I love the recent change to finished work shelves that allows you to assign them to a specific crafter. I’m still not sure I understand the most efficient way to use all the containers though. What takes priority over what? And who is responsible for transporting things between containers? What tips do you have for chests, tuns, barrels, shelfs, supply racks, baskets, etc.?
Check the description of the storage items
There are 3 overall kinds of storage when looking at purpose
1 supply type,either in the name or it is in the description
2 crafted items, finished workshelves,…
3 general storage, higher capacity than other types and i think more kinds of storeable items
Which type is a tun? Seems like general storage, but not everything is allowed. What is considered a “dry good”? Some containers allow you to pick multiple filters while others only allow one specific item or one category. And then you have the casks that limit the types of things you can put in them. I get the general idea, I just can’t remember which thing does what and I end up spending a lot of time looking at every container until I find one that makes sense.
What kind of containers do you use for storing all the vegetable and fruit baskets from farming? What about all the trapper stuff that ends up all over the ground?
Tuns are for storing liquids after they’ve been crafted.
“dry goods” generally means foods like grains, but also includes a bunch of miscellaneous things. The important thing to know is that any of the containers that accept dry goods are going to be ones where you select a specific type of item to store, rather than a mixture of items.
As far as dealing with veggies or trapper loot, that’s a good scenario to use something like a chest or crate – you don’t want to sort the items as they’re being harvested you just want them off the ground ASAP. Then you have input bins to “call for” those materials where you need them, so that the chests are being constantly drawn from and the items are flowing towards where they’re needed.
So, the basic strategy is:
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chests/crates are good for either short-term storage in situations where lots of different items will be nearby (e.g. trapper, or next to the town banner so that you have somewhere to put any items you’ve just bought from traders); and for long-term storage of excess materials. Chests are flexible, but they aren’t very smart about keeping things where you need them; especially if you default to ‘accept everything.’
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input bins/shelves/etc. will “pull” items to an area (actually they just tell hearthlings to go fetch the item to store in them), so you use them to maintain a supply of materials anywhere that they’ll be needed.
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output shelves are a temporary place to store finished products – literally just so that they don’t get put straight onto the ground – and you always want to put them next to workbenches.
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there are different types of all these storages for “solid” items (crates, urns, input shelves) and “liquid” items (barrels, kegs, etc.), and they have the same logic. So a keg is basically an input bin for liquids; and a tun is an output shelf for liquids, etc. Sometimes you get items that can do either – e.g. I think that barrels can accept either liquids or certain foods – but, generally speaking, there’s a second important distinction between the container types: some can store “categories” while others store specific items that you select. So, for example, crates can store all kinds of raw veggies simply as “raw veggies”, whereas an input shelf can either accept “all raw veggies” or else it can filter by individual varieties.
As an example of how this whole system works: let’s say you’re trying to store some logs, well you’d want to have an input bin for wood (set to “all logs”) in the carpenter’s workshop since you always want wood to be available there. Once you get to a high level carpenter, you might also want input bins for things like cloth, leather, gold flakes, stone, and anything else the carpenter will use pretty often – and you would have an input bin for wood in the mason’s workshop and the weaver’s workshop since they’ll be using wood too. Now, let’s assume you have lots and lots of wood available; you’d probably want to store the bulk of it at the carpenter’s shop (they’re the crafter most likely to need most of it!), so then you put a big chest for wood in the carpenter’s workshop… the input bins in your other crafters’ shops will mean that they have a little wood available without having to go collect it from far away, but you won’t end up with all your wood being stored somewhere weird just because that’s where there was space for it at the time. By using a mix of crates/chests and input bins, you can control the “flow” of logs to where they’re needed! You would then probably want output shelves set to accept furniture in all 3 of those workshops, and you might have a chest set to accept furniture somewhere in the middle of town.
Now, let’s imagine you’re building a large castle or something… before you start building it, you can place down some input bins for stone, wood, and anything else you’ll need so that they’re available right near the construction site. If you have some already full chests/crates of those materials, you can even move the full crate in one go to save even more time! This saves the hearthlings from walking back and forth to get materials, and that means more time to build the project and less time wasted on travel.
And that’s the crux of the whole system really – it’s about getting the items where you need them so that the crafters or builders or whoever can just grab them and do their job, rather than having to walk all over town fetching different resources to do their job. You’ll see if you follow along as hearthlings do their work that they get jobs done much faster if they split up all the “walk over and collect an item” steps as individual hauling jobs rather than making them all part of the crafting job – instead of 1 hearthling having to go to 5 different places to do a job, 5 hearthlings can each go to 1 place and bring back the needed resource… and they can all do that at the same time! So instead of having to wait for that 1 hearthling to complete a lap of the town and maybe go out to the forest or the mines too, you can have all the haulers doing their thing together, and 1 hearthling comes to grab all those materials already stored in their workshop and just do the task straight away. And while that crafter is crafting, the haulers* can start replenishing resources straight away, so the crafter is ready to craft another thing immediately after!
*haulers can also be cricket golems if you’re lucky enough to get some, or you can even get hearthlings who have the Pack Mule trait and un-tick their other jobs so they just haul things… once you have the storage set up, you can start using all kinds of advanced tactics to make things more and more efficient.
So, the main things to remember when creating storage:
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think about where you want the items to end up, not just where they are now
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think about where your hearthlings would have to travel to go and collect any ingredients. If it’s a long walk and one of your crafters would have to make it often, then you probably want an input bin for that item nearby so that someone else can do the walking/carrying and let your crafter do the crafting
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some storage containers work with a specific item that you select; others will store a category of items. Which one you use will depend on a few factors, but usually the ones where you select a specific item are “input” containers (i.e. they pull that item to them.) The input items do have a “all of this category” option too, though (e.g. “all raw veggies” or “all kinds of stone”) in case you don’t care about the specific type and just need the general type for a recipe (e.g. how veggie soup doesn’t care what kind of veggies you use.)
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Thanks. Very helpful! I think I was trying to use input and output bins too much and wasn’t using enough of the normal chests/crates. Once I added more of those in strategic spots, I noticed less stuff on the floor and better efficiency all around.
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