Meal priority issues!

[joaonunes]

Sorry for the double topic but this issue bothers me every single time I play this game...
Why do my colonists keep eating raw food instead or decent meals?

I have a pretty heavily modded game, if I don't have over 50 mods installed so far I shouldn't be far from it... Maybe "Extended Traits" could be a possibility or "Refactored Work Priorities", but I doubt it...

That's basically it... I have about 100 fine meals and 50 simple meals but my pawns keep eating raw potatoes...
What can I do about it?

[faltonico]

Sorry for the double topic but this issue bothers me every single time I play this game...
Why do my colonists keep eating raw food instead or decent meals?

I have a pretty heavily modded game, if I don't have over 50 mods installed so far I shouldn't be far from it... Maybe "Extended Traits" could be a possibility or "Refactored Work Priorities", but I doubt it...

That's basically it... I have about 100 fine meals and 50 simple meals but my pawns keep eating raw potatoes...
What can I do about it?

They might be eating what they are carrying in their inventories, if they are assigned to handling, they will most likely have raw food.

I'm not sure, but it might also be related to the fact that when a pawn is going to pick up something from a stack, it makes it unavailable to anyone else. So, if any other pawn decides to eat at that time, it will pick up the second best thing, and if that is taken as well to the third and so on. Do you have installed the increased stack mod? 100 meals would be a single stack.

[joaonunes]

They might be eating what they are carrying in their inventories, if they are assigned to handling, they will most likely have raw food.

I'm not sure, but it might also be related to the fact that when a pawn is going to pick up something from a stack, it makes it unavailable to anyone else. So, if any other pawn decides to eat at that time, it will pick up the second best thing, and if that is taken as well to the third and so on. Do you have installed the increased stack mod? 100 meals would be a single stack.

Yes I do have that mod... I guess that explains it Pawns are not carrying potatoes they are moving across my colony into the freezer to grab some raw food to eat, I guess the solution is to either make more food types or make more food so it will spread to more squares.

Thanks for the help! This issue started becoming serious when I was coming closer to my current population numbers (~20 colonists).
Making more food should be easy though... I have 2k shrooms and 3k veggies in the freezer (shrooms count as meat ) so I guess that is what I'll do first.

The other thing I should do asap is to assign more than one square for food storage (right now fine meals have its own square, simple meals another square, etc... Freezer space started decreasing a lot because of 5 stack meals or stacks of 30-40 vegetables)

[faltonico]

You can also try and install vegetable garden, it adds a very good variety of foods. So colonist don't have a single stack option to choose from.
The newest version is not save friendly as its author said, but the second most recent is working just fine.

[Thyme]

Pawns prioritise food within a certain radius (14?), they will take any food from there before checking tiles further away. That's why I have a stack of fine meals in my freezer on the side closest to my bedrooms (in addition to one close to the dining room).

Sent from my HTC

[joaonunes]

Pawns prioritise food within a certain radius (14?), they will take any food from there before checking tiles further away. That's why I have a stack of fine meals in my freezer on the side closest to my bedrooms (in addition to one close to the dining room).

Sent from my HTC

That seems a bit low value... My pawns literally cross the entire colony to get food and the meals are right on front of the door, vegetables at the back of the freezer

[joaonunes]

You can also try and install vegetable garden, it adds a very good variety of foods. So colonist don't have a single stack option to choose from.
The newest version is not save friendly as its author said, but the second most recent is working just fine.

I also use that mod and have some salads ready, but I guess 3 food types is still low xD maybe some soup and some other meals might help thanks for the suggstion

[Wishmaster]

When searching for food, Pawns calculate a score for every food source they can reach and pick the food with the best score.
That score mainly depends on distance and meal quality (simple, fine...).
If your pawns eat raw potatoes instead of meals it's might be because potatoes are much closer than meals.

To diagnostic this, you can try to switch to development mode and check the "Draw food search from mouse" option found somewhere in the developments tools on the top of the screen.

[joaonunes]

When searching for food, Pawns calculate a score for every food source they can reach and pick the food with the best score.
That score mainly depends on distance and meal quality (simple, fine...).
If your pawns eat raw potatoes instead of meals it's might be because potatoes are much closer than meals.

To diagnostic this, you can try to switch to development mode and check the "Draw food search from mouse" option found somewhere in the developments tools on the top of the screen.

