Does anyone know how to fix someone wandering? Do I need to give them a job specifically (or is that just the way of saying that they’re a laborer?
It’s a generic can’t work message. Since this is a Tanner, I assume the issue is that there are no resources available for Tanning work (Pelts, Water).
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Ah! I see! Do people without work at their job become a laborer, or do they just wander around doing nothing?
For now they are dead weight and you have to manually unassign them from their jobs to get them to do stuff. If we’re lucky, there will be an idle worker patch in the new hotfix coming out either sometime tonight or tomorrow morning
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Nice! That’ll be nice to have tomorrow because it’s kind of a pain lol.
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“Wandering - Unable to Work” doesn’t explain to the players why this character can’t work. This is very confusing.
I hope this will be fixed in the future
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Speaking of the hotfixes, I saw the notices about #1 and #2, but I looked all over the place and saw no way to download them. Do they download and install automatically?
Yes, if you have that enabled on Steam. It will download and install any patches for the game automatically. You can see the version number in the bottom right of the screen when you first start up the game.
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It’s a real pain this message. Some industries like firewood splitter and sawyer seem to be relatively immune from this but others like cheesemaker and various factories seem almost totally stuck with this message on every employee. I try undoing the slot and hope it will re-assign a less lazy or distracted character but this is always in vain… it really needs to be fixed.
I have a farmer that is stuck in “can not work”, it is not winter so what the beep is framer problem. (I am talking to the farmer since I can not see why that should be. 
)
As that status almost always means that resources are missing or some other condition prevents them from working, your farmers probably just fulfilled all current work - so no crops need harvesting or seeding and no bee products are available for transport.
The only thing that needs to be fixed is most likely your resource storage, as your factories are usually missing some required material to keep working.
This also occurs frequently if a building is newly built and you fill it up to the maximum numbers of workers. As only one or two workers can typically carry enough to fill up its material storage to the maximum, the other workers will have to wait until the materials are present to start working, so only ramp up the workers once that initial storage filling has been done.
Unfortunately, we’re 15 days later and idlers still don’t work as temporary laborers. I’m afraid it was a design decision, although I don’t see the logic behind, and I hope it will change.
It happened to my waste collectors before the patch. I loaded the game and my town was full of shit, literally, and the waste collectors refused to work cause they felt filthy. It hasnt happened since the patch so im hoping its a thing of the past. But Im sure workers can be idle for other reasons than lacking eesources.
Well this game is all about managing ressources so adjusting your workforce depending on :
- if you have enough materials for your workers to actually work
- if you have enough storage for their products
seems quite important no ?
For example if i don’t have any more willow then i’ll just remove workers from baskets shop (or close the shop completely which will do the same) and put them back in when i have some fresh stock available.
Note that its quite important in early stages since you have limited workers / labourers available but its also very easy to track by checking your inventory (R key). Once you’re economically developped you don’t have to care that much and can leave some workers idle half of the year (at 700 pop i got 190 labourers / workers so really i dont care).
I have found out that works well. You do have to monitor your resources. Not that difficult.
At year 56 I finally realized why my hunters weren’t upgrading for about 10 years and I noticed that they were lacking iron bars. So I went to my Foundry and all 6 workers were either idling or wandering. I had around 600 iron ore in Raw Materials but the foundry workers weren’t doing anything with it. So I salvaged the Foundry and rebuilt it. I did remove all the workers and replaced them but that didn’t work… But rebuilding the Foundry worked. Now all my workers in the Foundry are productive.