Artisan Production Workload

[Roi Louis J]

In my city, I have a carpentry shop right next to a warehouse that stocks wood and furniture. The warehouse always has 300+ wood and has a very low workload (never more than 33%).

Yet, even if I only have one carpenter working, the carpenter workload is never more than 60%. Shouldn't it be a lot higher? We have room to store furniture, and the workers shouldn't be traveling very far if at all to fetch wood and deposit furniture. I would think they'd be able to work at full capacity. If I increase the workers, the workload goes down considerably, which makes me think that I wouldn't get more throughput by adding employees.

The same thing happens with my masonry setup, which is just like the carpenter setup but with stone.

[Shoddyfrog]

The workload is an indication of how close to being overworked a building is.
60% workload does not mean they are only working at 60% speed, The building is working at full speed. It is only working slower than it could do, if the workload goes over 100%.
But it does mean that there are too many workers employed at the building, you want the workload to be as close to 100% as you can without going over.
60% means that the building could produce at the same rate, with fewer people employed there.
Basically workload is an indication of how effiicient a building is.
At least I think that is right ;)

[Roi Louis J]

This makes sense, but I'm still wondering why there wouldn't be enough work to keep 1 carpenter fully occupied. A one-man farm being at 60% workload could make sense - there's only so much farm work to be done, so if the farm is small enough, one person could be more than enough to take care of it. But for a carpentry station I would think that as long as there is sufficient material and storage, there should always be work to be done.

[Gamatron]

Maybe his internal storage is full? He won't work then. He will haul the furniture to a stockpile if it's close enough though, but it won't count towards the workload.

[Corni]

i got the same issue... most workload are beneath 60%, materials are on stock, the buildings are made for example 4 people , so they have to have more workload...

sry for my bad english

[Guurt]

I don't think 1 worker should be able to work at 100% because he has to eat, relax, sleep, and use the bathroom.

For rooms to be at 100% they need multiple workers per station so that the station can be running at full. If the replacement workers are far away when this employee gets off work then they station will also be inactive while the new worker arrives.

If you want to have buildings at 100% you need to have a lot more workers than work stations and there needs to be facilities for eating, relaxing, and what not very close so work time isn't wasted by travel time.

You can see the issue with travel times visually with bedrooms easily. Beds are marked as used when a worker decides to path to that bed, not when they arrive at the bed. So if workers have a very long way to go to reach a bedroom then the bedroom will often look pretty empty even though there are only a few people there sleeping.

[Gamatron]

WORKLOAD

Workload means at what percentage a worker has something to do at his work. So if there's nothing do do, workload will be 0, and if there's always something to do it will be 100%. It is just an indicator, and not absolutely correct. It's a number only for the workers of the room.

In an industry like the carpenter, there will always be something to do if:
The carpenter has access to wood within a radius of 150 tiles
The carpenter has access to furniture storage within 150 tiles

If there is no access to wood, the carpenter won't work
If there is no access to storage, the carpenter will work until the room's internal storage is full.

I think both problems will show up if you hover the room, not sure.

SERVICE

Like Guurt wrote...

Service rooms have "available services" and can look like 5/40. For a dormitory this means that it has 50 beds, whereof 5 are available to sleep in. The rest of the beds are either:
-reserved by someone who is on his way to sleep
-used by someone who is sleeping
-untidy after someone has used the bed

Untidy beds needs to be made by the workers of the room.

So, if available services are 0, that could mean you need more workers that need to tidy the beds, but only if workload is 100%. If workload is below 100% it means there aren't always enough untidy beds for the workers, instead most beds are reserved by sleepy persons. That indicates that the room is too small and there aren't enough beds.

[Guurt]

I was curious about this so I ran some tests.

I built 2 woods shops, one to the right of a wood storage area, and 1 to the left of a wood storage area. Distance from the wood to the work area was the same. Each wood shop had exactly 1 actual work station.

However, all facilities for eating, sleeping, bathroom, etc were far to the right of both buildings.

I then staffed these buildings with uneven numbers of works.

The world load percentage had almost nothing to do with the actual output of furniture. In almost every case the wood shop that produced the most amount of furniture had the lowest work load percentage.

The thing that made the most difference to the production was the distance from the other facilities.

The wood shop to the left of the wood storage but farther from the facilities always produced less furniture even if it was staffed with 4 workers while the other wood shop had 2 workers.

They reached parity when the wood shop to the left and farther away from the facilities had 4 workers and the wood shop to the right which was closer to the facilities had only 1 worker. At this point they were even. The actual work load percentage was like 17% in the wood shop with 4 workers while it was 83% in the wood shop with 1 worker even though both were producing essentially the same number of furniture.

When I did the test with each wood shop having 4 workers each the wood shop to the right which was closer to the facilities produced more furniture even though the work load percentage was about the same.

In the end what I learned is that the work load percentage doesn't really indicate how much of a product a work shop is producing. What actually matters to producing more products is travel time to other facilities.

So organizing your industry with easy access to food, sleep, bathroom, etc, is way more important than the work load percentage.

Perhaps this test was anecdotal. But I thought it was interesting.

[Gamatron]

That makes sense. each time a worker is available to work, he will ask his room if there is any work to do. If the answer is no, he decreases the workload of this room. If there is something to do, he increases the workload.