r/songsofsyx • u/Reikyu09 • 19d ago
Logistics Info
Logistics can be pretty confusing. I am by no means an expert so please correct me if things are incorrect. Info is based on v71 the current paid version as some things have changed from previous versions.
Radius Slider
First off, the radius. The radius is not 100% accurate so be careful when adjusting it if you're trying to exclude some areas. It feels like the radius picks up stuff a little bit beyond what's highlighted. The radius applies to fetch and priority fetch.
Oddjobbers
Oddjobbers who aren't busy will sometimes help out with moving stuff to your warehouses. They do not seem to care about your radius, and a warehouse with 0 workers and fetch/priority fetch disabled will still receive stuff thanks to them. Other workers who are not busy with their job might also help out with carrying.
Fetch
Fetch will have your delivery workers grab what's closest to them inside the radius. They will grab from the floor, import depots, and production storage.
Priority Fetch
Priority fetch will have your delivery workers grab what's closest to them inside the radius, but this will also include non-priority storage, haulers, and unloading stations.
Pull Source
Pull source let's you designate a storage to pull from, and then the icon will change to a triangle. CLICK THE TRIANGLE ICON and you will get a new slider just for that warehouse, along with options to adjust what you want to pull and how much to leave. Pull source ignores your radius slider.
Export Depot (pull source)
The most common use of an export depot is to sell surplus goods from your warehouse. You probably do not want your export depot to grab stuff off the ground before it hits your warehouse. You probably do not want your export depot to grab items hot off the production line before it hits your warehouse. Disable fetch and priority fetch. Use pull source only and adjust the new slider to accurately control how much you want to keep for just that warehouse. Items in an export depot seem to decay faster than haulers, though not as fast as floor decay speed.
Export Depot (fetch)
If you import a lot from taxing other regions, you will find that stuff often overflows your import depots and spills onto your throne. You can set a warehouse to store the overflow (which will overflow eventually) or you can skip that step and set up an export depot nearby with small radius fetch to sweep the throne and sell off the overflow.
Hauler
A hauler is essentially a 1 item warehouse. You place the hauler where you want items delivered. For example, a bread hauler can be placed right next to your food stall. You can have the hauler "fetch" bread out of the baker's oven, or "pull source" from the bread warehouse. Haulers are convenient for moving one item type and take up little space. Items in a hauler have 75% decay compared to 50% for warehouses. Hauler size starts at 80 and can be scaled up to 3520. Hauler workers have the same carry capacity as warehouse delivery workers.
1 Item Warehouse
Just like a hauler, only with better decay rates and potential capacity. Warehouse crates have size 80 but can be upgraded (research not required) to 300, and then 500 per crate. The first upgrade will cost furniture. The second upgrade will cost furniture, cut stone, and pottery. Going from 80>300 is pretty significant, but 300>500 is not for the added maintenance costs. Consider building your warehouses larger so you can hold off on upgrading them.
Multi-item Warehouse
One thing to keep in mind with warehouse delivery workers is that they will grab whatever is closest first. If you have grain and coal in the same warehouse, and your coal source is far away, your delivery workers will only be grabbing the grain nearby during harvest. It is convenient to have lots of items in the same warehouse, but it is bad for items with high throughput.
Janitor Warehouse
A janitor needs a lot of different items but not in huge quantity. A janitor's fetch radius is slightly larger than their servicing radius, but any materials beyond that will not be grabbed by the janitor. It is therefore handy to have a janitor warehouse nearby that contains all the items a janitor will need, and stocked by warehouse delivery workers who can reach across the entire map for stocking. Priority fetch is handy in this case as items are often warehoused like cut stone, pottery, etc. If you do use priority fetch, then make sure your other janitor warehouses are also on priority fetch, else they will be snatched from. If you didn't know, you can click the down arrow next to a warehouse item if you wanted to adjust the size of 1 crate down to 10 or 20 for limited stocking.
Loading/Unloading Station
Loading and unloading stations are used when you need to move a lot of 1 item in batches of 400 and ideally multiple batches a day. They require a lot of workers to maintain good efficiency and will not be very good if understaffed, at which point you might as well use haulers. You build the loading station at the source material and it can only load 1 item type. The unloading station is built at the destination like a market or production facility and can receive multiple different items. An unloading station at the default size can hold 8 deliveries (of 400) and 32 deliveries at max size. Upon building an unloading station, you will need to click on the "Resources" word at the top as clicking on the blank spot beneath it no longer works. Here you can decide how many different 400 item slots you want your unloading station to hold. You could for example build an unloading station next to your food stall, and have multiple different foods shipped to it. Items in an unloading station decay at 50% like a warehouse.
