Idle Peeps

[krawiecalex]

I can't get my peeps to work. I settled the second island and have 22 peeps. 16-21 are always idle despite having multiple job locations with no one there. What's going on?

[Dead M8]

Hey there! Have you built them houses? That's often a problem, in that in order for your Peeps to work, they need accomodation :)

[krawiecalex]

Yes I built the housing for 22 peeps.

[Lanosa]

This is a stupid question, but... you built a school in your 2nd island? You need it to create more peeps on other islands or your basement has 0 peeps in it.

[Techhead7890]

A screenshot might help clarify what's going on. It's a little hard to tell, because jobs are kinda complicated. In my experience it could be anything out of the following cases:

1. An individual building will say "No Peeps" and kick out all their workers when their output storage is full. This seems most likely based on what you said about nobody being there. Basically, buildings won't work because they have nowhere to put stuff, and so all the workers have nothing to do and go home. This is shown in the building panel with a green bar over the panels, and the ring around the resource icon be grayed out. If that's the case, there are tooltips with hints when you hover over the errors in-game -- you could try building a Warehouse and assigning it to that resource to get more storage capacity for example. I guess "Peeps Not Required" is a better way of interpreting this error message.
   
2. Peeps are "idle workers" while they're at a house waiting to get assigned to a different building. This is probably what you're seeing in the HUD/interface to find idle peeps. Anyway, some Peeps are just going to be hanging around houses and that's fine. It can actually kind of useful because they go and fetch food when they're left at home.
   
3. And a sidenote: the main HUD interface says "Empty Posts" at the top of a screen when a building can function, but can't find workers to assign it. This doesn't sound like the case here because with that few Peeps on the island, the idle Peeps should be found and assigned to those jobs pretty quickly. So it would be rare to get both idle workers and empty posts on a small island. "Empty Posts" is usually a problem case where the town overexpands and needs to raise more Peeps.
[/list]TLDR, the building probably doesn't need the workers, it can't make things if it's too full anyway.Hope this helps if you come back to the game!

[LazOfSteel]

i've noticed that there tends to be idle peeps when caches are full. for example, a factory making iron can only hold 8 completed irons. so those peeps working there will leave and go idle if theres nothing else to do.

if you build a warehouse. the 8 irons will be moved there, freeing up the iron factories cache, calling on peeps to start work again. this applies everywhere not just iron smelters.

[krawiecalex]

My resources were full for the production buildings. I also didn't realize you needed the library before explorers would retrieve tech points.