Stupid dupe's routes

[CDoroFF]

I have started new map after RU and come across irritaing factor— how they choose storage. I have never seen so silly routes, be it task to store smth or to build. They ignore nearest storages and material under their feet and deliver materials from and to the most distant storage. Now i separate every route with doors and play with permissions to force them to use proximal source of resources. Just check this screenshot. Sedimentary rock right here, but Marie prefer to run across whole map to the base and take 50kg from storage. Stopping dupes with "move to" does not fix that behavior.The only way is to lock them in area.

[Sasza22]

Do you have proximity enabled? It`s in the top right corner of the personal priority setting. Without it dupes will use an addititonal hidden priority instead of prioritizing the closest task.

[Kabrute]

I've noticed the same thing and I do have proximity enabled and it doesn't help with this problem.  20t of sandstone 8 tiles horizontally away from build area, the dupes leave the base to pull sandstone up from below

I tried adjusting everything except door permissions, up to and including moving the dupe to the storage compactor and even emptying compactor on the floor...... nothing helped.

[NanoD]

yeah I have seen same thing. I am like you have stuff at your feat and they run and grabb stuff from container. Other times they run and grabb stuff from the ground far away instead from a closer container. 

[KittenIsAGeek]

Most of the time, my dupes grab the closest resource.  But, then, my storage bins are on priority 2, so its usually almost a last resort for them to get stuff from a bin.

[Kerd]

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Do you have proximity enabled? It`s in the top right corner of the personal priority setting. Without it dupes will use an addititonal hidden priority instead of prioritizing the closest task.

I do and it doesn't solve the issue.  I'll have dupes running across the map into fresh passages for 10kg of slime instead of the container 2 tiles from the farm.

 

I think there's a preference for using loose materials over anything in a container.

[KittenIsAGeek]

For slime, I use shipping systems.  My puft farm will have an auto-sweeper that puts slime in a conveyor loader and sends it to a sealed staging room.  That staging room will have another loader that feeds directly to my mushroom farm via rails that are completely sealed to prevent off-gassing while sitting idle.  I use a similar method for the algae distiller.  When I'm digging out a slime biome is the only time my dupes touch the stuff.  I put a loader my dupes can access near where they are digging. Once they have the area cleaned up, I deconstruct the loader and rails.

[CDoroFF]

4 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Do you have proximity enabled? It`s in the top right corner of the personal priority setting. Without it dupes will use an addititonal hidden priority instead of prioritizing the closest task.

Yep. I enable this feature as soon as possible. Mosy annoying thing for me if dupes do smth in not optimal way. In most situations i undertand their behavior and I always ready to change priorities or to lock smbdy in area to avoid timewaste. However now i can't realize why they move so strange way. Another screenshot with same Mary (I really close to make my first dupicide right now). She just wants to take some sedimentary rock to build pipes. 
btw, i have tried to change priorities on jobs and storages - no effect. I have tried restart the game and enable\disable proximity - no effect. Actually, this is not a proximity bug. They do nearest job based on their priorities, it's fine. But they do it in a weird way. Kind of rectal tonsillectomy. Dupes was really much smarter in last map\update.

[Saturnus]

Try strict mono-pathing. I find that often helps. Mono-pathing is making absolutely sure that dupes have one, and only one, way of getting from A to B. And by that I mean literally anywhere on the map to anywhere else. This will often involve a lot of one-way doors but the rewards in increased FPS and better pathing outweighs the negatives manyfold.

[The Flying Fox]

The reason for this behavior, from what I've seen in the past, is that Dupes are basically picking a storage container when they're first assigned that sweeping task.  The picked storage container being the closest one to them that accepts the item they're trying to store, when given the task.

 

Of course, this could easily mean they're on the left side of the map, get a sweeping job on the right side, but because they're on the left side, they pick a storage compactor on the left side.  Forcing them to go all the way to the right side of the map to pick up the item, then go back clear across to deliver it.  Then, if there's another delivery in the same location, they do the same thing once again.

 

Sometimes, when I've noticed it and it bothers me, I'm successful in getting them to pick a closer storage by issuing a Dupe a move command before they pickup the item. (Basically issuing any kind of move command close to the item as that forces them to drop any task.)  Of course, this requires a little luck in them picking up the same task again..

 

So yeah, really annoying thing that's been in the game since forever that they should really fix.

[zergologist]

should've made it so that the dupe would go for the storage container nearest to the area that needs to be swept

[CDoroFF]

42 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

Try strict mono-pathing. I find that often helps. Mono-pathing is making absolutely sure that dupes have one, and only one, way of getting from A to B. And by that I mean literally anywhere on the map to anywhere else. This will often involve a lot of one-way doors but the rewards in increased FPS and better pathing outweighs the negatives manyfold.

There is no monopath on the last screenshot, however it was the only way to any location on a map.before. On a screenshot dupe from location A wants to build pipes in location B. Material in location C is ignored despite my commands to "move to — C point". Bad screenshot, but believe me, there is no way on top of the map.

@The Flying Fox, yep,I really have tryed to sweep everything in the biome but cancel this order, before this bacchanalia starts. But moving dupes and canceling sweep order does not help me at all.

[Craigjw]

I too have noticed this.  I have a Storage box filled with 20t of Iron Ore, right in the middle of my base.  When ever I build anything that required Iron ore, the stupid dupes will travel to all the way to the lava biome or into space to pick up iron Ore that is on the floor for the  job instead of just using the Iron that's close to hand and in a storage box....

I'm wondering if it's due to the Dupes priorities, as the particular builder I watched, has their Storage priority set to X, as I was hoping to get the builder to just do building.

[Sasza22]

I wonder if it has something to do with the storage priorities. Lets say you have your ore storage at 7 and your build at 6. Maybe the dupe ignores the storage since it has higher priority than the build so he walks all the way to an unstored piece of ore that has no priority on it. Kinda like the auto sweeper works. It won`t unload the receptable until it`s priority is lower than the storage.

[Sol_Armande]

So I'm here because my dupes are going to the farthest task, mining ONE SQUARE, and then going back to whatever other task, despite the entire area having priority 9 in said mining area.

The pathing is just generally terrible, it's the most frustrating thing about this game and I really hope KLEI puts some time into it before they go live, I've tried a number of things at different stages of the game with mixed success but it really takes the fun out of the game, I've had dupes starving because they won't cook despite both priorities being as high as possible, you basically have to restrict them to ONE task which means a ton of micromanaging if you want things to be efficient and again, that's just not fun.

The game is generally great, but there's only so much that can be explained by "the duplicates are stupid because they are clones," yeah I get it but at this point it's just a poor excuse for horrid AI and highly imperfect priority options.  I definitely wonder if the two or three-tier (jobs being the third) priority system is to blame as well.