Jobs & Assignments
Every worker gets a day job and a night job, set on the Girl Management screen and carried out during the weekly turn. What happens between “you assigned it” and “here is the report” is more than one question, and this page separates them, because they have different answers and different fixes.
The five questions behind one assignment
Section titled “The five questions behind one assignment”Right now the game asks these in order. Later it will show you more of them directly, but the sequence already exists under the hood.
- Can she be given this job at all? Some assignments have hard rules. Only one Matron per building and only one Torturer across all of them, and neither can be a slave. Arena beast fights need a beast in your stock. A failure here is absolute: no roll, no partial result, and the game tells you why on the spot.
- Is the post free? One Matron per building is not a statement about her, it is a statement about the building. A perfectly suitable worker can be turned away simply because the post is taken.
- Will she agree to do it? This is the refusal roll, and it is the one players most often mistake for a bug. See below.
- How well does she do it? Her stats and skills feed a performance score that decides her pay band and which version of the report you read.
- What actually happened? The outcome, including luck: who she met, what she found, whether she got hurt.
A worker can be perfectly suited to a job and still refuse it. Those are different questions, and treating them as one is why “she has great Combat, why won’t she go” feels broken when it is not.
What actually makes a worker refuse
Section titled “What actually makes a worker refuse”Refusal is rolled fresh for each shift. The pressure to refuse is built from the job on one side and the worker on the other.
The job pushes back with two properties. How demanding it is, and how frightening it is. Cleaning a room is neither. Exploring the catacombs is both, and arena fighting more so. These are fixed properties of the work, not of her.
She pushes back, or does not, with these:
| Makes her more likely to refuse | Makes her less likely |
|---|---|
| High Spirit, meaning she stands by her own judgement | Happiness |
| Hate toward you | Love toward you |
| Obedience below 50 | Obedience above 50 |
| Fear of you | |
| Libido, for work she can enjoy | |
| Confidence, which specifically blunts fear of dangerous work |
Obedience works in both directions from the midpoint. Training it past 50 does reduce refusals; it is not a threshold you tick off.
Things that do not touch the refusal roll, despite what you may have read: your house cut, tiredness, slave status, a gang assigned to guard the building, and the Matron. Some of those matter a great deal elsewhere. None of them is an input to this decision.
The Matron deserves a note, because the connection is real but indirect: she raises Happiness for miserable workers and takes exhausted ones off duty to rest. Happiness is a refusal suppressor, so a Matron does reduce refusals over time. She just does not touch the roll itself, and adding one will not fix a worker who hates you.
Two things bypass the roll entirely. A worker under the effect of a control item complies without objecting, and your conduct policy for her can forbid certain work outright, which is not a refusal but a rule you set.
Refusing recently does not make the next refusal more likely. It used to, and one unlucky roll could start a spiral nothing pushed back against. The log still tells you she refused last week; it costs her nothing.
Explore Catacombs
Section titled “Explore Catacombs”Sending a worker below the city is the most-reported job in the game, so it gets its own section.
This is not the gang mission of the same name. Gangs can also be sent to the catacombs, and that is a separate assignment with its own crew, its own report, and its own rules. See Gang Missions. The two share only the standing capture order on the Gangs screen, which applies to both.
How a shift resolves
Section titled “How a shift resolves”She goes down, and the first question is whether she finds anything. An “encounter” means running into one to three inhabitants: beasts or monster girls. That starts a fight, and winning it is what produces gold, items and captives.
Her chance of finding something is her Combat or Magic, whichever is higher, with a floor of 25%. A complete beginner still meets something roughly every fourth shift. Skill raises that all the way to certainty, so training a delver is well worth it; it is simply not the price of getting started.
What a shift is worth
Section titled “What a shift is worth”| How it ended | What she gets |
|---|---|
| She refused | Nothing. She never went down. |
| She searched and found nothing | +5 Experience. No Combat or Magic: she did not fight anyone. |
| She fought and lost | +5 Experience and +1 Combat. Losing a fight still teaches you about fighting. |
| She fought and won | Gold, possible items, possible captives, and her usual skill gains. |
| Nothing is installed to meet | Nothing, and the report says so. |
That last row is worth knowing. If your installation has no creature content, the catacombs are genuinely empty and no amount of training or patience will change it. The report names it as a content problem rather than dressing it up as an atmospheric empty crypt.
A beginner therefore always has a way forward. She meets something regularly enough to learn from it, and the shifts where she does not still teach her the ground. The one thing that pays nothing is refusing, because she did not go.
Loot is unchanged by all of this. What drops, and how rare it is, works exactly as it always has. The famous story of someone’s worker coming back with one enormously valuable item was luck, not a mechanic you can farm: item drops are drawn without regard to rarity.
Where this is heading
Section titled “Where this is heading”Picking a job for a worker means guessing. You look at her numbers, you look at the job name, and you work out the rest by sending her and reading the report. The plan is to answer that on the assignment screen instead: a job would say which of her abilities it is actually about, and the screen would show how well she suits it.
Not one number for everything. “Can she be given this job at all”, “does she suit this kind of work” and “will she agree to do it” stay separate answers, because a worker can suit a job perfectly and refuse it, and another can be willing and hopeless at it. One rating covering both would tell you neither.
A rating would not move because you handed her a sword. How well she suits the work is about who she is, not what she is carrying this week, and gear belongs to how a shift goes. Nor would it stop an unskilled worker from trying: someone who is not good enough yet should be allowed to go and do badly so you can see it and decide, so the screen would warn you rather than block the assignment.
None of this is in the game. No thresholds or formulas are published until it is, because they are still being tested and are likely to move.