I don’t know if it is a bug or not, but catering trucks have really big issue on big airports, where they are better turned off than used.
THEY NEVER fill to full capacity, so every flight they go from parking to get enough to service ONE plane. It makes planes be late because of time they have to take to get supplies and back.
Why don’t they work like jet fuel trucks, fill to full, also why don’t they fill if they reach some low threshold like 20 percent or something.
Its really useless to have them sit there with 20 meals then go pick up meals and back to plane while doing their job
wouldn’t it make more sense, they reach 20 percent or so and instead going to parking lot they go fill up before next job.
Catering trucks load only the number of food for a plane. That’s kind of realistic. Imagine your food gets loaded in the morning to a truck but your plane flies in the evening. You may want fresh food and not a salad which was the entire day in the truck.
You just need enough trucks. Also the location of the catering depots should not too far away from the stands. At some size, a 2nd depot also makes sense and you can change the rate of meal production speed.
I have played with over 200 flights a day and no catering truck was delayed.
Maybe you can share your airport layout and we have some tipps to improve this service.
that might be the case, then they should load before the flight lands, since there is no way on big airports that trucks can start going to get the food when flight is at gate and be back in time… it just don’t happen, and causes huge delays in flights… even with close by depot you will get delays due to the fact you might get a lot of flights at around same time… so something needs to be done here
I do play with extended maps and over 50 stands and don’t have any delays.
Make sure the catering trucks are parked next to the depot and not next to the stand.
Here an example of an old airport. The two catering depots, each of them has parkings with about 14 trucks very close by avilable. The food gets picked up as soon as a plane arrives. Within those 4 hours it’s no problem to load the food and drive to the stand most far away. They are finished before the boarding starts.
As @andyc correctly points out the loading per flight is implemented by realism, would be highly unsanitary and unrealistic (since meals are crafted per airline) to have the stock in full. In a real world airport you would most likely have your catering trucks load up before the aircraft arrives, yeah, but a lot of the design decisions we’ve made in this game is because of what can go wrong. If we book a catering truck to a specific flight before it has arrived, and then there’s some fundamental flaw with the airport’s design that prevents that specific aircraft from arriving, and that situation is multiplied by five while you still have another section of the airport that is running fine, it too could stall because of no available catering trucks as they’re all preoccupied by deadlocked flights. The same goes for any vehicle service, we simply do not allocate resources for an aircraft until its guaranteed that it has arrived to the stand.
Feels like an unrelated issue, but in my airport with 4 terminals, I have 3 catering depots, one for each terminal and I tried to assign a group of catering trucks to the vehicle depots in each terminal as well.
Once flights start landing, all the catering trucks rush to one depot and try and fill up there… which makes the food store deplete quickly and doesn’t keep up with the deliveries even though the other 2 depots are completely full still.
I’ll have to go back and look into where the trucks are assigned, but seeing if anyone else has run into the same issue.
I applied the most recent update before opening today. I can see all my trucks parked next to a full catering depot travel all the way to the other side of airport to go to the depot there. So I’m still seeing the issue, if an update has been released.
It makes the game unplayable for me, as due to the amount of trucks they block all the roads over that side of the airport and causes knock ons to everything else.
I too am running into the catering truck issue, still. I finally had to turn it off. There’s some design issues I’m overcoming, but the bigger problem I’m having is the vehicles still driving all over the place for no reason. The baggage trucks driving across the map. This also holds up the catering depots while the baggage truck and fuel truck take up the Q and have to do a uturn This map has all sorts of calamity taking place. Realistically, it’s the same calamities I reported before the “large map” update as an opporunity to see what will happen. It has happened. It’s not perfect, but the vehicle behaviors have not changed for a really long time, and echo other’s complaints and observations. I’d swear to you the de-icing trucks are dancing in the snow they do so much wild nonsense. It’s like if a vehicle sits too long in aparking lot, it just dispatches to go for a drive around the map.
I have similar issues but a little different of my experience. My experience of catering tuck stuck is the demand of the meal larger than the production of the meal.
All tuck just still in one depot to get meal but the depot stock level is 0. After that, all truck leave the depot and go outside. After few second, the depot product 10 meal and all the truck get back to the depot. And the depot meal stock level back to 0. This cycle repeat and repeat again. Meanwhile, the level of the depot next that depot is 5000 meal.
As a result, I need to turn off catering function.
My observations.
Airport is split into 3 terminals, vehicle depot and catering depot present at each and catering trucks are assigned to each.
Catering trucks ignore terminal assignments and even closest catering depot and go across the airport to the depot in terminal 1 causing shortages of food and traffic jams as catering for 3 terminals are concentrating on the one depot.
My airport does have bad road construction, but this was fine before one of the mid Beta 6 patches that fixed a vehicle issue as they were using the depot in their own terminal.
