Beavers should prioritize to live near their work (job and home proximity)

Comments: 45

• 28 Sep, '21
  Foxy Merged

  I was thinking beavers move to a building closest to their work if there's space(and perhaps trade if not) within a district of course

• 14 Oct, '21
  Dan Merged

  YES, Move beavers homes closest to work, or at least the option to tell individual beavers where to live.

• 14 Oct, '21
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "automatic house moving" (suggested by Foxy on 2021-09-28), including upvotes (3) and comments (1), was merged into this suggestion.

• 15 Oct, '21
  Kevin Merged

  Sometimes beavers live in houses extremely far away, while they could basically do a house swap, allowing both parties to live closer to their work.

• 16 Oct, '21
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Reset housing for beavers" (suggested by Kevin on 2021-10-15), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 24 Oct, '21
  Fox Merged

  Make it easier to minimize beavers walking all over the map.
  
  Make beavers live in the lodge nearest their job.
  
  Toggle a view that highlights where all your food or water is, indicating a walkable radius. Same mechanic as clicking on a building and showing the walking range on the paths, except all places where water is stored would show at once, and overlapping areas would become greener. If a part of the path is red or even blank, you know you need to place water storage nearer there so that beavers don't have to travel as far to eat or drink.
  
  Also for haulers! I'd like to be able to toggle all haulers at once and see how much of the map is comfortably served by haulers.
  
  Would also like if I could click on a job building and have nearby resources relevant to the job highlighted. Clicking a gristmill would highlight buildings containing wheat. Clicking a bakery would highlight buildings containing flour and logs.

• 26 Oct, '21
  Fox Merged

  I realize now that the way I phrased this sounds like I'm telling you to do this rather than suggesting an idea. I initially thought that the fact that this was an idea and not a demand was inherently implied, but it's been pointed out by a friend that that is not immediately obvious. Sorry about that! It's just an idea, not a demand.
  
  I love this game so much as is and I know everything ya'll have planned will only make it more amazing, with or without my ideas. :)

• 25 Nov, '21
  rainy Merged

  one step further - I'd like to assign beavers to specific lodges. thanks y'all, I'm having so much fun! :)

• 

  10 Dec, '21
  ItDoesntMatter Merged

  This would save a lot time & resources.

• 12 Dec, '21
  savanik Merged

  I also have this as a concern / annoyance. I also have a possible solution:
  
  Select two beavers. Calculate their path from their housing to their workplace. Sum the distance of their paths. Now swap their housing locations, and sum the distance of their new paths. If the new distance is less than the final distance, have the beavers swap where they live.
  
  This does require four pathfinding runs per comparison. You could do this as a round once per day, or you could select a few random beavers, and the settlement would gradually converge on more efficient housing. Or you could create a new structure (Organizer?) and have every time they 'produce' their output, they run this calculation.

• 13 Dec, '21
  Lyndwyrm Merged

  I would also appreciate some way to either have beavers automatically choose a home to live in based on how far it is from where they work, or for the player to manually tell beavers to move to a given dwelling. I don't know how beavers choose homes now, so I could understand some challenge with either of those. For instance, if the player told a beaver to live in a house, the beaver should continue living there, not move the next day when another house is built further away.
  
  At the same time, a converse of this, where the unemployed beaver that lives closest to a workplace is chosen to work there would be good. Then the player could at least bump beavers from their current workplaces (by temporarily disabling them) to filter them down to the nearest workplaces.
  
  I can see why for game theme/balance to not do this, because the player doesn't directly control the beavers.

• 13 Dec, '21
  Lyndwyrm Merged

  I saw this in my first game where I put a single house far from the district center, with a farmhouse, waterpump and storage by it. I thought that way some beavers could live and work there and add some water and food supply. But beavers that moved in didn't seem to correlate with beavers that started working there, so beavers had to travel to work there, and beavers travelled from there to work in the main city. I thought I might be able to solve this with a district gate, but, then I'd have to have distribution posts to move food into the city, and those beavers wouldn't benefit from the combined resources of the main city, and overall it would be an expensive setup for just some expanded food production.

• 15 Dec, '21
  Shurlan Merged

  I'd like to see this as well, tho more due to immersion than efficiency since it only matters for travel in the morning and they are quite fast anyway.
  A few considerations:
  savaniks approach can get stuck in situations where a group of beavers swapping would improve the situation but pairwise swapping gets rejected.
  Optimal solutions (for example found via dijkstra) also have problems: They can be opaque to players. Building a house in front of a workplace might still be filled with beavers not from this workplace if it improves the global solution, leading to fustration since what the player sees as obvious does not happen. (This is more likely the smaller the houses are.)
  I think the best would be:
  A) Allow players to link workplaces to homes
  B) Assign homes greedily (For example: Assign first choice shortest first, for the ones whos spot has been taken: second choice shortest first, third...)
  Automatic assignments have a huge problem: When to rerun? On path change? Paused building?

• 25 Dec, '21
  Raithis Merged

  One of the things I frequently notice is some beavers passing out of exhaustion, even with 16h work days. On inspection, this most frequently happens when a beaver's place of work is far from their home. This circumstance happens even when there is open housing next to their place of work. Food/Water is fairly even spaced.
  
  I would suggest adding a housing preference option with the default being shortest work commute.

• 25 Dec, '21
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Shortest Commute Living Choice" (suggested by Raithis on 2021-12-25), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 03 Jan, '22
  sunyudai Merged

  Honestly, I would go with a non-optimal but "better" solution - when a beaver shows up for work at the start of the day, and there are homes with open slots, the game checks if one of the homes with open slots has a shorter path than the beaver's current home.
  
  If yes, the beaver changes homes.
  
  Simpler to code and no route comparison making it likely take less of a performance hit to test route lengths, while at the same time ensuring that beavers wind up with shorter commutes. Also, only checking if there are homes with openings can save some comparisons with a simple test.
  
  This won't wind up with optimized routes, but it will wind up with generally shorter commutes and chances for commutes to improve over time, more realistically modeling a real life situation.
  
  If needed, maybe even limit the number of times the game checks routes per day per district - I.E. the game will only check 10 beavers routes each day, and which beavers gets checked changes each day.

• 11 Apr, '22
  ISAWHIM Merged

  I have beavers sleeping in homes that are half-way across the map from where they work. Actually, they all seem to criss-cross like that. I didnt' take the time to build individual houses and "near work lodging", so that beavers across the map could move-in.
  
  Depending what the beavers assigned job is, they should choose a home location that is nearest, unless they are a "general laborer". (Bakery guys bunking at closest bedding to bakery". Lumberjacks bedding at closest bed to his work-spot. Haulers at closest "whatever is left", by their "busiest hauling job".)
  
  This goes for water and food too. I have water barrels right next to busy spots but many run across the whole map to get water from the pumps! They can't wait 1 second for a sip, but they will run for 20 seconds to the center of town, and back! Time is money, bring a canteen to work! (NOTE: We need canteens and lunch-boxes production.)

• 11 Apr, '22
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Smart beavers. Living near work." (suggested by ISAWHIM on 2022-04-11), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 30 Apr, '22
  Javey Dones Merged

  https://discord.com/channels/558398674389172225/723433090944335933/969966996311662592
  New housing algorithm to go to housing to sleep closest to their workplace rather than across the map. Living close to work would allow a faster morning work efficiency.

• 02 May, '22
  jcheung Merged

  slightly modified suggestion:
  allowed "work radius" for housing, which defaults to infinite.
  exception: buildings set to the highest work priority which aren't filled by nearby housing should be allowed to draw beavers even when out of reach, because you set the priority high for a reason. or so i assume.
  
  either way, the OP suggestion or mine, we'll probably also need a way to control where beavers live. even as simple as "fill to max" checkbox, or "kits only" or "adults only" would probably work

• 06 Oct, '22
  Wool Merged

  I'm still new to the game so I might be missing something.
  
  As it is right now:
  
  I built an "outpost" as far away from the center as possible; built houses and workplaces. The job assignment is completely random as far as I can tell which makes for very awkward trips where beavers trek for most of the day just to reach their workplace, despite living right next to one.
  
  I've tried messing with all the panels, including pausing all buildings and unpausing, pausing the buildings these distant beavers work and and trying to manipulate the randomness to employ them there. Nothing really worked, if there's a tool for that I might've missed it. So either whatever is there should be more prominent (or I'm just dumb) or this could be a thing to consider :).

• 14 Oct, '22
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Ability to prioritize jobs based on housing proximity" (suggested by Wool on 2022-10-06), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 20 Dec, '22
  santa Merged

  Get the workers to live in the nearest house to their job. rather than scampering to the other side of town. add some kind of transportation system. river or rail. dont really like the different districts. prefer one big world will buildings where ever you want
  
  great game !

