High unemployment yet nobody works (and other issues)

[karel2501]

I am sorry for a rather bitter post, but I have to vent some frustration. So for context - I recently got back into the game, thinking I'll give realistic settings a try. I set up a small town right next to the checkpoint to provide me with reliable workforce to build the actual main settlement a little further away, since I learned in previous attempt that foregin workers from checkpoint massively bottleneck the construction process.

However:
I have 15% unemployment. I also have several construction projects in walking distance from the town, and several more further away. They do not progress. There are no workers. Nobody works. 15% unemployment. Transportation provided.
WHY?!

I also have problems with kindergarden. I have one set up. Fully staffed. Only like five children in it. EVERY SINGLE ONE of my houses claims there are multiple families who can't work because there are no kindergarden spaces available.
WHY?!

I also have regular famines. I have a shop. Fully staffed. Again. 15% unemployment! 4 tons of food. All in walkable distance. 50 people are currently claiming to be starving.
WHY?!

In the extremely, EXTREMELY rare case, when I force workers from a certain house to search for work at the bus station where my construction office busses pick up workers, they will RELIABLY be taken to a place that has no materials, idle for a while, and then vanish.
WHY?!

I could go on. Medical clinic - staffed, has a car, few patients in - 20 people complain they can't get medical care. Pub - same deal. Heating plant. I have one house specifically dedicated to provide workers for it. Walking distance. Stops working ever 5 minutes due to lack of workers. Basically - nothing works. For the record, all my workers are mixture of regular soviet imports and a few experts, I don't import people from third world countries.

I want to love the game. I love the theme, the detail, the complexity, the mechanics. But NOTHING works. I feel like I have zero control over anything happening. None of the tool-tips gives me any clue into why these things get consistently broken. Everything takes absolute ages. Every few minutes there is a rapid drop in health and satisfaction for NO REASON. While my money burns away. It's so damn frustrating.

What am I missing?

[kbeza41]

The first item, which talks about the workers, it is possible that they exceed the educational level for the job offer, that's why they don't work there, the rest, I have the same problem and I can't find a solution, although I have seen other players and it seems that have overcome this problem

[Catsander]

Originally posted by karel2501:

What am I missing?

It is impossible to answer your questions without more info. It could be anything.

Not all construction projects are accessible to workers without construction office such as roads and plumbing.

20 people lack access to a service once isn't that much. It takes a time for those messages to go away.

[Molybdane]

I kind of feel your pain. I'm on my third realistic run, having ditched the first 2 due to eventual failures. I am definitely dreading the moment I'm getting my first people.

As for your situation; do you have some kind of exceptional distribution of buildings, houses to the one side, everything else together some distance off, for example? That's all I can come up with.

I do think that OP's issue would be somewhat addressed if anyone could give a reliable method of keeping a heating plant not within walking distance running for say, 16 out of 24 hours.

[Catsander]

Originally posted by Molybdane:

I do think that OP's issue would be somewhat addressed if anyone could give a reliable method of keeping a heating plant not within walking distance running for say, 16 out of 24 hours.

Busses that arrive at the plant with regular intervalls. Works 24/7

[GeeBee]

Have you tried opening up a building to see what the stats tell you. Might give you some further clues. Also post some screenshots as that might help folks give you some additional pointers.

[GeeBee]

In terms of getting workers to construction site have you checked that your bus stop is not full of students or passengers which is stopping workers being able to be picked up. I assume you have a construction office with a bus and you have set the CO to collect workers from the bus stop?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

In the case of the kindergarten I believe the kids will claim a spot without being there, so try increasing the number of workers or buildings. I had an issue that was resolved by doing that.

The shop having 4t of food doesn't matter if the queue is outside the door and around the block because there isn't enough space for shoppers inside, also keep an eye on the shop and see if it runs out of food before the resupply vehicles can deliver food. I don't have issues with shops running out of food but I also like to use warehouses and forklifts to make their storage of food and other goods larger.

Also note that you may have workers miss the first attempt to buy food in a new shop, especially if you moved a bunch in at the same time, as schedules diversify this will go away.

A clinic can easily be overwhelmed by patients in high pollution zones or high population zones, the clinic also needs to be in walking distance of houses or a bus stop that receives freetime travellers. If a pub is having the same issue you need more pubs.

Heating plants and other critical out of town infrastructure needs frequent and reliable transport for the workforce and you need at least 3x as many inhabitants as the workshift requires as each shift is 8 hours. Cable cars are the most reliable option as they don't care about snow and can be more frequent than every 60 seconds (workers will wait 60s at a transport station at most).

