Manual for Plantations

This manual is incomplete.
You may want to read the first post here or even all the pages to get an idea of what plantations are about.



Time in Plantations
The time flows freely in plantations. You can add workers any time. Request improvements at any time. Change anything at any time of the day. However, some of the choices you make, may need a few minutes (up to 10) before they are reflected to the plantation.

Improving Buildings

When improving any building, the following factors play a role in how fast the building will be completed.

• Utility Facilities Quality
This plays a paramount role. There is a base bonus that sometimes will be larger than your Quality bonus.


• Laborers Number
There is an optimal number but the more you add, the more production you will get. If they become too many, their efficiency drops.
You can control the amount of Laborers by assigning more acres to Utility Facilities.


• Tools Availability
There is a minimal maintenance fee. With no tools, you cannot improve anything.

The interface will give you approximately the time remaining for completion. This time is based on cycles of 10 minutes. Which means that you will not get 14 minutes, you will get Approximately 20 minutes instead.


Maintenance

Maintenance display is rounded. The actual amount might be less. However, you will only pay in whole crates whenever the time comes (ie, if your actual consumption is 0.2 crates, then you will pay 1 crate after 5 hours have passed).

While you get an hourly display, in fact maintenance is paid multiple cycles within an hour. If you do not have enough resources to pay for a cycle, you will miss the building benefits for this cycle (not the whole hour or day) but no resources will be removed. If you have enough resources at next cycle, it will count normally and resources will be removed.


Consumption

Needs are not cumulative. Your workers will only consume what they currently need.

Food

Food maintenance is a little different. You can control how much your people eat and they workers need this much more than anything else. You must pay extra attention to your food reserves. If you run out of food, the negative affects can be devastating. It is always preferable to limit the rations or fire workers rather than risk to end up with no food. The workers will get very unhappy if they have no food and their health will drop significantly and can even result to their death in short time.

Once starting a plantation, you must expect a tough period early on, till you can get some of your infrastructure working.

Of course, you are not obliged to build any and the plantation should still produce even with no infrastructure. It could even produce good amounts without any infrastructure. However, this will be in the expense of worker lives.

One of the first buildings you should consider improving early on, is Utility Buildings. You will need a few tools crates to pay for its operation and lots and lots of Laborers. Remember to allocate a few acres to it as well. You will be able to keep track of your remaining time constantly with very frequent updates.

Every worker added to your plantation is going for work right away. However, their numbers may not reflect immediately. You do not need to do anything to allocate them. Although saving acres will update their numbers, it makes no difference in production or anything else. Instant update there, is just a visual aid to help in your plantation management.

Workforce

Workers have two visible attributes: Happiness and Health. You can review them at the Workforce page.

Happiness affects many things. Work efficiency is one of them.

Workers also have 4 extra hidden attributes. These are:
-Stamina (How much energy they have, a tired worker will produce less)
-Hunger (Hungry workers will be more prone to injuries)
-Fat (Well fed workers will generate fat. Some fat is good to have as it protects your workers health but if you overfeed them constantly, workers can also become very fat, which will create issues).
-Expertise (The more a worker survives, the better he learns the job and as a result his efficiency is better while he can also passes some of his knowledge the new ones ones, so his expertise is not lost entirely after his death)

The only chance to get an insight at the hidden attributes, is from the advisor.

Not yet activated

There is also the memory of each worker. While the memory works already, the actions that result from the memories of each worker are not yet activated. This will happen soon though and will affect any actions your workers take collectively against or in favor of you.