Workshop Sort-of-Good Practices

[Saint Landwalker]

I've seen, both on the forums and in the Discord, a number of folks who are complaining about not being able to turn a meaningful profit, and I wanted to throw together a quick something to try to help people by pointing out some best reasonably okay-ish practices that can help a factory not just stay afloat, but be consistently and significantly profitable, without bothering one whit about client contracts.

For reference, here is my "main" factory, shortly after finishing the 365-day achievement (the last one I needed):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1912932684

A few pieces of information about this factory that may not be immediately apparent from the pictures:

• Don't be fooled by the "248" daily balance. If you actually do the math, this factory is averaging, for its entire life, a daily net profit of over $5,000, after accounting for all expenditures (including equipment purchases, land purchases, and construction costs). If you remove those and limit it to only operating expenses, then the daily net profit is even higher. (And just to prove to myself that I wasn't full of crap, I ran the game for three more days from the moment of the screenshot. I made another $89,424, net profit, mostly from mountain bikes and round tables.)
  
  
• I have 70 workers for this factory, although unless I'm orchestrating my production runs well, about a third of them are probably idle on average (in this picture, since I kind of stopped caring about production, over half of them are idle, but I'll start another production run soon and that will change). I have 20 Assembly Specialists (which is mostly pointless), 10 each of Wood, Metal, and Plastic specialists (also mostly pointless), 4 Technicians, and 16 Super Haulers. My daily payroll is almost $7,000.
  
  
• In case you can't tell, my layout isn't even remotely optimized. I have some egregious lapses in efficiency here. And yet it still works. Imagine what it could do after a good redesign!

Now, I'd like to use this as an example to point out a few things that can help folks who are struggling:

• Efficient Intake. I have a large general storage zone right next to the Import cargo bay (and that bay is only used for imports). When a truck arrives, my workers can quickly get all of the material off the truck and onto the shelves, ready for distribution throughout the factory, without wasting much time.
  
  
• Efficient Output. I also have a large Export-only storage zone, right next to the Export-exclusive cargo bay (there are actually two Export bays, but you can only barely see the second one). After the products are delivered here, they can be loaded quickly onto the delivery trucks, and having two export bays means I can be shipping out two products at once if necessary.
  
  
• Local Storage. Every workroom has its own input zone, and every workroom has a general storage zone to act as an "output" zone. This cuts down on worker travel time during operations—a worker grabs the input material, quickly reaches their workstation, does their job, then throws the result into the general storage zone nearby so they can quickly move on to their next task. The haulers will grab everything in the general zones and bring them to where they ultimately need to be.
  
  
• Easy Breaks. I have six break rooms scattered around the workshop, so no matter where a worker is, they can reach one quickly. Although the game isn't great about having a worker who is finishing their break attach to a task that's close by, this at least significantly cuts down on the time it takes a worker to reach their break, and therefore allows them to start recovering energy sooner.
  
  
• Decentralized Assembly. Frankly, I could probably parcel this up even more, but I have a total of four assembly rooms (one of which is exclusively Advanced Assembly, bottom left). This means I can basically be doing three to four "assembly-lite" products at once, or if I'm doing a product run that has multiple parallel assembly operations, I can be doing all of them at once instead of having to do them sequentially, which is a horrible waste of time.
  
  
• Smooth Traffic. My factory might look like a labyrinthine warren of corners and hallways, but the actual flow of traffic through the workshop is quick and relatively seamless. There are definitely some areas I could improve (looking at you, central Assembly Room), but for the most part workers can get where they need to be going without wasting too much travel distance. There isn't even very much obstruction (my obstruction rating is "S"), so there's minimal slowdown.
  
  
• Pick the Right Job. This is probably the most important point to make: Don't take jobs that your factory can't do well. If your factory is slow at producing catapults, don't make catapults. My factory—and I didn't even intentionally set it up this way, it just kind of happened—can absolutely murder an order of bicycles. So if I ever want to put some people to work and make a fistful of cash, I can crank out 30-40 bicycles in hardly any time at all. If the market ever offers me acoustic or electric guitars, I can also rip through a hundred of those in almost no time. If you only have one or two Assembly rooms, don't pick jobs that have six different assembly processes.
  
  
• Client Contracts Are a Trap. Building off the point above, a lot of people seem to be lured by the siren call of the "Challenges." And the Challenges aren't all bad. Some of them are genuinely profitable, and the reputation is nice for meeting milestone requirements or unlocking the terrific double-mood decorations. But don't just blindly rush into them, especially if it's a job that your factory isn't set up to handle well. The reward-per-item is usually not much different than comparable items on the general market, and it can be significantly worse. Incoinc contracts in particular are absolutely heinous.
  
  Let me repeat that: Incoinc contracts are hot garbage. Do not do them if you're having cash flow issues. (The "Final Challenge" for Incoinc is extremely lucrative, but everything leading up to and after that point is absolutely abominable.)
  
  (Edit: This no longer seems to be the case, or else I just got some especially terrible contracts. Incoinc now appear to be just as hit-or-miss as everything else.)
  
  You also can't ship Challenge production runs incrementally, so if you want to get a quick bit of cash (or even just clear out some storage space), you can't just call up Mitzurella and have them come pick up the first eight Minicars while you finish building the other seven. You can ship out market products pretty much whenever you want, as long as the market isn't saturated yet.
  
  
• Manage Your Production Runs. Don't just queue up 200 drones and let it ride. That's going to be an enormous amount of raw material, and it's going to clog up your shelves as it crawls through the production process. This is especially true for products with a lot of intermediate steps, because all of those intermediate resources have to go somewhere, and it can often be at the expense of other materials for other production runs that you can actually be using right now. For the most part, I do production runs of 30-60 units. I might do four of those in a row, but by spacing them out, I'm keeping everything moving with fewer overload situations.
  
  
• Parallel Production. If your factory is set up for it, try running multiple jobs in parallel. In parallel. That doesn't mean making Square Tables + Tall Drawers + Catapults. It means jobs that don't cannibalize each other's workstations. Do a furniture job and a robot job and a plastic doodad job, or something like that. Obviously, make sure you have the staff for it, and you don't want them to all end up competing for the same assembly benches at the same time, but if you can sequence them properly and have the capacity to handle it, this is a good way to keep your workers productive.

Honestly, at the end of the day, a lot of it really boils down to just "Pay attention to your factory, see how it operates, and see where you can make it operate better." If your workers have to walk too far to get to breaks or transport materials, or one of your workrooms always seems to be crazy overloaded and backed up, or there's a particular point in your production runs that seems to bog down consistently, look at it and see what's happening, and figure out how to make that stop happening.

A lot of this may be easier said than done, and I certainly don't have any silver bullets here, but my hope is that it will give folks who are struggling some nudges in the right direction. If folks have more targeted questions, I can't guarantee I'll be useful, although I can certainly try.

Happy Workshopping!