Duplicants Dropping Stuff

[Zarquan]

(This turned out long so...) ABSTRACT:  Dupes sometimes get in to never ending cycle of going down a ladder, picking something up, needing to breathe and dropping it, then repeat.  How about if the dupe's new path follows the same route for a while as the original delivery job, they hold on to the material until the paths diverge instead of immediately dropping it?  Or maybe just leave it attached to the ladder?

One thing that is kind of irritating for me is in the early game when the dupes are ordered to get algae at the bottom of a ladder, go and pick it up, run half way up the ladder, and run out of air (which is why I needed algae in the first place) and drop the algae all the way back to the bottom.  This can lead to endless loops where nothing gets done.  I supposedly had 5 tons of algae, but none of my priority 9 deoxidizers were working.

This happening with algae is rare because when you are going far enough that they are running out of air, you probably should have switched off of algae, but I had a lousy seed with very little algae in the core biome and no steam geysers anywhere near my base, so I had to go far with low level dupes before exosuits.  But this can happen with other rare materials all the time, like wolframite and diamond, if you don't have exosuits or the infrastructure for oxygen rooms yet, but oxygen rooms would actually pose the same problem.

I managed a fix by putting door "checkpoints."  The dupes would carry it up to above a door and dropped it so it ended up on the door, which was closer, and within half a cycle, it was in my base.  But this is silly and it slowed down my dupes going up and down the ladder.  Plus, if any dupe decided to go down for any other reason, then the progress was lost.

I was thinking that if a dupe is carrying a material and they get distracted, they should keep carrying their stuff until the path diverges from their original path.  If they are carrying algae to the deoxidizer in the base, but they want to eat, they keep carrying it in to the base on the way to the mess hall.  They reach the fork where they would have chosen one direction to go to the oxidizer and another to go to the fridge to get the food, so they drop their algae there.  That way, if they are distracted from carrying algae to the base by needing to go back to the base to eat or get air, at least the algae will be in the base, even though it might not have made it to the deoxidizers.  Another dupe can carry it the rest of the way.

Another solution is for them to leave it on the ladder.  If a dupe was carrying something and has to do something else, they will leave the stuff attached to the ladder so that the next dupe can pick it up where the other left off. 

[Kasuha]

21 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

ABSTRACT:  Dupes sometimes get in to never ending cycle of going down a ladder, picking something up, needing to breathe and dropping it, then repeat.  How about if the dupe's new path follows the same route for a while as the original delivery job, they hold on to the material until the paths diverge instead of immediately dropping it?  Or maybe just leave it attached to the ladder?

Had this to happen to me too. There's a way around it - make stops on the ladder. Every so often (doesn't have to be very often) remove a piece of ladder and put a block in there, then construct five ladder segments in the next column so your dupes can find a way around it. Or you can alternate runs of the ladder in neighbor columns with a block at the bottom of them. When your duplicants run out of breath, they'll drop the item on the block and will not have to return to it so far.

You can remove the stops later when your duplicants train their athletics or stop needing to catch breath so often for any other reason.

[Zarquan]

Just now, Kasuha said:

Had this to happen to me too. There's a way around it - make stops on the ladder. Every so often (doesn't have to be very often) remove a piece of ladder and put a block in there, then construct five ladder segments in the next column so your dupes can find a way around it. Or you can alternate runs of the ladder in neighbor columns with a block at the bottom of them. When your duplicants run out of breath, they'll drop the item on the block and will not have to return to it so far.

You can remove the stops later when your duplicants train their athletics or stop needing to catch breath so often for any other reason.

Yeah, but it's silly to have to do that, at least in my opinion.  If I'm carrying stuff, like bringing in groceries, and I decide I'm very thirsty, I might bring the load in, but not finish the task (putting away the food).  I would then drink some water really quick before resuming my task.  I would definitely not put the food on the ground to do that.  I would carry it until my new path diverged from my old task.  It doesn't help my example that both tasks take place in the kitchen, but I think the example is still good.

[Oozinator]

18 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

.. If I'm .. I decide I'm.. I might .. I would ..  I would .. I would..

You are no dupe!
^^

[Kasuha]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

If I'm carrying stuff, like bringing in groceries, and I decide I'm very thirsty, I might bring the load in, but not finish the task (putting away the food).

