I see in the patch notes that some Caravan mechs have been fixed. As a player in the northern region on a slow developing server, the lack of Caravans being used has never been a matter of the mechs being wonky, but rather on the overall viability of transporting crates via caravan versus via mule.
The only mats for JM caravans come from the southern regions. With those hard to get mats, you can theoretically get 8 crates in a slow moving Caravan. You'll likely need to have a few people guarding it. If you take those people, and all of you use alpine baghorn mules instead of the caravan, you'll complete the crate run faster and it'll have moved 9+ crates.
It's also far less time consuming/difficult to get a team a set of baghorn mules, than it is to create the caravan. Why would anyone go through travelling for 50 minutes to get to the south, gather materials, bring them up north, then spend a small fortune refining/processing it all, all that for a less efficient way of doing crate runs?
This area of the game needs a lot more work than just fixing a bugged attacker/defender event. And the north's gaps in crafting options for various simple items is limiting on the northern players ability to try stuff out — like having to go south to be able to craft apprentice bags, as there're no ash trees in the north. Similar issue with Caravans.
