Go to area when Idle

[MythN7]

I have started noticing that dups are going to stupid areas to hang out when idle.

I move them manually out of the area and they just go back there.

My cook is currently only allowed to cook, nothing else what so ever.

And this is prob the absolute farthest away spot from the kitchen he can get, so not sure why he wants to hang out in slime lung PO when idle.

Could you make the dups either go hang out in the rec room, canteen or barracks when idle and are choosing a move to loiter spot.

 

At the VERY!!! least, they should not loiter in non oxygen, especially slime lung PO

[goboking]

It would be nice if dupe used the Recreational Room as a place to idle.

[MythN7]

19 minutes ago, goboking said:

It would be nice if dupe used the Recreational Room as a place to idle.

I was thinking, not sure why it would be that spot if it is the reason, but the deodorizer would be putting out O2, and the one in that spot of the base I have would be running the most constant out of all my deodorizers.

So maybe they like to hang out at those when idle for the O2 it makes?

Maybe an item like the creature lure, but more like a flag pole or marker that you can build of out anything as a decor item, that attracts dups when they are idle, Lets you pick where they hang out map by map, could even put the door by dup allow toggles, so you can have diff spots per idle dup.

[WiDOWZ]

Idle is bad. Encouraging idleness is very, very bad. The whole point behind the notification is to warn you, of an unproductive dupe. The minute you start thinking its ok and you're fine for the moment, you should and will suffer. Also as a general practice, having them in a message table is far more efficient especially if you play custom very hard mode like I do. Just assign and adjust it to a specific dupe.

[Lutzkhie]

or you can make a hamster wheel for each of them at lowest priority so that when no one is doing stuff they go to the manual generator, their supposed to be idle time becomes electricity generation time a faster way to fill you batteries and saves a lot of coal

plus they get "athletics" leveling up, they become a speedster

[mircomars]

lol a high decor treadmill room for idle specialists that's a great idea!

[MythN7]

2 minutes ago, mircomars said:

lol a high decor treadmill room for idle specialists that's a great idea!

ya ill try it out actually, i usually destroy them cause with the sweepers and 4 hatches locked into the coal power room with a sandstone storage high above to load up then remove allowance so it drops in makes it so you dups NEVER! need to go in there at all, expect for tuning up the generator, which you could easily keep the sandstone drop out of reach ability from the dups going on via 3 high tile or locked door, but yet its in range of the sweeper so they pick up the coal pooped out.  I usually try to have that storage compactor set to 1 priority as my way to stop guys from going idle.  but doesn't always work.

[strawberrygirl]

I noticed that they also like to idle wherever your focus is so if you are building something and have a bunch of dupes around the bored dupe with nothing to do will hang out with them while glaring at you.. kind of in a way to let you know he's bored. In a way its helpful but not always for the reasons OP mentioned (they aren't in the best spot all the time).

[goboking]

5 hours ago, mircomars said:

lol a high decor treadmill room for idle specialists that's a great idea!

I've been doing this for a while now.  Back when I first started playing I noticed my idle dupes would often leave the base to stand around in unbreathable gasses.  This was before exo suits were a thing, so their stress would spike when they did this.  To combat this I started building a high decor room with a few manual generators set to a priority of 1 and gave everyone the Power job, so now my idle dupes run in place on a treadmill instead of suffocating themselves outside the base.

[Zarquan]

21 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

Idle is bad. Encouraging idleness is very, very bad. The whole point behind the notification is to warn you, of an unproductive dupe. The minute you start thinking its ok and you're fine for the moment, you should and will suffer. Also as a general practice, having them in a message table is far more efficient especially if you play custom very hard mode like I do. Just assign and adjust it to a specific dupe.

That's not entirely true.  If a group of dupes is highly stressed and you don't have enough message tables, it can make sense to try to give them a day off.  But then they wander out of the high decor areas and don't come back unless you micromanage them, which means they don't get the stress relief and can exhibit their stress response.  This can be an issue on fatalistic if you have a food crisis and have to break out the meal lice or your dupes have to work in a thawing ice biome and get cold and wet.  It would make sense for them to make their way to the rec room or mess hall when they aren't busy.

[WiDOWZ]

On ‎3‎/‎14‎/‎2018 at 11:15 PM, Zarquan said:

That's not entirely true.  If a group of dupes is highly stressed and you don't have enough message tables, it can make sense to try to give them a day off.  But then they wander out of the high decor areas and don't come back unless you micromanage them, which means they don't get the stress relief and can exhibit their stress response.

