Autosweeper priority too low

While annoying, this is not a bug. Its up to the player to arrange the setup in a way, dupes wont steal work from sweepers. And yes it can be done. Maybe not every time, and maybe not in an easy way, but in general.

It is definitely a bug, there's no situation ever an auto sweeper should wait for a dupe to complete the work if the sweeper can complete the work itself in a fraction of travel time. Your suggestion is very limited in its application, currently I have a boiler that relies on making steel with a refinery, because I want as high of an uptime as possible, I gather all the materials into storage containers near it and build an autosweeper, theoretically it should deliver everything and keep the refinery filled all the time, but time and time again it stops working because a dupe decides he wants to bring iron from my base storage to the refinery, leaving the storage container full of iron untouched and the sweeper idling, while my operator had to wait for the dupe to travel half the map to bring in the iron that is already right next to the refinery. I am fully aware you can prevent this by blocking access to dupes from stealing this job, but the example I gave make this fully unviable, as 1) You need a dupe to operate the refinery itself, and every tile you need to open for operating can be used to deliver as well. 2) Iron is used commonly enough that you do not want to store all of them in a single pit that only the sweeper has access to.

 

At the very least, we should be given option to enable "auto sweeper only" for any buildings that accepts a supply task, just like the conveyer loaders.

Edited January 9, 2020 by bountygiver

Its doable...

Place the containers inside a "room" that dupes cant access (you can feed them from the outside with conveyors). A sweeper can grab things through a mesh door. That way, only the sweeper can deliver to the refinery. That is, as long as there is no material outside of your container room. 

I'd say it's a bug, or at least a flaw, because dupes can steal jobs from one another if one wins some calculation while the other is traveling. There's no reason the sweeper shouldn't steal any jobs in its range as it is able to do them.

Edited January 10, 2020 by FinalDoom

On 1/9/2020 at 2:50 AM, SharraShimada said:

Its doable...

Place the containers inside a "room" that dupes cant access (you can feed them from the outside with conveyors). A sweeper can grab things through a mesh door. That way, only the sweeper can deliver to the refinery. That is, as long as there is no material outside of your container room. 

I literally just said this is not a good solution earlier because other tasks also needs that material....

agree