In Rimworld you will often be micromanaging pawns as they desperately try to kill themselves, other colonists and that stack of chemfuel in your storage area. One thing that can help reduce the amount of mental breaks and fights is micromanaging tasks with a prioritization queue.
Making sure colonists are doing the right thing at the right time can make or break a colony. Tha ability to have a hunter hunt 5 different animals in a row may just save your colony. That is where queuing multiple tasks at once can come in handy.
How to Assign Multiple Tasks in a Queue to a Pawn
To have a pawn do multiple actions one after the other, firstly select them. Now, hold down the SHIFT key and right click on the item you want. Now, left click the task you want them to do. This will add the tasks to the queue so their current action is not interrupted.
You can see how many tasks the pawn has queued by selecting them and looking in their info panel at the bottom right. You can see in the image below that my pawn has 106 tasks currently queued.
Pawns will always finish their entire queue of tasks before doing anything else. This means they will ignore their basic needs. Be careful when adding too many tasks to the queue as colonists will not eat or sleep until they finish everything.
How to Remove a Prioritization Queue From a Pawn in Rimworld
Have you accidently assigned some order to a pawn and wish you could delete some in the middle? Unfortunately there is no way to see which actions have been queued to be performed. This means there is no way of removing some of the tasks in the middle at all. The pawn will simply perform every action as you first set it out.
You can however, completely remove the queue of actions that have been assigned to them. There are two ways to do this: You can select the colonist and then select the option to Clear prioritized work (C key). Alternatively, you can select the colonist and then prioritize a new task without holding the Shift key. This will just have them complete the one task you specified and clear the queue of remaining tasks.
How to Have a Colonist Only Do One Type of Work
If you are interested in having specific pawns for different types of work without micromanaging each task, luckily this is possible. The menu in which you can govern and decide this is the Work menu. Select Work at the bottom left of the screen.
At this screen, you can define different work types for different colonists. For example, if one colonist is an has a high medical skill and the other has a horrible level, you would only have the best colonist doing medical work.
You can also take this one step further and prioritize certain tasks over others manually. At the top left of this Work menu there is an option for Manual Priorities. This will change each job to a numbers system, there the lowest number job will be completed first. For example, if you have a colonist assigned to Cleaning and Doctoring where the clean has a priority of 1 and the Doctor job of 2, they will always clean before doing any doctor work. (Meaning they will basically never be doctoring at all!)
If you notice strange work priorities in your colony, you should try to tweak this menu to your liking. This will also let you have pawns that are specializing in certain tasks and not wasting their time on other things.
Love micromanaging and finding you aren’t getting enough of it? Try starting a second colony in Rimworld so you can stress about two colonies at once!