Industry Storage Behavior Hypothesis

[1989inferno]

I've noticed this behavior as the cause of a lot of my traffic problems and am curious if anyone else has seen it. It happens both in my modded and unmodded games.

I've read analysis about storage facilities and their behavior both here and on reddit & steam and agree with what seems to be the consensus: if you don't have enough raw material storage you generally have problems related to using all your trucks. The raw extractors send trucks out of town because the storage is full, and the raw storage facilities send out of town because the facilities are above the setpoint, often leaving your processors with no raw material even though you have a ton of storage and extractors nearby - there are no trucks left to get the material from the extractors or the storage to the processors.

The commonly presented solution is add more storage. Having done that, I'm now seeing a new problem. All my storage facilities are set to "balanced", and are holding their targeted amount of resource. Great! they shouldn't be sending trucks to export because they're at the targeted value, and shouldn't be importing for the same reason. That just leaves deliveries to processors which shouldn't use a ton of trucks. Despite that I'm seeing all their trucks still being used. Doing what? Delivering material to other storage facilities.

I'll use the oil industry as an example but I've seen it with the ore and farm industries as well (haven't tried forestry yet).

I have a big area built to look realistically like part of a large oil complex. Many many tank farms with a few extractors and a good number of refineries. It was a mess when I first placed them because all the tank farms imported crude oil to get to the setpoint. That died down after a while and the tank farms stopped importing. I figured if I balance my production of crude from the extractors to the consumption by the refineries the tank farms would be happy and I'd have relatively fewer trucks on the road - the load more or less balances the input so no importing or exporting needs to happen, only deliveries. False. All my import/export trucks are gone as expected, but my roads are still clogged with almost every truck from almost every storage facility delivering crude to other storage facilities. Note my extractors never complain about no buyers because the storage facilities are not full, and my refineries don't often complain because the crude gets to them, except the occasional times the trucks get stuck in all the cross balancing traffic. I just have roads bumper to bumper with trucks "from small tank farm" delivering "to small tank farm".

My hypothesis is that storage facilities are nearly always either requesting more material or shipping out material. Even if the facility is near its setpoint it could still use a little more or a little less material to get closer to it. In addition if there's a facility not close to the setpoint it will request from other facilities to get to the setpoint, sometimes moving the origin facility away from its setpoint, making it request more material to get back to setpoint etc. A facility requesting material also occasionally gets too much material, some of which it then has to turn around and send back out to one of the origin facilities.

It's actually an interesting controls problem, and I'm not sure yet if I think there's an in-game solution or if I'd like to see some tweaks to the game code. I imagine there should be some tuning parameters in the code to manage the filling/emptying behavior which I suspect is where the solution lies, since all we can do in game is add or remove facilities to be filled or emptied.

Mostly this write up was to help myself understand the dynamics, but if anyone feels like commenting or better yet validating or disproving my hypothesis with in game testing please go ahead.

 

[Cymsdale]

It seems like it would be simpler if you could toggle import/export on each storage.

Or set options like: "Export above 80%, import below 10% (or never)".

 

[1989inferno]

While I agree that may be helpful, it wouldn't solve this problem as even set to "don't import or export" the storage facilities would still be shipping back and forth amongst themselves.

 

[AG_Wittmann]

Hi, sorry, putting this here, because, its more fitting.

Meeh, im not really happy with the new DLC so far.

The income of my city is now unsteady, i know, i still make a plus over the month or year, but the weekly income will switch between +25.000 and -11.000 nonstop. Forestry and Farming are mostly only losing money. Oil Industry is at the moment barely a positive income. Ore Industry still in developement, not active at the moment. The only steady plus are this unique Factories, i have only 2 at the Moment active (Bakery and Furnituremaker) and both are at 150% and can produce nonstop and this two Factories alone are making 20.000 or more. But they do only sell their Luxury Products in Chunks, that would explain the nonstop up and down of the listed Income. But why is the Industry only a money loosing business?

The extracted Ressources for all three Industry surpass the Demand of the Producers by 20% to 30%, but i still import some ressources (WHY?)

The biggest issue i have, are this Warehouses and Storages and the Common Industry.

I know, the Storages are for Ressources only, the Warehouses are for Products, Goods and Luxury Goods, but not for the Ressources (Oil, Plants, Logs and Ore).

The Warehouses have an Option for storing Specialized Goods, what does this mean? The Infotext isnt really clear, i read it in my language and in english, still confucius to me. What does this Option? Holding all Products at once from the Forestry, Farming, Oil and Ore Industry, include Ressources or only the processed Goods like Timber, Flour, Petroleum, Meat, Plastic etc. at once?

What happens to this stored Products, are they transported to the Common Industry for converting them into millions of trucks and plaquing my City with Congestions or are they directly converted in the Warehouse (Repacking) and moved to the Commerce for selling (Millions of Vans and Congestions again)?

How are this new Industry Buildings acting? Do they (the buildingowned Trucks) only carry out or can they carry in needed Goods? I had watched my Extractors and Factories, so far, i saw only carry outs. Can anyone confirm this? Imports are only made with foreign trucks or Trucks owned by a Cargo Airport, Port or Trainstation.

