Overview
Just a small guide on how to organize your dupes schedules for maximum efficiency. Say goodbye to long waiting lines for the bathroom and noisy cot neighbors, and tap into your Night Owl duplicants’ full potential while you’re at it with the help of SCHEDULING!
Getting started with scheduling
So you’ve just spawned into your new rocky home and you’re plowing straight ahead towards getting that latrine installed, right? Good for you! But now you’re faced with one of the first dilemmas of the game: How many toilets do I place? You may pick one or two to start out, which is completely reasonable, but let me tell you, your dupes only have so much downtime, and there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done! This is where scheduling comes into play.
This is the button that creates all the scheduling magic! Or rather, it brings up the scheduling tab so you can make your own magic. Still, it’s as magical as your dupe’s reaction to getting a job. Click it, and you’ll be presented with this menu:
From here, you can control every aspect of your dupe’s lives, from when they sleep, to when they take breaks, to how long they have to work in a cycle. The minimum amount of downtime a dupe can have is 1 block, and each additional block adds +1 morale, As you can see, my dupes gain a +1 for having 2 blocks of downtime. If I added more, it would go up from there.
How to schedule
Now then, the first thing I find helpful is to rename this first schedule. “Default schedule” and “Custom Schedule #” doesn’t sound as nice to me. Feel free to skip this step if you like, but I’m going to rename mine for convenience.
Ah, that’s better. Putting them in blocks makes more sense to me. Now that the schedules themselves are out of the way, let’s add another schedule to evenly distribute out dupe’s downtime.
As you can see, I’ve given Block B their downtime in the morning instead of at night, and moved their bathtime block after the downtime section. This is because when dupes don’t have access to showers, the showering block acts like a working block, so if an early-game dupe only has one chunk of time to work after waking up before taking a break, that would leave a lot of abandoned tasks for the A Block to pick up later. It’s cleaner (pun half-intended) to put that showering block after the downtime in this instance.
But why stop at two schedules? What about the Night Owl dupes and the ones with the pea-sized bladder? Well, I have you covered there as well.
-Note that having four blocks of downtime means those Small Bladder dupes get +3 morale over the course of the day.
I usually reject dupes with small bladders, so take this example schedule with a grain of salt, but moving the sleeping blocks to the morning instead of keeping it at night is the best way to get the best out of your Night Owl dupes. Like Early Birds, they gain +2 to every stat during their favorite time of day. Early birds are best kept in the Block A schedule for this reason. Additionally, if you put your Loud Sleepers with your Night Owls, all you have to do is arrange your dupes’ assigned cots and you can very easily work around their snoring.