Also make sure you have a regular school, otherwise some of those workers maybe uneducated as they grew up in the republic without a school.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by karel2501:

I am sorry for a rather bitter post, but I have to vent some frustration.

No worries; the game is pretty complex at times.

Originally posted by karel2501:

I set up a small town right next to the checkpoint to provide me with reliable workforce to build the actual main settlement a little further away, since I learned in previous attempt that foregin workers from checkpoint massively bottleneck the construction process.

Try to replace foreign workers with machine power when possible and use cranes with them if you cannot.

You can also build two free bus stops near the customs house, link them together with the "where should workers go?" mechanic, and then have a medium sized bus (~40 seat) shuttle foreign workers from the customs house to one of the stations. This setup will collect all of the foreign workers from the customs house and stores them in the pair of stations (they won't teleport back to their country). Whenever you need them you can send a bus to one of the stations to collect them.

Just be careful not to allow the stations to overfill or foreign workers will not be able to get off the bus and eventually will teleport away and waste the money you paid for their labor.

Originally posted by karel2501:

I have 15% unemployment. I also have several construction projects in walking distance from the town, and several more further away. They do not progress. There are no workers. Nobody works. 15% unemployment. Transportation provided.
WHY?!

This could happen due to a few reasons:

• Workers wait too long to be picked up - Citizens will always wait for 60 seconds at slow speed at stations (roughly 20 to 22 seconds on fast speed), so you need to ensure that transportation stops at the station are frequent or you need to use workarounds to make them wait longer (which has issues of its own). If you don't do either of these options, they will teleport home unemployed after waiting too long. End stations and line spacing with multiple vehicles are two options to maintain a station period lower than 60 seconds.
  
  
• Delivering excess workers - If you want workplaces to be filled constantly you can try to deliver more workers than it needs, but this will result in excess workers timing out in the vehicle or in a drop off station and teleporting home to be unemployed for the day. You could fix this by having extra jobs for these extra workers, which could be a surplus building built nearby (use the "where should workers go?" mechanic to prioritize a building for workers) or just aim to run the building at ~80% staffing and use the "extra" 20% spare jobs as a buffer to absorb the excess workers.
  
  
• Station is too crowded - If a station reaches its citizen limit, no more citizens can go to the station. For workers, this means they will spend the day unemployed if there are no other stations or free jobs in range for them to go to. Solve this by building bigger/more stations or restricting certain citizen types (students, passengers, tourists) from waiting there (they can still be dropped off there, just not forced off).
  
  
• Education level is too low - Workers need at least a basic education to work at all, and some jobs require university education to be worked in. Children and most third world immigrants will need a school to attain a basic education before they can work in society.
  
  Students who cannot study (including at a university) will also count as unemployed, but if you mouse over the unemployment figure in the top right of the screen, it will show you the break down of unemployed people by the reasons they are unemployed.
  
  
• Stuck watching children - If citizens do not have a kindergarten within walking range (public transportation cannot be used to move babies to a kindergarten) then they will have to stay home and watch their children while being unemployed.

You might also need more workers. Generally you need about 3 workers per job slot, but some actions (long walks to work, timing out a wait at a station while trying to get to needs, and a few rare other instances) can increase this ratio. Try to maintain between three and four times as many workers as job slots.

Originally posted by karel2501:

I also have problems with kindergarden. I have one set up. Fully staffed. Only like five children in it. EVERY SINGLE ONE of my houses claims there are multiple families who can't work because there are no kindergarden spaces available.
WHY?!

Only those who live within walking range of a kindergarten will be able to have their children looked after there, so ensure all residences have one nearby or accept that some will be unable to work.

Originally posted by karel2501:

I also have regular famines. I have a shop. Fully staffed. Again. 15% unemployment! 4 tons of food. All in walkable distance. 50 people are currently claiming to be starving.
WHY?!

This could be for a few reasons:

• Like workers, citizens who wait too long at a station to get to needs will time out and teleport home with the need missed for the day. Ensure that passengers are picked up every 45 seconds or so or they will miss their chance to get whatever need you aim to supply them via public transport.
  
  
• Citizens also need free time to satisfy needs, but some activities can also use free time:
  • Walking during free time will use up a little free time.
    
  • Waiting at stations will use a lot of free time.
    
  • Waiting for service at a service building also consumes free time.
    
