extended shift eventually prompts the 'you're using it too much' event, and blowing it off raises Strike Risk everywhere that's running Extended Shifts... but the best workplaces for it are no-Strike places! Labour Laws are basically The Last Autumn's version of Purpose Laws: they're your second Law tree, just like in A New Home you don't have access to them at all until a plot event unlocks access, and eventually you will pick one of two Terrible Paths to commit to, where following your choice to its ultimate conclusion is always a dystopian nightmare. Unlike Purpose Laws, the unlocking occurs in two stages. When you first get started on Generator construction, Work Safety is not a mechanic: a bit after you've first started actually working with a Generator tab building, you will be informed of ab accident almost occurring, Workplace Safety will kick in as a mechanic, the following 9 Laws will be unlocked, and you will be given a quest to pass either Short Shifts or Safety Procedures so as to mimprove safety. Then once the Shaft Structure (Your very first step in assembling the Generator) reaches 70% progress, an Accident willl unavoidably occur. At that point you'll get the prompt to side with the Workers or side with the Engineers, determining what the rest of your Labour tree will be; those Laws don't actually 'connect' to any of these core 9 Laws. though. You effectively have 3 Law sets, just with the second and third shoved into the same 'tab' by the game. It's kind of weird and I'm not sure why they didn't make it truly three tabs. Was the code just not suited to adding a third Law tab to the Book of Laws, at least not without it looking terrible? Ah well. In any event, let's cover these core Labour Laws: Short Shift Requires: Nothing. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Unlocks Short Shift at all Generator tab buildings. A Short Shift lasts from 8:00 to 16:00 instead of 8:00 to 18:00, and raises Workplace Safety by 1 while active. Passing this Law also immediately raises Motivation a little. Basically, you can sacrifice 20% of the workday to push up Workplace Safety. This is absolutely worth doing when Workplace Safety is at -3 or worse, because Deadly Accidents become possible, and these can do things like produce multiple instant Amputees, make many laborers on the job Ill and/or Gravely Ill, or set back progress on the site entirely. Unfortunately, Short Shift is a victim of Frostpunk's ongoing reality that it is not a turn-based game even though it comports itself in various ways as if it believes itself to be one. You can toggle shift length at will, and so can get the Workplace Safety benefit for 8 hours and then still work those last two hours anyway. The game has an event that will chide you for doing this, apparently, but not a real limit on doing so; Short Shift really should've been something you can't cancel out of once commited to it, specially thanks to... Work Standardization Requires: Short Shift. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. From now on, Short Shift applies 10% more Efficiency while active, but also raises Discontent a little. Passing this Law also immediately raises Discontent. Oh boy. Yeah, you can just get 8.8 hours of labor out of people by claiming they're on a Short Shift, and then get the other 2 hours anyway by swapping to regular hours at the last second. That's... that's just great Frostpunk, thanks for this horrible design. I personally don't do this because it's not necessary and I hate what an obvious, dumb exploit it is, but yeah. Anyway, as I implied a moment ago, non-exploitive use of this effectively means a Short Shift only actually gives up 1.2 hours of progress by default while still improving Workplace Safety, making it an even more appealing choice. The Discontent penalty exists, but isn't really a strong reason to ignore Work Standardization: you really ought to pass it in every run in practice. Next Law! Extended Shift Requires: Nothing. Incompatible with Two Shifts. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Allows all jobsites to switch their working hours from the usual 8:00-18:00 length to instead 6:00-20:00, a 40% increase. Doing so raises Discontent slightly, and passing this Law immediately raises Discontent slightly. It's our old friend Extended Shifts, but now it sucks because instead of being gated behind Emergency Shift, it competes with what amounts to a superior version of Emergency Shift: Two Shifts Requires: Nothing. Incompatible with Extended Shift. