself and delivery to it independently.

 

[vonVile]

I'm sure Dupes deliver materials with just Build and Dig Jobs only turned on. Deliver is set just for things like; Water, and Sweeping.

[brummbar7]

5 hours ago, Kasuha said:

I think you're missing point of this thread.

I'm not missing any point.   The OP suggested adding a single extra job - procurement - which would only involve delivering building materials.  The OP wanted this so that they could separate dupes that deliver construction materials from dupes that deliver stuff like fertilizer, coal, sand, etc.  Presumably because often when you want stuff built, you want it built now, not after your dupes deliver fertilizer to 50 farm tiles.  *You* expanded upon that to separate out delivery jobs for all major jobs that had any sort of delivery involved at all. 

I am saying sub-checks for most job delivery tasks is unnecessary as most jobs that have some delivery involved, don't have enough delivery involved to make it important enough to separate that delivery out from all others.  You can already prioritize these intermittent delivery jobs amongst themselves via building priority, with the hidden inter-job priorities also factoring in.   I'm saying that sub-checks unnecessarily clutter and confuse the UI, and it would be better to take those jobs that innately involve a LOT of deliveries and other tasks, and/or have other good defining requirement/conditions (e.g. toxic environment), and make them their own jobs.  I.E. farming and slime distilling.    I think the OP's original proposal of a separate job for construction deliveries may have merit, due to the unique nature of construction deliveries (often very long-distance), vs all other types of deliveries.

I am *not* proposing coupling intermittent deliveries with their jobs.  I would propose leaving all other jobs as-is, because for a given scale of base, you can already just have a dupe that does 'deliveries' in general and he can, in my experience, cover cooking, science, sand, coal, and all other intermittent delivery tasks, with the player prioritizing them via building priorities.  Largely because most of these tasks occur pretty close to their supplies.  Your cooks and researches can go on as they are - that job just means that one task.  Their jobs (imo) do not involve enough delivery to make it worth wrapping specific deliveries into their job, unlike farming and slime distilling, nor enough to make the delivery it's own job, like construction delivery.  Just leave them with general deliveries on, and in the rare instances where all other deliverers are busy, they can cover their own deliveries.  But via building priority (and the hidden inter-job priority scale) they will *mostly* handle their own job I think - at least, I've never had a problem getting cooks and researchers to do their jobs under the current scheme. That is *my* point. 

The caveat - to keep general deliverers from doing farm/slime delivery, you either probably have to exclude fertilizer, seed, and and slime from the general delivery job - possibly confusing.  Or you have to allow some buildings, including compactors, to have allowed user lists.  I actually think you could accomplish a lot with just the allowed user lists actually, jobs aside, and that user lists would be a nice feature.  But that's a little OT.

Now I don't have experience with bases over 11 dupes in size.  But it seems to me that if you get that big you can just have more general delivery dupes, rather than needing a dupe that does sand, a dupe that does coal, etc. 

[Kasuha]

20 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I am saying sub-checks for most job delivery tasks is unnecessary as most jobs that have some delivery involved, don't have enough delivery involved to make it important enough to separate that delivery out from all others.

And I don't agree with you. At least farming needs it as much as building and while we're at it, it's better done in a consistent and comfortable manner rather than just making an awkward exception that doesn't work like anything else.