How to take crates from great to amazing: Specific Goods and Priority Boxes!

Suggestions
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I have two suggestions for one of the best quality of life improvements to come to stonehearth: The crates! First, as I may have mentioned, the crates are amazing! I love not having fields upon fields of wooden logs and boxed corn! The crates inspired some new ideas, though, that could make them even more convenient.

1. Specific Goods:

I like segregating my work spaces and closely controlling who is pulling from what box. Being able to send wood to one crate and stone to another is a great first step, but we run in to some disambiguation issues when it comes to furniture, weapons, and plant products. Being able to specify, say, silk thread for my weaver products room and wheat in my farmer’s hut would be a HUGE help. Specifying the boxes near my woodworker for wooden furniture and the boxes near my mason for stone furniture would REALLY improve my ability to find items, as well as my productivity flow. I know hearthlings already target the closest applicable boxes, which helps, but I desire more complete control over my storage solutions.

2. Crate Priority

There would be several good ways to implement this, but here’s the basic idea. The ability to tell my hearthlings to prioritize one box over another would really help my sorting. By telling them to target the boxes nearest to my mason with raw stone FIRST, and THEN sending it to overflow storage, I could more conveniently optimize my craftsmen. Whether this takes the form of numeric priorities (the higher the priority number, the more likely a hearthling is to target it) or just a low/high priority toggle would suffice, as well.

Thanks for your attention, and I’d love to hear your comments!

4 Likes
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the priority bit has already been suggested a few times (I’d provide links but there are several of them and I don’t feel like digging through hundreds of posts to bring up the links). in fact, I’ve personally made a suggestion thread for crate priority lol

the specific goods bit would be nice though

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What we really need is a basic filter tab, and an advanced filter tab where we can go in and set specifics when it’s important. I’m not sure what this will do to any lag issues related to pathing.

Prioritizing stockpiles sounds wonderful (it’s a fantastic thing in dwarf fortress to be able to tell a pile to take from another pile.) But I’m pretty sure this will eventually cause pathing and processing issues. Ultimately I do agree, we definitely need to get some way of prioritizing stockpiles at some point.

The thing I MOST want to see on crates/boxes though? A dump feature. If I want to undeploy a box and it still has stuff in it, I’d rather have my hearthlings pick the box up, dump it out on the ground, and move it. then they can pick up the stuff that used to be in it and move it to proper boxes/piles. I don’t want to wait for them to get around to emptying it in their sweet time and just sort of forgetting about it and leaving it sit there with one lump of coal that needs to get moved before I can tell them to undeploy it.