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Allows all jobsites to switch their working hours from the usual 8:00-18:00 length to instead 24 hours, but also doubling the needed labor force to operate them and splitting the assigned labor into two 12-hour shifts. Doing so also raises Discontent slightly, and passing this Law immediately raises Discontent slightly. Hi Emergency Shift, I see the devs tried to rework your overpowered self and somehow made you even more stupidly abusable. I get the thought process here, and if Frostpunk was a turn-based game (Or faked it more adequaly), this would actually be a pretty goo pair of Laws that would be an interesting choice: get 40% more labor on a worksite at the cost of Discontent, or get 140% more labor at the cost of both Discontent and doubling the amount of labor you have to apply. That'd be cool! In actuality, this is largely Better Emergency Shifts because... -You don't spend Food or suffer deaths from using it. It's just free. -It doesn't have a cooldown, and so can be abused continuously wherever you need it, instead of only every other day. -Most cringe-y of all, Frostpunk is a real-time game and you can freely change shifts at will: as such, you can run Two Shifts through the night, then turn it off on a jobsite and redistribute labor during the 8:00-18:00 period to other worksites, then switch back to running Two Shifts wherever you need it at 8:00. This last point can in fact let you get 8.8 hours of labor with Short Shift and immediately proceed to switch to Two Shifts to thus get 24.8 hours of labor out of a day at essentially no meaningful cost. Shift length really needed to be something that the player couln't mess with a will at any worksite... I personally don't abuse these particularly inane exploits, partly because seriously they're such gross exploits but also because that's a tedious daily hassle that's really not necessary, but even just playing honorably still leaves Two Shifts as grotesquely powerful. Most glaring is that it's the ultimate form of Workshop Shenanigans: instead of running two Workshops to alternate Emergency Shifts on, you just run one Workshop with Two Shifts to tear through techs at 240% speed at even less cost than Emergency Shift abuse imposes. It's less egregious with other worksites, but it's still ridiculous. If you have two Fishing Harbors, shunting one group of Workers to the other is the same labor but 20% more Raw Food per day at basically no cost. Same with eg Sawmills, Gathering Posts, etc... ... only it's even better than that suggests because The Last Autumn centers itself so heavily on chokepointing labor considerations. The Generator construction is particularly egregious, as it's done in stages where you can be blocking from starting on the next stage by a single worksite; finishing the Shaft Structure is not something you can speed up by building a second Shaft Structure. Similarly, there are only four slots in total for Docks and Fishing Harbors, and so pulling more labor out of a single building is an advantage you simply can't replicate with more parallel worksites once all four of those slots have been eaten. More debatably, the buildings for constructing the Generator construction resources can technically all be massed, but two of them require Steam Cores and they all compete for the limited portion of the map designated as the Generator Construction Site, so there are sharp limits on your ability to actually do this; in practice you're probably only going to build one of each, and so squeezing more work out of a single building once again gains extra value. The whole thing is predictably very, very powerful. From a more narrative representation sort of perspective, I far prefer Two Shifts to Emergency Shifts, and I'm actually pretty frustrated the game presents Two Shifts so negatively. Getting more labor from a jobsite by having multiple shifts working around the clock isn't fundamentally a dangerous, exploitive, abusive practice (unlike the Energency Shifts situation of 'you lot are just not sleeping for 36 hours'), and Frostpunk itself shows no recognition of any of the real problems with implementing such: your employees don't complain about having trouble sleeping because there's always heavy machinery operating all hours within shouting distance of their tents (Which logically would have basically no sound dampening), the game doesn't have the night shift more likely to suffer accidents due to inadequate lighting, you don't have to specifically have a kitchen night shift in support of the other night shifts... ... I'd rather have Two Shifts be the basis of 'get more work out of this jobsite' in other scenarios rather than Emergency Shift (I'm looking at you, Frostpunk 1886), and also prefer for the game to not treat it as negatively as it does. (And/or for it to try to incorporate some of the realistic problems with making night shifts work smoothly) All this on the assumption of also fixing the 'this game thinks it's a turn-based game, but it's not' problems, of course; it's ridiculously abusable as-is. (I'm a bit baffled the devs didn't reuse the 'hunter resting from the hunt' logic for night shift employees, frankly) Anyway, these each have a Law locked behind them, so let's get to those: Extended Shift Compensations Requires: Extended Shift. