colonists idle even though they have work to do.

[Praise the Sun]

so my colonists have 1 task right now, mining, all are assigned to mining and there is nothing else to do. they just dont do it, why?

[The Void]

I had same issue (especially with stonecutting and cooking). The problem was "Quality Surgeon" mod. Check if you have this mod active and try to deactivate.

[Amrak]

I have found my pawns get so much more done if I only set their bed time. I put 2 blocks at 21 & 22 pm so they will go to bed for the night. Unless night owl I set theirs at 6-7 am. Doing it this way helps to avoid mood breaks. They get more done and take a break whenever they need one. Very few of them ever get idle. When they do I check and add more mining etc... They eat, recreation, work and sleep whenever they want. So far it is working great! They will go to bed at 21-22 but then get right up if not sleepy and do their own thing, same with the night owl.

[Praise the Sun]

they are all idle, i am using mods, no they are not restricted, and they do have custom priorities but they have nothing else to do.

[Amrak]

OK I see, I am playing 1.0.2 vanilla. I used the priorities mod in B18 and at the time it caused this issue with my pawns. I thought it had been fixed. maybe not.

[CellNav]

Originally posted by Praise the sun:

they still dont mine, my prisoners are now taking care of that but they wont research too. could it be that the prisoner work mod is making them not able to work?

Yes, more than likely. Another player had a problem with that prisoner mod. Their problem was that the colonist wouldn't sow his growing fields. The actual problem was that the prisoner "area" was bleeding into the colonist area ... In other words, the prisoners owned the tile that couldn't be seen by the colonist (prisoner area "trumped" the colonist area).

Check the prisoner area and reorganize your base. I think that other player discovered the problem by clicking on a prisoner bed. When you do that it will show the area for prisoners, and his problem was that the area "bled out" between two walls that he didn't see before. You should be able to see the "yellowish" zone for prisoners when you click the prisoner bed.

EDIT ... I don't run mods so I don't know if you can assign "prisoners" a seperate area. If you can do that then that's got to be done ... IDK.

[strom]

Came accross this post with the same problem. But I finally found the solution, Basically if I used the mod for cooking 10x of something, it broke the queue like that. I had to destroy the cooking station and remake it, and only use the tasks with 1x of the ingredient. Still working out what the problem is, I have to look at logs

[Praise the Sun]

for me it was the prison working area interfearing with my colonists queue