Housing Question

Okay so I'm playing around with housing prior to the release later this month. There is something I don't understand quite yet...I can build say a lower worker house. and improve it to get more workers. However, this means I will have a lot fewer beds than workers. So should I not have enough beds and houses for my colony? Do they sleep in shifts? Is the penalty for sleeping on the ground bad? What's the best way to handle this?

 

You can just build extra beds if you make the house bigger.

It's fine to leave your lowerclass with floors though, this is what I do, only overseers get beds.

 

i've been building my lower class houses 5x6 with 3 cots, 2 windows, 3 long clothes lines and a shrine. this way it meets all req for worker pop and i keep their happiness up. for overseers i make also a 5x6 and there is enough room for 2 beds, 2, practical table/chairs, 3 practical cabinets and 2 bookshelves (as i can't ever seem to get carpets to work in my overseer's houses.

 

Worker quality of life, by design, matters less than overseer QoL..

 

but the more people are happy, the better they work, why not have both?

 

Right...but I still have far less beds than people. Doesn't this affect them poorly so that they start getting mad and unproductive (both overseers and workers) after a few days of sleeping on the floor?

 

I have a colony full of happy productive people. each house has exactly the items required to meet the goals of the building to get maximum population from it. I attribute this to the vast quantities of Chicha and Wine i produce and serve at my Public House.

A side note, this was the first time i every built a public house and successfully stocked it with booze. Prior i had always built a church and let the vicar (unsuccessfully) take care of his flock.

Since i built my public house and filled it with Chicha, i have had zero cult events. I had one prior to the public house.

I later, built a church too, assigned a "spiritually inclined" overseer to the position of vicar. I have yet to see him even go in the church or bring any of the hard built cogs to it for service.

 

Does it have altar and chairs?

 

The trick is to start by building houses which have more beds than they contribute to the population cap. E.g. with a standard colony loadout, build your first bunkhouse with 6 cots in it. The base population cap increase for a bunkhouse is 2, plus 1 for three or more beds and plus another 1 for two or more windows (both of which are easy to achieve). This increases your population cap for lower class colonists to 6 (base 2 plus 4 for the bunkhouse), which is precisely the number of cots you have. After that, build 4-cot bunkhouses (with windows) and your lower-class cap will always be the same as the total number of cots (you can do larger if you want to get the quality pop-cap bonus as well but I usually don't bother).

It's a bit more tricky with middle class colonists as you start a lot of them. But the same principle applies: build houses with more beds than pop-cap increases until everyone is housed, then you have full control over population. I usually build 4-bed middle class homes and hit two out of the three cap-bonuses. it takes a while to make sure everyone is housed but by the time you finish you should have more or less all the middle-class colonists you need. The alternative would be to make especially large middle-class houses to start off with (say 6 or 8 beds) which will achieve control sooner. But I don't personally like giant houses*.

Of course, you can *not* do the above, and have some people sleeping on the floor. This does cause penalties but starting colonists are more resilient to it due to their Pioneering Spirit trait. I'm also led to believe that it matters less for lower-class workers. But I personally like to keep them happy where I can and beds are an easy way to do this.

(At risk of going on about this, your question highlights one of the reasons I don't like the current housing/immigration system - it's counter-intuitive. The solution to colonists needing shelter is, pretty obviously, to build houses and beds. But building more houses - if you don't make them large enough - exacerbates the problem by drawing more colonists and therefore ensuring you still don't have enough beds. As such, you're left needing to game the system by strategically managing the number of beds and population cap bonuses, which isn't very transparent at first.)

*At risk of going on about this further, it's another reason I don't like the current housing/immigration system. It provides an incentive to do precisely the thing it was supposed to inhibit - building giant houses - since doing so gives you control over population expansion sooner. Indeed, for a standard colony loadout it seems the 'optimal' solution would be to build a large 10-bed middle class home which will immediately align the pop-cap and number of beds (base 7 plus the house; make it 11 beds if you want to chase the quality bonus for the house as well). Literally the only reason why I don't do this is because I like sensible-sized houses and it's sad the game punishes me for that, especially when it's supposed to be designed otherwise.

 

I removed the chairs for use in my public house, but i still have a stone altar there. No one ever used it aside from the occasional sleeping person. I never even saw my Vicar in it.

 

I do three beds per middle class house, doing a 5x5 square floor plan. The upgrade puts two overseers added per unit, allowing me to use 7 houses to hit full beds. I can then upgrade houses as I add new ones to keep bed count in line with overseers.

 

For me, i plan the city out a bit, say for example, u are gonna build a metal works which is gonna have one overseer and 2 to 3 workers, so what i do is, build a labourer house very near that with 4 beds at quality 8, and a middle class house at quality 6 to 10 base on your preferance, yeah i know it is gonna be more beds then people but, ideally u would want only those people working in the metalworks to sleep there, just build more of these sleep houses at other places, based on where you are gonna have workers working nearby, u can even make spare houses a little far away for any building and those people who have no where to sleep might go there to sleep.

 

I have changed to a four bed 5x7 overseer house... gets me two extra overseers with two extra beds. When I want more, I can add the windows and table sets.

 

The table and chair set which adds 1 more overseer at a cost of space and materials which is bad in my opinion because they are not space efficient and u end up getting even more colonist to beds and also more space is needed to make the house in the first place. I initially DID plan my houses with tables and chairs until i realise it is just not worth the space. Well that's my opinion though.

 

I like them for the ambiance... the extra overseer is a bonus... now that we may have some save stability, I expect to add windows to my workshops as resources become plentiful.

 

Yeah it would be if wood, which people seem to generally spend like crazy, is indeed expensive.

 

This is not the colonial way!!

I just exploit all the resources and let my people stave and toil while I trade things for wood