There's currently a bug where exporting from industry areas via any other means of transport than highway makes zero income. It probably plays a role for you.


Because you probably have too many storage trucks out exporting and unable to meet demands at a given time. It's very difficult to completely eliminate imports.


Special goods = Timber, Flour, Petroleum, Meat, Plastic etc. One warehouse can only store one of these at a time.


Special goods can be either sent to unique factories, sold to generic industry for generic goods manufacturing or exported by warehouses.


Raw extractors, unique factories and storage/warehouses only deliver out, and processors can also import.

@ristosal: Thanks for trying to help me.

Back to this special goods. These Warehouse got this Option as last entry, its only named Special Goods, so im asking, which kind of goods are meant. When you see a Warehause filled with Meat, you will see packaged Meatboxes, same for Timber and Flour. But this "Special Goods" are neither of them.

I tested some Warehouses with this Option, one close to a Cargo Trainstation surrouned by Common Industry and its at 80% capacity (switching between 20%, 50% and 80%) and i see Trucks coming from the Cargo Trainstation in and Vans going out to the Commerces. But i still dont know, what kind of magic Goods this are.

Same for the other smaller Warehouses, they get their stuff from the Cargo Trainstation, but i dont know, what they are getting in.

 

[ristosal]

Back to this special goods. These Warehouse got this Option as last entry, its only named Special Goods, so im asking, which kind of goods are meant. When you see a Warehause filled with Meat, you will see packaged Meatboxes, same for Timber and Flour. But this "Special Goods" are neither of them.

I already told you what Special Goods are, so you appear to be confusing different terms again. Please go back and get this correct so we're actually talking about the same thing

 

[Avanya]

Despite that I'm seeing all their trucks still being used. Doing what? Delivering material to other storage facilities.

Are you able to reproduce this in a completely unmodded game? As in the launch option -disableMods is being used so all mods are gone and a fresh city is made that has never had any mods? I tried to reproduce this without any luck, so if you have a completely unmodded save that does that I'd love to see it (and perhaps more importantly we need the devs to see it).

 

[AG_Wittmann]

I already told you what Special Goods are, so you appear to be confusing different terms again. Please go back and get this correct so we're actually talking about the same thing

No, i think, we are both confucius.

https://i.imgur.com/e5dfToh.jpg

What does it mean? Are in this Warehouse goods from the Common Industry or Goods from the new Industry? And what are this Goods? Timber? Or another sort of Goods?

 

[ristosal]

What does it mean? Are in this Warehouse goods from the Common Industry or Goods from the new Industry? And what are this Goods? Timber? Or another sort of Goods?

That's generic goods from the zoned generic industry. Special Goods (timber, plastics etc.) are produced by various processing buildings of industry areas and can't be sold to commercial zones. These Special Goods are first delivered to unique factories that manufacture Luxury Goods, which can then be sold to commercial zones for profit.

 

[Chieron]

My hypothesis is that storage facilities are nearly always either requesting more material or shipping out material. Even if the facility is near its setpoint it could still use a little more or a little less material to get closer to it. In addition if there's a facility not close to the setpoint it will request from other facilities to get to the setpoint, sometimes moving the origin facility away from its setpoint, making it request more material to get back to setpoint etc. A facility requesting material also occasionally gets too much material, some of which it then has to turn around and send back out to one of the origin facilities.

This feels like the classic AI problem with thresholds. Going over the target by a tiny bit will trigger an export/ move to other storage, going under will trigger an import/request from other storage, without a range where the AI is satisfied. Especially, as the storages will likely not count resources enroute to them. So a truck delivers resources and pushes the storage over the limit, then it tries to get rid of the resources again, possibly landing a partial truckload below the limit, requesting a new load while still exporting..

 

[Promethian]

Balanced mode is the threshold system that is suggested with the export threshold at around 60% and the below this point import threshold at around 40%.

If things aren't working right its typically because of one of two factors. The amount of storage you have (or more accurately truck capacity) and the amount of goods you are producing. Based on what I am seeing you are probably under producing the good in question. So your storages aren't getting enough and its causing the wonky behavior probably followed by brief bursts of appropriate behavior when you run low enough. If you are doing it right, and by this I mean producing just a little bit more than you need, then your storages will all float around the 60-70% mark.

 

[Turjan]

I noticed the system actually breaks down because of overproducing of raw materials. With a few tiny fields, you already produce multiples of what your supply chains can handle, which results in all trucks being on their way out of the city. I have also seen that warehouse shuffling. In the end, your processors and factories don't get anything, although your exports go into the thousands.

 

[von Bixler]

@Turjan: You are definitely correct about that, at least for the farms; After playing around with it a bit I switched to tweaked field assets that dramatically lowered both the output and the number of workers... felt a lot more balanced for farms of more realistic scale.

As to the OP's point, I believe that's correct as well; I think some tweaks to the fill settings would definitely improve the supply chain without having to build a massively redundant amount of storage; The current settings don't really seem to be designed around specific functions.

