Base Efficiency & Worker Math4 min read
How Box Proximity & Restricted Chests Break the Sorting AI
Workers walk halfway across the map to drop off a single log, a pathing loop you can eliminate with chest placement.
When a Pal finishes gathering, it looks for a valid chest to deposit into. If the nearest chest is full, filtered against that item, or simply far away, the Pal commits to a long round trip, and while it walks, it is not working.
Use filtering to force short trips
Chest item filtering lets you reserve a chest for specific resource types. Place a filtered, high-priority drop-off chest directly adjacent to the resource node it serves, right next to the ore vein, the tree line, or the mill output. The Pal deposits in a step or two instead of animating a full cross-base walk.
Why proximity beats capacity
- Adjacent chests collapse the drop-off animation loop almost entirely.
- Dedicated (filtered) chests stop unrelated items from clogging the slot.
- A short haul frees the worker to return to the node faster, raising real throughput.
Match workers to nodes for the tightest loops.
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