excavating, early game.

[sly hound]

I just got your game. I'm used to testing.. I noticed that your excavating/diggers bounce all over when doing a large patch of clearing the area, they spend more time traveling that removing rock walls. I do smaller batches and they still seem to bounce from one side to another, but they are staying within the same batch color.
Also, in the smelters, it gives a conversion of 9 ore to 3 units both silicone and iron, and they only give you 1 unit of material. Is that a bug or a feature?

[sweet canyon]

as for the total listed in the smelter.. thats over 1 minute.. so i divide the quantity on the right into the amount(s) on the left to get a per craft total.. confusing i know. hope it changes.

[lavish ruin]

It gets worse closer to map edges, looks like they check work distance from the elevator. Dug a large area and they excavated it in arc from the elevator direction.

[shrewd schooner]

and the only fix the excavate efficently is to pain stripes that are perpendicular to the elevator....
Also, regolit is picked up in the same pattern. and regolith is brought not to the nearest storage but equally distributed to all storages that accept regolith from drones.
ints

• dig a nice tunnel, set up a bulk storage there, paint stripes around that bulk, collect regolith.
• use the excavation priority to your advantage. everything you paint with one stroke is first priority, second "stroke" is second priority and so on. (if drones excavate and then "find" a more priority patch, they will hollow that out and you might not want that)
• only have one bulk storage that accepts regolith, toggle that on and off as soon as you need the drones for other tasks
• tha hauler drones are so effective for regolith pick up. without researched upgrades, they do 10 regolith pieces per round trip

1. sorry for my bad english today
2. these hints do not invalidate your precious feedback that excavation might really suck for new players that start out!

[sweet canyon]

i've noticed the same. no matter the shape i draw they dig in a crescent

[dense storm]

yes, this has been a complaint for the whole early access. the drone priorities were coded for coding efficiency, not work efficiency. we live in hope that they will eventually get back around to them, and will add additional complexity to the code to allow them to work more efficiently. they only have so many developers, and there's a lot of unfinished game to get out before going back and completely redoing stuff that's already mostly functional.

as Clunello pointed out, once you've learned how they work if it really bothers you. you can manage your priority and access settings and it helps a bit. otherwise we just have to deal with it until they can get around to it.

[magic schooner]

it does bother me, as well, that they bounce around so much. They should excavate the marked block that is closest to them.