So here you are, happily carrying a block of granite for your upcoming construction job, when it suddenly occurs to you that you are totally out of breath and you'll certainly die if you don't find a place where you can breathe. Well to be honest, I'd probably get rid of that block of granite pretty fast before running for some air because my life is more dear to me than some goddamn construction job.

In general, well, carrying stuff does not slow down our duplicants (yet?) so they could technically keep their load through that and continue on the task when they're done catching breath. It's not there intentionally. It is kind of natural behavior, plus it puts down at least some challenge for not caring about having breathable atmosphere where you send your duplicants. Honestly, they can hold their breath for unnaturally long time (and unnatural amount of work done) already.

[BlueLance]

Just wait until they make it a dupe will not work if they cannot breath XD Holding breath is exclusively for getting from A to B or emergencies.

[Oozinator]

When a dupe drops stuff down a ladder, more then once a cycle, he/she/it deserves death penalty!
I place a firepole next to the ladder and fill the area with healthy O² to increase their lifespan a bit.

[BlueLance]

I just use exo suits for places that are tall like that XD

[LiveYourDreams]

i came here to mention this exact thing. I dug to the oil/diamond level. I dont have my exosuits set up yet. 

I was wondering why cycle after cycle nothing is getting done and I noticed that my dupes are running all the way to that level where there is abyssalite and picking it up then running up the stairs and dropping the abysallite on the way. They get some air then go and do the same thing over and over again. This can't be intended right? This abysallite is for projects elsewhere. So I am hoping setting those projects to lower priority will fix the issue.

It is an endless loop. I can't imagine why they have to drop whatever it is they had in their hands. 

 

[Zarquan]

6 hours ago, Oozinator said:

You are no dupe!
^^

Very true. 

 

2 hours ago, BlueLance said:

I just use exo suits for places that are tall like that XD

But I had to go out early due to there being very little algae in the stating biome.  I hadn't even researched brute force refinement yet.

3 hours ago, Oozinator said:

When a dupe drops stuff down a ladder, more then once a cycle, he/she/it deserves death penalty!
I place a firepole next to the ladder and fill the area with healthy O² to increase their lifespan a bit.

Probably the optimal strategy here was to build a deoxidizer down at the bottom of the ladder, you are right.  It still feels silly that such enless loops can happen.  I could also turn on red alert.  I think that would work too.

[TehPlayer14]

Shouldn't dupes anyway keep the item that they are holding while recovering breath and then continue the task that has been interrupted?

[Zarquan]

5 hours ago, Kasuha said:

So here you are, happily carrying a block of granite for your upcoming construction job, when it suddenly occurs to you that you are totally out of breath and you'll certainly die if you don't find a place where you can breathe. Well to be honest, I'd probably get rid of that block of granite pretty fast before running for some air because my life is more dear to me than some goddamn construction job.

In general, well, carrying stuff does not slow down our duplicants (yet?) so they could technically keep their load through that and continue on the task when they're done catching breath. It's not there intentionally. It is kind of natural behavior, plus it puts down at least some challenge for not caring about having breathable atmosphere where you send your duplicants. Honestly, they can hold their breath for unnaturally long time (and unnatural amount of work done) already.

Yes, because I am not a duplicant.  As you said, duplicants can hold their breaths while running for a very long time.  But if the ladder was long enough, the same thing could happen with eating or going to the bathroom, even if every possible tile was oxygen.  It's not like its even that far from the base.  I can see my base from the algae deposit.  But my dupes have no athletics trained yet, so they are slow.  I also probably wouldn't go in rooms filled with chlorine or natural gas.  I also wouldn't drop the granite down a ladder where one of my friends might me.

I'm not asking for them continuing the task once they've caught their breath.  Someone else can pick it up and continue for them.  What I'm talking about is removing this warning-less endless loop that can be a black hole for your duplicant's productivity and can quite literally kill your base. If they are carrying algae to the base and decide to do something annoying like breathe instead, they will still bring the algae to the base and drop it on the floor somewhere.  It'll be used or swept eventually.

[BlueLance]

13 minutes ago, TehPlayer14 said:

Shouldn't dupes anyway keep the item that they are holding while recovering breath and then continue the task that has been interrupted?

