Usefulness of scheduler?

[Wraith_Magus]

While in theory, the scheduler can be useful for managing when characters go on breaks, I see some major flaws with how the schedule exists currently.

Basically, each block of schedule time is far too large to actually be useful. Characters can never make it through a whole morning without needing to handle at least 2 or 3 needs. That means that even during their "scheduled work times," they aren't doing work all the time. Then, during free time, they usually fulfill all their needs long before the next block is up, and I tend to wind up manually ordering them to do something, anyway.

Either there needs to be a much finer-grain scheduler, or a "do this all the time" scheduler, because I see no point in a middle ground.

Add to this that many jobs are difficult to schedule meaningfully. I set one mechanic to "repair furniture", but most of the time, there are no jobs slated, because they don't seem to bother unless I manually set repair orders, and when I bother to do so, it creates a large glut of orders, rather than a string of orders to take care of over time. With flight crew, it's even more unpredictable when I will need someone at the shields console, because they're just wasting time sitting there when there's shields full and nothing shooting at us.

Worse, I think that the schedule may be related to some problems with crew leaving needs fulfillment before they are complete. They order a meal, sit down, then get back up and go back to their scheduled duty before actually eating anything, that that just wasted a supply.

You may, in fact, be better off replacing the whole scheduler with a "Priorities" system, where you just slide potential jobs up or down a list, like in Gnomoria. (With "in combat" and "not in combat" being two different priorities lists.) Then, they just take whatever job is highest up the list that needs doing.

[Uncaged Studios]

This is something that is definitely being evaluated. The truth is almost everyone who plays the game expects the crew to act in different ways based on their own interpretations of how they would act while working.

The first step is going to be exploring the layer of how in depth I can allow players to set their own AI. Right now some of the decisions are behind the scenes and embedded in the code but their is no reason they can't be exposed and fully customized by players.

There is a setting in the crew management panel for fulfilling their traits but I want to flesh that out even more.

I'm sure there are bugs though that need to be evaluated, with the next Alpha focus being on crew I'm hoping to fix a lot of those issues.