Priorities

jfjohnny5

What follows is a request for some general knowledge transfer.

I've learned a LOT about how this game is put together while working on a pretty big mod over the past month. I've learned most of this through the tried and true method of experimentation. Change X. See what happens.

The priorities in the priorities.txt file is throwing me though. I noticed that the cockpit crewing priorities have a high number, so I was thinking high value = high (primary) priority. However, as an experiment, I put some basic weapon crewing priorities at 10000 (10x higher than the cockpit); to no effect. Then I was thinking that maybe the priority is a 'weight' that gets added to a pathfinding algorithm. However, setting that same weapon crewing priority to 0 still didn't change anything. They always went to crew the cockpit first. I mean, that's great and all. Somebody's gotta fly the ship; but for the purposes of tweaking priorities on my modded parts, I'd like to get a better idea of how they work. Anyone have any insight?

Walt

Crew do jobs in pretty much straight priority order (highest first). There are a few exceptions to this:

They need to be able to get there to actually do the job.
They won't crew a weapon that doesn't have ammo/power.
If they're carrying ammo/power, they won't drop it to go do something else.
They may momentarily get assigned to a lower-priority job before being reassigned to a higher-priority job.

So a weapon at 10000 priority should definitely be crewed before the cockpit. Are you sure they had access to the weapon? Are you sure the weapon had ammo/power? Are you sure you edited the correct value?

jfjohnny5

Walt Hmmm, I think I may have tested from a brand new ship in creative. In other words, nothing had ammo or power. That's probably why they skipped the 10000 priority weapon to be a pilot instead. I'll test it some more and let you know if I see anything that doesn't jive with your explanation. Thanks as always!