Which leads back to my earlier point. Encouraging it is bad, to be effective is to not have idles in the first place. If it is stressed in fatalistic you want to have the message tables at the ready or at the very least do something productive at low priority in a good décor room. Using excuses like I don't have enough message tables is asking for it and should be punishable. There is only so much "automation" and hand holding a game can gift you before it stops becoming interactive and no longer feels like a game but a simulator of sorts. Saying more micro managing or preparing prior is bad is like is a slippery slope and akin to stating that the game is bad because you cant eventually automate everything. I for one prefer more interaction, not less. Again that's not to say I'm completely against it, just that it doesn't come without its own implications.

[Zarquan]

On fatalistic, improperly managed dupes can have a stress crisis very early (which is part of why it's a fun challenge).  If you run a large base, it is very reasonable not to have enough message tables because you simply can't support them on your power grid or normal wires.  I'm fine with them being stressed because they had to do an underwater job or work in a really lousy place.  I just don't like it when I try to make them not work and they just hang out in the sewers or the mealwood farms and get stressed out.

I do have a fix for it though that I implement in all my bases.  Make all the areas with oxygen in it high decor.  That way, they use their built in "return to safety" behavior to get somewhere safe, which also means somewhere with good decor.  It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.  It feels silly to me to have to do that though.  This leads to other problems, like not having enough oxygen outside the base so they can't do tasks easily without exosuits which can greatly hinder expansion.  I just think that after they are in safety, they should either go to a room like the rec room, mess hall, or barracks, or have a similar "return to high decor" where they try to get somewhere with good decor.

My objection was saying idleness is always bad.  It's not that bad.  I would rather have my master farmer idle in my base for 10 seconds and be ready when the farm needed his attention than have him go off and do some task far away and made my farm less efficient (as the farmer doesn't instantly go to harvest a plant or boost a plant).  He has a purpose in my system and him not being present hurts my colony, even if he is idle. 

Idleness just means they are consuming resources without any direct benefit to the colony.  Lots of things do that, like not immediately making sure geysers don't overpressurize or using a carbon skimmer just to remove CO2 when you could use slicksters and get crude oil.  You could argue that not harvesting morbs from outhouses from the very beginning is a waste of dirt.  Being idle for a few seconds or even a whole cycle (if planned) isn't a serious problem as long as you have dupes to do the necessary jobs.  It just slows you down a little, but that's usually OK.  Oxygen not Included isn't a game where you have to do everything perfectly or everyone dies a painful death.

[WiDOWZ]

10 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I just don't like it when I try to make them not work and they just hang out in the sewers or the mealwood farms and get stressed out.

It feels silly to me to have to do that though.  

My objection was saying idleness is always bad.  It's not that bad.  I would rather have my master farmer idle in my base for 10 seconds and be ready when the farm needed his attention than have him go off and do some task far away and made my farm less efficient (as the farmer doesn't instantly go to harvest a plant or boost a plant).  He has a purpose in my system and him not being present hurts my colony, even if he is idle. 

 Oxygen not Included isn't a game where you have to do everything perfectly or everyone dies a painful death.

Why would want to make them not work or do something productive for a whole cycle? That doesn't make any sense. You're straw manning too much here so I'll digress and try to keep things simple. You've basically turned this into a discussion as to how bad idleness is, but in order to establish that we have to agree on a certain premise and that would be that idleness is bad period. You said so yourself when stating "Its not that bad" so I've already won the argument. Now to the degree in which its bad is debatable of course.

Ill just start by saying for someone who seems to want this feature implemented why would you simultaneously state that you would rather have your farmer idle for 10 seconds then essentially go somewhere else? It only adds more credence to my argument somewhat against it, not your own. Point is you're kind of flying all over the place here and it would appear to me you don't know what you want. I'd suggest you start by establishing a healthy argument in its favor while weighing in the cost/gain associated and come back only when you've done so. Only then can I start to make sense of what your point is and as to whether or not I even object to it in the first place so as to not get straw manned and avoid any unnecessary rants.

[Zarquan]

First of all, you started talking about the positives and negatives of idleness by saying:

On 3/13/2018 at 11:44 PM, WiDOWZ said:

Idle is bad. Encouraging idleness is very, very bad. The whole point behind the notification is to warn you, of an unproductive dupe. The minute you start thinking its ok and you're fine for the moment, you should and will suffer

 

3 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

Why would want to make them not work or do something productive for a whole cycle? That doesn't make any sense.

