Idle villagers waiting thier turn on a crowded food source

While testing hotkeys and playing around with different buttons I’m comfortable with. I noticed that a group of 4 villagers were labeled as idle on my UI. I hit select Idle Villagers in Radius which I have assigned to MB4. I have no issues selecting idle villagers this way until these 4 villagers waiting their turn on the sheep.

Is this intended?

If the villagers are showing Idle on my UI I should be able to select them even if they are waiting their turn on a resource.

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Hey @JetLikeM3! The behavior is intended. However, we consider these Villagers to be “semi-idle” and should not have the “Zzz” over their head. Are you seeing this?

It does sound like they are showing up as idle in the UI, which I agree is counter to not showing the “Zzz.” If this sounds right, I’ll open an investigation into it.

Villagers waiting around for a food source should be classed as ‘idle’, yet they are not.

You can have 10 villagers waiting around a sheep that already has 8 villagers on it, but you don’t get any idle villager notifications while they are waiting. The game thinks, since they are tasked to food, they are not idle. Infact they kind of are idle and would be nice to show it

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sorry for the late replay but yes the game does consider them idle and are on the UI as idle showing Zzz

@JetLikeM3 | @SavageEmpire566

I didn’t see this until after I posted here:

You can still cycle through these “semi-idle” villagers and select them using the “select all idle” hotkey, but you are correct that the “select idle villagers in radius” doesn’t work with these. From what I’ve gathered from the UI in this game, I’m assuming there’s a difference between “idle” and “having Zs” (or not holding a gathering tool in their hands). Seems like they should be the same ‘villager state’, but at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t…

(I think these should be called ‘lazy villagers’ as they don’t want to be noticed that they aren’t working)

This might also lead to another issue I’ve noticed specifically with the Malians (or anybody gathering from cows) - there’s a lot of funkiness there - If I have villagers gather from sheep, they will go idle before bopping any nearby cows (not in ranches) - however, if the cows are already dead, they will transition from sheep to cow. I know this one might be a tangent of the previous issue - but I think it’s more of a specific issue derived from this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a herd of cows hanging around and food-gathering villagers (holding shepherd staves) just standing around them.

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Reminds me of something that may be a related clue. Spearmen that get an upgrade while building a ram would interrupt their ram production and cause them to skip to the next command in queue. I interpreted it as the old unit getting deleted and replaced by the upgraded version instead of being modified. They reassign the queued tasks to the new unit but forgot to have it resume current task or something. They might have fixed that one by now, haven’t checked in a while.

But it seems similar to cow being switched to carcass instead of just modifying the cow’s values and parameters. So they correctly assigned the carcass as being collectable material but didn’t think about the cow. I guess since it’s the first new harvestable neutral food (not counting boar) they hadn’t made a global “meat source” category for the cow and sheep to share, and are apparently divided resources.

I’m too lazy to analyze the villager situation but I hope they correct that to properly register as idle. It happens to me every game in the first 10 seconds when I pull the first sheep adjacent to the town center and assign 6 villagers to it, there is only ever room for 5 and the 6th ends up standing there waiting ,doing nothing, with no idle warning.