Not sure if it's a bug or if I'm just stupid,.. but it seems like half of my people sit around idling when there are tasks they could/should be doing. I've got a population of 90 (25 prestige) and a fair amount of overseers ....and some are hard at work. Others are just sitting around. I initially had some berries queued up to be harvested and instead of going and harvesting them, one group just sat there and did nothing but gossip and walk around town until they starved to death.. Any tips for actually getting my people to do what I want? PS I cheated to raise my population by resetting the timer for it.. but this happens even if I don't do that. I just want to let it run overnight to see if it's playable in the morning.
There's so many systems working with each other that it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what causes these things - can you upload a replay of that play session and we'll examine it?
I'm 99% sure that it's the same replay from: https://community.gaslampgames.com/...-and-a-script-error-and-more.8768/#post-88163 ..but I wanted to ask in general in case I was actually doing something wrong.
There's a quick solution for idleness. A big pile of frontier justice will get them moving. Got to fill those new graves somehow. There's a few jobs that can get your people stuck in a loop of laziness. I do find foraging berries and the like to be the main culprit. Generally if I want to have a session where nothing gets 'stuck' I stay away from foraging and build one building at a time. This means you only ever have a few jobs going at once which helps most of the time.
This seems to happen to me when I renovate a building and end up with a ghostly construction job that will never be completed. Workers will mysteriously stop doing any other tasks. The log file also reveals job utilities dropping further and further into the negatives over time.
In the daily schedule of your average colonist. 1. wake up in communal bunk house 2. eat raw cabbage 3. talk to random colonist 4. move to work site 5. chop tree 6. talk to coworkers 7. wander around. 8. talk to random colonist 9. return to work site 10. get yelled at by overseer for being behind schedule 11. chop tree 12. drink booze 13. eat raw steak. 14. chat with co-workers. 15. get yelled at by overseer for not working 16. chop tree. So as you can see, they are working, but as efficiently as you might like.
Oh that happens too, but something is definitely going wrong when they all stand at the stockpile never actually doing anything, or if they sit on a berry bush but never actually pick anything, and so forth
My poet wandered off and starved to death...he was kind of useless... Also, there's tasks to be done but half of my work groups say "No Job" damn them and their obviously lower class laziness!
Actually, poets seem to perform a very valuable role now in that they passively explore the map. They just seem to have some trouble pathing back.
The job system is still rough around the edges and since you can't cancel orders like forage or chop trees its best to issue them only when you need to. And generally only issue a few jobs that can't be canceled at a time. This sounds like a bug. Have you reported it, ideally with a console and replay attached? A lot of the time this means one or two people in the work crew are doing jobs like hauling that doesn't assign a job to the entire work crew. I'm pretty sure if one member is doing something it can stop the workcrew as a whole from picking up another job, at least for some jobs. When you see a bunch of workcrews idle but have jobs queued try pausing and looking at the characters in the idle workcrews to see if any of them are up to something. I've complained about this but it seems to be fairly low priority for the devs despite the fact it seems to really bother a lot of players, especially new players.
I had this problem with a group I had designated as kitchen staff; a large order of cabbage was placed but they just stood around. I soon discovered the Frontier Justice button.
That might be a common case, yes. At least it describes an earlier game I had. Stuff like that would be improved by a more transparent Interface; Just tell me that this crew is kinda busy (maybe something along the lines of "2 Idle, 1 Busy"?), and I'm already happier than before.