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. Employees on Extended Shift eat an additional half a ration per day, but Extended Shift causes less Discontent. Oh boy. I'm not sure how the game mechanics this exactly given the whole 'you can toggle shifts freely' nonsense. There's probably some way to trick the game into not eating the additional Rations while still getting full benefit, honestly, but I don't know that for sure, and I honestly don't really care beyond generally sighing at Frostpunk being sloppy with the entire shifts system. Just looking at this from an Honest Play perspective, this is still a really sucky attempt at giving you a reason to actually use Extended Shift instead o Two Shifts; you can't really afford to spend food really freely in The Last Autumn, whereas you can afford to blow up minor Discontent penalties, even if they add up enough to produce a Strike Risk increase. And even if that weren't so, this doesn't do anything to address the part whre Two Shifts is massively better than Extended Shift... doesn't eat extra rations at all, pretty sure Shift Work Coordination Requires: Two Shifts Law Cooldown: 18 hours Activating Two Shifts now raises the maximum employees needed to only 50% more than a single shift (Rounding down) rather than 100% more, but To Shifts raises Discontent more. Additionally, passing this Law noticeably raise Discontent immediately. The game frames it as Two Shifts requiring 25% less citizens, which is true of the total but is easy to misad as a smaller impact than its true impact. Regardless, this can be viewed in to basic ways: the first is that it massively improves the labor distribution fficiency of Two Shifts. eg instead of cramming two Sawmills of employees into one all-day Sawmill, you can cram three Sawmills of employees into two Sawmills that are running all day. Alternatively, you can view it as a significant improvement to work speed on Generator construction: one of the main limitations of Two Shifts is that doubling the employee requirement is insanely demanding when it comes to Generator objects, as most of them have a base max of 50 Workers. Pulling 50 Workers onto the current Generator stage is already often requiring you pull basically all your non-essential labor for a decent chunk of the run, in which case pulling 100 is probably outright impossible; knocking it down to 75 might still be too much to fully fill, but getting to eg 60 Workers assigned will jump from 'the night shift is working at 60% Efficiency' to 'the night shift is working at roughly 80% Efficiency', meaning it's working 33% faster in real terms. That said, I personally find Shift Work Coordination a dubious deal. By far the biggest benefit to Two Shifts is how much it turbocharges your research, and shaving off a handful of Engineers is basically no benefit for that, while the Discontent increase must be shouldered continuously anyway. This is the most egregious point by far, but there's a similar point regarding Fishing Harbors and even Reloading Stations to a degree: Shift Work Coordination is primarily advantageous if you are using Two Shifts heavily wih the Generator construction process in specific, where the worker count per worksite is high. Among other points, Two Shifts' Discontent penalty is scaled to number of worksites, not number of people working; having 5 sites drop from needing 20 people to needing 15 is the same number of people freed up as having the Core drop from 100 people to 75 people, but the former is 5 times the discontent penalty as the latter. I'm similarly unfond of it from a narrative standpoint. Its core concept is that micromanaging laborers somehow results in needing fewer people to get the same amount of work done, applying only to Two Shifts in specific. This is pretty nonsensical on the face of it just for that last point, but is also part of a weird, frustrating trend with The Last Autumn; as we'll be seeing more with the Engineer Laws, this scenario seems to believe that leadership constantly micromanaging minions can produce superior results, with the only tradeoff being that the people being micromanaged will resent it. That's tempting to believe if you play a lot of games where the player can perfectly micromanage every single minion to optimize their results, which Frostpunk is broadly part of that collage of games, but that's pretty unrealistic to achieve in reality, and even if you can achieve it... well, plenty of people applying such a micromanagement-centric approach to real life have had it go quite wrong, and not necessarily by virtue of a revolt occurring or the like. Fundamentally, management from above is limited by its distance, the lesser quantity and fidelity of information compared to the people who are right there, not to mention the delays involve in relaying information up to management and then relaying orders back down from them. Unless you genuinely are surrounded only by people who are basically actively committed to making bad decisions, intense micromanagement is honestly prone to backfiring. I'd have preferred practically the opposite concept: increase shift requirements by 50% so everybody