Good meals just don’t reach certain buildings, even tho, traffic is fine. As a counterpoint, home appliances have no such troubles, despite having to travel a lot more.
I actually had similar problems with survival food, but that was fixed by distributing them throughout the city. The downside is massive over production and wasted space. You can see Lv4 houses among the Lv5s, despite making more, than enough good meals. Even some of the Lv5s are struggling. (the Lv3 dwellings don’t have park coverage yet)
Impossible to tell from your screenshot alone, but there are a few things I can suggest. First of all surrounding your residential district with food factories probably doesn’t help. In general factories tend to prefer to deliver to consumers close to them, but they sometimes also deliver to those which are far away. This happens increasingly often as the close ones are full. Whenever a food factory decides to deliver something across your entire town, this blocks one delivery of a close factory. This is a problem because food is consumed quite fast and long delivery times are dangerous. If you want to surround your houses with food factories then you also need to use districts or it may be more detrimental than helpful.
The next thing is the difficulty level you are playing on. Reducing the Citizen requirement difficulty doesn’t help I think because it also reduces the storage capacity of the habitat, AFAIK. Another interesting point is traffic difficulty. On higher difficulty they transport fewer goods in each car. On lower difficulty they transport more. This is actually a problem, because consumers will only request a truck once they need a full delivery. That’s at least how it was in old versions. Not sure if this is still the case, since I only play on hard difficulty which doesn’t have this problem. Looking at your town layout I suspect your not playing on highest difficulty.
And finally your traffic may simply not be running smoothly enough. I can’t make out any cars in your screenshot so impossible to say. But I had this problem the other day with both foods. Everything looked fine but they were occasionally starving. I analyzed my traffic and learned that the cars were simply taking too long to get to the habitats. It looked fine, as in it was not completely clogged, but I found two things when I looked closer: cars were queuing a lot because they didn’t use the 3 lanes available to them properly. Another problem in the current version is that cars can sometimes stack in infinite piles on top of each other, making each car take very long to reach its final destination. I fixed my lane settings and everything resolved.
Thank you, for the advice, but I’ve noticed some other nonsensical situations in my game. The most clean-cut is uranium enrichment. Let’s do the math! A chemical plant makes 3 units in 10 secs. That’s 18 in a minute. At 75% efficiency, that’s 13.5 per min. An enrichment plant takes 8 units of chemicals a minute. At 150% efficiency, it takes 12. The ratio of 1-to-1 chem-plants and enrichment plants should be perfect. So a district with 20 enrichment plants and 26 chem-plants, should never run short on chemicals, right? Now look at this:
The enrichment plants are screaming for chemicals, despite having fully stocked chemical plants literally next door! Traffic is perfect. No jams anywhere, but they still complain and stall. The only reason my reactors are fine is because I make more, than double the requirement!
So yeah, I’m convinced, that the game is bugged. With a new map and the 1.0 release on the horizon, having problems with pathfinding is a big concern.
Please devs, fix ASAP!
Are you using Districts at all? Also, in the example you can click on the starving plant and check how many of the lacking ingredients are on the way by hovering over the ingredient with your mouse. Chemicals have a maximum stack size of 10 and what almost certainly happens in your case is that the low stockpile in the plant plus what’s on the way already sums up to 10 already. In that case, the plant won’t order any more chemicals even though the factory next door has a full outgoing storage. To fix this, use districts. I use districts to manage my deliveries and unless I screwed up the traffic nobody lacks anything. I never have to overproduce anything.
I’ve actually tried to use districts to fix the food crisis. They did literally nothing. Not that I expected them to. Districts are for situations, when you have multiple possible sources with multiple possible destinations and you want to specify, what should go where. Here, there’s only one destination: my city, whit it’s one residential district. It’s individual buildings, that the traffic AI seems to have a blind spot for, which could explain the uranium industry:
Speaking of the food crisis, do you know how I “fixed” it? I got high-tech tools running, to complete the adamantine drill. After a while, I noticed that my city is dying. The problem was the deluge of traffic unleashed by the high-tech tool factories. So once the drill was ready, I completely dismantled HT tool production. Once the colony recovered from the death spiral, I realized, that the food had no more issues. I didn’t modify my road layout, I didn’t modify my food production and I still didn’t use districts. I’ve even added a few residential buildings, yet I had no problems with food. No, the bug/curse moved over to VR edutainment:
As for the 10 chemical limit, I thank you, for pointing it out. Because that’s straight-up flawed design right there. If a factory can only hold resources for one production batch, than continuous production is physically impossible. No matter how close or numerous the supply buildings are, you still have to wait between each cycle for the goods to get delivered. If a process takes “x” amount of something, than the internal storage should be “x times 2” minimum, otherwise, production brakes down. An even more likely explanation for the uranium industry!
So, I guess, that’s another one for the “fix it, please” list: Give all production building “Batch times 2” storage as a minimum!
