Idling Caretakers

[Bullwinkle]

Lots of litter in my zoo. Lots of trash cans. Lots of caretakers with advanced training. Yet they are spending > 50% of their time idling. I'm not talking about commuting, but they are idling. The "on duty" % is like 12-15, and Idle is like 52-60%. I tried assigning 4 of my 5 caretakers to 4 custom workzones just for them, and left the 5th one to wander. Didn't help. Added another staff room so they are never too far from one. Didn't help. Any suggestions? It seems worse now that I'm in Franchise than it was in Sandbox

[grampers62]

Okay, let's talk lots... How many is that and how large is the zoo in terms of guests and playable area?
Also do you enough staff rooms in the right places? One can see if the staff rooms are effective by clicking on them. If they are too far away they will not get much use and be ineffective. If they are always full then there needs to be another one close by. Also training caretakers is often unneeded, they do fine untrained on a well planned zoo.
Note, if you are playing a career zoo those are often set with altered behaviors for staff, guests and animals to increase the challenge for the objectives.

[Bullwinkle]

I've got enough well-placed workers and staff rooms that would have been fine when I was playing Sandbox. I can't give exact numbers right now, but I think my best day I saw 999 guests, and I'm sure the number of staff rooms is 3. It is a tiny zoo, which is one of my top complaints from guests: small zoo. I'm in Franchise mode now. My 3 mechanics are enough to keep the zoo in good shape AND do research. iirc, I think I have like 6 vendor-workers. 5 caretakers should be enough, I think. I just need to learn how to increase their "on duty" time and decrease the idling.

[Nioell]

Can you maybe post some screenshots with the litter heatmap and workzones for those caretakes on? It's aways easier to find problems when you can actually see it.

It kinda reminds me of a problem I had a while ago when I had everything set up as well but still some paths were full of litter. I then spent some time following my caretakers around and found out that they never even crossed those paths because others were shorter. So even though it should've been in their workzone they never went there to do their work, instead they stayed on their nice clean main paths while all the others drwoned in litter and full bins -.-

Maybe that's the case here as well? If so putting vending machines e.g. on those paths and adding them to the work zone can help. Sadly we don't have any other way to set up the workzones here like we did in PC with the workzone markers, those would be really helpful in PZ as well...