“How do Haulers actually work? Logistics tips as well please.” The replies to that kind of thread are almost always tips — put the warehouse nearer, add more of them, check the priorities — and tips are the wrong shape of answer. Hauling is a queue. Queues have a capacity, that capacity is computable, and whether yours is above or below demand is a fact about your city rather than a matter of taste.
Songs of Syx hauler requirement, at a glance
| Situation | Haulers required | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Short route inside the walls, well staffed | 5 haulers needed (have 20) | This route has slack — those haulers can cover a second, longer route before either one backs up. |
| Long haul to a distant mine, same crew size | 52 haulers needed (have 10) | The crew is undersized for the distance — either add haulers on this route or move the storage closer. |
| Same long haul, but with carts assigned | 18 haulers needed (have 10) | Carts close most of the gap that adding bodies would — check cart availability before requesting more haulers. |
These are outputs of this site's own round-trip queue arithmetic run against illustrative inputs we chose, not values extracted from the game files — distance, speed, capacity and work hours are things you measure on your own save. Use the calculator below for your own route.
What a hauler is actually doing
Strip away the job labels and a hauler runs one loop forever: walk to the goods, load, walk to the destination, unload, repeat. That gives a round-trip time with two components that behave completely differently:
- Walking, which scales with distance and is fixed by your layout.
- Loading and unloading, which does not care about distance at all.
Divide the working part of a day by that round trip and you have trips per hauler per day. Multiply by what each one carries and you have throughput per hauler. Divide your daily volume by that and you have the answer to the question everyone is really asking.
Measure one walk, then read the rest
How many haulers does this route actually need?
15 haulers needed you have 20, moving 5,455 of 4,000 units a day
- Round trip
- 44 s
- Trips per hauler per day
- 13.6
- One hauler moves
- 273 / day
- Backlog building
- 0 / day
- If distance were halved
- 8 haulers
- If each carried double
- 8 haulers
Throughput is 136% of demand. You could move 5 haulers onto other work before anything starts backing up.
Speed, capacity and work-day length are measured values you read off your own colony, not constants we assert. Time the walk between two points in game and divide — that single measurement makes every other row here correct for your version.
You need exactly one real measurement to make this correct for your version: time a hauler walking a route you know the length of, and divide. Every other row follows from that. We are not publishing a movement speed as a fact, because speeds in this game have moved between versions and the widely-linked reference pages have not been maintained through those changes. A number you measured this afternoon beats a number somebody wrote down two years ago, and it costs you about fifteen seconds.
The last two output rows are the ones to act on. They put the two available fixes side by side in the same unit — haulers saved — so the choice stops being a matter of opinion.
Distance or capacity: the answer flips
This is the part that a tips list cannot give you, because the correct advice reverses depending on your own layout:
| Round trip is mostly | Halving the distance | Doubling what each carries | So do this |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walking (long routes) | Large saving | Modest saving | Move the stockpile closer |
| Handling (short routes) | Almost no saving | Large saving | Leave the layout, raise load size |
Two colonies can have identical hauler counts, identical demand and opposite correct answers. On a long supply run from an outlying mine, relocating a stockpile can retire half the crew, and upgrading carts barely registers. On a tight industrial block where the walk is fifteen seconds and the handling is ten, moving the warehouse another five tiles closer buys almost nothing while each extra unit per trip pays in full. The travel-share row in the calculator tells you which colony you are.
What a shortfall looks like before it looks like anything
A hauling deficit does not announce itself. Production does not stop; it stalls intermittently and asymmetrically, and the symptoms get attributed to everything except transport:
- Workshops idle while their input sits, produced, at the other end of the map.
- A stockpile shows a healthy total of a good that consumers are nonetheless short of.
- The backlog grows on a schedule — a fixed number of units per day, exactly what the calculator reports — so a colony can run for a long while looking fine and then degrade quickly.
That last property is the reason to compute the number rather than watch for trouble. A ten percent shortfall is invisible for weeks and then is not.
Do not staff it to exactly one
Set the assigned count so throughput clears demand with margin, not so it matches. Demand is not flat: a harvest lands in a lump, a construction project spikes the flow of materials, and a hauler pulled onto a higher-priority job disappears from the pool without warning. A route provisioned to exactly one hundred percent is a route that spends part of every season behind.
A Hauler post costs no resources to build or maintain, so provisioning one route above break-even is cheap insurance rather than waste. If your workshops are idle and hauling is comfortably ahead of demand, the constraint is elsewhere. Check whether people are simply too unhappy to work using the need floor calculator, or whether the labour is being eaten by overheads you have not counted, which is what the slave ledger measures.
Which version this is written against
V0.71 — the branch visible in community posts through July and August 2026, including a 27 July 2026 thread that puts the version in its own title.
Movement speed and carry capacity are exactly the kind of value that drifts between builds, and they are the two inputs this calculator most depends on. Rather than publish numbers we would have to re-verify every patch, the tool asks you to time one walk. That measurement takes about fifteen seconds and is automatically correct for whatever version you launched.
Sources
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Hauler — haulers get an increased carry-capacity bonus over a normal worker but only cut decay by 25%, against a warehouse’s 50%
- Songs of Syx Wiki, Logistics — logistics workers carry more than other job types, and that carry bonus is what the “raise load size” side of the comparison is drawing on
