So the game has increased in complexity over the last few alphas, first with the addition of stockpiles, and now with work tables and the associated bill system.



I'm seeing more reports of people getting blocked by AI/behavior/usability issues. Things like:



-Why aren't they cooking? (the ingredients are too far away, outside the bill's ingredient search radius, or, no cook with enough skill, or you ordered a fine meal but only have one kind of ingredient)

-Why aren't they cutting stone? (bill expired)

-Why aren't they hauling the bodies? (the bodies are far away; they're busy hauling other stuff because they haul in order of distance)



Basically, it seems there are a lot of silent failure points. It worries me. I don't want people to hit these kinds of silent failures.



My question is:



Tell me stories about times you got stuck by some usability/clarity/AI priority condition that you didn't understand and caused you distress.



To be clear, I'm not really asking for suggestions about how to fix things. You can offer these if you wish, but they'll be of secondary importance to the problem story itself.



Thanks greatly to anyone who is willing to share their experiences of the game breaking on them! If I collect a good number of these stories, I hope I'll be able to synthesize a redesign that elegantly fixes the problems. I really want to add content to the game, but I also want to make sure the core stays nice and smooth. And unfortunately, I think it's been regressing on the smoothness measure since the pre-alpha due to increasing complexity.



In order to keep this thread clean, posts that don't focus on a usability story are liable to be deleted. Sorry, but I don't want this to devolve into a general suggestions thread.