Some jobs are fixed duration - menial labor takes 3 hours, combat patrols take 10 hours, upgrading a base takes a variable amount of time but it’s known when you assign the mission.
Other jobs are open ended: you can send someone out to forage for 4+ hours with no maximum. How am I supposed to tell you how much food a forage job will take when the forager might be gone for 5 days? The NPC checks if you have 4 hours worth of food before he leaves, but when he comes back, he may want 5 days worth.
Yeah that’s not efficient at all, the best thing to do would be to do how MMO’s handle this sort of thing, base the amount of materials gathered on their skills, and leave the npc in a sort of " limbo " until you retrieve them. As it stands it makes little to no sense to expect the player to believe that the npc will be performing their assigned task indefinitely which the game currently seems to think they do. ( It doesn’t seem like their assigned chore produces indefinite amount of goods )
The tasks should have a min and max ( But obfuscated ) expected result based on the associated skills and stats of the person sent, a food cost for committing the task (in the realistic expectation that the food would be rationed to them for the duration of the task), and a set amount of time before they’re flagged as " done " with it.
Having to helicopter-mom the base and trying to guesstimate how much nutrition they may require and needing agency on my part to hand-feed them isn’t very fun- there might be base upgrades I’m unaware of that could help alleviate this literal pain in the keister but I’m unaware of it.
Another idea is to be able to use a two-way radio to remotely manage the base or communicate with the manager?
Another is to have the companions auto-return after said task is complete unless something blocks them from updating the camp aka a vehicle on the terrain?
It seems a little weird to me that the npc’s could wrack up tens of thousands of calories worth of hunger/thirst if I wasn’t exactly quick about returning to base.
On a final note the NPC’s can atleast be " programmed " to auto-pickup certain types of food and drink prepared for them, but I play with their needs off to skip that tedium.
NPCs sent on gathering tasks will continue to attempt to gather stuff until you retrieve them. Of course it works that way. And I don’t see a problem with sending out an NPC to gather stuff for an extended period: why wouldn’t I be able to do it?
Remote management via radio, e-ink tablet, and possibly other options is something I’m working towards, but it’s a not a simple thing so it’s going to be a while.
Auto-return on task completion is really tricky, because there’s no easy way to set up an event timer in CDDA and the current return code is based on the assumption that the NPC returns to the same location as the player.
Honestly, I’ve always tried to keep at least a 2 week reserve of food at my faction camps, and that’s not particularly hard. It’s even easier now that NPCs can hunt and trap for the camp, making it easier to generate a food surplus.
just some ideas of mine, I mean it makes a little more sense now that its been explained but it is mechanically one of the biggest head-scratchers I’ve faced so far.