A work area is where a resident is allowed to work. If people are standing about saying they have nothing to do, this page is almost always the answer.

What counts as the settlement's ground

Three things add up to it:

1. The ground around the Frithstone - 30m by default (WorkRadius). This exists before you draw anything.
2. Circles you draw on the map, each with its own centre and radius. A circle may belong to one trade, or to all of them.
3. Keep-out circles, which win wherever they overlap an allowed one. This is how you carve the swamp out of a felling ground.

A circle must sit within 200m of the Frithstone (AreaMaxRange). An area belongs to a settlement; the leash is what stops one being drawn in the next biome.

Drawing them

Panel → Settings → Draw work areas on the map. Pick a trade with the row of tools, pick allowed or keep-out, then click on the map. Drag the radius to size it.

Place areas on the world map puts them on Valheim's own map instead, if you would rather see them at world scale.

Press Back to leave the screen. Escape also works and no longer leaves the map stuck over the panel.

Why a resident says there is nothing to do

Distances are measured flat. A circle drawn on a map is a circle on the ground: a berry thirty metres away and twenty-five metres up the hill behind it is thirty metres away, not thirty-nine. That was a real bug once and is worth knowing the answer to.

Everything else is reported. With VerboseLog on, a Forager prints the whole count:

nothing to pick - 190 pickable(s) in the world, 28 passed the first look,
162 already picked and regrowing, 27 outside the work area (6 anchor(s)),
1 in a farm field or cultivated, 0 not in this resident's allowed materials

and then the circles themselves:

the anchors are - r30m @0m from Frithstone, r60m @60m from Frithstone, ...

Read together those two lines answer the question completely: how much is ready, how much of it is inside your circles, and where the circles actually are.

The Hunter prints the same kind of breakdown, including how much game was passed over for being beyond its 60m commit range.

Allowed materials

Each resident also has a list of what it is allowed to touch - which trees, which rocks, which game. Panel → Settlers → the resident → the material rows. A gatherer that reports "not in this resident's allowed materials" is being obedient, not idle.

Ground the settlement has learned to avoid

If RememberBadGround is on, anywhere a resident had to be rescued from - a bank, a bog, a ledge - is remembered and treated exactly like a keep-out circle you drew. Turn it off if you would rather they kept trying.