As I said, meals are closest to the freezer's door, raw food at the back, meaning that pathfinding should find the meals first.

I'd guess the issue here is what "faltonico" said: since I have a high-ish number of colonists (~20) and the food is all stacked into one square when one pawn goes to get a meal it prevent every other pawn from getting that meal from that exact square...
It turns out several pawns can grab food from the same square, I just checked it, so the problem is elsewhere... Maybe the distance to food is not calculated by the pathfinding (as in where the pawn will actually walk) but by linear distance to the food through walls...
I'll try the dev mode tool to figure out what is going on. Thanks for the feedback!

EDIT: Used the tool and found out that they will pick food in this order:
Packaged Survival Meal > Fruit (any type of fruit)/Grilled Vegetables/Salad/Fine Meal/Mushrooms > Simple Meal > Raw Food
All the food types separated by a "/" are picked by different order depending on the side of the colony pawns come from, values are very similar and are higher than the others by just a point or two.
The issue is they eat Mushrooms (I mistaken them for potatoes ) instead of normal meals, which is bad for me because they are my main source of "meat" and need it to craft meals. I don't care much about the fruit being picked first, but the shrooms are a real pain to see being consumed raw... What can I do to change it? Edit the nutrition value of the food?

[Wishmaster]

Yes it's calculated with a linear distance, you'll see that when using the development tool.

[joaonunes]

Yes it's calculated with a linear distance, you'll see that when using the development tool.

See my edit above pls

Also I should be editing the "preferability" tag in the defs, not nutrition... It's at "RawTasty" and I could change it to "RawBad" like all other non-fruit type vegetables

EDIT: easy fix!

Code Select Expand

<ThingDef ParentName="PlantProductBase">
    <defName>Rawmushroom</defName>
    <label>mushroom</label>
    <description>Raw protein-rich mushrooms. Nice to eat, even when raw.</description>
    <graphicData>
      <texPath>Things/Veg/mushroom</texPath>
    </graphicData>
    <thingCategories>
      <li>MeatRaw</li>
      <li>PlantFoodRaw</li>
    </thingCategories>
    <statBases>
      <MarketValue>4</MarketValue>
    </statBases>
    <comps>
      <li Class="CompProperties_Rottable">
        <daysToRotStart>14</daysToRotStart>
      </li>
    </comps>
    <ingestible>
      <foodType>VegetableOrFruit</foodType>
      <tastesRaw>true</tastesRaw>                              <!--Added tag-->
      <preferability>RawBad</preferability>                       <!--was RawTasty before-->
      <nutrition>0.12</nutrition>
    </ingestible>

  </ThingDef>

Now it has the exact same food value as raw potatoes! No more pawns eating my mushrooms raw

[faltonico]

I also use that mod and have some salads ready, but I guess 3 food types is still low xD maybe some soup and some other meals might help thanks for the suggstion

Off topic: Eating the more elaborate foods give paws buff to filtration, consciousness, movement and other stats, may be worth making them. If meat is what you are lacking, grow beans and make tofu out of it (you can make soy milk if you want too xD).

[joaonunes]

Off topic: Eating the more elaborate foods give paws buff to filtration, consciousness, movement and other stats, may be worth making them. If meat is what you are lacking, grow beans and make tofu out of it (you can make soy milk if you want too xD).

Thanks, I noticed that after I researched more advanced meal types and started making some Stews, never been happier
I still have some research available to get new meal types so I guess I'll start with those first, the colony anti-mortar shields can wait for now

Regarding the meat issues, I started having problems with my farm animals eating too much, so I killed almost all of them and stuck with Capybaras only. Now I have 6k meat and 6k veggies xD I forgot I had all those animals because I usually keep my screen centered on the actual colony and they just kept reproducing... After I saw some repeated miscarrying messages I saw that I had close to 20 Emus, 10 elephants and 30 capybaras... Got rid of the elephants, emus and about 20 capybaras Had to expand my freezer to hold all the meat xD Even with max stacks of 750 meat...

[Thyme]

Most corpses provide better storage than the meat they yield. (vanilla ofc)

[joaonunes]

Most corpses provide better storage than the meat they yield. (vanilla ofc)

I'm using Increased Stack Size so even though elephants have 350 meat I can fit 2 elephants worth of meat into one square, in my case butchering is more space efficient (as you said in vanilla corpses are more efficient in many cases)