Fifty-nine blogs ago we warned players about a significant pathfinding problem. Actually, its more of a goal-choosing problem. When choosing the closest bed/crate/grocery store/job/anything, they do not actually compare the paths they would need to take there. They compare the straight distance between their current location and their goal - ignoring walls, floors, terrain, anything that blocks their path. This is visualized in the image above. The miners will need a bed during the night. They search for the closest bed, ignoring terrain, and find the beds in the house above them. Within that circle, there are no closer beds. Then they calculate a path, which is a pretty long one. That path takes them through another underground room filled with beds. Theyll ignore those and go to the closest beds.
As you can see in the image above, when night falls, the colonists will go to the closest beds that actually require the longest path. This is how it has always been in CS. Weve received a moderate amount of complaints about wonky pathfinding and very weird bed use by colonists. Were pretty sure a large portion of these issues are caused by the problem described above. Well - in the internal dev build, this problem is now fixed :D
This is what our scenario looks like in dev build 0.7.5 - the miners are all in the sensible, closest beds! This wont make a massive difference in small, simple colonies, but it will probably have a major impact on large, complex colonies with twisting mines and multi-level buildings with limited stairs and entrances. Were planning to release 0.7.5 in 1-2 weeks and then wed love to hear how this changes things! Hopefully, a large amount of issues are fixed at once. Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord