Pathfinding - should avoid badwater as much as possible when heading to a destination.

15 votes

Beavers seems to not care at all about the presence of badwater and go through it even if there is a reasonable path with no badwater available to them to go to their intended destination. Considering how fast a beaver gets contaminated (in seconds), without proper pathfinding in which beavers try to go around the badwater when possible, this makes the badwater feature more of a painful challenge rather than a fun challenge.

Under consideration Experimental Suggestion Suggested by: Greytusks (05 Oct, '23) • Upvoted: 20 Apr • Comments: 5

Comments: 5

08 Jan
Maoman
Agreed. I have to deal with two dozen contaminated beavers now because they kept using a slightly shorter water route during a badwater tide when a perfectly good dam with a walkway was just a dozen or so blocks further away.
1
25 Jan
Nikolay
I've seen a beaver cross 10 tiles of badwater to go to a contemplation place.
I've seen beavers go into badwater to complete construction projects I don't really care about.
I've seen beavers commute to their workplace over badwater to cut some dead trees somewhere far way.

> go around the badwater when possible
I would make this stronger and they that beavers should never ever voluntarily get into bad water.

Beavers know badwater is deadly. I value beavers. Let beavers also value beavers.

The alternative is a lot of micromanagement - making sure that there is no possible path crossing badwater and that no construction task will be misinterpreted by the beavers. Also this highly discourages building a couple of stairs to cross the river early game.
1
22 Feb
Tom
There should be one exception to this - that it beavers should enter badwater if it's the only way to reach a construction project, *and* there's no other construction projects of equal or higher priority still incomplete (so that they won't enter badwater to complete a row of platforms over it, but instead complete the platforms one at a time from the top). I *do* want to be able to tell my beavers "no really, you need to get stinky because this *has* to get finished", but I want the normal behaviour to be to stay out of the badwater unless it's *absolutely* necessary.
18 Apr
Jonathan
Instead of using a painstakingly-built, safe path that went to my current build site, fourteen builders traveled down a dead-end stairs (I used to build dams earlier) into badwater to travel a very long *pathless* distance.

I could sort of get it if there was a problems not routing beavers through the badwater, but it didn't even use a path to irradiate my workforce.
20 Apr
officialNecro
I would prefer this to be either a toggle per building and per district. You'd be able to set the default behavior of how beavers of a district handles badwater obstacles and then individually set labor buildings. The goal there is obvious, during a badwater season I don't want my beaver doing stuff that could lead to contamination, so by default I would have the district set to avoid badwater. However, at some point I build a few decontamination pods after which I don't mind the builders of one building going into the badwater to complete an essential project.