TASK QUEUES
Ordered lists of pending work that agents execute autonomously — designation queues for mining and construction, job lists colonists pull from by priority, command sequences units work through.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN COLONY-SIM · AUTOMATION · RTS · BASE-BUILDING
Dwarf Fortress's designation system is the ancestral form (paint the mountainside for digging and the dwarves organize the labor themselves), RimWorld refines it with a priority matrix (each pawn's job preferences form a labor market the player tunes rather than commands), Factorio's construction-bot ghost queues turn blueprints into pending work, and RTS shift-click queues let one order chain into expeditions. Designers use task queues because they separate intent from execution: the player's job becomes declaring what should happen (dig here, build this, haul that), while the simulation solves who, when, and in what order — which scales player agency past what direct control could manage (a hundred dwarves can't be micromanaged, but a designation layer commands them all) and shifts the gameplay from piloting to management, the genre's actual fantasy. The queue is also the delegation contract's paper trail: visible pending work lets players audit what the colony believes it's supposed to be doing, and re-prioritization is how they steer without seizing the wheel. Key decisions: pull versus push assignment (agents choosing eligible tasks by proximity and priority versus tasks assigned to specific agents — pull scales better, push controls better), priority expressiveness (global orderings, per-agent matrices, urgent-flag overrides), and starvation visibility — the task stuck at the queue's bottom forever needs surfacing. Pitfall: silent queue pathologies — work that never happens because no agent qualifies, priorities deadlocking, or the crucial order buried under two hundred hauling jobs, all invisible until the wall isn't built and the siege arrives; queue systems owe players diagnostics (why isn't this happening?), because delegation without observability decays into distrust and re-micromanagement.