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Caravan Extended

Do you know the following problem or something similar?
You have a farming outpost away from your main clutter of buildings and the people there need some clothes or tools. Now you create a trading route in your stable to transport those things, but your utterly stupid donkeys can't do anything but simply transport ALL of your clothes and tools there. So you have to manually take care to pause the route when sufficient clothes and tools have been moved to not drain your main settlement of their clothes and tools. And on the other hand you must resume the route early enough if the reserves of clothes and tools run low on your outpost. And sooner or later you will forget one of those actions and all your carefully managed balance of production and consumption will crash.

If you ever experienced some problems of this kind, I will tell you: WORRY NO MORE !!!

I present to you the incredible CARAVAN EXTENDED mod which will solve almost all of your problems you have ever had with the stupidity of your donkeys. With the added trading route options of this mod a whole new world of resource storage management will open up to you! You want to equally distribute your resources between two, three or more storages? You want to have a secure minimal amount of tools in your outpost? No problem anymore!



In detail this mod contains some optional config tweeks concerning the stable management and the main total rewrite of the trading route handling system.

The optional config tweeks include:
- "Immortal donkey" option: Increases the maximum age of your donkeys so you don't need to breed so many replacement donkeys anymore
- "Max worker" option: Set the maximum number of workers per stable
- "Max donkey" option: Set the maximum number of donkeys per stable
- "Max routes" option: Set the maximum number of trading routes per stable (! WARNING: The new priority based selection of routes uses alot more computational power than the games default selection mechanism. Thus take care when increasing the number of routes per stable as it could significantly influence your overall game performence. Use this option when care!)

Additionally there are some options which change the general behaviour of this mod:
- "Count mode" option: Select how resource counts are shown in transport route list. Standard shows the current resource count, other modes includes already reserved resource counts into total balance shown
- "Priority mode" option: Select between different versions of the priority system. Later versions should be better (from personal experience), but you can still use older versions of the priority system if your transport network was tuned for them
- "Show priority" option: Debug option to shown the routes priority value instead of its resource name

The rewrite of the games core trading route mechanics inserts additional route modes in addition to the games default "Transport all" mode. For all kinds of trading routes there are now three different modes available which can be chose for each route individually:
- Transport all resources (similar to the games default behaviour)
- Transport resources until a certain userset rate between the source and target storage is reaches (uni-directional)
- Transport resources until a certain userset rate between the source and target storage is reaches (bi-directional)
Additionally for single resource trading routes four additional modes are available:
- Transport resources as long as the source storage amount is above a userset threshold (uni-directional)
- Transport resources to have a certain fixed amount in the source storage (bi-directional)
- Transport resources as long as the target storage amount is below a userset threshold (uni-directional)
- Transport resources to have a certain fixed amount in the target storage (bi-directional)
Each transport mode has some parameter which can be chosen by the user from a set of predefined values like the exact rate between the storages or the fixed amount of resources.

In addition to providing those new transport modes this mod also replaces the games base mechanic for selecting which route the handle (more or less cycling them) by a priority based selection system. Thus everytime a donkey is looking for work all routes of his stable are checked and the most urgent one is chose. The priority of a certain trading route is based on two factors:
- The deviation of the resource distribution between the current and the desired state
- How much of the mules carring capacity would be used to handle the route
In total this priority based system should provide for a better handling of very different types of trading routes within the same stable.



So how to use this mod? Actually this is quite simple! (For the short but very clear version just look at the pictures to this mod). The creation of a new trading route using this mod consists of three steps:
1.) Create the trading route as always
2.) Left click on the storage amount of the target storage to cycle through the different available transport modes until you find the one you like
3.) Left click on the storage amount of the source storage to cycle through the different available parameters for your selected mode (distribution rate or amount limit).
Your current setting will always be shown a descriptive image between those two numbers. The former option to click on the storage amount to move to the according storage has been remapped to right clicking on the numbers.



I hope you enjoy all the nice possibilites for resource management provided by my mod. If you want to share your most fancy management setups or have some more proposals for my mod (or find some bugs), just leave a comment and I will try to find some time for your concern.

So have fun and I hope you enjoy the new transport route mode options as much as I do!