Why your tribesmen stopped working
Six reasons, in the order they are worth checking. All of them are states the game tracks and never shows you.
Soulmask gives a tribesman a job and then never tells you which of 31 internal states they are actually in. Several of those look identical from the outside — the tribesman is standing there, doing nothing, and the job is still assigned. Here is what to rule out, cheapest first.
1. You were offline too long
The single most common cause, and the one nobody mentions. After 7 days of the owning player being offline, that player's tribesmen go dormant and stop working entirely. The threshold is a server setting — Days offline before tribesmen go dormant — and a host can set it anywhere from 0 to 30. Creative-mode servers ship it at 30 instead.
If you came back from a holiday to a dead base, this is almost certainly why, and it is not a bug.
2. Their mood collapsed
There is a work state whose whole meaning is “too dejected to work”
(XinQingJuSang). Mood is governed by two server settings that move in opposite
directions: Mood growth rate and Mood decay rate. On a server where decay
outpaces growth, tribesmen will stall no matter what you assign them.
3. They are on auto-management
TuoGuan is a state, not a setting: a tribesman under automatic management is
not going to take your manual assignment. It looks exactly like being idle.
4. They are asleep, dormant, or sheltering
Three separate states — ShuiJiao (sleeping), XiuMian
(dormant) and BiNan (taking shelter) — all render as a stationary tribesman.
Sheltering is a response to danger; dormancy is the offline timer above.
5. You are over a cap
Recruitment and fielding have hard ceilings, and going over one does not always announce itself. See the caps that decide how many you can have.
6. The station, not the tribesman
Several work states are about a place rather than a person —
ShouLieChang (hunting ground duty), TrainGround and
WaitingForTrain. A tribesman waiting for a training slot is working as intended.