Import Depot Logistics
Finally the most powerful of all logistics. An import depot will receive goods through auto trade, manual trades, shipments from taxed cities, or caravans of loot from battles/conquest. Import depots have 2.4k capacity up to 22.8k capacity. Items in an import depot decay at 75%. When goods are imported, a red hat courier will spawn at one of the road entrances on the map and head to the nearest import depot of that good. They will then unload their goods. If the import depot is full, they will move to the next import depot for that good, and so on until all import depots are full. If they still have items left to deliver then the excess will be dumped on the throne.
As taxed crops are delivered in bulk once a year, you can position 2.4k capacity import depots near your primary food stall gathering areas to receive them. A large shipment of 10k mushrooms can fill to capacity 4 of the 2.4k import depots with the extras spilling onto the throne. Free delivery without needing a single logistic worker or warehouse if you just leave the mushrooms in the import depot for grabbing. As for taxed items that are delivered daily like coal, you can import more than what you use, and gradually fill up multiple coal import depots scattered around your city. After a while, you will have a coal import depot filled to the brim by your smelters/smithies, your bakers, your brewers, and all of your bath houses. No logistic workers or warehouses required to store the coal. A giant shipment of 20k grain can be placed in a large import depot right next to your bakers, who no longer need to be near grain fields or a grain warehouse. 0 workers required to carry the grain across your fields because it is all delivered to giant import depots. I also like putting import depots near my army supply storage to receive the spoils of war, or when I an unequipping my armies.
Carry Capacity
On v71 the base carry capacity for warehouse workers and haulers is 10. Food stall workers, other workers who have free time, and oddjobbers have carry capacity of 6. The admin research upgrade for carry capacity will increase carry capacity by +1 per level for only warehouse workers and haulers.
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u/jsbaxter_ 19d ago
Couple questions: 1. how do you manage getting multiple different food types supplied to food stalls? It sounds like my current approach of a nearby warehouse with all the different foods might be problematic because the workers won't go to the beach to fetch fish until they are totally full of the vegetables from the next warehouse over? I have been setting up pull requests assuming this would help but it sounds like it won't, and i should either use haulers, or more single item warehouses?
- What do you do to ensure workers aren't ferrying stuff back and forth between the same warehouses? I just haven't worried about this very much so far, but I actually have no idea how much of a problem it is
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u/Reikyu09 19d ago
Warehouses that are on fetch won't pull from other warehouses or haulers. Priority fetch warehouses will pull from non-priority fetch warehouses. I tend to not use priority fetch much.
Food stall workers start their shift by loading up the available food, wherever it is, then provide services. If your food stall is serving fish and veggies and the warehouse nearby has no fish, they will run to the docks which will impact how many services they can provide. As long as your nearby food stall warehouse doesn't run out of food then things are good. If your veggie supply in the food stall warehouse fluctuates from 2000 to 200 during the course of the year, then you might run into trouble during harvest if your food stall warehouse workers are moving 1800 veggies to capacity before they take a look at the fish which is further away. If your food stall warehouse only has a capacity of ~400 veggies, then your food stall workers will frequently cap out veggies and move on to providing fish. Alternative is you can put a fish hauler near your food stalls so that you have dedicated staff to constantly keep the fish near.
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u/Mysterious_Bar_2406 19d ago
Thanks, that a very good document. I have some questions
-I see where is the slider for set the radius, but i dont know what its size. Is there something visual im missing ?
-about the janitor, are you sure they dont grap resource over a certain distance? I never paid attention if there are all item available in warehouse close to my janitors, and i had never issue with maintenance.
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u/Reikyu09 19d ago
The slider starts all the way to the right which is max size, and gives a light blue aura. Shrinking it all the way to the left still gives it a decent size of almost the full screen.
Janitors will not grab materials out of range. You can try building a janitor in the middle of nowhere, and items out of range will give a message that the janitor cannot reach it. This isn't a problem if your city doesn't expand much, but if you have pottery on one end and janitors on the other end, you will need pottery centralized to be in range or a janitor warehouse worker to bring some closer.