• 26 Dec, '22
  Gin Fuyou Admin Merged

  "Homes and transport" (suggested by santa on 2022-12-20), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 30 Dec, '22
  LordZanik Merged

  I was going to suggest what Rainy mentions and also add I'd like to have the ability to assign a beaver to a specific job if possible as well.

• 15 Mar
  Snippyhippie92 Merged

  I like this. But I wouldnt go for assign beavers to houses. That would be far too tedious to manage, every death/birth/ or job switch would require you to go in change that beavers housing every time. I think it would be far better if we could assign housing to specific jobs. That way, when a beaver takes a job its automatically assigned a bed in the lodge you specified. Way more automated and simpler once it gets setup.

• 21 Apr
  BlastMan Merged

  This change will gain workers efficiency in large districts (especially in update 4 with no district range). It will be nice to see several residential quarters on a big map.

• 24 Apr
  Y'shtola

  Terraria is nice with allowing you to select which "house" something lives in.
  If we could get an interface to shift housing for beavers, it would be nice.

• 27 Apr
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Let the beavers live in the closest houses to their work buildings" (suggested by BlastMan on 2023-04-21), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 28 Apr
  MaDu

  this is crucial in update 4. Setting up a new district takes a lot of preparation, so I really loved having no limits on the districts. However, it's not nice to see a beaver commute to the other side of the map, and it has already resulted in beavers getting the "exhausted" debuff. I all for game balancing, but this is just a dumb behavior for a beaver.

• 01 May
  Darren

  This would be amazing to have. Especially if you can create smaller sub districts by having a water and food storage near those houses.
  
  Then I can make a distant processing district that has 3 houses, some food and water, and all those local beavers do is jump into their job and work.

• 10 May
  MrBuisson

  the most frustrating thing with this isssue is not in the morning. At the end of the day some beavers can't reach their home in time and actually sleep in the wild. Every day.

• 19 May
  J Merged

  With the change to districts having unlimited range, it no longer makes sense to have all your important jobs and housing close to the district center. Jobsites can be more distributed now. If you have a remote scrap metal collector and there is a tiny shack next to it, then only that beaver will live there and nobody else since it would be too far away from jobs closer to the district center.
  
  This will allow users to reduce the time it takes beavers to go to and from work and to group different “industries” into more visually pleasing sub districts.

• 22 May
  Gin Fuyou Admin Merged

  "Beavers live closer to their worksite" (suggested by J on 2023-05-19), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 02 Jun
  a new player Merged

  make it that beavers will live closest to there place of work

• 06 Jun
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "beaver living location" (suggested by a new player on 2023-06-02), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 06 Jun
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Living close to work" (suggested by Javey Dones on 2022-04-30), including upvotes (6) and comments (1), was merged into this suggestion.

• 06 Jun
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "More Efficient Beavers: Make beavers live close to their job, and show resource proximity" (suggested by Fox on 2021-10-24), including upvotes (15) and comments (6), was merged into this suggestion.

• 08 Jul
  DremeMynd

  This is especially important now that districts are potentially infinite.

• 03 Aug
  kevin

  absolutely necessary!

• 22 Aug
  Someone Merged

  I have a very large city, which is possible because of the removal of district limitations. However, my beavers spend their whole day commuting instead of being useful. It would be great if i was able to place houses close to their workplace without them wandering away to work on the opposite side of the map

• 28 Aug
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Beavers are not working closest to their home" (suggested by ItDoesntMatter on 2021-12-10), including upvotes (12) and comments (7), was merged into this suggestion.

• 28 Aug
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Beavers should choose their residence based on proximity to workplace, not randomness" (suggested by Someone on 2023-08-22), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

• 20 Sep
  Viral Merged

  Basically, I love building large settlements but my biggest issue is the workers just take whatever house they want, I'd really like it if the workers would choose the house closest to their job with an open bed in it, or maybe have a set limit of blocks that if they're farther away than that amount they check for a closer bed that's available? I get the district limits are there to negate the need for this but again, I love the huge sprawling settlements that just test how much I can build

• 20 Sep
  Gin Fuyou Admin

  "Prioritized housing for workers" (suggested by Viral on 2023-09-20), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.