Hey guys,

I have a quick question. When I assign workers to a plant, is it assigning them to work that one specific plant, or work as a farmer on all of the plants?

Thanks!

They will work up to 12 plants per worker and auto assign automatically once you assign them to one of the plants. When you plant new crops, you may need to assign again, not sure about that.

12 plants? I was under the impression it was only 6 per worker

It is 6 food, but as most plants are 0.5 food it is up to 12 plants.

The actual value is 6 FOOD per manual or auto assigned worker.

Any combination of plants within reasonable proximity that add up to 6 Food, the worker will try and work

Most crops are 0.5 food produced per planting - some like mutfruit is 1.0

So if they are assigned to say corn, which is 0.5, they will work 12 corn plants for 6 food. Or work 6 mut fruit plants.

Hm, what's the difference between manual and auto assigned workers? Do you mean that new settlers who I haven't assigned anything will automatically work on farms, or are you just talking about manual and auto assigned specific plants?

Also, thanks for all the insight guys! I'm surprised it was so difficult to find this information out on google

I have seen npc work even if not assigned, however I also get complains that plants need assigned workers.

My guess is that assigned workers are more efficient, distances on settlements might also affect this

Manual assigned workers are those that you via workbench UI select and assign a task, like farm this area.
Manual assigned workers sometimes break when new settlers come in - assigned farmers for example will sometimes stop farming. I believe this is because if you dont assign new settlers to anything they will assign themselves farming jobs (see below)

Auto assigned workers are ones the settlement just has do stuff on their own - i have never, ever seen workers auto assign to guard post, supply line, etc - so the one auto job we are talking about is farming and tending.

When new settlers arrive, if they are not given a manually assigned task, many times they will just start faeming an available plot of land - especially if you plant more crops than you currently have workers available to farm. I would not count on auto assigned farmers but assign your specific plots you want worked manually, and then let the rest happen automativally.

For example - since workers dont farm a plant, but a region, i plant completely segregated crops, to control what my workers farm and tend.
Since i like running huge adhesive farms, i plant 3 main fields separated from each other - corn, mut fruit, and tato. I manually assign workers to one square of each field.

While 1 worker produces only 6 food yield, that one worker can tend to quite a few more.

What does 'tend' mean? It is my definition but i noticed that if you plant a crop and have zero workers farming in that area, that plant
wont even produce any harvest that you can manually pick yourself. Crops get auto deposited into work bench but at a slower rate than if younjust picked each plant manually when it was ready to pick (esp with fast travel reset)

So i manually assign a worker to one square of my corn field that has many, many more corn planted than the 12 this one worker can 'farm' as far as yield for settlement food calculaation. This one worker will yield 6 food, but tend a lot more than 12 corn - he will move aroind raking the ground, this is what apparently makes the plant actuallt produce the crop which you can then just let be auto deposited at a slower rate and fractional portion, or you van every now and then return from a trip and pock manually every corn on your 40 corn plot.

Auto workers will assign themselves what seems random section of the available crops planted,. If bad luck they will assign themselves to same section yoipur manual worker was, and it will somestimes make the manual worker stop.

Bascially, if you never manually assigned guards, supply. Etc, it would never happen. But farming will always happen. Its just more efficient to do it manually but you could if you wanted, just recruit beacon settlers and never assign them anything, long as you planted crops, they will go find them and tend it to make it grow, then farm it to produce the 6 food yield.