I’ve been playing the same world for about a week and have noticed two big problems. First Hearthlings have a bad tendency to litter or simply not move things to stockyards. Second you can’t make them prioritize buildings or tasks. I have a small guard house I needed done a week ago and the hearthlings won’t work on it for more than a few minutes at a time because there is a surplus of stone in the mine. And then when they do go get the stone or work on the guard house they tend to just drop food or other things just anywhere.
We really need a way to set town based priority such as 1) “Make this building” 2) “Go loot those goblins” 3) “Go clean up the bread you left on the roof” Oxygen Not Included has a really good way of doing this by just setting a numeric priority to specific tasks.
Not exactly what you want, but you can disable what they are allowed to do.
By disabling everything but building…well that’s all they’ll do.
Yeah I’ve been using that to make sure at least one person is just building but they tend to spend a lot of time idle if I set more then like 3 of them to it. I think its because they won’t put the stone in a stockyard so they think they can’t build.
Possible workaround - after the mine is dug out, place a stone stockpile covering the entire tunnel.
I don’t know for sure if that will autostock the items into the pile or not, but its worth a shot.
BH
I feel ya. Those same things are happening to me in unstable. They also are completely ignoring the gardener’s baskets so all they do is pile up around my garden plots and go rotten instead of fill crates I placed right next to it. :’[ AI seems /very/ confused on what it’s supposed to be doing.
I’ve noticed that the littering gets worse if there’s nowhere to put the items in question. My Hearthlings take a while to get around to all the little menial tasks because there’s just so much to do. The more crafters you have building things and tossing stuff on the floor, the more items the AI has to account for. (Honestly, it’s a wonder anyone wants to eat the stews and bread when the cook just throws them on the floor after preparing them.)
When I have about six of them, I break them down into a specific column of tasks to create little teams: I uncheck all but build for designated builders, all but mining for designated miners, and all but job/hauling for the gofers. This seems to help in my games, so if you haven’t actually kept them on permanent designations it might be worth a try for you. The other thing that might be bogging you down is that the Hearthlings have a bad habit of just running off to talk to someone. Or, worse, they stand there and go idle waiting for the other person to talk to them… which gets still worse when that pair of Hearthlings are both waiting for the other person to come over.
And this is in the stable part of the game. Maybe they’ll get closer to right in the next update. I can only hope.
I agree on the check job list, this helps any town alot.
But when a new player is starting up the game, there are no hints to this system? So maybe if somehow, the player was guided by the game into this citizen screen and made aware of it? Is it even in the tutorial? That might be the right place for it 
100% agree on a priority list. Maybe applied to containers like the crafter supply ones? I would love to set primary / secondary / tertiary containers for stuff, or make a “supply chain” to certain resources.