  • Radio and TV also need free time to affect their influence on a citizen.

Long commutes to work (riding in a vehicle or waiting at a station) will also increase the time they spend at work (mainly to preserve the 3 workers per job ratio) and the free time it takes to satisfy their needs (to balance out consumption over time). At the extreme end of things it can take a large percentage of a citizen's free time just to satisfy needs, potentially to the point of running out of free time entirely before all needs are fully satisfied.

Sometimes citizens' needs will also be amplified (usually due to missing it earlier, but sometimes just because) from needing 100% satisfaction to needing 200%, 300%, or even 600% satisfaction, which all take more free time to satisfy. Not much you can do in this case except ensure they don't miss needs (50% or better prevents a need from being counted as missed though).

Originally posted by karel2501:

In the extremely, EXTREMELY rare case, when I force workers from a certain house to search for work at the bus station where my construction office busses pick up workers, they will RELIABLY be taken to a place that has no materials, idle for a while, and then vanish.
WHY?!

Just have to ensure the workplace always has materials, or if a construction site, reduce the number of workers going there and use manual assignment of COs with buses and cranes to limit the waste of 'workdays.'

Originally posted by karel2501:

I could go on. Medical clinic - staffed, has a car, few patients in - 20 people complain they can't get medical care.

Citizens have a 'visit doctor' need where they need to visit the hospital for a checkup, which happens more often if their health declines due to alcohol consumption, lack of heating, or exposure to pollution. Ensure they have access to a hospital via walking or public transit in addition to having ambulance service.

Originally posted by karel2501:

Pub - same deal. Heating plant. I have one house specifically dedicated to provide workers for it. Walking distance. Stops working ever 5 minutes due to lack of workers. Basically - nothing works. For the record, all my workers are mixture of regular soviet imports and a few experts, I don't import people from third world countries.

Sounds like you need more workers or that your existing workers have very inefficient worker to job ratios (due to long walks to work, wasting time waiting at stations trying to get to needs that are not provided, like religion, etc.).

If you are using the "where should workers go?" mechanic, be aware that workers will only go to buildings that the building they are walking from is linked to. A good practice is to link a building to wherever you want workers to go and then to a station, then set the station to 0%. This will basically make workers try to fill any jobs in the area first before going to the station to look for work elsewhere.

You might also just be experiencing a bug.

Originally posted by karel2501:

I want to love the game. I love the theme, the detail, the complexity, the mechanics. But NOTHING works. I feel like I have zero control over anything happening. None of the tool-tips gives me any clue into why these things get consistently broken. Everything takes absolute ages. Every few minutes there is a rapid drop in health and satisfaction for NO REASON. While my money burns away. It's so damn frustrating.

Random population deaths could be a few things:

• Heating plant pollution - If you build your heating plant too close to residences, the pollution during winter will lower the health of the residents and thus lower their lifespan to their current age and thus kill them with a heart attack or stroke.
  
  
• Likewise if your heating infrastructure is inefficient, a lot of citizens will die from hypothermia. Residences, service buildings, hotels, prisons, most fire stations, and aircraft passenger stations all need heating.
  
  
• Other sources of pollution can also kill citizens if they are built too close to residences, but otherwise citizens are not affected by pollution; service buildings can be built in polluted areas without issue, including sports fields. Here is a short guide to pollution and some ranges you should maintain between pollution sources and residences.
  
  
• Old age will also kill citizens, and since you tend to invite a large group of them at the start, a lot of them will also die at the same time as they reach the end of their lifespans.
  
  
• Poor quality drinking water (<97%) will also kill citizens, especially as you get below 94%.
  
  
• Having a hospital is required to fend off random epidemics, random accidents (casualties from fires especially), and lowered health due to drinking alcohol, exposure to pollution, or a lack of heating in winter.

Construction can be slow, but the key is to manage your vehicles better (they should always be moving) and use fewer and smaller buildings, as water, sewage, and trash can be handled by trucks at first while smaller buildings need fewer materials/workdays and thus fewer truck/bus loads to complete. There are also other tips and tricks you can use to speed up construction, particularly for projects far from customs or your building material depots.

Originally posted by karel2501:

What am I missing?

Experience and time. If you have more questions, post 'em.

[karel2501]

OK, so after cooling down and experimenting some more, I figured out some of the issues. One of them was the fact that during about 5 minute period when my housing was full because new housing projects were delayed, about 150 people decided to move into empty houses in random cities all over the map. Only one per house, completely randomly. In cities with no infrastructure. So those accounted for majority of my unemployed workers, they were literally on the other side of the country. It was impossible to recover them, as I would literally have to hunt down every single one individually.

