Some distance from your settlement, you’ve established a mine. Your workers are gathering stone and ores and depositing them into a stockpile just outside the mineshaft. In the settlement, you have specialized stockpiles for various resource types.
Goal: To get the resources from the mine’s stockpile to the settlement without disrupting the workers’ mining duties.
Solution: Twofold.
A) A mechanic in which you can select a stockpile and, with the click of a button, assign that stockpile to ‘request’ its contents be delivered to another stockpile, even if the destinations stockpile is not set to hold that kind of resource.
B) A limit to how many workers assign themselves to fulfilling stockpile output requests, allowing the other workers to remain focused on their tasks.
Desired Behavior:
The miners will continue to dig up stone and ores, gathering them into their nearby stockpile and immediately return to mine for more. Meanwhile, one or two workers from the settlement will set out to retrieve the gathered materials in the distant stockpile, and bring them to the destination storage in town. Because the destination storage doesn’t accept stone or ores, the resources will immediately be flagged for relocation to the nearest available compatible storage.
Naturally any resources in any storage could be ‘output’ to any other stockpiles (including chests and crates), for streamlining any resources. The game would need to handle each output assignment as its own job, assigning at least one worker to each instance, and adding more if there’s a surplus of workers. The math for that kind of thing, I’d leave up to the programmers. Unless Hauling was to become its own specialized worker job.
Just something I thought might be a useful addition…
Hey there @Klokkwork, I really like this idea, and it actually came up in a recent dev stream (sorry, don’t remember which one). I am going to address it in two parts.
A similar idea to this was discussed in the stream. The idea in the stream was that any individual stockpile could have a “maintain item” function similar to a crafter workbench, and workers would try and ensure that the proper number always existed by pulling from other stockpiles. The big idea was that you could have a “central” storage site, with large stockpiles, and then maintain “specialized” stockpiles, particularly in regards to crafters, with workers helping to move everything.
This is coming! The “Hearthling Therapist UI,” which is planned for Alpha 13, will allow for you to set exactly what tasks each Hearthling can do, so if you only want 2 moving stuff, you can turn off “hauling” for all the others.
@jomaxro Absolutely splendid! I like the “maintain item” idea. That would definitely help in streamlining the flow of resources and keeping the town running more efficiently.
I have to ask, in regards to the “Hearthling Therapist UI”, does this apply to all Hearthlings, or just workers? It might be nice to have crafters dedicated to certain recipes.
It think the developers should try to play Pharaoh (old city management game). The storage system there is awesome. You have all the resources where you want.
As for the “maximum worker”, you could maybe have a carrier class, or as you say, have a maximum number of workers moving stuff.
I think the best solution for moving your resources, would be to have the hearthlings prioritize transportation last, expect if you manually tells one worker to carry the stuff from one place to another