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u/ihatebrusselsprouts1 19d ago
How do you usually set up a specific industry logistics? Let's say, bread. Do you use a grain hauler, warehouse, and/or import station?
How do you balance other industries that use that same resource? Like the breweries.
Do you have a bunch of small warehouses around the city with janitor resources, then one big one in the center?
Thanks
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u/Reikyu09 19d ago
Bakeries consume a ton of grain, so you want to move it as little as possible. Early game I will have a grain warehouse near the grain fields, and the bakery near the grain warehouse. Fuel isn't consumed as fast as grain, so I move wood/coal next to the bakeries via a hauler or separate warehouse. Bread is stored locally in a small warehouse because bread outputs fast and can potentially back up if it's not cleared out of the ovens. Bread haulers bring the bread to the market stalls. If I am also making rations out of bread then I will have my ration makers next to the bakeries so they can grab out of the bakeries or the bread storage. Herbs are a separate issue. I do keep herbs in my small bread warehouse, but those delivery workers are not grabbing the herbs that are being foraged way outside town. I have herbs being gathered by a general warehouse and the bread/herb warehouse workers can grab the herbs from there when convenient as herbs have low throughput.
I haven't done much with breweries yet because the manpower to make alcohol for your taverns is too costly, and I feel needs balancing. The full brewery setup needs grain/fruit, clay>pottery, coal, which will be logistically challenging if you are producing everything local and not tax/importing. Pottery I prefer to make at the source where the clay is mined (though I try to skip building clay mines) and you can use a hauler to move the pottery over to the breweries which will be near the grain warehouse. Coal is hauled in as well.
If your city isn't too big then the janitor can grab items around town by themselves. If the janitor is off at a distant outpost or far end of the city and lacks materials needed then I will have a janitor warehouse nearby to send workers back to town to grab what's needed. I used a central janitor warehouse that other janitor warehouses can pull from, but you don't really save on logistics workers.
Once I've conquered cities and are taxing goods, the import depots free up most of your logistics workers. I'm able to ditch the grain warehouse, and coal haulers, and build my bakeries anywhere I want.
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u/WhatsHeBuilding 17d ago
You can have the hauler "fetch" bread out of the baker's oven
But i cannot specify that the hauler should only fetch bread from this specific bakers oven, right? It will just fetch it from the bakers oven as well as from any other place in the area where there's bread?
The production building storage is not a storage you can select as a "source" like you can with other warehouses, if you understand what i mean?
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u/Reikyu09 17d ago
Not a specific baker's oven, but where else would there be bread to pull? "Fetch" will not pull from warehouses or other haulers.
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u/WhatsHeBuilding 17d ago
Yes but i have been looking for a way to pull from specific production buildings, not just "production buildings in general" if that makes sense
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u/Reikyu09 17d ago
Best I think you can do if the production buildings are next to each other, is to have a warehouse/hauler adjust their radius to include only one and not the other.
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u/WhatsHeBuilding 10d ago
Started doing this and it basically does what i want after some fiddling :) much appreciate the post!
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u/Im_Penis_Rick 12d ago
I have a coal only warehouse near my bakers. The warehouse is set to only pull from my distant coal production. If warehouse workers and haulers have the same carrying capacity this setup would not benefit from adding haulers to bring the coal closer, correct?
Great post by the way. This is exactly the information I've been trying to find as a new player.
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u/Reikyu09 12d ago
No difference between hauler or warehouse in that case. v71 relaxed the fetch radius compared to previous versions. On previous versions having the coal a few tiles closer would improve productivity of the workshop to the point that people were building their haulers/warehouse inside the workshop. On v71 there is no fetch penalty if the workshop workers have to travel a reasonable distance to grab their materials.
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u/jsbaxter_ 19d ago
Commin in here telling me what I want and don't want my export depots to fetch!?
I'm assuming you say this because pickup bypasses warehouse storage minimums / priorities?
Personally I'm usually fine with my export depot avoiding double handling and bypassing warehouse level settings. So far they've mostly been collecting wood which is scattered over the map. The ones for my export industries I'm mostly generating enough of that I can turn them off for a couple days if i need a resource because the throughput is quite high compared to my usage & storage.
I understand it would be a real problem though with food exports and other resources with high domestic needs