The Arborist work area is too small for the level of work required, which results in high idle time. If you fill their work area with even mature trees, they will spend the majority of their time being idle. This happens even with only one worker. There’s almost no need for a second worker.
You can micromanage them to work multiple areas, but this is tedious with everything else going on and it’s easy to forget, especially at higher speeds.
If the work area was larger, they would have more work to do.
Arborists can gather from trees outside their radius so you can plant more trees around the circle. This is quite strange that it shows 100% idle though.
If you mix different types of trees in the working area then seasons of gathering will be spread almost for the whole year - peaches in summer, apples in autumn and pears in winter and spring.
One circle can provide about 1000 fruit per year, so you most definetly would need a second arborist.
Oh I thought they gather only inside the radius. I guess the radius is only for planting then?
In my screenshot, each arbrorist building has one worker and trees only in their work radius, which could explain it. Though you mentioned 1000 fruit per year per circle, and the trees in the screenshot are fully matured. So I’m not sure what’s going on there. I have one circle of fully matured peach trees and one circle of fully matured apple trees. Two buildings, one worker each.
The radius is only for what they collect. You can plant fruit trees anywhere, and if it bears fruit while being the closest source of food villagers will grab it.
Or, I just realised, you could pause the game, put the circle down where you would like it to be for another arborist before building, use that as a guide to put a load of more trees down, then put the circle back and start construction on the new Arborist building.
Wait, which is it? Do they collect only in the circle? I know villagers will grab from it if it’s close. But if I plant another large grove not near the villagers, do I have to manually move the circle for the arborist to collect? Or will they collect all fruit trees?
No, they replant trees automatically only inside the circle. But they will plant new trees anywhere on the map and help each other.
And they can harvest fruit slightly outside the circle. It is not granted, but very often they do it. Although they will prioritize collecting inside the circle. Usually additional row of trees outside of working area will increase arborists’ output up to 1000 per year per circle or even more.
But more important is to mix different types of trees for same arborists, because trees have different harvest period, so arborists can spend more time collecting fruit during the year
Right now, apples and pears harvest at the same time, over a 3 month period. Peaches also get 3 months. So for 6th months, they have nothing to harvest.
I wish they had ability to plant and tend berries. For example, here in Florida, Strawberry harvest starts in February. Or maybe a greenhouse for tropical / citrus fruits? Or willow trees for the basket maker? Just something to keep them busy December to May. Otherwise, I have to remember to unassign them so they can join the laborers and then remember to put them back to work - like I do with the farmers.
Pears can survive winter partially so their harvest time is much longer - autumn, winter and early spring. So arborists can do harvesting almost the whole year, and plant new trees in spring preparing an orchad for the next arborist building
So the three month time frame window listed for each type of fruit is not its harvest window? Is that their planting window ? I have just planted my orchard in my current game, ( 6 of each type I tand they will need to mature a bit for full production. I will have to remember to check and see if the arborist is actually harvesting past what is listed.
A little demonstration of how arborists work.
I have a layout as following: line of peaches 3x9, line of apples 3x9 and line of pears 3x9
Avarage productivity of grown trees - 1000+ per arborist building.
There you can see that arborists can gather from trees outside of their work areas:
Idle time mostly during the spring and winter time. And it goes down during the harvest season. You can plant new trees during spring to lower the idle time.
Even next spring there are still pears survived and arborsits have work to do. But saddly they will ignore if trees inside their working area do not have any fruit. So, I’m going to adjust my working area the way that pears will be in the middle and mostly covered with the working circle.
But even with that setup arborists have plenty of work to do and provide very nice output.
Having trees outside the working area you might partially lose fruit on trees, but your arborists most certainly will have enough work to do. So do not limit yourself with only the working circle and do not bother to cover all the trees with it.
