Cities: skylines forest industry not enough workers

Pretty often players can face the Cities Skylines not enough raw materials Issue in their industrial districts. The most puzzling thing is that usually it appears in the areas that are used to be established and nothing seemed to be changed there for a while. In this article, we will figure out how to fix and even prevent the not enough raw materials cities skylines issue

How to Get Raw Materials in Cities Skylines

Your industrial districts require raw materials to process and turn into products later sold to commercial zones. Those raw materials are either extracted by your ore/oil/farming/forest industry or imported. The imported raw materials are delivered by trucks, cargo trains, ships, and planes.

The Reason for City Skylines Not Enough Raw Materials

The reason for the issue is that somehow the needed material is not delivered to the plant that requires it for functioning. For example, your lemonade factory can’t produce lemonade without glass.

If the industrial building stops receiving the needed raw material then you see the corresponding icon above the area:

So this means that raw materials can’t be delivered to this industrial building in time to continue processing. Let’s learn how to fix not enough raw materials cities skylines industries issue.

Fixing Cities Skyline Not Enough Raw Materials Issue

First of all, you need to find out what exactly raw material this building was relying on. If it’s some kind of a specialized industry that needs ore for example, then the issue is related to a broken supply chain from your extracting facilities (though ore can be imported as well). If that’s a generic industry then the first thing you should look into is your transport system.

The thing is usually the issue appears when your city is growing. It could be easy to deliver the imported goods to your industrial area by trucks when the city was small but when it grows the roads may become full of service vehicles, buses, taxis, etc and so trucks with goods just stuck in traffic jams failing to deliver the needed materials in time.

Inspect your traffic, and figure out how goods were delivered to your industries. A good fix for Cities Skyline not enough raw materials Issue could be to create a dedicated road for your industrial complex. On the other hand, you may want to switch to another way of delivering goods – e.g. by adding a cargo train terminal to increase the capacity. 

To prevent the issue from happening you need to balance the growth of your industrial zones and the road capacity. Don’t grow zones too fast, try to distribute them for better transport access. Consider building hubs with further distribution to smaller zones – e.g. ship terminal accepts goods as an entry point and then cargo trains deliver them to different zones in other parts of the city.

For DLC Owners: Cities Skylines Industries not Enough Raw Materials Issue

If you have the Industries DLC then you can also use the warehouse functionality. This adds a lot of flexibility to your supply chains and more interest to the logistical part of the gameplay.

The idea is to place a warehouse that is specialized on the needed type of resources next to the plant that requires these resources to function. In this way, you will be able to accumulate the resource all the time and your factory won’t face the lack of it even due to traffic jams and so on.

Сities Skylines How to Get Coal

Sometimes your coal electric plant may lack coal to operate. In usual situations, the plant gets coal from your ore industry. If you don’t have one or it can’t fulfill the demand then the coal will be imported. The lack of coal happens when there are some issues with delivery which means trucks can’t reach the plant in time. To solve this, try to build a plant close to highways, cargo terminals, ports, etc to make sure trucks reach it in time.

The Cities Skylines 'not enough workers' problem is one of the most common issues you’ll run into when building your new metropolis. Problems are inevitable in Cities Skylines, but the fun of the game comes from the creative solutions you craft to deal with each one - but knowing what to do in the first place is sometimes a hurdle you need to overcome. So, if you’re confused about the Cities Skylines 'not enough workers' problem, then make sure to carry on reading for all the details and how to fix the issue.

• Get a new perspective with the Cities Skylines first person mod.

What Is The Cities Skylines 'Not Enough Workers' Problem?

Click to enlarge

The Cities Skylines 'not enough workers' problem is fairly self-explanatory, as it appears when your businesses (either commercial or industrial) do not have enough workers to operate at full capacity.

It has two stages of severity that is indicated by the colour of the notification, and has a few different variations that can help you identify what the specific cause of the problem is.

In general, the problem lies within how educated your population is, and if there are enough citizens of the right education level to fulfil the jobs that populate your city. 

For example, if you have zoned a large chunk of high-level office buildings, but your city only has an elementary school and maybe a high school, there is definitely not going to be enough educated workers to fill the jobs in the office. Conversely, a university-focused city is not going to have enough workers for the industry sector, so you’re going to have to make some changes to deal with that.

• Running into the Cities Skylines not enough buyers for products problem? Look no further than our guide for the causes and how to fix.

How To Fix Cities Skylines 'Not Enough Workers' Problem

Click to enlarge

There are realistically three main things you can do to solve the Cities Skylines 'not enough workers' problem, and they both can unfortunately be quite slow to fix. The fixes are as follows:

• Amend the education level of your population
• Increase your general population
• Bring your citizens closer to the jobs

While they may seem like obvious fixes to the issue of not having enough people to fill the jobs, they are unfortunately the only things you can do to make a real difference to this issue.

Amend The Education Level Of Your Population

Click to enlarge

As alluded to earlier, one of the main factors that dictates who takes what jobs in your city is how educated the people are. As a general rule, lower educated citizens fill your industry and low-level commercial jobs, whereas higher education leads your population to office and high-level commercial work.

To understand what you need to focus on in terms of education, you first need to identify what type of jobs are the ones without enough workers. If it is industry, then you’ll need to adjust the level of education available to your citizens -  for example, having a high school capacity of half the available population of an area.

If it is on the highly educated side of things though, your best bet is to invest in higher education like more high schools and a university. Highly educated workers will emigrate from other regions, but they can only go so far, so building your own services can be the right thing to do. The obvious main problem with this is that it takes a while for your citizens to become properly educated, so it is a more long-term fix, instead of an instant one.

• Increase your control even further with these Cities Skylines cheats.

Increase Your General Population

Click to enlarge

The most obvious answer to the problem is likely still going to work, and that is definitely the case here. What better way to create more workers than to increase your population, which in turn increases the amount of available people to take those jobs. 

You do of course need to have both the space and the RCI demand to satisfy this action, but demand for residential will likely be there already due to the available jobs. If it is not though, making your city more attractive through things like parks, attractions, and lower tax rates can be a good short term solution.

Bring Your Citizens Closer To The Jobs

Click to enlarge

One thing that you need to be careful of when expanding your population is making sure that those new citizens can actually get to the jobs you want them to fill. Traffic and road infrastructure is always at the core of a lot of issues in Cities Skylines, but making sure you have an efficient transport network could be the solution to your problem here. 

Either make sure that your workers are situated locally to the jobs, or build efficient transport to allow them to get to businesses easily. This can either be through direct public transport routes, or auxiliary roads designed solely for the purpose of getting them to work. 

So, that’s how to fix the Cities Skylines 'not enough workers' problem, going over the three main potential causes and fixes you can use to fill out your businesses. If it’s good that are causing you an issue though, make sure to check out our guide on the Cities Skylines 'not enough goods to sell' problem.

How do you fix not having enough workers in cities skylines?

Why do I have no demand for industry in cities skylines?

How do you use the forest industry in cities skylines?

Will there be cities skylines 2?