Granularity/Bills Tab for colonist work.

[mcduff]

The new bills tab is excellent and really lets you set it up so your colonists keep themselves in food, weapons and clothing without having to micromanage everything.

However, there are still some frustrations with some of the lack of granularity of priorities for other tasks.

The work tab is a good way of seeing what all your colonists can do at a glance. But, it would be nice to give colonists a "bills tab" of their own.

So you could give everyone a bill "haul food from the fields to the freezer" but only some people "haul everything to everywhere."

Or you could put "clean the hospital and kitchen" at a higher priority than "clean blood off the ground outside."

Smithing, crafting, cooking and tailoring can be mostly sorted with workbench bills, although having some extra control here would be nice too. But hunting, hauling, doctoring, cleaning, mining, constructing etc are all fiddly.

I don't know how exactly to do it, but perhaps one solution would be to replace the number based priority system with an "edit details" button for each pawn.

So, if you just put a tick in the box, the game automatically adds a "do all work of this type" bill at the priority it lives in the list.

If you click "edit details" you can edit, rearrange and add new versions of the bills.

Back on the main grid, clicking to remove the tick in the box would disable all bills of that work type.

Yes, there is the possibility that you could get yourself tied up if you forgot you made a bill restrictive, but you can do that now anyway, especially with workbench bills (for eg, I forgot I'd set one of my cooking bills to be specific to a single pawn until waaaaay far through my latest playthrough.)

I think this would really help with some basic bits of micromanagement like keeping hospitals clean and getting crops in from fields, even if you haven't got the pawns available to be dedicated cleaners and haulers.