I also discovered a problem where one of my footpaths connected to the bus station instead of the road connecting to that station, and I assumed people would be able to pass through it. Turns out, they can't, they can enter the station itself, but they can't navigate through the station, which caused one singular house (with only 30 inhabitants) to not reach some of the infrastructure.

The kindergarden issue is still present, and despite all the well meaning advice through out the thread, it remains as such. It's not an issue of lack of spaces, it's not an issue of accessibility (the town in my OG post was literally entirely walkable, every single house had every facility in walking distance (one accidentally isolated house not withstanding).

The system is just straight up buggy. I think there are random spikes and drops in staffing with each "shift", when for a few seconds, the place becomes unstaffed (one wave of workers leave, the next one isn't in yet) - and those are enough to make people go "yep, there is no free place" for the next half an hour. Same goes for the food. The games employment system is just incredibly iffy overal. Same issue with weird ebbs and flows in worker spawning causes the periodic drops in heating plant employment, despite me having more than enough of workers. It all just really, really janky.

Anyway, thanks everyone for giving advice, I still appreciate it. I eventually did manage to get to a stable place, 3500 people, 90% satisfaction for a good few years.
Then I looked away for few minutes and my entire city collapsed, literally in less then 10 minutes, because of some hitch with coal supplies to my heat plant.
Jesus the death spirals in this game are ruthless. But this one, I at least understand what I did wrong.

Time to try again tomorrow. Thank you all for having patience with me.

[Elessar_warrior]

Your kindergarden issue looks like a low productivity/loyalty of workers. They may be umproductive and thus take care of fewer children.

[moron_with_a_gun]

Once I killed 4k population because I upgraded a road without realizing that there was no other path for citizens to walk to a heating plant...
I still think the odd minimum road segment length is the worst for OCD though. Nothing like trying to make perfectly square blocks and having to tear up roads so that you dont need to finish with a slightly angled street.

[karel2501]

Originally posted by Elessar_warrior:

Your kindergarden issue looks like a low productivity/loyalty of workers. They may be umproductive and thus take care of fewer children.

Nah, it has nothing to do with loyalty. I have been doing some experimenting and I figured out the issue, it's actually remarkably simple. The issue is entirely with the base way the game assigns work-posts.
The problem is remarkably simple. Whenever a worker ends their shift, the game will instantly update the facility's service status, and will assign a new worker to take the place (if there is one available).
The problem is that while the service status updates instantly, the new worker will take time physically moving into the building. This means there will ALWAYS be dips in production, it is simply ENTIRELY impossible to keep any building working at full efficiency all the time. For short intervals - between the old worker despawning and the new worker arriving at the spot, the availabilty of the product will drop to zero, and that is enough to screw you over.

This CANNOT be solved or prevented, you just have to provide huge redundancy options. The only way to avoid these dips is to have at least two separate spots in two separate kindergardens for each one flat. This goes for every other services, the kindergarden is just particularly visible one.

This is something that could in theory be solved, if the game either qued new workers before the old one's shift was over, or if workers left lingering impact, meaning the productivity of a facility would continue to be elevated for some time after a worker has left.

But in the current state, where production gets updated the INSTANT a worker leaves his post, but new one is only assigned after he leaves, the productivity will ALWAYS jump up and down drastically and result in bizzare behavior and unrealible availability of services. Does not matter how many workers you have. If you have single service building, your service will CONSTANTLY drop down, even to zero, because of this simple mechanical issue.

Originally posted by moron_with_a_gun:

Once I killed 4k population because I upgraded a road without realizing that there was no other path for citizens to walk to a heating plant...
I still think the odd minimum road segment length is the worst for OCD though. Nothing like trying to make perfectly square blocks and having to tear up roads so that you dont need to finish with a slightly angled street.

Yeah, this happened to me multiple time while I was fiddling around learning how the game works. I actually kinda like this, though I think it's a bit too extreme (epople should be able to walk across a in-progress road construction). I'm fine with having to think ahead about your construction projects.
The demolition mechanic, on the other hand, was just too much for me. I had to turn it off. Having to wait for minutes at a time to delete 5 meters of gravel road is just too much for me.

