Messages

I am pretty sure it's because it should be RawPotatoes NOT RawPotato. There was apparently some renaming of internal names lately it seems (last 1 or 2 version of game).

Edit:
You can try to see if you can fix it yourself by checking Defs/RecipeDefs/Recipes_AnimalH.xml for any occurence of RawPotato and changing it to RawPotatoes. It should fix it.

<tasteThought> DOES play a role in whether a colonists pick certain food or not after all. Just tested this. I was wrong, can't say I am surprised though. 

I used Simple Meal and Fine Meal, removed Fine meal bonus mood, in all other aspects they are the same. Locked a colonist in a room with both. He would choose either of them, almost always the one that was closer to him.

When I added AteKibble as a thought to Fine meal things changed. He would no longer pick Fine meal even when standing right next to it and having Simple Meal on the other side of the room. The only way to force him to eat it was to forbid Simple Meal.

Conclusion: Colonists take mood effect of Meal into consideration when deciding whether to eat something. This likely happens for any other item too (like a clothing piece, exactly the same in stats, quality and state but one from corpse from example).

This means there is more room to fiddle with food priorities if one wants to, which is almost certainly a good thing, though it makes balancing quite a bit more complicated. 

I am not gonna bother testing <optimalityoffset> since that seems like too much work and I would prefer to play the game now 


Edit:
One last thing. Currently you can use the Animal Ration Protein or either Pellets when crafting Fine / Lavish Meal. This is probably OP and also illogical. It would be best to either disallow their use for making human Meals or at least set the default recipe setting to off (currently it's on). No idea how to do any of those two though xD

Take this (at most) as a food for thought (very fitting considering this is about meals  ), since I am most likely wrong:

I view <tasteThought> as a mood effect only, not something pawns would take into consideration (this is the part where I can be very wrong) when deciding what to eat. A simple add-on effect activated when certain condition is met (in this case effect = mood loss, condition = is eaten by pawn). Not like it couldn't affect pawn food choice but to me having 3 filters to go through seems like a waste, though it is still a possibility.

This is probably easy to check ingame by editing two meals to be exactly the same and having one with negative mood and then observing what the colonists will do. If they pick both to eat or at least the one with the negative mood this should more or less prove that  <tasteThought> has no effect on their choice. Otherwise I was wrong and it plays a role.

<optimalityoffset> MIGHT be a value that modifies the <Preferability> , which I think is internally a (numerical) value. Pure speculation ofc  Again, nothing to directly affect pawn choice, rather just adjust the main decision mechanism.

<Preferability>  to me looks like the main thing that governs what the pawn will or will not eat and/or when. I have found several of them that are used in game (I might have possibly missed some!). I ordered them in what I believe is least desirable food to most desirable food.

DesperateOnlyForHumanlikes = (humans won't eat this, aka Hay if I understood it right)
desperateOnly   
RawBad
MealAwful
RawTasty
MealSimple
MealFine
MealLavish


I think the way you sorted this out is fine, as long as it works. Knowing why it works that way is of secondary priority. It is quite likely that only the devs know the internal workings of the values we use and are allowed to change (with the possible exception of a hardcore mod maker who spent a lot of time experimenting but might not see your question, ever, so can't answer it ).
As for what you want, your setting now might not allow colonists to eat the pellets at all, since it uses what Hay does and you can't eat Hay, right? (which you don't want) This needs checking in game. I might do it myself tomorrow if someone else isn't faster.

desperateOnly  might be the best bet with added negative thought (if you don't want to mod in another one you will have to make use of the existing ones ofc, though from the way you worded it, it sounds like that stuff would taste quite a bit worse than kibble  ), if it works the way I believe ofc 

It might be a mod conflict, that's always a possibility (and I would dare to say: as long as you use multiple mods, the most likely cause), probably my case too since no one else reported such a thing.


