Edit: Please note that because of the urgency of wanting to get this information out to the community, we decided to publish the initial English version. Additional languages are being worked on and we'll have them out to you ASAP. As always, thanks for your patience!
Hello fellow tycoons,
Paul here, Lead Game Designer on Good Company! Happy to see you enjoying the game!
Since Good Company hit Early Access, there’s been a lot of debate about how certain parts of the logistics work. We are aware of numerous shortcomings in that area and of course we are planning to improve those as we move forward with the development. Our hope is that this system will soon change in a way that makes it more accessible and more fun to interact with.
We can see some folks are having issues with the current system, especially when it comes to logistics bandwidth. Until we can implement these improvements, here’s a quick guide to help you get started and some tips on how to make the most of the system.
Adjusting Bandwidth
The logistics bandwidth determines how many slots of an inventory are reserved for a particular item type. If you create a connection between two inventories (or a crafter and an inventory) the system reserves one slot for the transported item type in the target inventory, unless there already is a reservation for this type.
You can increase how many slots an item occupies on a shelf using the 'bandwidth control options'. Switch to Logistics Mode and click to expand the logistics node of the inventory. Here you can view the reserved items for this inventory and how many inventory slots each one is occupying. You can adjust these by selecting the item and increasing or decreasing the bandwidth (i.e. the number of reserved slots in the shelf) in the bottom area of the logistics node widget.
Notice that you can only decrease the bandwidth if there are reserved but empty inventory slots. This is because putting items into an unreserved slot automatically creates a reservation. You’ll have to make sure that inventory slots you want to be unreserved again are empty first.
Bandwidth and Products
Since products don’t stack like other items (there can only be one product in an inventory slot) we’ve set a default bandwidth of fifteen slots for products when we first launched into Early Access.
However, later in the game you might want to sell more than fifteen products per week. Or maybe your production cannot supply all fifteen reserved slots and you want to use the other reserved slots to sell a different product.
Let your Logistics Employees do the Walking
Since crafting tables cannot store items, the carrying from and to a crafting table has to be done by the crafting employee. If crafting employees have long walking distances to their storages, they will spend far less time actually producing new things and your efficiency will suffer. Remember: time is money. Try to keep input and output inventories which are directly connected to crafter as close to the crafting stations as possible. Let logistics employees fill up and empty these storages. Your production will be faster and your staff costs much lower.
Prioritize your Logistics Connections
This is an advanced technique and most setups should work just fine without it. However, if you want to have that little bit of extra control you can set the importance of each logistics connection. Logistics employees will try to satisfy connections with higher priority.
This is useful, for example, if you want to siphon a part of your modules from your production to supply an analysis table. In order to reduce impact on your production you’d want to set connections going to your analysis workstation lower than the connection resuming your production chain.
Priorities only affect logistics employees and can only be set on connections between inventories. Production employees will ignore priorities entirely.
We hope this helps you in your future endeavors.
All the best,
your Chasing Carrots