Create: Workers

A factory can hire and keep its own workforce. The Worker Station holds a rack of programmed hats and takes villagers on to wear them, refilling a job when its worker is lost. Crews work in three shifts around the clock, eat, sleep, and trade with you off duty.

Added

• The Worker Station hires villagers for you. Put programmed hard hats in its rack — up to twelve jobs — and it takes on unemployed villagers from nearby to wear them. Lose a worker and it hires a replacement onto the same job, so a line that was running keeps running. The rack is a priority order: the job at the top is staffed first, which is how you say what matters when the village is short of people.
• A lamp per job on the front of the Station, so "is this line short-handed?" is answerable without opening anything. Lit means every shift that job runs has somebody on it, dim means the job is programmed and short, dark means the place is empty. Lit lamps draw full-bright, so a working Station reads across a dark factory.
• Three shifts. Each job can run a day, an evening and a night crew — three villagers keeping the same hours at different times, which is a job staffed around the clock. Crews are told apart by the colour of their hi-vis. A Station short of people fills whole shifts before starting the next, because a line missing one worker usually produces nothing rather than less.
• Workers keep hours: they muster, work, have time to themselves, and go to bed. They walk to their post shortly before the shift starts, so the next crew is in place before the last one stops, and off the clock they behave like any other villager until it is time to sleep. A night crew really does sleep, in daylight.
• Sneak and right-click a bed to say where a job sleeps. It names a dormitory rather than a mattress: a job's workers share one hat, so whoever gets there first takes that bed and the rest find a free one beside it instead of wandering off to whatever is nearest their work.
• Name a job from the Station's screen, with no anvil and no experience. The name goes on the hat and onto whoever is wearing it, which is the short answer to "which villager is that?".
• The Canteen feeds your workers. Workers eat while they are on the clock and slow to a crawl when they run out — they never stop, but a starving line is a slow one, and it says so with the same unhappy particles a lost worker throws. A Canteen feeds every villager in range, through walls, out of its own stock, and nobody walks to it: put one where the people are. It takes bread, carrots, potatoes and beetroot through a funnel, a chute, a belt or a hopper, like any other container. It deliberately stops a little short of the point at which villagers will breed.
• The Canteen shows what is in it. Its top is its nine slots laid out one to one, so a stocked trough is a heap of food and an empty one is an empty trough — and bread, carrots, potatoes and beetroot each look like themselves rather than four colours of the same lump. A part-full slot draws less than a brimming one. There is a level on each of the four sides for when the block is built into a wall, a comparator reads how full it is, and goggles say what is in it.
• Workers trade. Off the clock a Worker will trade: 86 offers across five levels that buy what your factory makes — andesite alloy, shafts, cogwheels, casings, pressed sheets, and higher up the components that are a real chore to automate — and sell you assembled machines in return. What it offers follows what you are building rather than what you can afford: andesite kinetics and your first water wheel early, then logistics, then processing, then contraptions and fluids, and the package network last. Hauling counts towards its trading level. It will never sell you a Hard Hat.
• Three more Ponder pages. Hold W over a Hard Hat and Ponder now walks through a Station taking a villager on, then shifts and sleep, then feeding a crew and trading with it. The last one is on the Canteen as well.
• New settings for the above: stationRange, workingHours, clockOn, requireFood, ticksPerFoodPoint, hungryPace, canteenRange, bedSearchRadius, absenteeTimeout and recallStuckWorkers.

Changed

• Villagers are hired by a Station now, rather than by hand. Right-clicking a villager with a hat no longer employs it — put the hat in a Station and it finds somebody. Firing one is taking the hat out of the rack, or breaking the block. Endermen are unchanged: they have no profession and no job site, so no Station could ever employ one, and they are still hired and retired by hand. A villager that already has a job still cannot be hired; break its workstation first, exactly as the game makes you.
• A job's hat stays in the Station and its worker wears a copy. Nothing is handed back when a worker dies, because the job never left the block — which is what lets the Station refill it.
• The Worker Station and the Canteen wear Create's own andesite casing, and connect to it. Set either beside an Andesite Casing block, or beside each other, and the seam between them disappears the way it does between Create's own blocks. Both keep a face of their own in an inventory: the Station's lamps and the Canteen's gauges are drawn on the item as well, and the Station's icon is turned so its lamps are on the lit side of the picture rather than the shaded one — neither is a plain casing cube in a chest or in JEI.

Removed

• hireChildren is gone. With villagers hired by a Station, the game's own rule decides it — a child never takes a job site and so never arrives at one — and the setting had nothing left to decide.

Note

A villager you hired by hand before this update keeps its hat and carries on working. Retiring it now leaves an ordinary unemployed villager for the village to give a job to, rather than putting back the profession it had when you hired it: a Station only ever employs villagers with no job to give back, so that record is no longer kept.