WHY ARE MY WORKERS NOT COLLECTING STONE WTF?

[Gower]

The stone is right next to my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ town and when I select the stone for collecting, nothing happens. How can I fix this? OMG

[pdoan8]

Do you have empty stockpile spaces?

Do you have enough laborers?

Use Steam overlay to take a screen shoot (F12), upload then post the link. Simple, but gives much info to diagnose your problem.

[GrumpyBear]

That's probably iron.

[Traksimuss]

Yea it took me like 5 hours to be able to tell the difference between stone and iron deposits.

[VovOzaum]

if your workers are busy collecting from somewhere you set first to be gathered, they will prioritize that, unless you use the set priority button

[elFuzz]

This may not be the issue, but I'll mention this so you know what's happening in the little computer peoples minds.

The Boss just told us to harvest all the ______ in this big huge rectangle! ( Call this First Job)
The Boss just told us to build a house! (Call this Second)
The Boss wants us to build a Town Hall! (Call this Third)
The Boss wants us to harvest all the ______ in another big huge rectangle! (Call this Fourth)

Then you unfreeze the game.

The laborers STOP their tasks of picking up food from fishing spots, warehouse, etc and begin working on your list of chores as they are more important than the every day things they do.

The Builders have nothing to build yet (House and Town Hall), so they will be doing what the laborers are doing for now. (Unless you have other stuff ready to be built like Roads or other buildings that have all the resources and are ready for building)

When you start your game, your camera faces North, I am describing this using that perspective.

Starting on the first thing you told them to do (First Job in, First Job to do) - think of it as a grocery list and you don't go to the closest thing first but get everything in the order on the list.

First Job: Harvest big area. Starting at the lower left corner proceed to the right, then go up one and start on the next row left to right. As you go, pick up what you harvested and take it to a storage area when you can't carry any more stuff.

Second Job: Carry resources to the House.

Third Job: Carry resources to the Town Hall.

The House has all the materials now, the builders STOP acting like a laborer and work on the house and do not help harvest the Fourth Area.

Fourth Job: Start harvesting.

Part way through, the builders finish the house but the Town Hall doesn't have enough stone yet. Bulders go back to being laborer.

Part way through the last job, they get enough stone, Builder heads over to the Town Hall to do their job of building it.

Jobs done.

Now, I don't know if works like this in Vanilla (probably does), you can also tell your people to harvest everything in an area by making that area a Crop. This happens differently from the last scenario. It's the 'building' of a structure, so the builders and the laborers work together on it. Also, the resources aren't gathered - just chopped down or struck with mining picks leaving little piles.

Knowing all that ... here's what I like to do to clear a very large area of resources.

Build a stock pile (for all the wood, stone, iron) between the workers homes and the job - close to the job. If there is a lot of food/herbs in that area I might even place a little storage building (I play MegaMod, smallest storage building costs 10 wood and holds about 1000 weight of stuff).

Then, once I have those set up, I flag the area for clearing using build "Crop". I dont' plan to keep it a crop, so when they're done chopping stuff down, I just clear the crop and let them continue picking up all the stuff. Very gratifying. :) Can also do it as a harvest all, but I find it more visually appealing to watch all the trees fall like the scum that they are.

Awwe Man! Now I got this big storage pile way far from my town! Remove the stock pile structure, the laborers will come to it and move all the stuff to your normal stockpile if there is room. I also do that with storage barns that get full and are far from my market. Turn off all the builders so it doesn't get destroyed. They remove all the stuff from the barn in preparation of it being destroyed ... then when it's empty, I cancel the removal of the barn - and turn back on my builders.

Hope all that helped - I just had some coffee and needed to work off all that Caffeine. :) Wheeeeeeeeeeee