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Jobs & Work

Overview

Colonists find their own work. You don’t hand out individual tasks — you decide what each person is willing to do, and they pick jobs off the pile that match. Most of running a colony is adjusting that willingness rather than issuing orders.

When a colonist seems to be doing nothing useful, it’s almost always one of three things: nothing needs doing that they’ll accept, they can’t reach it, or a need has overridden work entirely.

How it works

Every colonist has a ranked list of civilian jobs — all their peacetime work — and, separately, a single combat role. The two answer different questions: the list is what they do, the role is how they fight.

Civilian jobs are worked top-down. The job in slot 1 is what they reach for first; the ones below it are what they fall back to when nothing better is available. Higher slots win, and you get more slots as a colonist levels up.

The combat role is one choice from Soldier · Archer · Knight · Mage — or nothing at all. A colonist with no combat role is a non-combatant: they run from a fight rather than joining it. That includes your Guards, whose job is to patrol, watch and raise the alarm — being on watch is not the same as being willing to die. If you want someone to hold the line, give them a combat role.

Combat roles are deliberately rare — roughly one founder in five is drilled for one, so most of your colony is people who will run. You are guaranteed at least one, though: a settlement never opens with nobody willing to stand. Everyone after that is your decision.

Work is chosen by priority, and needs sit near the top of it:

  1. Combat — being attacked outranks everything. What they do about it depends on their combat role: a colonist with one stands and fights, one without runs.
  2. Critical needs — a starving or exhausted colonist deals with that first.
  3. Work — the jobs they’re willing and able to do.
  4. Idle — wandering, socialising, whatever’s left.

That second tier is the one that surprises people. A colonist who won’t work is often just hungry — see Food & Eating and Sleep & Rest.

Skill matters too: given two candidates, the better-skilled one is preferred, and doing a job improves the skill that backs it.

Playing with it

  • Open the Jobs panel on a colonist to set their ranked civilian jobs. This is the main lever you have over what any individual does with their day.
  • Open the Jobs window on the bottom bar to see everyone at once. It is one sheet: a row for each colonist, a column for each job, and a mark in the cell where someone holds that job — numbered by how high it sits in their list. Click an empty cell to give a colonist that job, click a job they hold to move it up one place, right-click to take it away, and drag down a column to hand one job to a whole run of colonists. Click a job’s heading to bring everyone who does it to the top, and click a name to see that colonist’s slots beside the sheet — including the ones they haven’t unlocked yet and the level each opens at. If a colonist’s slots are all in use, right-click an empty cell to swap that job in for their lowest-priority one. A job with work waiting and nobody assigned to it breathes, so a gap in your coverage is easy to spot. Every cell also shows how good that colonist is at the job — a bar along its foot, and a green tint on the jobs they’re not doing yet — and a gold corner marks a colonist who is clearly the strongest in the colony at it (a narrow lead gets no mark), so you can see who ought to be doing what before you assign anyone. Click a job’s heading to bring the best at it to the top.
  • Give someone a combat role in the same panel if you want them to fight. It’s a separate slot from their work, so your blacksmith can also be your soldier — they’ll forge all day and still hold the wall.
  • Raise To Arms when a raid lands. Every colonist changes into the military kit of their outfit — armour and weapons fetched from armour stands, weapon racks and storage — and carries on working, but stands and fights instead of running. Nobody is pulled off their job; to command fighters directly, draft them. What each outfit wears in peace and under arms is set in the Assignments window. A cook in borrowed mail is still no substitute for a garrison.
  • Match jobs to skills where you can — a specialist finishes faster and improves faster, and the panel shows each colonist’s skill levels alongside the slots.
  • Use the Orders bar to mark specific targets. Arm a tool (chop, mine, forage, hunt, haul) and drag a box over the world to mark what should be worked. This is how you point the colony at that stand of trees rather than any tree.
  • If a job is going undone, check three things in order: does anyone have that job enabled, can they physically reach the target, and are their needs met?

Good to know

  • A colonist who won’t work is usually hungry or exhausted, not badly configured. Check their needs before rearranging their job slots.
  • Nobody works themselves to death. Critical needs always outrank work, by design.
  • Breaking off to eat doesn’t lose the work. A colonist dragged off a half-built wall by hunger picks up from where they stopped, and the time spent eating doesn’t count towards the job either. If someone else gets there first, they continue it rather than starting over.
  • Marked targets persist. Something you’ve designated stays marked until it’s worked or you cancel it.
  • A Guard is not a soldier. Guards patrol, spot trouble early and raise the alarm — but without a combat role they flee like anyone else. Staffing a garrison is a deliberate decision, not something that happens by giving people the Guard job.
  • A Guard only patrols when you tell them to. Guards don’t wander off on their own. Open a Guard’s task conditions (the cog button) and either turn on Auto Patrol — a beat around the edge of the settlement that grows as you build — or give them a route of their own with Set, or assign them to a patrol route on the colony map. A Guard with none of these has no patrol work, so they skip the Guard job and carry on with the next job on their list.
  • A colonist’s combat role doesn’t change with what they’re doing. Someone hauling a crate is still an archer, and will fight like one the moment it matters.
  • A colonist’s job slots grow with their level. A new colonist has three; the next ones open as they level, up to ten. A full colonist can’t take another job until you remove one, and a few jobs — the ones that run on their own rather than wait for orders — only work in the first slot, so only one of them fits. The Jobs window shows the slots a colonist hasn’t earned yet, and what unlocks the next.
  • Any colonist can be given any job. There’s no skill or level requirement to unlock one — an untrained colonist simply does the work badly and slowly, and gets better by doing it. A brand-new Healer will tend wounds clumsily from their first patient rather than standing around until they’ve somehow learned medicine.
  • Skills shown on the character panel may include temporary buffs, while the Jobs panel shows the stored level. If the two disagree, that’s why.
  • Idle isn’t wasted. Socialising and recreation feed the soft needs that keep mood up.