What does Building Performance do?

[The Founder]

Building performance is affected by:
- number of colonists in a workshift
- Specialistastions of colonist in a workshift
- selecting Heavily Workload increases it
- soil quality for open farms changes it

But the information I would need is what it actually does.
The ingame help got nothing.
The Wiki got nothing.
The best I could find is some post on the Forum from 2018, with no Response or Reaction - so I have no idea if that was ever even how it worked.

What does "Building Performance" do for a farm?
What about a Factory/Workshop?
What about a Service Building?

 

[Gilbert95]

The tooltips don't tell you this, but I have played the game enough to know they boost the relevant output

Farm -> more food
Factory -> more widgets
Service building -> more comfort

My casual observation suggests the relationship between performance and output is roughly linear, but I have never tried to detemine the actual formulas behind this. As much as I enjoy SM, the lack of detailed tooltips compared to mainline PDS games does annoy me at times.

 

[The Founder]

Farm -> more food
Factory -> more widgets

That is what post I linked above said too, but I am wondering how that works with food that needs 5 days to grow and may get anything from 1 to 3 shifts?
How are shifts without workers handeled? Is one shift with many workers better then many with a few workers?

The Service buildings propably just use a snapshot of the value when the Colonsit walks inside, but for the rest 1 full shift might not equate to a single production cycle.

 

[pitkanen]

For most production buildings... (base production)*(Building Performance/100)
For sanity/health from medics - same as production I THINK
For most service comfort buildings (lets say a building has a base service comfort of 60)... Service Comfort = 50 + 10 *(Building Performance/100)

For production - It is usually best to have them all do 1 shift (electricity reasons). Avoiding night shifts is also a priority for production due to sanity - especially outside.

For comfort - Keep in mind that are two checks - are they being denied a service they want? If so they lose comfort. Second check - is the service comfort of that building higher than their current comfort. You main goal is to make sure services are open when colonists want to use them so they don't lose comfort. Having service buildings open for more shifts is usually preferable over a few fully staffed shifts.

You can strategically fully staff comfort buildings in the early game. If you have all miners working first shift, fully staff the bar second shift!

 

[Gilbert95]

For most production buildings... (base production)*(Building Performance/100)
For sanity/health from medics - same as production I THINK
For most service comfort buildings (lets say a building has a base service comfort of 60)... Service Comfort = 50 + 10 *(Building Performance/100)

For production - It is usually best to have them all do 1 shift (electricity reasons). Avoiding night shifts is also a priority for production due to sanity - especially outside.

For comfort - Keep in mind that are two checks - are they being denied a service they want? If so they lose comfort. Second check - is the service comfort of that building higher than their current comfort. You main goal is to make sure services are open when colonists want to use them so they don't lose comfort. Having service buildings open for more shifts is usually preferable over a few fully staffed shifts.

You can strategically fully staff comfort buildings in the early game. If you have all miners working first shift, fully staff the bar second shift!

These formulas make sense based on my observations, however there is another factor to consider with production buildings. The calculation is performed over time, I am guessing once per in-game hour. For standard production buildings this means the effective output per sol is sum of the outputs each hour, and the building performance can vary over the course of the sol based on number of workers in the shift (and quality of workers), working overtime, and probable some others I am not thinking of off the top of my head. This means that if you only staff one shift, you are effectively getting one third of the the projected output, as under normal conditions no progress is made during empty shifts. The exception to this is farms, where you can only staff one shift. For this my assumption is that the game sets an average performance based on the one worked shift and applies that to the remaining un-worked shifts. You can see all this if you stare obsessively at the accumulating outputs over the course of the sol.

 

[pitkanen]

That is correct. Each shift makes their own bit. I'm not sure how often the game does its check for "Make (X progress)*(Performance) towards a new machine part", but watching a "Double Production Ruleset" Machine Parts Factory plug away, I think it is more often than once per in-game hour. I've never seen 2 new machines parts appear at the same time... but I never just stared at it.

When I said 1 shift - I was saying if you had like 5 workers in an machine parts factory, you might as well have them be in 1 shift rather than spreading them out (unless you concerned that they'll over-capacity comfort buildings).
More workers always means more output (unless they are wrong specialization rebels, or drones aren't keeping up, or the new worker is an idiot).