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If I understand well the terminology, when I affect one worker to a warehouse, he becomes a conveyor.

Today, I wait for all my production buildings to be built, filled with workers, and then only I start filling warehouse slots to create conveyors.
But am I wise? I guess not.

I'm wondering : if I have some workers,
but yet not enough to fill all my production and harvest places,
- let's say that I have 10 workers, but 13 slots in harvesting camps and production buildings, so that they are 3 free places left unoccupied -

When a new villager comes, the eleventh one,
is it more interesting for me to assign him:

  • at a 11th working slot
  • or at the first free slot available in a warehouse?

What will prove the most helpful?

3 Answers 3

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In general, no. Haulers are highly situational, and as a beginner you shouldn't be using them. In general just employ them as workers. Build more copies of a building if you want more output than the maximum number of slots it has.

If you want to learn more read the rest down below.

Why not to use haulers

There's four main reasons why. Note: these reasons do not apply to free haulers such as the warehouse carts you can get from cornerstones.

Additional trips

When a villager is employed in a production building, more trips they undertake are 'loaded' trips (the villager is carrying something), rather than empty trips (the villager is carrying nothing). Let's compare having a sawyer and weaver haul their own stuff to having a delivery worker do it;

In the case of self haul, the sawyer will take any produced planks out, then return with wood and produce another set of planks. If you set the storage limit to a smart value, you can have your sawyer with full hands both ways most of the time.

In the case of delivery worker haul, the delivery worker will get a bunch of delivery tasks in their queue. They might get the wood, then move empty handed from the sawmill to the weaver to remove the produced fabric. Then proceed empty handed to the sawmill to remove the planks. Then back to the warehouse to get wood (etc.) If you observe haulers for a while you'll notice they take a lot of walks without carrying things.

Hauling (to warehouses) isn't that much work for most producers

In most typical scenarios, workers don't spend that much of their time delivering things to a warehouse. For your typical building task, 10 of something is produced in roughly 2 minutes, then a few seconds are spent hauling it. Sometimes ingredients are restocked on the way back.The ratio can be as much as 1:30.

With a low(ish) number of employed workers (you were suggesting having only about 10) your hauler(s) will spend most of their time doing nothing (useful).

Haulers can go to far away locations

You can build more than one copy of a building.

This applies a lot to farms. Using a hauler near your farm is unreliable. You can't tell the hauler what to deliver. While using a second farm to harvest is a reliable way to get everything off the field before storm hits and destroys your crops.

Situations in which haulers might help

So when should you use a hauler? There's a few reasons why you might be using one;

Helpful cornerstones

There's a few of these (haulers carry more, haulers take less frequent breaks). In the second case, it can just be to get your final resolve push through with fewer resources (earlier).

Lack of parts

Parts are usually your most constrained building material. If you're out of parts, and out of woodcutter slots, but still out of wood as well, then put a hauler in the small warehouse next to where your woodcutters are working as a partial 7th (10th) woodcutter. Woodcutters work fast enough that your hauler will be busy most of the time.

Very large quantities of resources

Not really necessary (more of a win-more) but if you do end up with ludicrous production via cornerstones, haulers can help you get those 100 herbs out of that greenhouse and into the provisioner so it can keep producing more money and food for you.

Certain particular glade events

The Drainage Mole and Infected Drainage Mole events require so many resources to solve them that your event workers might not finish in time to get the event done before it would destroy your glade resources. Build a warehouse next to the mole and put a hauler or two in it to finish the hauling faster so your event workers can start earlier and potentially avoid taking a break at a (far away) hearth.

Micro

You can use a hauler (employed for a few seconds) as an (unreliable) way to micromanage getting resources out of buildings slightly faster.

The most common example for me: Food producers often take a break before delivering the thing they just made. This can often cause fox cooks to die from starvation if your settlement is lacking food. If you don't have the luxury of using non-foxes as cooks, haulers can be an alternative. By making sure it takes the resident fox a few seconds before reaching the hearth, a fast hauler can grab the food he needs to live before his break happens.

Caveats

Playing with haulers is a bit different than playing without. Haulers cannot read your mind. So, they can't tell whether that building with 0 workers in it is supposed to be filled with resources or not. To that end, when you don't want haulers delivering a resource to your building, turn that resource off in its recipes. When you don't want haulers delivering anything somewhere, you can mothball the building (disable its recipes or the building as a whole).

When mothballing or disabling buildings, resources that were on the way might still end up being delivered. In general, when playing with haulers you have to keep a closer eye on the resources stored within your buildings. It's easy for things to end up in the wrong place and you wondering where your stuff went. This may take some time getting used to. Whether the (admittedly small) benefit of haulers is worth it will depend on your playstyle.

For beginners, in general, I recommend actually ignoring this mechanic entirely until you're comfortable with the game's micromanagement without it, as Haulers actually unexpectedly make the game more micro heavy rather than less. Fire-and-forget usage of haulers will harm rather than help.

Resources for more information

Can someone explain haulers to me?

Please explain haulers to me

Wiki on haulers

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Personally I've not found assigning to a Warehouse (Hauler) to be terribly useful. I'm not exactly sure of Hauler's priority, but they seem to prioritize buildings close to the Warehouse. Haulers also have the issue that they will put many ingredients in a building, locking out that ingredient from other buildings.
My thought is that assigning to harvest/production means the worker can work as well as haul, so it's preferrable to assign there, especially if you have empty slots.

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This is situational. There are many times when haulers are more efficient than having another worker.

Often, you do not care to fill all worker slots on a building. For example, you might not need both slots of a Harvester Camp filled with workers. This is especially true if you don't have many charges left on those resources. In this case, having a hauler boosts your other production slightly, which you might prefer over having more reeds.

Or maybe you really need food right now, but don't want to build another food production building, or you are limited on pipes and already have one set up with Rainpunk. Employing a hauler means your Cookhouse workers can spend all their time producing, instead of transporting goods.

This can also be helpful for farms. Usually you'll want a Small Warehouse near your farm so your farmers can utilize every tile of fertile soil. If you're short on parts, or if having a nearby warehouse isn't enough (maybe you haven't built a nearby Small Hearth yet?), assigning some haulers can give your farmers more time to work the soil.

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