is working 8-hour shifts, with this improving Motivation when passed and reducing the Discontent penalty from making a jobsite work 24 hours. Mind, I'd also have preferred more in the way of toggles. Why can't I run regular Two Shifts at some places and its variant elsewhere? Why does passing this Law take away the old option forever? That doesn't make logical sense and it's not serving a clear gameplay purpose; this is in fact a bit of a recurring problem with The Last Autumn's Laws, that you have a fair few Laws that really should open up an additional option and instead they replace an existing behavior for no clear reason. The Adaptation and Purpose Laws in other scenarios largely avoid his type of jank; I'm not sure why this new problem haunts The Last Autumn. Next Law! Safety Procedures Requires: Nothing. Law Cooldown: 18 hours. All Generator tab buildings gain the Safety Procedures toggle. While active, Safety Procedures applies a -25% Efficiency penalty, but raises Workplace Safety by 1. Passing this Law immediately raises Motivation a little. Note that Safety Procedures usually acts as an additive modifier 'at the end': say you have 5 Workers on a building that accepts up to 20 Workers. That's 25% of the builing's potential, so they add 25% Efficiency. If you then activate Safety Procedures, this will (usually) subtract 25 from 25 and so the building will do no work, being at 0% Efficiency. I say 'usually' because sometimes it will radomly remove only 25% of whatever current Efficiency is, with no rhyme or reason I can determine (I think it's most prone to occurring when an Efficiency boost is in play?), but most of the time it oes the aditive penalty thing. This notably means it's important to maximize Worker count if you want to leverage Safety Procedures. Applying it to a maxed-out building gives the expected 25% reduction in effectiveness, whereas applying it to a worksite that's only got half its maximum Workers means you're halving the speed that work occurs at. It's really weird and I don't get why the devs did this. Except for Organ Transplants sometimes buggily adding 20% to what sgould be a 0% building, the only other Efficiency modifier in Frostpunk to do this addditive behavior is Automaton innate Efficiency: everything else is a percentage boost scaled to labor rate. (eg +20% makes each citizen at a Steelworks add 12% to Efficiency) It's so weir I gnuinely wonder if it's a bug or oversight. Aside this weird thing with its Efficiency, I quite like Safety Procedures as a Law and building ability. It works straightforwardly sensibly outside the Efficiency thing, it's perfectly reasonable for slowing the worksite down to make it less dangerous but also, y'know, slower, and it fits well with The Last Autumn overall trying to pressure the player into making unpleasant decisions bcause of their needs: you need to build the Generator on a timetable, so if you're falling behind schedule you're going to start getting a temptation to abandon caution and hurry things along at the cost of employee safety. It works nicely! Aside the Efficiency jank. Next Law! After-Hours Equipment Maintenancce Requires: Safety Procedures. Law Cooldown: 18 hours Immediately raises Discontent some, applies a permanent Discontent increase, but unsafe workplaces will have lower odds of an Accident triggering. Um, what? Alright, first of all I should explicitly clarify this does not change the Workplace Safety number; all it does is make it so a workplace that is sufficiently unsafe that Accidents are possible will have nebulously lower odds of such an Accident occurring at any given moment. This... makes it kind of awful. You can't tell if it's benefited you at all, and more importantly it's very viable to get through The Last Autumn having your workplaces largely or entirely at -2 Safety at worse; you have to be a -3 or worse for Accidents to have a chance of rolling. This Law also has absolutely no effect on the series of Accidents that are tied to specific steps of Generator construction and occur when the given building reaches a specific percentage of completion. As such, you are largely suffering a Discontent penalty for absolutely no benefit, making this a dumb trap Law. I'm also unfond of it from a more narrative standpoint. Proper maintenance of tools isn't already occurring? My employees being ordered to maintain their tools pisses them off and also doesn't tie up any of their time? Huh? What is this?? Next Law! Dispensary Requires: Nothing. Law Cooldown: 36 hours. Unlocks the Dispensary and initiates a quest to build one within 2 days. The building! Dispensary Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel Size 2x2 Manned at all hours by up to 5 Engineers. +1 Heat, supposedly does... something to help with Gravely Ill patients. need to actually test the damn thing patients prefer Infirmary ------------------------------ Next time, we start getting into the real meat of Labour Laws, starting with siding with the Engineers. See you then.