It all started either from a bug or my lack of oversight, but around the time my colony reached 45 inhabitants my farmers decided to take a prolonged vacation from work. By the time I noticed this my food stocks were nearly depleted. I immediately ordered the plundering of the map for all foodstuffs, excluding fish eggs. This wasn't enough. The farmers continued their strike and starvation began to take hold. All work unrelated to food and its production was halted. By the time anything was foraged, it was eaten on the spot. Some died from their hunger while the farming was restarted. I knew the harvest would come far too late to save the colony. The airship bearing life giving food arrived, but what it delivered was far too insignificant to save many and only bought me a little time. A few more fell to the lack of food. I was left with one option. In the words of Lenin, "Those that do not work, will not eat." I ordered the execution of all laborers not employed in food production. Cannibalism had already occurred at this point, but now it became mandatory. My colony shrank in size by 20 people. The first to go were the naturalists and the aristocrats. They were not missed, for they gave nothing to the Empire. Then the workers of idle work groups. There was work to be done to save the outpost, yet they did nothing. They had to die. There were three unfortunate casualties though. Immigrants must not have heard of our struggles, but they came anyway. Immediately upon their arrival, they were executed and eaten. This purge gave the hardworking survivors the time needed to survive until harvest. Cabbage and wheat abounded once again. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. I do not regret my actions. It was for the good of the Empire. Shortly after recovery, the game crashed......
Lenin's advice was apparently very useful in this situation, even if he is a Commie Scumlord. IT is unfortunate that he chose to be a part of that cult instead of my cool club. Which is not a cult. Its a club. Call it a club because that is what it is. And nothing else.
I had a similar problem. Even after limiting available work for half my colony to farming and foraging, my farmers decided they were too good for manual labor. I decided to tell them to forage fishman eggs and go get a drink. Came back to a long pork fiesta. Kind of wondering how to get farmers consistently farming.
I am pretty sure the problem stems from Workshops and how Overseers work. If the Overseer claims a workshop, they only allow their workers to work in that building or do absolutely nothing. This brings a lot of headaches when mixed with 30E's broken supply drops cursing you to tiny 1-man workshops leaving the rest of your workers to happily loiter and watch the farms die. Which is partially why the Overseer system had an aspect of doom from the beginning. If only the Overseer has the ability to tell their workers to do anything, and if the Overseer only cares about their workshop then I realized how without shock we should be that we're locked in a cycle of starvation and inaction. This brings the trademark "You obviously have the play the game X way" the recent blog lamented, an issue I am all too familiar with. Yes, I could just order new overseers and only have three buildings by day 7 but that is not only boring but because of what the problem actually is; there's a good chance farming will break once you have too many workshops anyway. Though I'll be happy when colonists stop eating raw food before it's cooked. Military Overseers should be in charge of the Arsenal and other military buildings, Upper Class colonists should be doing *something* helpful, since if I wanted all of my colonists to stand around and do nothing I would just build workshops.
