2 crafters 1 que - How to manage them?

Is there any way to manage what hearthling crafts what from inside the que?

IE: I have 2 or more carpenters. Is there any way I can control who makes what? I keep running into an issue where one crafter is taking ownership of all the maintain X item jobs and that is creating a very large bottle neck in production.

Also if I have a low lvl crafter and a high lvl crafter and I’m trying to get high quality low tier items, I don’t want the low lvl crafting those items when the low lvl could be making other things.

You can manage quality or experience gain by turning off jobs for one and letting the other finish the queue. The lower level guy will just have to chill if you want high quality stuff and the higher level guy can chill if you’re just producing stuff for experience.

The problem is that turning off jobs for one or more crafters will create a production bottleneck that I’m trying to avoid.

Another example would be if you had 2 or more lvl 6 blacksmith doing several maintain item jobs.
One of the items your trying to maintain is steel. That is 3 items in the crafting que: Iron, charcoal, and the steal itself.
One of the blacksmith decides to clam all 3 jobs and not let the other blacksmith(s) help. This greatly increases the time it takes to make anything that needs steel.

to work around this: i think you can have -TWO- maintain X commands for the same item? its just that the crafters cant get the same block on the right at the same time.
so if you want to make 6 chairs, put down two commands for 3. (unless its maintain commands, then 2 for 6)

That shouldn’t be possible – each hearthling can only claim one job at a time. As long as you have workbenches for them both to use, they should be able to split the tasks up according to the order of the queue, available materials and available benches.

Generally, the problem when you have two equal-levelled hearthlings claiming jobs is when there’s a really long/bulk order in the queue (say you wanted 20 steel ingots made as a single order) – because then one hearthling will claim that entire job, work until they run out of resources, “bounce” the job to the queue and pick up another one (which is probably going to be the auto-produce for one of those resources), and then go straight back to the in-progress order as soon as materials are available. You can avoid this outright by breaking the big order up into smaller orders (e.g. 5 orders of 4 bars each), and make sure that the auto-produce orders have a higher priority than the order to make the final product. That way, as soon as one crafter takes resources to work on the final product, the other crafter should start replacing them. Of course, both need access to the appropriate workbench and raw materials, so it’s worth checking the requirements for each recipe to make sure you have one bench per crafter that’s like to need one.

Flipping this the other way works great with crafters who are split across different levels – let’s say you want to level up a rookie blacksmith but you also need to be producing gold bars, and you don’t want your high-level blacksmith doing the “training” queue for the rookie. Well, you can just make a large order for gold bars, and the high-ranked blacksmith will be locked into that as long as there’s ore and fuel available. Meanwhile, the rookie will do anything else in the queue that they could normally do, which might be making new fuel (if you’re using ACE) or just processing whatever low-level ores into bars without worrying that your high-level blacksmith will “waste” the chance for experience by crafting them instead of the rookie.

I’m guessing that the solution to your issue is probably a combination re-ordering the priorities for crafting (so that first- and second-stage materials are crafted before the final products, e.g. fuel and iron bars are all crafted before they try to craft steel), making sure there are enough workbenches, and making sure that materials are kept in storage. As long as the AI isn’t stuck in a “back and forth” pattern because of a lack of resources, the crafting should hum along smoothly once your priorities and supply lines are set up correctly.

Also, if you’re using ACE, multiple crafters can work on the same order simultaneously. So if you have them prioritized by highest skill required first, everyone should be maximally productive.