7 out of 8 workers are wondering and unable to work in this sawmill. I have another two sawmills in the same situation. Basically I’ve got 20+ workers who are just not working.
The wood is there. They are fed. They have clothes on. Buildings are reachable. When people decide to work, they can.
So what is the problem here? There is no feedback to the player so that we can take the appropiate steps and solve whatever roadblock there is.
A tooltip on mouse hover explaining what the problem is would be awesome.
yep, i had like 6 smelterys all with 6-8 people “idling-unable to work” or “wandering-unable to work” maybe one person stocking and one person working. Out of 40 people maybe 4 working at any time. Meanwhile, I have 2.2k iron ore and 1k coal in fully stocked stockyards right beside their building, happiness/food maxed out, etc. It’s always like this! Highly inefficient.
Shouldn’t everyone be stocking logs? Is it sufficient the amount of logs this person carries for 8 people to process planks without stops at the sawmill?
So they aren’t really unable to work, nothing is wrong, they are just waiting.
What is the difference of people working and people who aren’t working you are asking? I am pretty sure you knew this, but things get done faster.
8 people can carry more logs than 1 person while 7 sit back and pick their nose.
How about having those wondering people carry logs instead. When they are back, they will have 8 times the amount which in turn will allow them to work for longer periods without stopping again and repeating the same scenario.
Will your game be completed earlier if 8 designers work on it rather than only one while the rest are on break?
What happens most of the time is that one villager runs out to get more materials while the rest keep working. Sometimes you do end up in this scenario where they’ve run through the materials and need to wait for restock. It kind of depends on how well organized your resource storage is.
If all 8 went running out to get materials you would still have nobody producing anything in that time.
Yes, cause design work is like sawing a stack of planks…if you want to get into weird strawman arguments…wonder if you ever heard of too many cooks in the kitchen.
From this screenshot it is difficult to determine how far they have to walk for logs. Perhaps the warehouse is far away or there are no logs at the nearest one. Perhaps there really is a problem in logistics. But we also don’t know at what point the worker goes to collect the logs. When they are no longer there, or when they remain 10%/20%/30%… of the total number? If they are not there, then no matter how close the warehouse is located, there will be downtime in production. The problem here is weak AI.
Wait, to logs have to go to the warehouse before being rediverted to the factory in question? Early in the game, this is not the case. I wonder if that is what happens at a certain point.
I agree. Even if you optimize production by building multiple filtered storage with selected materials right next to manufactures (eg. wood storage next to Lumber Mill), there are always workers idling.
But I understand FF is not “super-efficient manufacturing game”.
(Fun fact: in Factorio, inserters stack items not calculated by numbers, but by time of production - there is always materials inserted for next 2.5s of crafting)
Based on my recent observations playing, it seems like there is currently some sort of issue with the way the AI stocks production buildings, which is causing a lot more of this than I’d typically expect.
That said, our choice to make a fully simulated town-builder has created a lot of AI and balancing complexity which also effect how buildings have to be stocked, where there are stock limits and villagers must reserve items prior to fetching them to avoid buildings hogging critical resources while others are unable to function or multiple villagers all running to retrieve the same resources.
That said, something seems messed up, which is causing this to happen way more than it should and we’re looking into it.
