Workers
The workers are little animal-like creatures that will help you do tasks, such as farming, crafting, and even defending your fortress!
Workers can be seen after killing bosses, by attacking Monster Caravans or exploring the world right after dawn. If you feed a worker, he will become tamed and you can direct him to accomplish certain tasks.
Untamed workers are attracted to honey. Therefore, a good way to attract workers is to build a trough and put some honey inside.
Monsters will ignore untamed workers, but most will try to hurt tamed workers. Untamed worker don't wear cloths.
Like, you, workers need to eat food. Be sure to feed them. When they are hungry, workers will directly get some food from containers or eventually the floor. If they can find a table, they will use it and eat even faster. Workers can eat cooked meat, berries and bread.
Workers also need to sleep. If you build beds, they will use them, and their sleeping will be of better quality (and therefore, work more). Beds need to be built in the obscurity to be usable.
Workers can be assigned to one or several jobs. Such operation can be done with the global job menu (inventory + right arrow) or by directly talking to the worker. If a worker has no job or none of his jobs are doable, he will just walk randomly.
In the global job menu, you can see the jobs, level and inventory of each worker. The level of a job show how fast (or how good) this worker is at his job. Job level increases with practice.
Some jobs require that you define an Area to indicate where to apply the job.
The soldier job need you to define soldier squads and give individual order to each squad (see Soldier (job)).
The jobs are:
- Soldier (job) : Defend you or your fortress.
- Catapult operator (job) : Fire the catapult.
- Woodcutter (job) : Chop trees.
- Farmer (job) : Grow and harvest plants.
- Hauling (job) : Get objects on the ground and store them in container.
- Craftman (job) : Craft objects at the workshops.
- Trapper (job) : Reload craw traps.
- Builder (job) : Build walls or dig terrain.
- Cooker (job) : Cook food and metals.
During the night, if you have defined a Safe place (area), the workers with a non-military jobs (all jobs except Soldier and Guard), will only do the jobs that they can do in the Safe place (area). Also, a worker with a non-military jobs will run away is a monster approaches him.
Each worker has his own inventory. You can take things from him and give items, creating a little mobile pack mule. Be warned! If your worker dies, your stuff goes with him!
Workers will store items in barrels. You can define specific storing areas over barrels, or let the workers storing the items randomly.
(before beta 1.0) If a worker is hurt by monster, he will die.
(beta 1.0) If a worker is hurt by monster, he will faint. You can heal him with a healing potion. Elfs will also try to heal wounded workers.
