0011418: Endless pathing errors attempting to eat inaccessible food - Dwarf Fortress Bug Tracker

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0011418	Dwarf Fortress	Dwarf Mode -- Non-dwarf Citizens	public	2020-02-25 18:06	2024-03-16 17:18

Reporter	mrmagolor	Assigned To	Loci
Priority	low	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	have not tried
Status	acknowledged	Resolution	open
Product Version	0.47.02

Summary	0011418: Endless pathing errors attempting to eat inaccessible food
Description	If you have monster slayers in your fort, they will constantly cancel their task due to being "unable to find path". errorlog.txt looks something like follows: path fail: dwarf,Eat,177,6,169 -> 14,158,84: Id 0002573:Path Goal Start Eat Job:Station Mill Building at 176,8,169 ...times like a million
Steps To Reproduce	1. Have a monster slayer visit 2. Allow them residency 3. Have them go into the caverns and eventually get hungry 4. Ye olde message spam
Additional Information	Curiously, thus far this only seems to apply to the "eat" job... This fort was also a reclamation - I did not have this issue when i first played this fort before abandoning it. My conclusion is that they're trying to path to food in undiscovered area.
Tags	No tags attached.

mrmagolor 2020-02-25 18:13 reporter ~0040207	EDIT: Strangely enough, one of my marksdwarves is in the tavern, which has food contained within it, thus further confounding this mystery (unless dwarves don't take proximity into account for eating/drinking)

Talvieno 2020-02-25 19:56 manager ~0040208	Is a save available, perchance?

mrmagolor 2020-02-26 14:40 reporter ~0040212	Sadly, I already expelled the affected mercenaries, and didn't think of making a save at the time.

Loci 2020-02-26 18:32 viewer ~0040218	It's likely they were specifically targeting a preferred food that is only available somewhere inaccessible. The game doesn't exclude unrevealed tiles when creating jobs, but does exclude them when pathing to perform the jobs (0002869). You can "bulk forbid" over the unrevealed areas to make unrevealed objects unavailable.

Rizzo 2024-03-16 17:18 reporter ~0042109	I also had a similar issue to this, but with one of my default dwarves. I had dug into a large cave chamber and the dwarf wandered or fell into a section with a mazelike path. Even though I had a staircase on the same level and to me it LOOKED like the dwarf could get out, vegetation might have been preventing it. The dwarf ended in a vicious cycle where it could not find its path back to food. The game began to lag to the point where I had to pause the game to issue commands (with only 1 dwarf having this issue). The fortress was not even very big, I just like to dig a path down to the depths early and this was in year 1. I removed all messages and kept my eye on the "error" messages to try and determine what was wrong. The same dwarf issues 117 could not path to food events in just a few moments. I had not set any particular food, he was just hungry/starving. I cleared it again, and verified the same result. My only recourse was to cancel all queues, all mining jobs, all production. I set all my other dwarves to mine the straightest path I could, waiting thought the lag until a path was found and the dwarf escaped. As soon as the path was cleared the lag stopped. One thought I had was that we should consider a lost status for Dwarves. I'm sorry if this has been suggested before, but when Dwarf has issued multiple "cannot path" events in a row, regardless of type, the Dwarf should receive a new status Lost. I've read multiple reports of pathing lag in the history and it seems that this could be resolved by changing the behavior of the dwarf slightly. Dwarves with "Lost" status turn off all survival/AI temporarily and report as lost to alerts (this would be different from "Missing") Dwarves with Lost status no longer attempt pathfinding and suppress needs, but simply stay put waiting for rescue (yes they could die, but better chances of rescue if the fortress isn't lagging) Dwarves wake up and only check if their path is clear after a delay timer rather than every game tick, if not reset the timer and wait If lost is too specific for other types of pathing, then maybe put the dwarf into some kind of slow update mode where it still waits on a delay before issuing any pathing requests... once it finds the path it wants remove the flag.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2020-02-25 18:06	mrmagolor	New Issue
2020-02-25 18:13	mrmagolor	Note Added: 0040207
2020-02-25 19:56	Talvieno	Note Added: 0040208
2020-02-26 14:40	mrmagolor	Note Added: 0040212
2020-02-26 18:32	Loci	Note Added: 0040218
2020-02-26 18:34	Loci	Assigned To	=> Loci
2020-02-26 18:34	Loci	Priority	high => low
2020-02-26 18:34	Loci	Severity	major => minor
2020-02-26 18:34	Loci	Status	new => acknowledged
2020-02-26 18:34	Loci	Summary	Monster slayers have endless pathing errors => Endless pathing errors attempting to eat inaccessible food
2020-02-26 18:35	Loci	Relationship added	related to 0002869
2024-03-16 17:18	Rizzo	Note Added: 0042109