One small addition that I think would reap huge dividends would be a simple pair of toggles to allow/disallow import and export; That would not only solve the problem of all the facility's trucks trekking halfway across the map to export, it would provide far more fine grained control to the flow of goods from one area to another.

Then you could have settings work more like this:

"Forward" : Sends out a truck immediately, but only once one full truckload is collected - These would be the storages that would serve as concentration points for dispersed production at the source, i.e. all your farm fields delivering to one spot which then forwards everything somewhere more central. With an export toggle you could make sure they were sending to your industrial areas, staying local, or exporting as needed.

"Stage": These would only send out materials in response to orders from production facilities, or when full - These would primarily serve to provide a goods buffer for your industry. If you toggled export off they would just hold materials until needed; If you also toggled import on, they could function as a central import point to make up shortfalls from your internal raw material production, rather than the weird situation we have now where your farm storages import to get to "Balanced"

"Reserve": Would simply fill up and not release anything until changed - Useful if you want to create a, well, reserve... Maybe to mitigate disruption from disasters? TBH I don't know that I'd actually use that setting but it'd be nice to have!

"Neutral": Would store incoming materials and send out order from production; Would not take any proactive steps one way or the other - This would be useful to see where the bottlenecks are in your supply chain so you could adjust accordingly.

As a complement to settings more like this, I think it would be really helpful for production facilities to have smarter priorities to their goods orders: Perhaps have them select from the most full of the three or four closest storage facilities. Going even further, you could actually set a limited range from which they could order, or set import/export toggles for them as well... that might actually be implemented better as a district policy!

I think some changes like these would go a long way towards making the supply chain work more smoothly and realistically; Since the simulation can't model some important aspects of a real supply chain (such as being to anticipate a delivery in the near future when accounting for supply), we have to allow for more control on the part of us omniscient players for things to work right

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

I noticed the system actually breaks down because of overproducing of raw materials. With a few tiny fields, you already produce multiples of what your supply chains can handle, which results in all trucks being on their way out of the city. I have also seen that warehouse shuffling. In the end, your processors and factories don't get anything, although your exports go into the thousands.

Sounds kind of crappy. I can imagine (I don't have the DLC yet) wanting to have large areas of fields, just for the look. If that causes over production and triggers tons of exports and export traffic, it could be problematic.

 

[Cymsdale]

I noticed the system actually breaks down because of overproducing of raw materials. With a few tiny fields, you already produce multiples of what your supply chains can handle, which results in all trucks being on their way out of the city. I have also seen that warehouse shuffling. In the end, your processors and factories don't get anything, although your exports go into the thousands.

I wonder if this is what's happening to me. I tried a simple farm area. I built up 6 farms, 2 fruit farms (lots of crop extractors). One silo and barn (storage for crops) and a single pig farm (producer that uses crops). The storage are both sent to "balanced".

Well, what is happening is the storage completely fills up and the pig farm demands raw materials for long periods of time (sometimes they dribble in). Why aren't they getting any crops from the many extractors or filled up storage? It's baffling to me. This system does not really work as expected.

(No mods)

 

[1989inferno]

Are you able to reproduce this in a completely unmodded game? As in the launch option -disableMods is being used so all mods are gone and a fresh city is made that has never had any mods? I tried to reproduce this without any luck, so if you have a completely unmodded save that does that I'd love to see it (and perhaps more importantly we need the devs to see it).

Yes, I have seen this in a -noWorkshop game. It may take me a bit to get it all packaged up but I'll work getting the save out. I think it takes a lot of storage facilities (10+) to really see this behavior; maybe you haven't placed enough in your tests?

This feels like the classic AI problem with thresholds. Going over the target by a tiny bit will trigger an export/ move to other storage, going under will trigger an import/request from other storage, without a range where the AI is satisfied. Especially, as the storages will likely not count resources enroute to them. So a truck delivers resources and pushes the storage over the limit, then it tries to get rid of the resources again, possibly landing a partial truckload below the limit, requesting a new load while still exporting..

It definitely sounds like a thresholding issue to me. I've definitely had issues like this at work. Tweaking deadzones and/or feedback behavior usually solves the issue.

... I can imagine (I don't have the DLC yet) wanting to have large areas of fields, just for the look. If that causes over production and triggers tons of exports and export traffic, it could be problematic.

That's how I ended up down this analysis rabbit hole. I think now that I understand the system I can build a zone that functions well, but IMO it won't look quite as realistic as the areas I have built, which don't function optimally. Oh btw I feel like most tank farms are connected by pipes to each other and neighboring refineries not trucks... The limitations of playing a simulation I suppose.

 

[von Bixler]

Sounds kind of crappy. I can imagine (I don't have the DLC yet) wanting to have large areas of fields, just for the look. If that causes over production and triggers tons of exports and export traffic, it could be problematic.

One thing I discovered when creating the tweaked ones is that the different appearances can have different stats: I left them as is for the greenhouse skin, so I could actually do "intensive" farming in a small area, while still having an option for expansive fields (That wouldn't completely trash the economy).

Edit: In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, this would have been a far more realistic way of handling upgrades to the farming area; "higher level" farm fields should actually just be more productive, rather than spatially bigger.