So yeah, the pawns simply walk to the storage area and start taking pellets into their inventory. I have seen cases ranging from a single one to over 300! I expected the animal handlers to carry some, for obvious reason but any pawn will take and carry them around.
Though I have a feeling it might have something to do with the food, since I tend to Draft them whenever I see them grabbing pellets, send them a small distance away and Undraft. They always go back for the pellets, however, when I send them to my dining room where Food is stored and Undraft there they basically always go and pick up a meal instead and forget about the pellets. In this case they have a shorter route to walk for a Meal than back to Pellets. But this is a pure speculation on my part from the observation.
Is there such thing like a *flag* for items (meal in this case - something like "is_a_kibble") that it is animal food and they shouldn't consider it for their nutrition requirement under normal circumstances? (probably not since they will eat kibble if nothing else is available but I am trying to find a straw to hold to  )


In any case, I checked my mod list and those are the most likely candidates for interference due to messing up with colonist hauling/carrying:
While You're Up (don't think so but mentioning just to be safe)
Stack Merger
Stack XXL (this one seems weird here, but maybe they would just pick up a small number normally but due to my setting they pick up a ton - either 10x or 20x whichever category Pellets falls into, probably the former)

Though I don't seem to have any problems with my mods (no errors of any kind in the console) and the only problem I saw was that colonists didn't pack all the Pemmican I needed for caravan which I found out was thanks to using Extended Storage mod (they did not pick everything I told them to up and moved on to form it... after deleting the container holding the Pemmican and using vanilla storage it worked flawlessly).

Edit:
Just witnessed the very same behaviour I described when Drafting colonists on 2 pawns at the same time. Send them to dining room, undrafted, they rushed in for Meals. I have a feeling it might not be a mod conflict after all. If you want I can record and upload it somewhere for you to witness.

Edit2:
Force fed a Protein Pellet to a hungry pawn without a food mood boost present. No bad mood from that (unlike kibble). This makes Protein Pellets the most nutrient efficient foodstuff available, though you get no mood boosts. 

Edit3:
I am no modder (nor do I know much about Rimworld modding), Checked the vanilla stuff for Kibble and yours. You do miss the <tasteThought> part in the defs, which I noticed ingame already. The vanilla kibble also uses <preferability>RawBad, while yours has DesperateOnly, dunno what is the difference, might not be a problem. The <optimalityOffsetHumanlikes> seem to always be -30, not sure whether increasing this can be done or if it will have an effect. I might try changing some of the values myself to see if the behaviour changes, hopefully my PC won't catch fire or destroy my save. 

Final Edit:
I think I solved it, everything looking OK after 3 hrs+ of play time. I changed the <preferability> to RawBad and added <tasteThought> same as Kibble (mostly for balance reasons, I hoped the first change might be enough to fix it) and behold! No one hoards that stuff anymore, I have seen two pawns with pellets in inventory, but both were animal handlers, I have seen them use it to train animals and they only carried (low) single digit amount.

All right! Thanks for the feedback. The github link has been updated and the def files have been corrected.
I apologize for the previous version, I used PlantPotato instead of RawPotato in a derp moment of mine. Well, its corrected now. Have fun.

Do you know why my colonists keep picking up and carrying around Protein Pellets? They don't seem to eat it (god forbid!) so I don't know what's going on, only that my animals suddenly have nothing to eat since all their rations are carried by colonists for some reason! 


Awesome mod btw, it made my life much easier while allowing me to keep lots of animal friends around!

i couldn't make the veggie and protein animal rations with Vanilla version. I changed the thingDefs in Recipes_AnimalH (RecipeDefs) in the mod, to RawPotatoes, RawCorn, RawRice, and Hay, and I could make the rations and then pellets. I just post this in case others have a similar problem.

Can confirm, this is needed for Vanilla version to be able to make ANY pellet. You can easily check that for yourself by putting up a job and there are no items to filter... since they use wrong names in the Recipe for the plants... the RawMeat is the only one that is ok. The above fix solves that. Also, Protein Pellets are strongUER.


Edit:
For some reason, my colonists keep picking up and carrying with them Protein Pellets. They don't eat them, just carry them around, I am baffled by this.