How to Fix Colonists Standing Idle While Jobs Are Available

An idle colonist standing next to a full stockpile usually means every job was filtered out for a reason you cannot see. The agent asked for work and the job giver said no to all of it. Instrument the rejection path so you can see why, then address the actual cause. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Log rejection reasons

For one idle agent, iterate the queue and record why each job is skipped: unreachable, reserved, skill too low, or forbidden. The dominant reason tells you which filter to fix.

2. Rebuild reachability on map change

Reachability is often cached per region. When a wall, door, or bridge changes, recompute the region links so jobs behind the change stop being treated as unreachable forever.

3. Expire stale reservations

Reservations from agents that died, were drafted, or got stuck can pin a job permanently. Periodically validate that each reservation's owner is alive and still working it, and release the ones that are not.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.