Ape Apps

I got one for ya.

I currently have a colony sitting pretty at 1977/1977 colonists/housing

I also had 1977/1977 jobs available/filled

I built 8 Lumber Yards a good bit away from the rest of the colony (Aesthetic choice, they're by my tree farms), and I have not built any housing for them yet, as I like to do the math and match up jobs to houses so I keep people employed and happy in homes.

Almost the instant the Lumber Yards are done, three of them are fully staffed and three more have 1-2 workers each. Okay, I figured some people decided to be manly and work at the LY instead of something else, and after a quick look several buildings are now short workers.

BUT!

When I went to look at my Economy tab and available jobs, it showed that I had 1984/2041 jobs filled. I still have 1977/1977 colonists/housing....And of course mid typing this, the numbers revert back to 1977/2041...Is there a way to keep colonists happy and stay in the jobs that they pick up that are like 5 blocks away from their homes instead of going to one 20+ blocks away?


This is on the PC in a Chrome window.

Good question. I don't know if there is a way. You can set wages for jobs and maybe they'll be inclined to go to the more lucrative ones? I don't think there's a way to lock them in, could be a bit of a random factor on which jobs they choose when there are more jobs than people. A fire drill may have them select closer jobs again, but that comes with it's own problems...

I honestly NEVER use the fire drill. It never helps anything and without fail breaks my colonies.

Sidenote, I found that they are all leaving my Adv. Microchip factories. Built some more housing near the factories to see if I could just fill up the rest of the jobs there. NOPE! Turns out I actually lost more people from the factories and they all went into the new LYs I made that caused this.

I also have tried changing pay for workers in the past. I've noticed the same thing before where workers seem to refuse to fill up certain buildings (Microchip factories and digsites most notably for me), despite every job being paid the same amount. I even set some higher than others, and those jobs still don't get filled out.

Colonists will fill available jobs if you have enough colonists to fill all the jobs. It is not immediate. If you're watching minute to minute you're going to be disappointed. If you leave your game running, remember to log out and back in periodically, it helps reset/fix some minor issues that mount over time.

Fire drills are often complained about so there are definitely problems there, but I seem to have had a lot of success with them. You have to be prepared for 20 minutes of no production, meaning extensive surpluses of food or water and the like, but for me they've worked if prepared for.

I have not done the logging in and out, mostly because if I leave it unattended for long periods it means I am away from the computer, so have not tried that. I know that colonists won't jump into jobs asap, but the issue at that time was that I had just as many jobs as I had housing for colonists, and my colonists were full. Their housing was also literally right next to the empty jobs for them to take.

I am nowhere near getting the stargate or space elevator that say that they can potentially let in more people, so that is not the issue.

And I have done a fire drill and let it go for an hour (I had more than enough supplies to go longer), but even after an hour, maybe a quarter of my buildings were even functioning, and barely at that. The empty jobs isn't a serious issue for me, I habitually overproduce everything, so a few glitchy job positions is really nothing crippling. It is just annoying because colonists start complaining about walking 30 squares to a job when they have a job available literally 1 square away from home.