discussion: forestry is frustrating

[kennyb]

quick list, with some easy improvements

• no tree planting designations keybind
• when planting on semi-mountainous/not-flat terrain, often times the tree planter gets stuck "unable to find destination it can reach" -- then when clicking on him, there's no info about which designation he can't reach. (it's usually a green designation on the side of a mountain)
  • it'd be helpful to know which designation he can't get to (red line)
  • it'd he helpful to be able to see the planter/harvester's navigation info while setting designations (or automatically yellow-out the ones he can't reach)
  • perhaps have a 3rd state for the designation (unreachable - white/red?)
• sometimes the planter plants a tree right in the way of his exit out of a tight spot, and again no reachable destination (recovery here works fine, but it'd be cool if he could know not to do that)
• forestry towers give no indication of how many trees and how many designations are in its area.
• forestry towers area is too small. often times I have to build in an area of the map that's not very flat and has mountains to the side, allowing only planting in <1/2 of the area. that leads to planter running out of jobs well before trees are able to be harvested (then I have to move him to the next tower) -- same with harvesters: 1 will empty the space in much less than 20y.
• setting up sapling boxes is really annoying:
  • if I build a new tree planter, I often forget about him cause there's no notification for completed vehicles in the depot, so he will run off to plant trees -- but when he's run out of saplings (even though he's in the area of a forestry tower), he still goes to the other side of the map where my farms are (the box with the push) to pick up saplings, until I assign him to a tower.
  • remote sapling boxes require a weird configuration because I can't set a pull on the box and I can only put a push on the farm box. (my workaround for this is to assign one truck to the farm box (with a push) and have him keep the other boxes in export route full) there's probably a more intuitive way. I understand the logic around not having a pull on a box where tree planters are going to be pulling saplings out of it, so there should be a way to allow members of its export route (ie, the forestry towers exporting from the box, and all planters assigned to it) to be able to pull out saplings.

there are other things, but these are the ones off of the top of my head.

[kennyb]

another one: tree planters can plant trees in positions where harvesters cannot reach the trees (notice the trees at the top of the hill)

[kennyb]

I can provide a save file with various/all of these problems demonstrated. I just closed the game, so I'll make them next time I play (they happen all the time).

here's a bonus one from a long time ago (bug - can't harvest trees.zip): I went into a death spiral while playing around with decals, and when the harvesters (or the vehicles) break down, it puts the harvester into a bad state