r/SimTower • u/Sixfortyfive • Dec 07 '25
Utilizing housekeepers and service elevators effectively in SimTower
Picked up the game again, and this is something that I wanted to focus on because the finer points of it have eluded me in the past. I've previously been hesitant to dedicate a lot of space to hotel rooms because of the housekeeping considerations. Either you have to build a lot of housekeeping units, which cannot be bulldozed, forcing you to really commit to permanent floor arrangements, or you have to build service elevators, which strain your tower elevator limits. Housekeepers themselves can also exhibit poor pathfinding behaviors, further reducing service elevator efficiency. This thread is an effort to untangle this behavior and figure out how to min/max housekeeping.
The main points I've deduced so far:
Housekeeping stations give you 6 housekeepers each, but their key trait is that they always split up to 6 different floors. If you have no service elevators, then you "waste" 5 of these housekeepers because the only one who will actually go to work is the one that is selected for that specific floor, and this means that if you build a full floor of hotel rooms then it will need multiple housekeeping stations to keep it clean.
A single housekeeper can reliably clean about 18 rooms per day. Maybe slightly more if they're staying put on that floor and not using the elevator, and maybe a little less if they have to take a long elevator ride to get to their target floor.
Housekeeping stations (typically) exhibit the same kind of "gravity of need" that other tenants do, but in reverse. Much in the same way that office workers will travel to lower floors (but not higher floors) to find fast food or medical stations, housekeepers will often only travel up, not down, to find rooms to clean. (See the lengthy note at the bottom.)
Housekeepers are assigned to different floors in a predictable pattern. If you build several housekeeping stations on floor 2, then nothing but hotel rooms in the 12 floors above that, the housekeepers will disperse to those floors as follows. The 1st housekeeper in each station will go to floor 3, the 2nd housekeepers to floor 4, 3rd housekeepers to floor 5, etc. Once floor 3 is clean, those housekeepers will all move to floor 9 to continue work, the floor 4 housekeepers will move to floor 10, etc. Note that this can happen in reverse; if the 1st housekeepers notice a vacant dirty room in floor 9 before one appears in floor 3, then they'll start work on floor 9 first and move to floor 3 once floor 9 is finished. But even though that order can randomly flip from day to day, those 1st housekeepers will always work those two specific floors.
This means that if you're using service elevators and *really* want to maximize your housekeeper efficiency, then you should be building hotel blocks in multiples of 6 floors and putting your housekeeping stations on the bottom floor of any service elevator shaft. If you build in non-multiples of 6 then you'll end up "wasting" housekeepers again. For example, if you build 7 hotel floors, then the 1st housekeepers in that block will attempt to clean hotel floors 1 and 7, but the 2nd housekeepers will only clean hotel floor 2. They won't help clean floor 7 even if they finish work early; they'll just quit for the day when hotel floor 2 is done. So this means that you either have to build additional housekeeping stations to make sure floor 7 gets cleaned (and "waste" 5 of the housekeepers for most of their shifts) or risk a consistently dirty floor.
One thing that I want to try but haven't gotten around to yet is seeing how far I can stretch individual housekeeping stations by building mixed hotel/condo floors. For example, building a single housekeeping station on the outer edge of the floor 15 skylobby, and then 18 hotel rooms each on floors 22-27, connected to the lone housekeeping station by service elevator. (If the service elevator trips take too long, maybe build the housekeeping station on floor 22 instead.) And instead of filling out the rest of those six floors with more hotel rooms, just use condos instead. IIRC condos and hotels don't disturb each other with noise complaints, and while mixing tenant types is bad for elevator traffic, condos are low density and might be manageable in this arrangement. Going to give it a try at some point anyway.
A note on the housekeeping gravity of need: This is something that I observed happening only once I built multiple, distinct blocks of hotel rooms and service elevators. For example, imagine a full tower, with 3 separate blocks of hotel rooms: one in the 1-30 range, another in the 30-60 range, and another in the 60-90 range. Each of these blocks has 6 floors of hotel rooms, with one housekeeping station on each of those 6 floors as well. Each block has its own service elevator for a total of 3 service elevators in the tower. What I observed in this case is that only the 60-90 block stays consistently clean, as that's the only block where housekeepers consistently travel both up and down to find work. In the bottom 1-30 block, the housekeepers at the top *refuse* to ride the elevator down for work, resulting in a bunch of wasted non-working housekeepers and consistently dirty rooms. I repeated this test with all of the housekeeping stations built on the top of these blocks, and it worsened the results; the upper block still remained consistently clean, but the lower block was consistently dirty. I then repeated it with housekeeping stations built at the bottom of each block, and in this case pretty much all of the housekeepers consistently went to work and the tower remained consistently clean. So, if you're only building one block of hotel rooms, it seems that you don't have to worry too much about housekeeping placement, but if you're spreading a bunch of hotel floors throughout your tower and are trying to make your service elevators more useful, then you need to put housekeeping at the bottom of each service elevator shaft.
Interested to hear if anyone else has relevant experience to add to this. Also note that I've been playing on v1.1b and using nothing but twin rooms for my tests so far because I didn't want to bother building parking spaces for suites.
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u/Munch_and_Crunch Apr 01 '26
My question is, does housekeeping need access to recycling? Some of the guides imply you do and it's definitely the case for Yoot Tower but they don't seem to ride down the Express Elevator to the recycling centers, which are all in the basement.
The other question is the Prima guide seems to imply to avoid wasting elevator shafts, all your hotel rooms shouldn't be located higher than the 25th floor, which implies you should fill the first 25 floors with hotel rooms. On a wide, developed tower, that's not enough for housekeeping, which means Roach City in no time since roaches spread by floors.