Are these outside farms?

Send a rocket my way, ill fill it up w/ some food for ya.. 2°N 21°W

I'm not sure about the mods, as I usually only use QOL mods, but I did have a similar situation.. Was a priority setting along with not enough drones/shuttles... Once I mass produced them, reprioritized a few settings, my network is flowing much smoother..
How many drones per station do you have near the problem areas?
Are food depots(storage areas) settings more than 0 ?

I went thru my whole setup and set diners/grocers to max, high priority, the storage pad outside of the domes set to max allowed (180, I think) then I set large food storage to 0, normal priority.
I then upped each drone base from the stock 6-8 (forget the #) to like 20+ and made my food producing farms all high priority...

This solved my issue, took a few sol cycles to balance out but.... it did work..
Again, sry I cant help with a mod, as I try not to use them, maybe someone else could point ya down that path... I just wanted to chime in and give some feedback to a similar situation I just experienced..

-=] GL

Unless his farms are outdoor farms which currently have a bug this is not a Drone issue.

They're regular, in-dome farms. (Haven't really gotten started on terraforming yet.) But it's definitely a drone issue. I managed to 'solve' it by building a new drone-hub on the other side of the dome and shrinking its area of influence so that it basically only encompassed the farms and the large food storage outside. That FINALLY got them started clearing the piled-up food.

As an experiment, I put down a new dome nearby - inside this new hub's area. New dome is set to 'normal' priority, farms and storage still set to 'high'... all drones immediately drop the food they're carrying and start working on building the dome. Okay, not LITERALLY, they DID finish their tasks before forgetting all about food-transportation and rededicating themselves to construction-work, but the issue remains clear - the drones seem to prioritize the transportation of goods DANGEROUSLY low, INCLUDING goods as utterly vital as food...

And if it wasn't already clear, at this point there were more than FORTY drones in operation around the farms. It literally seems like the only way to get them to pay attention to 'offloading' the food is for them to have NO OTHER POSSIBLE TASKS.

I'm wondering if the ranches have the similar bug as well.. I placed 3 inside a dome last night set no restrictions for the workforce, set 3 types of animals... Animals came out, so I was like, OK, cool, moved on to other areas of interest, then got pop ups that 3 buildings stopped working...
I couldn't get a colonist to work in them what so ever, not even a skilled worker..

I've since blasted them out and replaced them, but that was like an hour of trying to tweak and nothing would work it...
I did however have an outside ranch on another game, workers ran out there to work.. strange ...

I have never had to do anything special to get drones to pick up food from my farms unless I have not given them a Food Depot or the Food Depot I provided is full. Drones don't have a problem with path finding and Hubs don't have a problem multitasking.

However mods can cause some strange things to happen in the game especially if the mods the game was saved with are not enabled when it is next loaded.

Whenever I have a problem like this, 99.99% of the time it is because there is no hub that can access both the resources AND the depot/storage to move them to (or the depot/storage is full).

Originally posted by whanzephruseke:

Whenever I have a problem like this, 99.99% of the time it is because there is no hub that can access both the resources AND the depot/storage to move them to (or the depot/storage is full).

Guess this is the 00.01% one, then, 'cuz there's a mostly-empty Food Storage well inside the range of both hubs.

As for mods... hrm. I'm running two, and haven't turned them off at any point since activating them. Don't see how either could affect the drones. One is for making colonists less stupid (they'll actually move to domes that has housing and work for them instead of just randomly bumming around and complaining about being out of work and homeless!), and the other is for making shuttles less stupid (they actually move goods around instead of just dropping them off and then immediately picking them up again!). Both have greatly improved my QoL - hence why I'm now hoping to find a mod that can eliminate the LAST point of aggravating stupidity I'm having to deal with...

I guess I'm just lucky.

If you have too much stuff on high priority then it'll just act like regular priority. It sounds like you need more drones.

I'd try lowering the priority of the farms. If you have 600 food just in them, there's no need for high priority. Not to mention the hypothetical issue that it, in combination with the AI affecting mods you have installed, could cause the AI to prioritize keeping the farms stocked when at high. Untested and a shot in the dark, but worth a shot.

Instead, try setting your food depot to high priority, and if that works, remember to lower it later.

Finally, I'd definitely build more drones. 30 for 600 food alone is 20 trips each. What's the load on your drone hub? You mentioned building a second drone hub seemed to alleviate it, so it would seem it's a matter of overworked drones rather than dubious AI. :)

Oh, and what's the priority of your Diners and Grocers? If they're also high it could simply be that the drones won't bother with moving the food to the lower priority depot, since they're "on edge" to transport directly from a high priority producer to a high priority consumer, cutting out the proverbial middleman of the medium priority food depot. :)

Oh, I've fiddled with the priorities on loads of things to try and make things work. I had diners and grocers on High at first, indeed, but later set them back down to normal after they were fully stocked. The 'load' on the drone-hub read as Low throughout, but I've basically stopped paying attention to that - it doesn't seem to actually MEAN anything. It'll read 'Low' even though every last drone is in constant motion and never has an idle second, only to arbitrarily jump to mid or high for a while because of some swiftly-completed construction-project.

'More drones' is how I've solved things so far, but it's starting to become laughable. Yeah, sure, 600 food is a lot for 30 drones to transport, but the trip between the farms and the storage is very short, so once they actually START, it happens quite quickly. And more to the point, in the time it took to grow a new crop, those 30 drones had shifted something like 5 crates from each farm. That doesn't gel with any kind of equitable division of labor. And no, there IS nothing 'high priority' in their radius anymore. Except the farms. And honestly, if they're 'keeping the farms stocked' because they're set to high priority, that's a BUG...

Look... the issue CAN definitely be resolved with more drones and more drone-hubs. Like I said, the drones WILL transport the food if they LITERALLY HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO. I'm just annoyed that they're acting like that, and feel that there should be a smarter option than just 'keep piling on drones forever'. Besides, what if that's their PLAN?! It's quite the clever two-pronged strike, really... if the humans don't starve to death from lack of food, they'll be forced to build more and more drones to enable the transportation of their vital food-supplies, swelling the ranks of their supposedly loyal robotic servants...

Since you asked about mods, are you already using any sort of drone AI mods? That could be the issue if it's buggy?

Originally posted by BlackDragon:

The 'load' on the drone-hub read as Low throughout, but I've basically stopped paying attention to that - it doesn't seem to actually MEAN anything. It'll read 'Low' even though every last drone is in constant motion and never has an idle second, only to arbitrarily jump to mid or high for a while because of some swiftly-completed construction-project.

From what I have observed, the "High Drone Load" notification just means that the hub/commander/rocket is controlling drones at the edges of its zone.

I believe it's how long the task assigned takes to complete.