I just discovered a salvage spot and want to see which laborers are closest to send over there. Or, we have enough stone now. Anyone pounding stone needs to be switched to wood. Now I have to go through laborers one at a time to find the workers I want.
Click the laborers icon at the top of the screen, and click the search icon.
The name and info of the first laborer pops up but I can’t see it because it is BEHIND the main screen.
Close the main screen so I can see that Roderick is on the other side of the map doing something important. pick somebody else.
Close Rodericks info screen.
Repeat steps 1 - 3. Repeat 6 times - All wood chopping or transporting stuff.
Repeat again. 7th out of 20+ workers is 'contemplating" in the woods in the general direction of the salvage spot. redirect to salvage.
Keep repeating until you find the 4 stone miners and redirect them to the trees.
Either I am TOTALLY missing a shortcut that I should have seen by now ( somebody please same me from my ignorance ) or all of you have felt this same frustration at wasted time. If not :
A. please make the laborer info screen pop in FRONT of the main screen ( eliminates some steps ). Or, even better
B. Link all “villagers categorized as worker type laborer” and link them as you have “all buildings categorized as storage type root cellar” , and stick little “NEXT !” arrows on them so we can pop from one person to the next without having to open or close ANY menus / reports or info screens.
I agree with medea, there’s no need to manage them like that. In fact, it probably won’t accomplish what you want. Laborers switch tasks frequently, sometimes even dropping what they’re carrying in the middle of the street to do something else. So the laborers you are trying to assign to salvage probably won’t keep salvaging for very long, but eventually another laborer will come along to salvage some more. From my observation, salvaging is a very low priority task.
If you want to get it done quicker, the options are to check “Prioritized” and increase the number of assigned workers. The Prioritized check box doesn’t seem to help much, but increasing the assigned workers can be effective in getting workers to the site faster. But it still depends on what higher priority tasks need to be done.
The priority list is a bit opaque but unloading unchecked supplies on the Wagon or a Cellar or Storehouse is at/near the top. Blueberry bush movements might be the top. Exploration is high up. Beyond that, there’s a proximity factor but whether to Town Center or to closest storage, I can’t tell.
There’s a basic needs thing that drives me nuts, though. If a Salvage site has 5 pairs of shoes, and a free Laborer needs new shoes, they’ll cross the entire map to pick up one pair of shoes for themselves and head back to chop wood or mine stone. I have to manually tell them to put the all of the shoes in the wagon (I move the Wagon to salvage sites, obviously) before getting one pair. Oh, and Salvage > Excavate and it may override distance (not a complaint about that bit, that’s fine), and anything dropped on ground can have a strong priority but not always.
Obviously I picked the wrong thing to use as one of the examples. Forget I mentioned salvaging. Lets start over.
Lets say I have lots of stone, but need more wood for construction. I know there are a bunch of people working on gathering small stone groups here and there all over the area. I want to redirect them to woodchopping. I have to do the steps outlined above to find only those workers and send them to the trees closest to storage or road. I don’t want to prioritize the trees, because then other workers will stop important jobs like transporting goods or collecting nuts and berries. Now then …
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click on ANY worker you can see, and use a little “NEXT” arrow button to cycle through the laborers ( like you can with hunters or with root cellars ) and see who is doing what? Find the lazy ones standing behind a tree (where you can’t see him) “contemplating” something and send him back to work? I agree that once you get to a certain population size this would be unreasonable micromanaging at that point. But in the first few years, with only 25 people, there is no time for contemplating.
And If I set up a chain of 6 exploration flags, I only need 1 person to go - not 6. If I pause the game, set the flags and cycle through the workers, I can see who volunteered to go exploring and stop most of them before they quit chopping trees and all go marching off into the darkness.
I don’t use the exploration flags at all. In the winter, I grab a collector who has nothing else to do anyway and explore the map with him until spring comes or he starts to freeze. Then I send him back to his hut so he can start working.
I get what you’re saying about laborers in the early game, they don’t always do what you need. In the very early game it’s going to take a long time to get anything done so you just have to set the bar really low. My first year, after the town center all I need to build is a storage yard, 2 wood splitters, 8 houses, 2 wells, and at least 1 hunter and/or forager, hopefully done before winter comes. I’ve never had a problem with laborers getting enough logs and stone to accomplish this. Avoid laying down roads because they will waste time building those before doing anything else.
As for exploring, I do as Olaf does for the immediate area. Later, when I’ve built a fort I use the soldiers to explore. They can see farther than a laborer, move faster, and can take out predator dens they encounter.
Forget I mentioned salvaging. Lets start over.