Online tool to balance the smelters production queues
Hello everyone
I’m going to share in this post a little tool that I created online. The goal of this tool is to calculate the “best” way to manage the smelters’ production queues, “best” being of course a subjective notion.
For me this means two things:
- the longest bars to produce must be finished first
- I want the smelters' workloads to be balanced, i.e. I don’t want to have one smelter idle while another one still has two platinum bars to produce
Such a balancing is doable by hand, but it’s tedious to calculate. So why not use the power of a server?
Here’s the tool : http://www.zpponline.com/hayday/smelter.
The screen is divided in two main areas:
- at the top is where one can enter the amounts of ores stored in the barn
- the bottom section represents five smelters, each with its queue. I chose to show them with 6 slots but that could be changed
How does it work?
For basic scenarios it’s simple. Let’s say I have in my barn 8 platinum ores, 14 gold ores, 10 silver ores. I have only 3 smelters since I’m a beginner, and they don’t even have the 3rd star. So I type 8 in the “Platinum Ore” field, 14 in “Gold Ore”, 10 in “Silver Ore”, I uncheck the “Fully mastered” option, uncheck “Smelter #4” & “Smelter #5” to keep only 3 smelters, and voila! Everything is refreshed automatically after any input. The final display is as follow.
http://i.imgur.com/pulcTx5.png
What this tells me is that I should queue
- one platinum bar then one gold bar then one silver bar in the first smelter
- same in the second smelter
- two gold bars then a silver bar in the third smelter
That will leave me with 2 platinum ores, 2 gold ores, 1 silver ore in my barn - these are shown in “Remainder” fields in the top section - and my smelters will be done in 32~36 hours.
For a more complete scenario it’s possible to enter duration for slots already enqueued in the smelters. For instance in the following screen:
http://i.imgur.com/wgR1L1a.png
My smelters are fully mastered, I had such and such amounts of ores in my barn, and all my smelters were already at work. The 1st smelter had the first slot with 3h07 still left to go, the second smelter had the first slot still busy for 3h16, etc etc.
To fix manually a slot, simply click the checkbox next to it and enter a duration with the format NhMM with N the number of hours, and MM the number of minutes (such as 1h05, 12h34, 5h48…).
I loaded my smelters in HayDay following these recommendations and I know they’ll be busy for the next 18~22 hours.
Feel free to use the tool and to give me your feedback!