Grocers - Are they supposed to be worked by Botanists?

[Tom Foolious]

Obviously its food, but the description of the Botanist role is to work on farms (I believe that's what I read, I cna't check as I'm within my 10 days). I would think that a job like the Grocer could be done well by someone with No Specialization. It seems to be that way currently, but I wanted to make sure I'm not screwing myself over later in the game by assuming jobs for Grocer, Art Store, Electronics Store...uhh, etc. are great for No Specialization?

[VA gamer]

The jobs you mentioned are best worked by non-specialists. This frees up specialists like botanists to work farms.

[Tom Foolious]

Nevermind, I just found the answer to my question. If you click on a building, on the top of the right pane where the clickable icons are there is a spot that says "Best workers". When clicking on the Grocer, there is no "Best workers" leading me to believe that No Specialization is A-OK to keep throwing in those kinds of non-specialized buildings.

[Tom Foolious]

Originally posted by VA gamer:

The jobs you mentioned are best worked by non-specialists. This frees up specialists like botanists to work farms.

Ha thanks, I just found my answer before I saw your answer.

EDIT: Now if I can just keep my Engineers in the factories, Geologists in the extractors and botanists in the farms that'd be great! They keep mingling between jobs for some probably obvious reason I'm missing.

[beautheschmo]

They mingle between jobs because the game attempts to proportionally fill all the workstations in a dome's working area. If you've got, say, a grocer, a farm, a metals extractor and an infirmary in your first dome and haven't messed with workshift settings yet, your first batch of 12 people will fill in roughly the same way every time: 1 in the grocer, 2 in the infirmary, 3 in the farm and 5 in the extractor, filling them all up to halfway, plus 1 where I'm not really sure where they go (though I think they go to the extractor as well).

Since it always prioritizes that over specializations, it causes them to go to the "wrong" building to work, so you have to micromanage the available work-shifts to get people to go work at the right place. If you close shifts until you have exactly as many open shifts as you have workers, they should automatically filter into the correct spots (though the process can take a little bit of time).

I would say the behavior isn't really obvious and leans a little bit into being unintuitive, so don't feel too bad about missing it.

[Tom Foolious]

Originally posted by beautheschmo:

They mingle between jobs because the game attempts to proportionally fill all the workstations in a dome's working area. If you've got, say, a grocer, a farm, a metals extractor and an infirmary in your first dome and haven't messed with workshift settings yet, your first batch of 12 people will fill in roughly the same way every time: 1 in the grocer, 2 in the infirmary, 3 in the farm and 5 in the extractor, filling them all up to halfway, plus 1 where I'm not really sure where they go (though I think they go to the extractor as well).

Since it always prioritizes that over specializations, it causes them to go to the "wrong" building to work, so you have to micromanage the available work-shifts to get people to go work at the right place. If you close shifts until you have exactly as many open shifts as you have workers, they should automatically filter into the correct spots (though the process can take a little bit of time).

I would say the behavior isn't really obvious and leans a little bit into being unintuitive, so don't feel too bad about missing it.

Thanks for the info. Sounds more like unintended behavior of the game...but I'm not the developer, so I have no idea how the game was designed to behave at this point. At the point of the game that I'm at and for this being the "East Start" I would think they'd want specialization to prioritize over filling spaces. Especially since having the wrong specialty working somewhere causes a decrease of performance to your output. Oh well, this game is micro management heavy, so I guess this is a great time to get used to all of this!

[Tennyson]

I think it was intended behavior to keep things working even if a passenger rocket brings the wrong type of people for what was built for them. You don't want to bring a rocket load full of specialists and have nobody willing to work in the diner.

If you mark a building as high priority the workers will favor that building over the others, and specialists will fill it up when possible.

You can also tweak the AI's autobalancing by right-clicking on an open job in a shift and turning it red. This changes the math slightly on what it means to 'fill' that shift and frees up a slot. So you can set a factory to half of one shift in order to make sure a farm gets filled.

[Tom Foolious]

Originally posted by Tennyson:

I think it was intended behavior to keep things working even if a passenger rocket brings the wrong type of people for what was built for them. You don't want to bring a rocket load full of specialists and have nobody willing to work in the diner.

If you mark a building as high priority the workers will favor that building over the others, and specialists will fill it up when possible.

You can also tweak the AI's autobalancing by right-clicking on an open job in a shift and turning it red. This changes the math slightly on what it means to 'fill' that shift and frees up a slot. So you can set a factory to half of one shift in order to make sure a farm gets filled.

Gotcha, I was looking for some of the options you mentioned. I will utilize them once I get back to playing! Thanks for the information!