Crafting station usage

[Marvin Kosh]

It seems that for whatever reason, employee Sims on business lots try to use the closest unmanned crafting station when coming back from their break, rather than their previous station or the closest station which isn't blocked by an APO panel.  If they fail to get to the closest unmanned crafting station, their assignment gets canceled.

Is there any way to mod this behaviour so that if they can't route to the closest unmanned crafting station, they will try routing to another one?

[J. M. Pescado]

Yes, but since it defies the imagination as to why you would do a dumbass thing like that, it is not going to be something I am going to crack open the TS2 tools to fix.

[Marvin Kosh]

Dumbassery it may be to have your employees working on different things, it isn't as profitable, but a business that only sells one thing is bloody boring.

Without locking employees out of certain crafting rooms they would happily scrap anything on the closest crafting station unless it matches what they were working on.  Even if they could complete the thing on the table, they will scrap it and start over if it isn't what they were told to do.  That's the reason I'm using the APO panels.  But as I said, that means assignments get dropped.

If it can be done then I'll keep trying to figure out how chances are someone already did the same thing. D'oh.

[Jorenne]

I'm pretty sure someone did, either Paladin or JFade, I can't recall.  Use your google-fu.

[J. M. Pescado]

Without locking employees out of certain crafting rooms they would happily scrap anything on the closest crafting station unless it matches what they were working on.

Even if they could complete the thing on the table, they will scrap it and start over if it isn't what they were told to do.  That's the reason I'm using the APO panels.  But as I said, that means assignments get dropped.

Yeah, well, you know sims absolutely detest it when you block things they need to use. So you decide whether you'd rather they drop assignments, or scrap things. Since you're obviously not terribly concerned with an efficient business, let 'em scrap it, then.

[InsanePsychoRabbit]

Yes, it was Paladin that fixed this.

[aubreylaraine]

*raises hand hesitatingly*
what about the dj booth? my crypt o' night club has two dj booths on two floors and the employees ignore the bottom one. the only solution i have found is to force an error on the booths, make them selectable, cancel their action and unassign them using the controller. when they are finally stopped and empty i try to assign using the hammer or by clicking on the dj booth. usually i have to do this four or five times before they go to their respective floors. finally i made them both managers, as to have more controll and not have to dance with the tele-cat, but they are still insisting on using the same booth. i have even tried unassigning them before sending them home and calling them in at seperate times.

[Marvin Kosh]

Well I've tried Paladin's fix but that really just stops them from idling - so they stand at the door and keep trying to get in.

I think that it could be re-written so that an APO check is done before a crafting object will be returned to be used in the interaction.  Which means that by process of elimination, they will go to the nearest station that they're authorised to use.  But I guess I'll have to look at it sometime later.

[Marvin Kosh]

For the moment, I seem to have a fix for this.  When each employee leaves a crafting station, their nID is recorded as an attribute.  When the employee goes back to work, any crafting station which isn't being worked at and still has their nID printed on it will yell out 'Pick me! Pick me!' and bypass the bit which checks for the closest crafting station.

The only downer is that it doesn't work if the employee goes off-lot and then returns.  It only works if they go for a break on the lot.