Dungeon Settlers Work Priorities Guide: How to Assign and Optimize Settler Tasks
I’ve sunk more hours than I’d like to admit into colony sims. RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, a criminal amount of time in Frostpunk — I thought I’d seen every flavor of “my base fell apart because of one dumb setting.” Then I picked up Dungeon Settlers, and it humbled me in a genre I thought I’d mastered.
If you haven’t played it yet: it’s a mashup of grid-based colony management (think RimWorld) bolted onto real-time-with-pause dungeon crawling (think the old-school tactical RPGs your uncle still won’t shut up about). You run a surface settlement and send a party underground to fight monsters and loot ruins. Sounds great on paper. In practice, it means you’re managing two games at once, and if you get the work priorities wrong, both of them fall apart simultaneously.
I learned this the hard way on my second run, when my blacksmith — the only guy with decent Intelligence in my starting crew — wandered off mid-shift to pick up twigs. My weapons queue sat empty for two in-game days while my “elite” combat squad went into a dungeon with starter gear. It did not go well.
So here’s the guide I wish someone had handed me before that run. No fluff, no pretending every setup is “optimal” — just what actually works, what I got burned by, and how I fixed it.
Why Work Priorities Are the Real Boss Fight
Here’s the thing nobody tells you up front: your settlers are not employees. They’re closer to toddlers with weapons. Left to their own devices, they’ll chase whatever task is nearest and shiniest, not whatever your colony actually needs. Your best researcher will absolutely drop everything to go pick lettuce if you let them.
The game’s priority system ranks tasks on a numbered scale — 1 is “drop everything and do this now,” and higher numbers (or a flat “off”) mean “only bother if there’s genuinely nothing better to do.” When two tasks share a priority tier, the game falls back on its own internal pecking order, which is not something you want deciding your colony’s fate for you.
Get this system right, and your base runs like a well-oiled (if slightly grim) machine. Get it wrong, and you’ll watch your smiths abandon the forge, your farmers ignore rotting crops, and your dungeon squad show up to a fight underfed and under-equipped.
The Six Jobs You’re Actually Juggling
Before you touch a single priority slider, it helps to actually understand what you’re assigning. Here’s my no-nonsense breakdown:
- Expedition / Guard Duty — Combat readiness and base defense. Wants high Strength and Agility. This is your front-line crew.
- Research — Tech unlocks, from better tools to camp lighting. Lives and dies on Intelligence.
- Construction — Buildings, beds, clearing rubble. Needs raw physical strength.
- Farming — Growing and harvesting food. Domestic/nature-leaning settlers shine here.
- Crafting / Smithing — Turning raw ore and hides into actual gear. Extremely skill-sensitive — a bad smith wastes good materials.
- Hauling & Cleaning — The unglamorous glue holding everything together. No special stats needed, but it needs someone, constantly.
That last one is the one people underrate the hardest. I ignored hauling for an entire early game once, convinced my “real” jobs mattered more. My storage room ended up a chaotic mess of half-sorted iron ore and my mood stats tanked because nobody was cleaning up the mess either. Don’t be me.
My Go-To Starting Setup (Four Settlers, Day One)
You typically start with four settlers on a patch of barren land. Here’s the priority matrix I run every single time now — it’s not the only way to do it, but it’s saved me from more early wipes than anything else I’ve tried.
| Settler Role | Priority 1 | Priority 2 | Priority 3 | Disabled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Brainiac (highest Int) | Research | — | Hauling/Cleaning | Construction, Farming, Crafting |
| The Builder (highest Str) | Construction | Hauling | Cleaning | Everything else |
| The Farmer (best domestic skill) | Farming | Crafting (basic only) | Hauling/Cleaning | Research, Construction |
| The Flex Guard (combat/balanced) | Combat, Hauling | Cleaning | — | Highly specialized tasks |
A few honest notes on this table, from someone who’s actually run it:
- Your Researcher should basically live at the research station. Giving them a Priority 3 fallback on hauling means they’re not totally useless when research stalls out waiting on materials, but they’re not getting distracted either.
