The more time you spend playing RimWorld, the more sure you are that there is no way to make your pawns happy.
Well, if you would use a balanced schedule where they can recreate, sleep, and work, without them overlapping too much, then they would be very happy.
Recommended Read: What to Do With Old Tainted Clothes in RimWorld
The problem is that you will have to experiment a lot to figure out what the best schedule would be for each one of your pawns. And with death right around the corner, is it worth it?
So, to make your playthroughs easier with a simple pattern, here is the best work schedule you can set for your pawns in RimWorld.
Table of contents
How Each Schedule Option Works in RimWorld
There are five main schedule options you can choose for your pawns in RimWorld:
- Anything
- Recreation
- Work
- Sleep
- Meditate
Anything
When a pawn is scheduled to do anything, they will try to follow their work priorities unless their food, recreation, or sleep falls below a certain threshold.
This is usually the best option to set up for your pawns besides sleep to make sure that they fulfill their task but also avoid mental breakdowns.
A pawn tasked with doing anything will work unless their food and sleep need falls below 30% or recreation falls below 35%.
Recreation
This option will make your colonists try to increase their recreation needs if it is under 95%. It also works very similarly with anything, as the pawn will work if recreation is above 95%.
Your pawns will also do other things if their needs (food and sleep) are below 30%. If a pawn is sleeping while the recreation period starts and their sleep need hasn’t rested enough, they will continue sleeping through the recreation schedule.
Work
Work is the most intense schedule option, as it forces your pawns to wake up and work without regard to their sleep or recreation needs.
They will eat if their food need falls below 30%, though.
Sleep
Colonists with sleep below 75% will go rest if they have reached this point in their schedule. Otherwise, they will work.
If their sleep need has fully charged, they will wake up and go to work.
Meditate
Meditate works in a similar way to Work since your pawns will be forced to wake up and fulfill their Meditate task.
What is the Best Schedule to Set in RimWorld
In theory, it would be best never to use the Work schedule option in RimWorld, since pawns will work as long as their needs are met using the Anything schedule option.
Also, it would be good to set up recreation periods for all of your pawns, so they can talk and feel good together, building better friendships.
The Sleep option should be mandatory if you want to make sure that your pawns are rested and that couples spend time together in their beds.
So, in theory, what would be the best schedule to set for all your pawns in RimWorld? Well, there are two things that will matter when choosing a schedule: productivity and mood.
Productivity Schedule
If you prefer your pawns to be more productive (and spend less time micromanaging), then the best schedule would look something like this:
- 22 – 5 Sleep
- 5 – 7 Recreation
- 7 – 19 Anything
- 19 – 22 Recreation
This work schedule should be perfect for your pawns to get in the sleep that they need, the mood boost to handle the day, and enough time to get their work done.
The hours set by the game at the start for sleep are generally perfect. That is the exact amount of time you should leave your pawns to get their rest.
So, this basically means 7 hours of sleep, 2 hours of recreation before and after sleep, and then anything.
If your pawn needs to do a night shift or is a night owl, just move the sleep start hours from 11 to 18.
However, if you do have really good beds and your pawns don’t need that much sleep, you can lower the amount of time they spend sleeping.
There is no need to move the recreation time, on the other hand, as it is supposed to last them the whole day.
Mood Schedule
There is a double sleep shift schedule strategy that works really well in keeping your mood up during the whole day.
- 20 – 22 Recreation
- 22 – 3 Sleep
- 3 – 9 Anything
- 9 – 11 Recreation
- 11 – 15 Sleep
- 15 – 20 Anything
Using this schedule you will make sure that your pawns are always rested and that there won’t be any mental breakdowns if a raid starts right before sleep time.
However, using this strategy will leave you with less daylight for work and overall less productivity.
Since there is a limit to how much mood a pawn can lose per hour, making sure that they keep their basic needs up will result in a surefire way of avoiding even minor mental breakdowns.
One slight problem with this is that your pawns will often work at night. This means that you will have to set up proper lighting all over the possible workplaces.
Your night owls will also have to work during half of daylight, which will annoy them a bit.
So, if you have to choose a schedule, make sure to figure out first what matters to you more. Then you can start micromanaging their schedules and changing things when they get used to the presets we’ve given you.
Though these schedules will work for 90% of pawns, there will be some that these won’t work perfectly for. You will have to see how this pans out from case to case.
That’s everything you need to know about what is the best work schedule to set in RimWorld!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
