What is the Best Work Schedule?

[joe.m.klunder]

Hi Everyone,

I want to keep my productivity and performance high.

In real life, if I owned a work camp, I would give my workers 10 hours of sleep, and two hours of recreation.

In fact, real work camps of loggers, fishermen, tree planters, etc. get more than normal sleep, restaurant-quality food, and some recreation, because their work on the job is so demanding.

What is the best way in Rimworld?

[whatamidoing]

https://youtu.be/lq6pLMgnon0
I prefer recreation right after sleep instead of before like in this video, but it's a very minor difference.

[Astasia]

The most efficient schedule is generally the default one. 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours of anything. The 8 hours of sleep is mostly just to get colonists in bed at night when it's dark and their work/speed is reduced, and also allow couples to get it on. Single pawns in an always lit environment work better on 24 hours of anything.

Recreation scheduling is when you want them to recreate more than normal, like if they are in a bad mood and you want to keep them recreation maxed. Work scheduling is when you want them to suffer but get something done ASAP. Both are situational and generally something to be set temporarily. "Anything" is for efficiency, colonists will do just enough recreation and then focus on working, or take a nap if their sleep cycle has been interrupted by a raid or something. The default schedule allows colonists to manage things just fine and allows them to correct their scheduling after the various events the game throws at you that causes things to otherwise mess up a schedule. Trying to set a fixed daily schedule tends to lead to inefficiency and mood loss as tasks with variable durations and travel time throws a wrench into everything, on top of events throwing them completely off the schedule and making it difficult to resync.

Setting a couple hours of recreation before or after sleep for example. Colonists never strictly follow a sleep schedule, they are often doing long tasks when it's time to go to bed and then they go to bed several hours late, or they were woken up in the night after lovin because they were hungry and decided to get some work done after and end up going to bed early the following night. If you set 22 to 6 as sleep they are going to constantly deviate around 4-6 hours from that in either direction, and that 2 hours of recreation before/after sleep often ends up being in the middle of their work day causing them to say stop mining a resource vein on the other side of the map to run back to base to recreate when they didn't actually need to recreate. On "anything" they might also stop working while on the other side of the map to run back and recreate occasionally, but only when they really need to. These issue become much more noticeable once you start building high quality beds and installing bionic organs after which colonists don't function on a 24 hour schedule anymore, it becomes 4 hours of sleep (or 3 with a sleep accelerator) and 18 hours awake, there's no real way to manage it at that point, anything other than "anything" just becomes highly detrimental to productivity.