While I agree it is bad to have idle dupes, some things are worse and those things can be prevented by having them go idle in a nice room for the rest of the cycle.  I would rather have half a cycle of productivity lost from than have a binge eater go off during a minor food shortage because they wandered in to my high pressure room and jumped in the water on the same day they ate raw meal lice instead of gristle berry.  In that case, which did happen in one of my colonies, idleness was good because making him averted a crisis.

An analogy:  Losing water is always bad.  If water was just being destroyed, it would be horrible.  But having bristle berries is good, and it outweighs the negative effects of losing water.  So, feeding water to bristle blossoms is good, even though the negative of losing water occurred.

I play on miserable and fatalistic and take every dupe that comes and also always promote dupes as my challenge (I lose if one of them dies).  At about 30 cycles, I can't count on message tables to keep the stress down unless I have a well established power grid because they break the wires.

3 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

Ill just start by saying for someone who seems to want this feature implemented why would you simultaneously state that you would rather have your farmer idle for 10 seconds then essentially go somewhere else?

If they are assigned a task half the map away, they will go and do that task before they come back, which could be hundreds of seconds, if not the rest of the day.  If they are idly walking towards a high decor area, they will come back to the farm as soon as a task appears because they are idle.  That is the difference.  Also, farms tend to have decent decor anyway, so if the movement was based on decor, the farmer would probably stay in the farm.

3 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

straw manning...so I've already won the argument...straw manned....unnecessary rants

And here I thought we were having a civil conversation about how bad idleness was...

[WiDOWZ]

First and foremost don't quote using a conflated argument in such a way as to appear stringed together without separation, it sounds really stupid and incoherent. Also no, the simple solution to having them avoid a certain "room" is door access. Luckily with the latest Beta if you'd have even bothered to check it out, idleness should be a thing of the past if you're as an experienced player as you claim because of the new priority system in play. I would've mentioned this sooner, but I thought interesting to hear your arguments in favor of it which "ihmo" are terrible.

That said the ideal solution to this conflicting view of ideas has already been severely mitigated in the current beta patch(soon to be official). You can now set low prio task as apposed to having them opt out of one completely which should keep idleness to a minimum. I have a 170 cycle game and barely idled if but 2-3 times. Try it out for yourself then come back and tell me if this room idea is actually relevant or just as bloated as your reasons for it.

[Oozinator]

2 hours ago, Zarquan said:

.. quoting

Good luck and have fun ^^

[WiDOWZ]

Also to be fair I didn't bother addressing your earlier quotes because of how silly the last one sounded but I'll indulge for the sake of educating. You should and will suffer does not equate to a painful death, you're obviously conflating things. If left long enough, then yes it will inevitably be so for obvious reasons. But the loss of productivity is sufficient enough that it warrants its own recognition as something lost and never recovered. Where this not the case then what would be the determining factor driving the Duplicants or you for that matter to do anything at all?

That's a rhetorical question don't bother answering it. The answer is simple, to survive (hence the genre tag). To survive long enough requires a certain momentum that must be kept by progressing things forward, without conceding to this idea they're essentially just sitting ducks waiting to die. This is why its easy for me and many to conclude that any and all idleness is bad and eventually pays for itself otherwise the game isn't doing a very good job at what its supposed to be doing and that is keeping the Duplicants busy and productive.

[Zarquan]

11 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

Also no, the simple solution to having them avoid a certain "room" is door access

I don't want to micromanage the door access of 60 duplicants.  I do concede that the farmers could be banned from leaving the base with door, but that doesn't stop them from being distracted from their farming by other tasks within the base, like cleaning out one of my outhouses I keep around to spawn morbs or flipping compost.

11 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

You can now set low prio task as apposed to having them opt out of one completely which should keep idleness to a minimum.

I'm not completely certain how the new priority system works, as I only recently moved to the beta branch with a new colony, but from what I can tell, if they pick up a new low priority task, they will still go to it and attempt finish it before they pick up their original job.

10 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

To survive long enough requires a certain momentum that must be kept by progressing things forward...

I never said that idleness for the sake of idleness is good or can be good.  Nothing I said even approached that.  Quite the opposite.  I just said that there are situations where making specific dupes idle for a limited amount of time to prevent a stress response or to keep them closer to their specialized job can be beneficial.  If you have chronic widespread idleness, then you should consult your doctor immediately, as it might be a sign of a larger issue of non-productiveness that could lead to malnutrition and suffocation.  (That's a joke, just so you know).

