Eating priority.

[Amaror]

I found that morale is a lot harder to manage in alpha 6 and part of that is the eating priority. Eating should be the number one priority and colonists should do it before they reach the "urgently hungry" phase. Sometimes they seem to be so stuck on a job that they just won't eat. You also can't rightclick a meal and force them to eat.

I guess it was somewhat this way in the game before, but because there wasn't as much to do for your colonists it wasn't that much of a problem. Now with cooking, crafting and doctoring it gets really hard to manage morale sometimes and often requires a lot of micromanagment, like forbidding every job so colonists don't starve themselves to insanity.

[Shinzy]

If you draft and undraft your colonist they should prioritize eating/sleeping instead of the job they were doing if they're hungry or tired enough

[milon]

I've done the draft/undraft, and some things are still a higher priority than eating.  Like doctoring, IIRC.

[Ember]

had one that was starving, feeding the prisoners, then fed an injured colonist, then fed an injured prisoner, then went right to healing the colonists, had to disable those jobs so he could actually feed himself

[Shinzy]

*Waiting for that day when you lose your favourite colonist because the doctor was stuffing his face*

I haven't ran in anything like those yet.. but then my three doctors are two cooks and an empath, none of them ever take part in any fights so their hunger is usually well under control

but this is sounding like a real problem

[UrbanBourbon]

There is, or at least was, a definite fullness threshold when they'd eat. It was 20%, 25% or 30%. The way it worked was that as soon as the fullness bar got below that threshold, they'd still finish whatever they were doing currently, and THEN go eat. You could manually force them to re-evaluate the eating decision if you'd draft-undraft them in the middle of the job.

Most RimWorld jobs have multiple tiny steps during which the colonists re-evaluate their needs but research is something that doesn't have (many) clear phases, so you might find your researchers starving often or go to sleep quite a bit later than the other colonists. Crafting is like that, too, if a particular crafting job takes a long time, such as smelting slag. A way to combat this is simply modifying the crafting durations.

The problem might not necessarily be the starving but the distances that they have to traverse, so try to keep your workplaces close to the dining area. I, too, agree that the player should be able to "force feed" a colonist, or simply command all colonists to eat at once. That would be useful before combat operations. I'd totally love if I could set the limit at which they'd eat. Something like 20% is dangerously low, IMO. On the other hand, if you whip that number up to 50%, they'd just eat more often. The big issue is that sometimes in the morning, they're hungry, but not always hungry enough to eat breakfast, so they'd go do one 'step' of a job and then run back to eat, potentially wasting a lot of time on walking. That. Is. Super annoying. There really should be a separate check for the need for breakfast, or something that would ensure that they'd work as long as possible without interruptions. Maybe something like "always eat after sleeping 6 hours or more".

One more manual method to prevent super long trips back after 5 seconds of work is to just let them starve in the morning. Draft, starve, undraft. If they eat, OK. If not, starve them some more. It's important to manage the working distances. Don't dig metal that's asszillion miles away. Or if you do, expect it to take a while.

[BetaSpectre]

Just edit priorities and people will eat. Keep in mind that most people would prefer to have a hungry colonist instead of a dead one.

[Damien Hart]

Just edit priorities and people will eat. Keep in mind that most people would prefer to have a hungry colonist instead of a dead one.

Usually, a starving colonist stops being a colonist pretty quickly.

The issue occurs most often with doctor/patient and fire fighting. Most often after a battle, colonists are so busy dealing with this that they end up starving, them snap and leave/go crazy, which only exacerbates the problem.

The only way around it is to micromanage their priorities, which is tedious at the best of times, let alone when your base is an inferno and most of your colony is bedridden.

[MajorFordson]

Maybe it would help if colonists "job checked" hourly or something. Currently it feels like they will NOT check if they need to do anything else until the current job is finished.

Also I think firefighting and doctoring should, of course, be a priority over eating. You'd not stop giving life saving aid to a friend just because it was dinner time.

