I meticulously make roads and keep bed rooms nearby to the work the colonist is supposed to be doing, but I am still noticing that, without extra Common Sense, PUAH or Haul+ tasks being appended to their current action, they tend to take the longest possible route to reach their destinations. Like, I have a kitchen right in the center of my entire compound, with shelves and fridges to store the food in everyone’s bedroom. He finished making a meal and was taking it to a building like 16 tiles away to the left. Instead of just going directly there, the dumbass goes right, out the walls (despite being assigned to a zone that doesn’t allow them to leave the safety of said walls), around the entire perimeter of the compound, enters back in from the south and then proceeds up the 400 tiles or so back to the room that was super close to where he started. 😬
Is there, like, a mod that allows me to set pathing priorities like you can in Dwarf Fortress, or do I just need to give them brain implants that make them not so stupid?
Vanilla Rimworld pathfinding is bullshit. It gets even worse during fights, as pawns will move unnecessarily too close to the enemy, and get wrecked as a result. Or they shortcut through the freezer.
For DF-like path priorities, there’s Path Avoid.
There’s also a clean pathfinding mod
There’s a bunch of them actually:
The second one is up to 1.4 but comments in the Steam page report it working for 1.5 too. You can either edit the version manually or use something like No Version Warning alongside it.
I’m not sure how they interact with Path Avoid, I never tried them together, it might be worth a try though.