- The Builder swinging over to hauling once construction queues are empty is what keeps materials flowing without babysitting them constantly.
- The Farmer doing light crafting when crops don’t need attention was something I resisted at first — felt like a waste of a farmer — but it genuinely keeps consumables topped up without pulling anyone off their main job.
- That Flex Guard is doing double duty on purpose. Early game, you don’t have the population to dedicate a pure guard, so this hybrid setup keeps your camp defended and your stockpiles tidy.
The Part Everyone Forgets: Surface and Dungeon Are the Same Economy
This is the bit that got me on my second playthrough, and I think it’s the single most underrated mechanic in the whole game. When you send a party underground, those settlers are gone. Not “on a shift,” gone entirely from your labor pool until they resurface.
If your dungeon party happens to include your only farmers and haulers — which is easy to do by accident if you’re just grabbing your “best” fighters — your surface base grinds to a halt while they’re away. Nobody cooks. Crops rot on the vine. The mess piles up and morale craters. I once came back from a dungeon run to find three settlers in a full-blown mental breakdown because nobody had been assigned to clean for four straight days.
My rule now: before sending anyone underground, I check who’s left topside and make sure at least one farmer, one hauler, and one crafter are still on duty. It sounds obvious written down. It is not obvious in the moment when you’re excited about a new dungeon layer.
Mid-Game: Time to Get Ruthless
Once your population grows past that initial four, the flexible “everyone does a bit of everything” approach stops working. You need to get specialized, almost uncomfortably so.
The Dedicated Blacksmith: Find whoever has traits boosting crafting speed or quality, lock them to Crafting Priority 1, and disable basically everything else except a low-priority hauling fallback (I use Priority 4) so they only leave the anvil when their local materials genuinely run dry.
The Hauling Army: As your dungeon runs go deeper, the sheer volume of loot coming back to base will bury your logistics if you’re not ready. I now aim for roughly a fifth of my total population sitting on dedicated Hauling/Cleaning duty at Priority 1. It feels like overkill until the first time it isn’t.
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Mistakes I Keep Seeing (Because I Made Them First)
A few hard-won lessons, presented without the guide-writer politeness:
- Don’t let your combat squad do heavy labor. I used to have my fighters help with construction between dungeon runs to “keep them busy.” Big mistake — they’d show up to the next expedition stressed and drained. Keep their domestic priorities low, like 3 or 4, and let them actually rest.
- Don’t queue up huge construction projects all at once. Drop twenty build tiles at the same time and every construction-capable settler will pile onto it, abandoning whatever else they were doing — including farming. I build in small batches now specifically to avoid this.
- Pay attention to personal traits, not just stats. A settler prone to stress should never be parked alone on an isolating, high-pressure task. I lost a promising smith to a mental break once because I ignored their background and just looked at their crafting number.
- Environment matters as much as the priority number. You can have a perfect priority setup and still tank your efficiency if people are working in the dark, in the cold, or surrounded by garbage. Light, warmth, and a roof aren’t optional extras — they’re part of the productivity math.
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Final Thoughts From Someone Who’s Restarted This Game More Than Once
Dungeon Settlers rewards the kind of obsessive tinkering that colony sim fans already love, but it punishes you twice as hard if you treat the surface base as an afterthought to the dungeon crawling. The priority system looks simple on the surface — a grid of numbers — but the way those numbers interact with traits, mood, and who’s currently underground is where the game actually gets its teeth.
My honest advice: don’t copy any single setup blindly, mine included. Use it as a starting skeleton, then watch what your specific settlers’ traits and stats are telling you, and adjust from there. That’s the part that took me three failed colonies to actually internalize, and it’s the difference between a base that survives and one that quietly falls apart while you’re busy having fun underground.