That would be ideal, but they just drop it and thats the problem

[Supraluminal]

I've worked around this by using ladder stops similar to what @Kasuha suggests, and also by just oxygenating every area of the map I dig out. It works OK but I have to agree that the material-dropping behavior gets annoying at times.

At the same time, I can understand some of the rationale for it; it pushes you to provide your dupes with a hospitable work environment.  It's also the most simple solution - logically and probably technically - to the question of "what should a dupe do with carried material when interrupted?"

42 minutes ago, TehPlayer14 said:

Shouldn't dupes anyway keep the item that they are holding while recovering breath and then continue the task that has been interrupted?

For a whole host of reasons, they have to drop stuff at some point; imagine what would happen if they didn't/couldn't. Dupes can only carry one thing at a time and they have to pick up food to eat, for example. And what if the direction they go to catch their breath is the opposite of the direction you want the material moved? "Hold material until able to resume task" as a behavior is susceptible to a huge array of unintended and negative side-effects.

Maybe we'll get a "smarter" behavior at some point, but sometimes AI that's dumb but easy to understand is preferable in a game over AI that's smart but hard to predict and manipulate.

For what it's worth, I think @Zarquan's suggestion of dropping the material at the point where the dupe's new path diverges from their previous path is probably a good solution. I'd speculate that it would be inexpensive in terms of performance impact, and it's a fairly intuitively sensible behavior that should still be pretty easy for players to predict and work with.

Quick side-note on oxygenating your map: We're kind of conditioned by the game to treat oxygen as precious (it's in the name!), but when you compare the volume of it consumed by a dupe in a cycle vs. the volume it takes to fill some tunnels, it quickly starts to look appealing to flood the map with oxygen. A colony of ten dupes consumes 600kg of oxygen per cycle, enough to pressurize 600 tiles. That's a 200-tile-tall shaft at 3 tiles wide for a single cycle's worth of O2.

Considering that 1) oxygen used this way isn't "wasted" since your dupes breathe it while they work in the tunnels, 2) it reduces dupe time spent on catching breath which in turn means you get more useful work per unit of oxygen consumed, and 3) it keeps slimelung down, I find it to be a good approach.

28 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

That would be ideal, but they just drop it and thats the problem

It really wouldn't be ideal. If you change dupe behavior to "hold material while catching breath, then resume task" you'll just create a new set of problems, including a new endless loop in which a dupe tries to deliver material to a remote site, runs out of breath, runs back to breathable air while holding the material, resumes trying to deliver the material, runs out of breath....

Edit to clarify: It might be an improvement over the current behavior, I just want to point out that it's not "ideal" insofar as there are still problems with holding material when catching breath.

[Zarquan]

1 minute ago, Supraluminal said:

Considering that 1) oxygen used this way isn't "wasted" since your dupes breath it while they work in the tunnels, 2) it reduces dupe time spent on catching breath which in turn means you get more useful work per unit of oxygen consumed, and 3) it keeps slimelung down, I find it to be a good approach.

I agree.  I never understood this idea of "wasted oxygen."  Are you destroying it in some way?  Is it floating away to places your dupes can't get to?  If the answer to both of these questions is no, then your dupes will eventually get around to breathing it, therefore it is not wasted.  Pressurizing a large area doesn't waste oxygen.

[Zarquan]

Another idea that might make more sense or be easier to implement is a ladder with a landing.  It acts like a ladder for dupes, but materials can't fall through it.  It can cost more resources than a ladder but less than a tile and take longer to build.  

[Ambaire]

Simple solution: If a dupe enters a 'reach oxygen NOW' state (which defaults to 70% which is crazy), finish the current task then seek oxygen. Same goes for any other 'job break', hungry, bathroom, sleep, etc. Finish the job stage, then go on break. One exception might be for long constructions (building generators, etc).

 

edit: Perhaps have a job interrupt request where when their oxygen drops below 70%, go get oxygen after the current job completes. If oxygen drops below 50%, go get oxygen immediately.

[Kabrute]

don't even need 5 ladder segments, 1 solid block in the ladder line and one block to one side and down 2, so there is a 1 block gap between, dupes climb from ladder onto block, from block to block, then up ladder