Most tycoon games treat workers as interchangeable. You hire someone, they have a number attached to them, and the number goes up if you train them or give them the right equipment. It works, but it also means the worker themselves is kind of invisible. They're just a stat that happens to walk around your colony.

I wanted the opposite. I wanted the quality of your workforce to actually matter, not as a background efficiency multiplier, but as something you deliberately built. That's where the idea for crafted workers came from: instead of hiring someone and hoping their stats are good, you build the worker yourself, choosing what they're going to be good at from the start.

The part I spent the most time on wasn't the crafting itself, though. It was making sure the choice you make at crafting time actually stays meaningful. Early versions let any worker eventually get good at everything if you trained them long enough, which quietly undid the whole point. If a generalist could catch up to a specialist given enough time, then the decision to specialize never really mattered. It just became a matter of patience.

So I added max level limits tied to how specialized a worker is. A generalist worker can be trained across a lot of skills, but none of them will ever hit the ceiling a dedicated specialist can reach. A specialist caps out much higher in their one focus, but they're stuck there. They're never going to be useful outside it. No amount of time changes that. The trade-off you make when you craft a worker isn't a temporary head start anymore, it's permanent.

That's the part I'm most interested to see how people react to: that your early crafting decisions lock in a real ceiling, not just a starting point.

Would you rather have a workforce of flexible generalists, or a smaller team of hard-capped specialists? Genuinely curious which way people lean before they've even played it.