QoL: Make it less likely that obedient animals will eat cooked food

[METATERREN]

It is annoying when an animal is an a designated area that has 1. Hay and 2. Cooked meals, Beer, Spectago Tea and the animal eats the cooked meals.

Perhaps make it strictly tiered. Animals trained in obedience always goto the 1. (unprocessed food) in the hierarchy.

I'm pretty sure this system doesn't exist in the game. My dogs drink all my damn beer, and they seem to prefer spectago tea even more. They also eat valuables such as Fine cooked and Lavish meals. Crazy!

This would help avoid having to micromanage animal zoning for the animal area used to haul goods.

[NoImageAvailable]

With the vanilla balance it is actually better to feed your animals meals due to the improved nutrition value. IIRC a fine meal provides twice the nutrition of the ingredients used to make it, making it twice as effective as hay and other raw produce. A better fix would be doubling the nutrition value of hay so it actually makes sense to grow it, right now it is completely pointless.

[REMworlder]

I just ran the numbers and hay really is kind of useless.

Games like hearthstone have craftable feed types for animals. That might make the most sense to enable animals to sensibly avoid cooked food, since right now eating cooked food is the best thing the animal can do.

[Limdood]

from a nutrition per produced food perspective, yes, hay falls short.

from a nutrition per colonist labor hour perspective, i'd imagine hay comes out on top.

The shortfall with having to haul slightly more of it is offset by the time it takes to haul, cook, and haul the completed meal.  It also assumes that the animals aren't getting into the fine/lavish meal supply...

The suggestion is still valid - let us limit WHAT our animals eat by type, rather than just by allowed zones.

[Regret]

Lots of people ITT without pets.
Dogs will develop their own nutritional preferences just like humans do.
Even in real life it is very hard to train an animal not to eat something if it is in the place he usually receives his food.
I have seen quite a few animals trained to avoid certain areas though (kitchens, tables, beds, etc.) so even in real life zone forbidding is the best way to control what your animals do.

[Britnoth]

This would help avoid having to micromanage animal zoning for the animal area used to haul goods.

It takes all of 15-30 seconds to set up an animal area that does not include your food storage area. Unless you need to haul 100s of meals from one side of the map to the other for some reason, there is no reason to ever let your pets be hauling cooked meals.

Animals misbehaving by eating meals and getting drunk off beer is also hilarious, and should not be removed just because a minority are unwilling to use the perfectly working tools to control behaviour the game offers you. 

[Limdood]

the moment you set up that zone that doesn't include your food storage for your animals in 15-20 seconds....your animals can no longer haul food.

I'd rather my animals be hauling food than my colonists.

[Damien Hart]

the moment you set up that zone that doesn't include your food storage for your animals in 15-20 seconds....your animals can no longer haul food.

You can get around that using stockpile priorities; just set up a lower priority stockpile for raw food near your main stockpile(s), where your animals can access it. The animals will haul the food to the new stockpile, and your colonists will move the food on to the main one later.

[dosemeter]

The micromanaging fix would be to add this menu to each animal for can/can't haul.
Secondly the food menu would allow you to select what they can/can't eat.  Grass would have to be added to the list since it currently doesn't exist.  These selections would only become available after the animal is trained in obedience, then hauling.


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[Britnoth]

the moment you set up that zone that doesn't include your food storage for your animals in 15-20 seconds....your animals can no longer haul food.

I'd rather my animals be hauling food than my colonists.

False. The OP is about cooked food. Not raw food. You can differentiate between the two using different stockpiles and allowed areas for your hauling pets.

Also, using pets to haul the occasional dropped meal is horribly inefficient considering pets only check for haul work 50% of the time. Keep them on long distance hauling outside the base instead.

[Sometenranadom]

The suicider just makes sense, I mean I'm assuming they are all connected to one AI so any smart AI would know that throwing a punch hurts you fist IE losing the suicider, but hurts allot more to the one receiving it.