[Molybdane]

I appreciate you bringing up your findings, not many people do. There's so much to learn about this game. For example:

Originally posted by karel2501:

..., about 150 people decided to move into empty houses in random cities all over the map. Only one per house, completely randomly. In cities with no infrastructure. So those accounted for majority of my unemployed workers, they were literally on the other side of the country. It was impossible to recover them, as I would literally have to hunt down every single one individually.

I also discovered a problem where one of my footpaths connected to the bus station instead of the road connecting to that station, and I assumed people would be able to pass through it. Turns out, they can't, they can enter the station itself, but they can't navigate through the station, which caused one singular house (with only 30 inhabitants) to not reach some of the infrastructure.

I didn't know either of these could be problems. Footpaths to roads, not only to bus stations, check. And I'll have to keep an eye out when expanding into new areas without services.

Originally posted by karel2501:

The system is just straight up buggy. I think there are random spikes and drops in staffing with each "shift", when for a few seconds, the place becomes unstaffed (one wave of workers leave, the next one isn't in yet) - and those are enough to make people go "yep, there is no free place" for the next half an hour. Same goes for the food. The games employment system is just incredibly iffy overall. Same issue with weird ebbs and flows in worker spawning causes the periodic drops in heating plant employment, despite me having more than enough of workers. It all just really, really janky.

I share your experience, people not working at services they need. Also it seems that a small amount of workers can handle only a disproportionate small amount of demand on that service; one person works, one person served: 4 persons work, 10 persons served. I was hoping these problems would go away as I increase my population, solving the problems not efficiently, if at least with some surplus of workers.

Originally posted by karel2501:

Anyway, thanks everyone for giving advice, I still appreciate it. I eventually did manage to get to a stable place, 3500 people, 90% satisfaction for a good few years.
Then I looked away for few minutes and my entire city collapsed, literally in less then 10 minutes, because of some hitch with coal supplies to my heat plant.
Jesus the death spirals in this game are ruthless. But this one, I at least understand what I did wrong.

Time to try again tomorrow. Thank you all for having patience with me.

I'm happy I saw that one coming at least, and hooked up a small aggregate storage and unloader; 200 tons of coal should get me through the worst of it. I have only about 400 people currently, but I'm in a stable place at least. health, satisfaction, and even my money is going up slowly. A solid base for expansion. Time to try that tomorrow as well.

[MrKrabs]

Originally posted by karel2501:

The problem is remarkably simple. Whenever a worker ends their shift, the game will instantly update the facility's service status, and will assign a new worker to take the place (if there is one available).
The problem is that while the service status updates instantly, the new worker will take time physically moving into the building. This means there will ALWAYS be dips in production, it is simply ENTIRELY impossible to keep any building working at full efficiency all the time. For short intervals - between the old worker despawning and the new worker arriving at the spot, the availabilty of the product will drop to zero, and that is enough to screw you over.

This CANNOT be solved or prevented, you just have to provide huge redundancy options. The only way to avoid these dips is to have at least two separate spots in two separate kindergardens for each one flat. This goes for every other services, the kindergarden is just particularly visible one.

This is something that could in theory be solved, if the game either qued new workers before the old one's shift was over, or if workers left lingering impact, meaning the productivity of a facility would continue to be elevated for some time after a worker has left.

But in the current state, where production gets updated the INSTANT a worker leaves his post, but new one is only assigned after he leaves, the productivity will ALWAYS jump up and down drastically and result in bizzare behavior and unrealible availability of services. Does not matter how many workers you have. If you have single service building, your service will CONSTANTLY drop down, even to zero, because of this simple mechanical issue.

This problem got solved the following way:

- Maximum efficiency is reached prior having a plant fully staffed.
However this seems not to apply for shops and kindergarden and such.

- Any workplace can have a slight overfill of workers.

I often observed that some working places have more workers than it's maximum.

At the screen shot below you can see my starter village.
It has two kindergarden and two heating plants. They are reachable on foot.
There is no outage whatsoever.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3010762161

Maybe your problem is located elsewhere.

Can you post a screen shot of your setup?
Maybe we can find out how to solve your issues.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by Molybdane:

I share your experience, people not working at services they need. Also it seems that a small amount of workers can handle only a disproportionate small amount of demand on that service; one person works, one person served: 4 persons work, 10 persons served. I was hoping these problems would go away as I increase my population, solving the problems not efficiently, if at least with some surplus of workers.

The number of visitors a worker can serve depends on their productivity and whether the building has access to utilities (mostly drinking water; without it, workers work half as hard, but electricity also matters.)

Workers will have better productivity if their happiness, loyalty, and health stats rise.