The Best Base Workforce Setup

A good base practically runs itself: Pals grab jobs, finish them, and move to the next without you hovering. Getting there is less about owning rare Pals and more about covering every job and keeping everyone busy. Here's how to build a workforce that just works. The same habits scale, too — what keeps your first base tidy keeps your fifth from turning into chaos.

Cover every job first

Before you chase the single best Pal for each slot, make sure every job your base needs is covered at all. A base with five great miners and nobody on Handiwork will still grind to a halt.

Walk the full list — Kindling, Watering, Planting, Generating Electricity, Handiwork, Gathering, Lumbering, Mining, Cooling, Transporting, Farming — and confirm each one has a body assigned. The workforce tool makes this painless: pick a job, see who you've got for it, and fill the gaps before you worry about upgrades.

Generalists vs specialists

Some Pals show up on two different job lists — those are your generalists, and they're worth their weight on a small base where slots are tight. A few to know:

• Anubis — top-tier Handiwork and Mining.
• Dandilord — strong at Planting and Handiwork.
• Ophydia — covers Watering and Planting.
• Wumpo — Cooling and Transporting.
• Beakon — Generating Electricity and Transporting.
• Hartalis — Gathering and Lumbering.

Specialists like Orserk for electricity or Frostallion for cooling do one thing better than anyone. Early on, generalists let you cover a lot of ground with few Pals; as your base grows and you can spare the slots, swap in specialists to push output on the jobs that matter most.

Keep Pals from going idle

An idle Pal is wasted headcount. Idling almost always comes from one of three things:

• Too many workers for too few stations. Six Pals and three benches means some just stand around. Match crew size to the work available.
• Missing suitabilities. A Pal skips any task it can't do. Overlap jobs across your crew so there's always something each one can pick up.
• Low sanity or hunger. Tired, hungry Pals wander off and stop pulling their weight. Keep a hot spring, beds, and a stocked feed box running.

Watch your base for a quiet minute — anyone standing still is telling you something's off.

Plan it before you build

The cleanest bases are planned, not accreted over time. The base planner lets you lay out stations and see how the work will flow before you sink resources into anything, so you're not tearing down a misplaced furnace an hour later. A minute of planning up front saves you a lot of hauling walls around later. Sketch the layout, decide which jobs live where, then staff it with the workforce tool.

Where to go next

Map your layout in the base planner, then fill every slot using the workforce ranker. That one-two — a smart layout plus the right Pal in each job — is the whole secret to a base that hums along without you.