[Damien Hart]

Maybe it would help if colonists "job checked" hourly or something. Currently it feels like they will NOT check if they need to do anything else until the current job is finished.

Also I think firefighting and doctoring should, of course, be a priority over eating. You'd not stop giving life saving aid to a friend just because it was dinner time.

IRL, no you wouldn't. But you also wouldn't go psychotic because you we're am hour or two overdue for dinner.

[bobucles]

IRL, no you wouldn't. But you also wouldn't go psychotic because you we're am hour or two overdue for dinner.

You would if you were 3. 

But yes, the food system seems unusually punishing and colonists don't do quite a good enough job caring for themselves. Currently everyone waits to the very last second of their sanity, because meals restore to full so you need to min/max it. No one does that IRL. So what would work best?

Rimworld has enforced "sleeping hours", so maybe a "breakfast" hour would help? Starting the day on a half full stomach is just asking for trouble. Or maybe the stomach itself should be larger? It wouldn't be a problem for colonists to last twice as long without food, if they needed 2-3 meals to fill back up.

Then you can have conditions where colonists LOSE food very quickly. For example if they get sick they can't eat food or need soup or get vastly reduced effect from food. Or if they get a bad injury. Or if they witness a pile of corpses and decide to make an uglier environment.

[Lazarus]

Maybe it would help if colonists "job checked" hourly or something. Currently it feels like they will NOT check if they need to do anything else until the current job is finished.

Also I think firefighting and doctoring should, of course, be a priority over eating. You'd not stop giving life saving aid to a friend just because it was dinner time.

IRL, no you wouldn't. But you also wouldn't go psychotic because you we're am hour or two overdue for dinner.

I wouldn't be to sure... have you seen some people at restaurant when their meal is being cooked and their sitting there "God its taking so long!"

[Damien Hart]

I wouldn't be to sure... have you seen some people at restaurant when their meal is being cooked and their sitting there "God its taking so long!"

Sadly, I have. Though I wouldn't expect someone like that to last very long on a rimworld.

You would if you were 3. 

lol I am yet to see a three year old colonist though.   

But a predetermined meal time would be a good idea. It should have some sort minimum hunger check though, so a colonist who is starving for whatever reason doesn't eat, then meal time comes an hour after and they eat again. I'm not 100% sure on this, but i think colonists eat about twice a day too, so there would need to be two meal times.

[Drahkon]

Be nice to see eating priority increase as they get more hungry, if they are about to start taking damage from starvation there's no reason for it to not be top priority rather than going mad and killing the bedridden people they are supposed to be caring for. Same for feeding people, the more they need it the sooner they should be fed. I have to say that happens a bit fast as well, I get the hit to mood but people can survive quite a while with little food when needed.

On the topic of medical treatment, any chance of several tiers of medical kits? Maybe craft-able first aid kits < medical kits < nano meds < cybernetic kits.

[ChrisW]

Morning.. yes I noticed, and this actually allows for some facedesking at times.
Like when a cargo pod crashed, with food in it, and your starved colonist decides it's not yet time to eat, but work in the lower right corner of the map instead, to harvest some berries. Then as soon as he arrives, and his mood really took a hit from travelling through a pile of berries (i'd love that, actually. why do they hate it to be around food?) - say from a psychic attack ontop - and he finally gets hungry, he decides it is easier to go find that cargo pod food in the upper left map corner than going half a screen over to your food warehouse, or even reach down to the ground and eat a berry or 20. On the way there his mood decreases even more, then when he finally gets his premium food he has to eat off the ground in the wild, decreasing his.. oh, rampage time, sorry, no can eat now. Better run back to town to start some trouble and starve on the way there.

Quite frustrating.
I'd rather see someone who is starving automatically prioritize "grab the nearest food, no matter the quality or place, and eat it at a table if one is in a radius of 50 tiles, else on the ground". That would get rid of so many problems.