Characters will randomly stop doing jobs

[Belth]

I hear a lot of people have issues with mining stone. The problem for me extends far beyond just that. Say I have 6 guys in my squad. I order 5 of them to mine iron, copper and the 6th dude I send to explore distant lands. I stay on the explorer while the other dudes remain far away mining just where i left them. After say 1, probably 2 minutes of gameplay I find to my utmost surprise that the 5 guys that I left mining have decided to stop. Their inventories are not full, the mined that they work on have like 1 or 2 ores (they are not full), the workers were not attacked. So I wonder why do they stop working and make me constantly switching to them to re-initiate my orders instead of just focusing on my 6th guy exploring. I have a feeling that every time I cross zones with 1 character the characters in the other zones magically start forgetting their orders.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I am not talking about problems when assigning permanent jobs. The issue occurs when I select the char and right click over a mine. The character will work it for about 2 minutes and then it just stops. This happens especially when I switch between characters in different zones.

[pigiron]

When you click on their portraits, has their goal shifted from "operating machine" to "aimless"? In other words, does the AI think they are mining ore but no ore is actually being mined/no skill increases from mining ore?

Reason I'm asking is that characters sent to far off places tend to go "aimless" and lose their movement orders from time to time unless you guide them. This issue has been around for a while now (I just learned this today *grin*), and it may be related to what you're experiencing.

[Belth]

You got it absolutely right. This is exactly what's happening to my guys. I hope the devs get around to fixing that annoying thing. Also the game interprets "far off places" in comparison to the currently active character. As long as I stay close to the miners they won't stop digging but as soon as I switch to someone in a different zone the miners start getting "Aimless" status.

[pigiron]

Have you tried making your wanderer his own squad, and left your miners their own dedicated squad? I don't know if it will help or not, but it seems worse when I have say, ten guys in my squad with three of them at home farming/mining/crafting and seven out scavenging the ruins for ancient science books than when I keep one squad at home with three and one abroad with seven.