Habitat station modules add worker housing to the station. Habitat modules produce nothing, and while they don’t consume any resources directly the workers who come to live in the housing do.

Note: station factories operate fine without any workforce or habitats. Factories with zero workers consume resources and produce output at their normal baseline rate. Adding workforce will increase the factory output.

Habitats

Habitat modules attract workforce to your station. Habitats start empty, and fill slowly over time (assuming you provide the supplies the workforce wants).

Living space in your Habitats determines the maximum number of workers your station can attract.

Habitats may be partially or completely empty, depending on the current number of workers. Habitat space is handled as a total, rather than workers being assigned to specific Habitat modules. Removing unused habitats is fine, as long as the remaining total housing is enough for your current workforce.

Note though that habitats are species specific, though, so if you have a mix of Paranid and Teladi workers and remove all your Teladi habitats the Teladi living in them will leave your station (they won’t move the Paranid housing).

Factories

Each type of station factory has a supported workforce value (number of workers who can work in that module). Add all of these up to get the maximum workforce for your station.

Workers on your station are distributed evenly across all your factories automatically. If you have 10% of the maximum possible workforce, that means each factory will have 10% of its optimum workers.

Distribution of workers to your factories is automatic, and will automatically adjust as you add and remove modules on your station.

Workforce

Workforce are the workers themselves.

To see a summary of your current workforce, and information about what supplies your workforce needs, you can open the Workforce box in the station Logical Overview screen.

Once at least one worker arrives on your station, the Logical Overview will show ware boxes for the “inputs” (food and medicine) needed to supply your workforce.

Workforce effect

Workforce provides a bonus to the production of station factory modules, generating more output from the same inputs.

The bonus shows as a percentage. The maximum is around 30%. A 10% workforce bonus means that all factories on the station will produce 10% more output per factory cycle. The factories will consume the same input resources, but produce 10% more output.

The “more output from the same inputs” part is what’s important. In exchange for more complicated logistics, your factories generate more wares as output.

In most situations, the cost of providing supplies for workforce is a close offset to the increased value of extra wares produced. Workforce can increase profits by generating extra production, but the value of this is significantly reduced by the added expense of worker supplies.

[Note: that if increasing factory output is your goal, it may be simpler to expand production by adding more factory modules instead.]

Zero workforce

Workforce is not required for a station to operate. Even with zero workforce, station production will work normally. Adding workforce only creates a bonus for the station. It is fine to operate stations without workforce (if you don’t want to bother, or don’t have the resources to build Habitats and provide supplies).

You do not have to achieve maximum workforce in order to gain benefits. If you have the ability to supply food and medical supplies, any workforce will provide some bonus.

Maximum workforce

As noted, the maximum workforce your station will attract is the sum total of all workforce supported by all the station’s factory modules.

Once the station has enough total workforce for all factory modules, workforce will stop growing. Usually this is what you want.

Shipyards and wharves may want to “over-provision” their station workforce (see below), but for other station types there is no value to doing so other than creating “spare” workforce in case some of them leave due to unavoidable shortages of food or medical supplies. Note that “spare” workers who are not working in factories will still consume some provisions.

Workforce and ship crew

For a wharf or shipyard that lets you hire crew, that crew comes from the station’s workforce. [As long as the station’s workforce is at least 25% of maximum.] Adding crew to ships will reduce the station’s current workforce count.

It’s therefore desirable on such stations to provide extra housing and attract more workers than needed for the station’s factories, as mentioned above.

In the station’s Logical Overview, in the workforce box, there is a checkbox for “fill entire habitat.” Use this to over-provision the workforce and tell the station to keep attracting more workers, even if there are already enough to fully staff every factory. Workforce will keep growing until all Habitat modules are filled.

Attracting workforce

Workforce requires housing built at the station: Habitat modules. Each module has a rating for how many workers it can house. Empty housing provides no value, so you don’t need to add more space if you existing habitats are not full yet (and doing so will not increase workforce growth).

Workforce requires Food and Medical Supplies. If you have enough, more workers will slowly arrive. If you don’t provide enough supplies, they will leave instead. There is no warning or alert for declining workforce, so you need to be vigilant about checking in on supplies occasionally to make sure your logistics are working and sufficient.

Note that some sectors have planets, and these planets provide a bonus to workforce growth. You can see this in the Encyclopedia entry for each sector.

Workforce Supplies

Workers require food and medicine. As long as you supply enough, workforce will grow. When you fall short, workers will leave.

Food is species specific, and only usable by one species. Teladi will not eat Human food, and vice versa. Food supply therefore has to be matched to Habitat type. If you’re going to build housing for Boron workers, you must supply Boron food.

Medical supplies are identical for all species. Medical supplies are medical supplies, no matter how they’re produced. All species can be satisfied by any source.

Medical supply factory modules, though, come in several variations. They all produce medical supply wares, but they do it from different input wares. The Teladi medical supply module uses some of the same inputs as Teladi food, the Split version uses some of the same inputs as Split food, etc. It’s therefore generally easiest to match the meds factory to the species along with the food factories. Any type of medical supply factory will work, though, if you prefer to use one factory type to supply all workers.

Species differences

Teladi will only live in a Teladi Biome, and will only eat teladi food. Paranid only want paranid homes and food, Humans want human homes and food, etc.

What species individuals arrive at your station (thereby fuel workforce growth) is governed by the local environment.

It’s therefore best to build “local” housing and food supplies when possible. If a station is trading primarily with incoming Teladi ships, you’re likely better off building Teladi housing and food.

No species “works” better than any other. In the great tradition of exploitive space capitalism, workers are all just cogs in the machine, all interchangeable.