I’ve learned an interesting little quirk about distribution centers. They don’t respect paths; that may be by design.
If a building is within the DC’s (and perhaps even Collection Center’s) service radius, it will be served by that distribution center. It will do this regardless of whether or not it has a path to do so.
I’ve been using CC/DC combos to keep traffic separate, sort of like a gate that only allows certain commodities to drive on designated roads. I can still do that, but it means I need to site my DC’s much closer to their serviced buildings.
I have noticed this too, it is kind of a pain in the butt when trying to make remote factory zones for habitat resources. I have had to place the Collection Centers on the sides/corners of the zones and even then it can be tricky. Also a pain sometimes when placing them around my habitat zones/“blocks”, I have had to place them further away on occasion to get the radius of the distribution circle to stop clipping into the next habitat block. I have also noticed that sometimes (all the time?) on reload, they will reselect and “take over” extraneous buildings that I had deselected by reducing the area to 0, allowing the intended distribution center to take over, and then re-increasing the area so that they distribute to my intended targets. This is especially an issue when I am placing/using distro centers for High Tech Tools, as they are easily able to service multiple factory zones at once. Usually can do 2-3 factory zones with one distro center, its just the area selection that causes issues.
It would be very nice to be able to edit the collection + distribution circles in a similar fashion to how the District edit screen works (I do still like the initial circle radius selection, but factory and habitat zones are typically square, not round lol). Perhaps even just an option to make the selection area square instead of round would help? Maybe even rectangle AND/OR propagate from ONE side of the collection/distro building so that it is easier to keep them from selecting other unintended areas.
Still, they are very useful when trying to keep a max lvl habitat zone from downgrading due to the delay of resources travelling long distances from the factory zones.
Just checked, yeah they are resetting themselves after every reload, I had even moved the upper left Distro Center to the left to try and get them out of range of each other, am going to move it again now, but here is an example of what I was describing with the High Tech Tools Distros:
Distro Center that is “taking over” an unintended zone:
And then on the Distribution side, it is going to be very difficult, to near impossible to very tightly pack in Habitat Zones without the Distro Centers “stealing” all over the place. Now, this really is not a big deal unless you are trying to get to 100,000+ population lol, but it definitely forced me to put the distribution Centers in locations that were not the most ideal. You can see the second dual blocks of Habitat Zones on top, I am going to have to place their Distro Centers on the other side away from the highlighted Distro Center to keep them from conflicting. It would be MUCH nicer to have all the Distro Centers lined up in a group to the left or right instead of being forced to place them opposed to each other. But again, they are still extremely useful to keep those blocks of Habitat zones from downgrading, so can’t complain too much
That’s a really good point about the spacing of the DC’s. Thanks for the word of warning about them resetting.
I’ve been limiting which CC/DD Combos (DC’s) I use. Aluminum, Iridium, and Iridium Accessories are the only base materials I use with a DC. I collect the big five: Appliances, Computers, Home Robots, Good Meal, and VR. I’m not sure how best to use them for transport.
Here’s a 100 building city with a complicated road system for distributing 5 DC’s worth of materials to the center of the city. It’s fast; watching the cars fly out of the center is fun to watch! But the roundabout can’t handle that level of traffic. I’m thinking of doing a double roundabout in future.
Now that you mention it, I’ve seen @MrWhite ’s DC reset bug. When the game is loaded, not all DC’s get their AoE’s updated properly. I’ve only seen it once, but I did notice not all DC’s were affected.
I’ve managed to get some very fine control over which DC and which collection center serves their buildings. But almost all of them were still in place.
