How do loot zones for sorting work?

Hello! Just made this account for this new website, so sorry if I post this in the wrong area, its not like other forums I’ve used.

First of all, ingame theres some sort of zone management hotkey and the abilty to make and mark zones for loot sorting, but I can’t seem to use them even though I’ve defined an area for, say, wood. I did notice while fiddling with it, it mentioned some sort of “Defined zones unsorted/farmplot”, though I did’t find out how to change those

Im not sure if this is fully in the game yet or if Im missing something, but I looked around on search and did’t find much about it recently, so I would like to ask if someone knows more than me!

Thank you for reading this, hope this was clear!

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  1. You must define Loot: Unsorted zone over a tile where you dump your stuff, or you can cover your base with it
  2. You may define some tiles as Loot: Ignore, no items will be grabbed from there, even if such tiles are inside Loot: Unsorted
  3. You must define at least one other ‘target’ zone (rest of Loot zones), sorting does not know where it can put your stuff otherwise
  4. Target zones can be inside of Loot: Unsorted, any item that fit in current target zone is not moved during sorting
  5. Some zones covers more items if more specific zone is not defined, for example, if you have just Loot: Food, all perishable / nonperishable food and drinks will be moved there
  6. press Shift+O to trigger sorting - keep in mind that you have to stand within 10 tiles range

I want to apologize for not making the system more intuitive. I have some ideas how to improve its ease of use which will be eventually implemented.

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Thanks mate, this helped me out bunches. The thing I was not doing is putting an “unsorted” zone over the items I wanted to sort. While it makes sense, its not something I thought of at first, as I’m spoiled off of DF and Rimworlds hauling systems.

I think it works very well, and now that this post is made anyone can search it up quite easily as I tried to make it keyword acessable.

Though, if its simple, perhaps an entry to the help menu (the ? key) explaining the basics of zones to make the info you gave me on this forum, easily acessable with a few hotkeys.

Thanks for the help!

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Cataclysm Quick Tip #38 - Zone Manager (Hoarders and Farmers MUST watch!)

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Perfect. I’m real bad about sorting my shit.

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I have defined a custom zone “–filthy” but some of the filthy items are still going into a zone that is marked as “armor” and custom “c:clothing,-sheet”

What might be the cause?

I also have some unsorted zones that don’t empty out. Strange stuff like soap, loyalty cards, score cards, and knotweed are left unsorted.

Am I in error if I have multiple, non contiguous unsorted zones?
Is it still necessary to be within 10 spaces of the unsorted zone?

Does the algorithm repeat until the unsorted zones are all empty? If it only runs once without repeating then the ability to reorder the list might begin to have some meaning.

There’s already a defined loot zone for filthy clothings and armours. Just search for filthy when searching for a loot category.

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Something really helpful is the Personal Zones which’ll follow you around at exactly where you put it. I use it for Unsorted and Unload Containers.

Do I need to take precautions against spilling chemicals when unloading containers? So far it seems like those containers are being ignored or treated as chemicals and not containers.

Liquids aren’t unloaded, even when frozen I think.

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