Solved & Confirmed - 0.9 - Limited DM Storage Halts Production

[Mello Tonin]

I noticed this while excavating the area around the DM. My DM was running low on storage capacity, so I built a Storage Room. I selected all construction and crafting materials to go to the Storage Room so the DM would be food production only. My Imps keep emptying my Storage Room to bring back to the DM and this creates a loop.

[UfoL]

I think i posted about it (or at least planned to do so). This looping is haunting me for a long time too. I think it may be some issue with orger at which checks are performed.
Actualy a third state would come in handy here - banned/refuse/locked material that would totally prevent storing that type of material inside certain storage. Look for settlers for example - there was 3 states - neutral, get rid of, don't accept more. And resources always went to nearest storage accepting them. With those 3 states and "nearest storage" rule it was possible to effectively manage where goes what, and have several storages for same material in different parts of kingdom. In dwelvers however "fill with it" mechanism forces imps to take items out of any outher place and carry to the mark, which effectively prevents player from storing one item in several storages and is likely to create loops.
While "fill with it" green mark sounds good, it may work bad when that item is needed to be taken out of storage room. Once item is taken out and placed anywhere else immediately "red light" flashes: "this goes to storage NOW!". Some goods just have to pass trough another storage (or DM) room to be delievered to final destination, especially when it's further away, but the "fill with it" gets in the way and turns item back half way.
I remember having something over 100 of imps in small dungeon just moving coal from one storage to another.

[Mello Tonin]

Yeah I think this subject has been brought up in a couple threads regarding setting item max and mins, or like what you're saying a push/pull/neutral option.

[Rasmus]

Added to the list of Bugs/Issues & Crashes!

[Rasmus]

UfoL, you are very right in this. I agree with that we should focus on just pushing / banning items from being stored rather than pulling them towards storage rooms, it is way more logical. You are also right that there should be some kind of lock option so that the player don't have to go back and forth banning / unbanning items.

Something I have been thinking about is adding a "free up storage" button or something like that the player can press to move a part of the storage to nearby storage rooms that have storage capacity.

I have replaced the "pull button" with a "push button" for now and it seems to work as it should. So...

Also, I have increased the speed the workers can transport items between storage room by letting them use their backpacks for this.

Solved with the next version!

[Rasmus]

Dwelvers alpha 0.9b released, this one is solved but need confirmation!

[Mello Tonin]

It doesn't look like they are moving things out of the Storage Room when they are marked. Here is my save game. You'll see I'm pretty well jammed up. Hopefully it helps.

[Rasmus]

I have checked the savegame, the issue in your case was that one of the storage rooms wasn't linked to the others, and the others had output on the same items.
I have made a little difference with the next version. If an item is selected as output in the whole storage chain, then the game will handle it with a "store status" just to avoid buggy loops. Also, when this happen the "take out of storage" arrow for these items will flash so that the player gets warned about what's going on.

Back to solved with the next version!

[Mello Tonin]

I had the others outputting the same items because I wanted to make the DM food storage only. I remember back when I was using Storage Rooms a lot they would be these huge monstrosities because of all the resources being stored, and because the food cycle has to be linked all to the same storage room, the only way I saw to guarantee food production was to make sure food things were all in a separate store. I'm curious to see the resolution.

[edit]

I can verify in 0.9c that Imps are moving out the resources properly.

[Goblin_Priest]

So far, every game my production levels crash when the DM room is full. In my last save, I built a storage room and told them to put all of the food at the DM, and everything else at the at the storage room. They seem to be exporting the stuff as requested, but the production still doesn't really recover. The linkage seems correct (farm, cookery, and bar links to DM, which has all of the food and water), but production lags considerably, whereas before it was all running smoothly.

The more things go, the more I like the idea of specialized storage.

[Mello Tonin]

You really shouldn't use the DM for storing a particular item as this will jam up the works. Instead create a Storage Room and set the DM to push materials out. If you want a specific storage room just for food things as I do, then just tell the other Storage Room to push out food mats.

[Goblin_Priest]

You really shouldn't use the DM for storing a particular item as this will jam up the works. Instead create a Storage Room and set the DM to push materials out. If you want a specific storage room just for food things as I do, then just tell the other Storage Room to push out food mats.

Any reason for this? I figured the DM worked like just any other storage room?

I'll try that out.

[Mello Tonin]

It does, and when it had unlimited storage you never saw this problem, but it seems that it only has the capacity to store enough to get you to the point where you're building a Storage Room which is really what the purpose of limiting the DM storage capacity was all about: making Storage Rooms relevant again.

[Rasmus]

Solved and confirmed then I will give the storage rooms more options in the future making it easier to move around items in a controlled manner.