Personally, I feel needing more message tables is less a solution and more a symptom of a larger problem.  Use of message tables imply that your passive stress relief is insufficient and you either need to increase decor or decrease stressors.

The stringed quotes were to display the tone of your post, which was extremely confrontational and hostile:

11 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

stupid and incoherent... if you'd have even bothered... I'll indulge for the sake of educating...if you're as an experienced player as you claim...

Are you capable of having a simple conversation without insulting or being condescending to the other person?  I don't think anything I've said has been an attack on your intelligence or your character.  This should just be a minor disagreement on how bad idleness is.  I'm not sure I want to continue a conversation with someone who feels the need to insult me on every post.

Perhaps try saying why my ideas might be wrong rather than assuming I run around with idle dupes all the time and insulting me multiple times per paragraph.  I'll give you questions to answer:

1. If you're power system is already almost overloaded and you can't build enough message tables because of it, what do you do if a binge eater is about to go off who is at 95% stress and will go off by the end of the cycle?
2. If you have a specialist who you want to keep on task as much as possible, how would you stop them from wandering off to do another task if they finish their task for a second without having them go idle?

[Oozinator]

3 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

..Are you capable of having a simple conversation without insulting or being condescending to the other person? ..

Good question, but it feels better, when watching others, slipping into line of fire ^^

[TrustyFish]

A way to give dupes some time off would be really nice. With the current design of the game it's true that idleness is bad, and the notification is a warning. However, it is satisfying to be able to feel like your colony can be a nice place for them to live. When you've satisfied your survival requirements, and are using the automation and shipping tools, the number of useful tasks for your duplicants starts to drop rapidly. I often find myself having them dig up resources I don't really need. Having the ability to let them bask in the fruits of their labour as a late game goal would be appealing, at least until more endgame content is added.

[WiDOWZ]

The power limit sounds like an excuse when just one is really needed if you manage your dupes correctly. I only have one on fatalistic and haven't had immediate use for it since cycle 50 or so.  The Tables are just one primary example, the fact that you keep alluding to just one suggestion is telling. Also having 60 dupes and no power grid setup is laughable, for the oxygen alone you'll mostly run the limit. I guess its safe to say you put me at odds as whether to believe you or not sometimes although I will concede I should control my insults a bit better.

That said door access remains relatively simple. When your default position/argument is "I don't want to manage it, or it feels silly to do" for 60 dupes but all you're essentially asking for is another way to manage it for your 60 dupes you can see how I start to have trouble recognizing your argument here. To me its starting to simply sound like a question of how much of the game is automated and how much idleness is afforded to "you" the player. I could go on and on about how too much automation and self idleness is not a good idea but I'll keep things simple and say I like the idea that mistakes can happen if your not mindful of what your Dupes are up to. When no accidents happen ever as already afforded to you by the pause and queuing things up method (a feature I'd suggested removed "optionally" for vets✅ by blacking out the pause screens) It stops playing like a survival and becomes more akin to a monotonous simulation then anything else. Now that may very well be what some people want the direction of this game to go and that's fine, but I'm not one of those people.

[Zarquan]

2 hours ago, WiDOWZ said:

The power limit sounds like an excuse when just one is really needed if you manage your dupes correctly. I only have one on fatalistic and haven't had immediate use for it since cycle 50 or so.  The Tables are just one primary example, the fact that you keep alluding to just one suggestion is telling. Also having 60 dupes and no power grid setup is laughable, for the oxygen alone you'll mostly run the limit. I guess its safe to say you put me at odds as whether to believe you or not sometimes although I will concede I should control my insults a bit better.

That said door access remains relatively simple. When your default position/argument is "I don't want to manage it, or it feels silly to do" for 60 dupes but all you're essentially asking for is another way to manage it for your 60 dupes you can see how I start to have trouble recognizing your argument here. To me its starting to simply sound like a question of how much of the game is automated and how much idleness is afforded to "you" the player. I could go on and on about how too much automation and self idleness is not a good idea but I'll keep things simple and say I like the idea that mistakes can happen if your not mindful of what your Dupes are up to. When no accidents happen ever as already afforded to you by the pause and queuing things up method (a feature I'd suggested removed "optionally" for vets✅ by blacking out the pause screens) It stops playing like a survival and becomes more akin to a monotonous simulation then anything else. Now that may very well be what some people want the direction of this game to go and that's fine, but I'm not one of those people.

By the time I have 60 dupes, I have a good power grid and I usually don't have stress problems unless something goes wrong.  Also by that point I actually have difficulty finding things for all of them to do, especially since most delivery and maintenance is automated now.

Door access with 60 dupes is very annoying.  Especially since many dupes have the same name.  I have to figure out which Mae is the one I actually want to block from having door access.  It is also a lot of tedious clicking and scrolling every time I want to do it. 

The way I see it, the idea of this suggestion is that if they don't have a job to do, they should do something that makes sense.  Hanging out in the slime biome doesn't make sense.  Wandering in to the sewer doesn't make sense.  Going to somewhere that is pleasant to hang out makes sense.  It shouldn't effect most game play because most of the time all of the duplicants are doing something.  It is, by no means, making the game a monotonous passive simulator.

The issue also isn't mindfulness per se.  The first time I attempted accepting every dupe, I was running a base to 46 (I think it was pre tubular or something).  I had simply run out of productive things for most of them to do.  I had a few jobs around, but the things that needed to be done needed to be done precisely, so only a few dupes could work at a time.  You only need so many systems for your colony to be stable  As a result, about 10 of my dupes were idle.  I didn't realize their random hanging around would be more destructive than any stress response.  Since I didn't have work for them to do at that point, I didn't think it was a big deal.  However, they insisted on hanging out in the mealwood farms.  I spent more time ordering them to move out of the farm than doing anything else in the game.  I once told them to dig a series of pointless tunnels and there were so many of them and they were high enough level that they finished in about a cycle and I didn't want to destroy all the biomes.  It also slowed down my main projects, so I didn't want to repeat it.  They ended up depressurizing the farm and causing a massive food shortage.  I knew exactly what was going on, but I couldn't stop them without manually moving each individual dupe out of the farms and in to the mess hall.  This was only my first attempt to run a colony of that size and I know how to better give them passive jobs now, but I still feel it was ridiculous that I had to keep manually moving my dupes out of the farm and in to the nicer areas, only to have them turn around to go back to the farm idly in the farm a few seconds later. 

[Ambaire]

off-topic but I can't imagine having 60 dupes. the most I've ever had was 7 and most colonies I keep at 6 for ease of oxygen management. The latest colony got to almost cycle 200 with 6 dupes and it felt pretty good. 60 would be a chaotic madhouse

[WiDOWZ]

Well we can go on and on all day but again ill just say door access is relatively simple to avoid such instances as the farm one you profusely proclaim to have. Its really not that difficult if you set the default to no access and only allow the specialized few. Its been an interesting convo to say the least but its safe to say this isn't going anywhere. For the record I'm not entirely apposed to the idea, just not entirely convinced on the basis of your argument that its a necessary implementation simply because of its "pragmatic" approach to things. Otherwise we'd have a whole slew of features that would inherently make the game far more basic on the predicate that its "realistic" for Dupes to have common sense and logic themselves and so should presumably always know what to do without player input. Its a slippery slope is what I'm alluding too and one that must be treaded carefully. Good luck have fun.

[Zarquan]

If I had though of this problem, I would have built my farms differently.  However, the idea that my dupes would hang out there and depressurize it would never have occurred to me, so I would have had to plan for a situation from around cycle 10, when I started my farm, long before I knew about the problem.  At the time, I didn't believe in the idea of specialized dupes because I didn't have the ability to prioritize a miner as a miner but still let him build.  I just let them run wild and all the jobs got done.  This was before occupations, so this strategy made sense to me. 

My solution was to immerse my farms in CO2 so that they wouldn't hang out there because they couldn't breathe.  I feel that having to do that is silly though and I feel that they should be able to choose to not hang out there on their own because it's lousy decor and not a living space room.  I know I don't spend my free time hanging around the lice farms or the chemical processing plant or getting in the way on a construction site.

9 hours ago, Ambaire said:

off-topic but I can't imagine having 60 dupes. the most I've ever had was 7 and most colonies I keep at 6 for ease of oxygen management. The latest colony got to almost cycle 200 with 6 dupes and it felt pretty good. 60 would be a chaotic madhouse

That's what makes exciting!  It's a never ending challenge getting the next dupe in to the colony and being able to support them!  After a while, the water from the pre ranching 1 update isn't enough to give your dupes oxygen.  Not to mention the never ending puzzle of moving the oxygen in to the base.

Spoiler

Of course, the farms aren't working now because the require dirt fertilization and this colony has no professionals, so it is not going live for very long in the modern age.  I believe I did run this colony up to 60 dupes on this setup, but I can't find the save.  I stopped playing it once I realized my storage scheme kept the game running smooth by deleting most of my stored materials and I had no more copper.