I don't get Food priorities

[jman66]

I have scoured all the rim world boards and I still do not get some of the food priorities.

1) create a critical importance food stockpile and colonists won't pull from it to refill important hopper
2)create critical importance hopper and colonists will only pick as much stock as it requires to fill the hopper's deficit
3) set hopper and stockpile to same importance setting and u get the message that there is a higher priority area when forcing a colonist to fill hopper

4) try to make any survival meals or pemmican while keeping yr colonists on nutrient paste. won't happen. I know the prison bed trick, but why the complicated workaround? colonists obey orders all day long, but when it comes to any sort of self control regarding what they eat? nope. makes no sense.

5) colonists will walk right by nutrient paste to get to raw food, which they then complain about. and i know there are posts on the forum that offer explanations and I've tried them, but the fact is this happens frequently and has zero logic.

Ive tried the Smarter Meals mod but for some reason it does not seem to work on Mac or the new version.

Any ideas? Any help? Any fixes in later versions coming?

Its so frustrating to have a productive game going and to have to hover over colonists to make sure they aren't doing these totally counterintuitive activities.

[Foefaller]

Have you tried forbidding the meals and pemmican as your cooks are making them? Might not help the raw food issue (which sounds like a bug) but it will at least let you stockpile those things in the meantime. Just remember to unforbid them before you form the caravan.

I do agree that we kinda need ability to blanket forbid certain foods (especially setting meal quality to prisoners, same as medical care), or at least set the priority of what colonists eat (instead of them always going for the best food that is closest to spoiling)

[jamaicancastle]

They avoid nutrient paste meals because there's a debuff associated with them. There isn't one associated with preserved foods (survival meals/pemmican), so they prefer those to nutrient paste pretty much regardless of any other consideration.

Honestly you're almost certainly better off using the steel and power for something else. If you have enough food to be thinking about preserving it, just avoid nutrient paste.

[Vlad0mi3r]

I agree with Jamaicancastle, it is best to avoid nutrient paste  meals if possible.

However at only 6 units of raw resources per meal yes a -4 debuff but it means 2 hydroponics bays growing rice will give you a surplus when feeding 1 colonist. Really good news as the hungry and starving negative buffs start at -8 and go up from there (if my memory serves me correctly).

Now to the issues you are facing.

Pawns reserve things when using them. This can be a space in a storage area a hopper etc. When reserved only they can access it. So what you can find is a pawn walking past the nutrient paste  dispenser to go eat raw food because another pawn has already tagged the dispenser and is heading there to get a meal. quick method to deal with this is draft pawn until other pawn has gotten their meal then release your drafted pawn and they will go eat at the dispenser.

More complex resolution is to stockpile your nutrient paste meals. How to do this is to setup an area that covers the area where a pawn will walk to get a meal and the stockpile you want to store the meals in, make sure the stockpile is a fair distance away from dispenser. Wait for breakfast time and let your first pawn have their nutrient paste meal (this pawn must be able to haul for this to work, set their haul priority to 1). Draft or forbid everyone else from the dispenser. Once this pawn has had breakfast assign them to the area that covers path to dispenser and storage. Wait for the last of the other pawns to go and get their meal. As they collect their meal and start to move away from the dispenser draft them (R is the hot key for draft I think). They will drop the meal and wait. At this point the hauler will come and pick up the meal, (they will probably take the first one as a pocket meal) once the hauler has taken the meal undraft the other pawn and they will go and collect another meal. Keep drafting and dropping until you have stockpiled enough meals. Use multiple haulers if you want to speed things up and remember you will only get 12 meals per full hopper.

Now when making pemmican or survival meals you will need use the forbid technique. This is when the first meal/pemmican is made forbid it as soon as it is put down. Your pawns will keep stacking on top of the forbidden item until a full stack limit is reached. just make sure you forbid them as soon as they put one down in a new pile.

Using this method you can keep the stacks close to the kitchen and reduce hauling times.

Sorry its a bit of a wall of text at the top but I hope this helps.

P.S. I play on a Mac

[Limdood]

I believe the order is:

raw human meat
raw debuff food (rice, meat)
nutrient paste meal
raw food without debugg (corn i think)
simple meals
strawberries (has a tiny joy gain so it irritatingly rates higher than simple meals)
survival meals
fine meals
lavish meals

Pawns always take the lowest thing on the list they can access...they want the best food.

[Scrabbling]

I believe the order is:

raw human meat
raw debuff food (rice, meat)
nutrient paste meal
raw food without debugg (corn i think)
simple meals
strawberries (has a tiny joy gain so it irritatingly rates higher than simple meals)
survival meals
fine meals
lavish meals

Pawns always take the lowest thing on the list they can access...they want the best food.

The order should be as follows (by preferability from least to highest):

Undefined
NeverForNutrition
DesperateOnly
DesperateOnlyForHumanlikes
RawBad
RawTasty
MealAwful
MealSimple
MealFine
MealLavish

MealFine and MealLavish are selfexplanatory. Simple meals and pemmican have preferability MealSimple. NutrientPaste is MealAwful. Berries, milk etc. are RawTasty. Most other stuff is RawBad. Below that are corpses (DesperateOnly I believe) and most drugs (beer for example has preferabilty NeverForNutrition).

[Calahan]

@ jmangel66 - I'm moving this thread to General Discussion because I can't see an actual suggestion here. You mention a problem, but no suggestion on what you'd like to see implemented to address it, so this seems to just be a thread asking for ideas/solutions for a problem (which is fine of course, but means it's not a suggestion).

Also, it's really not a good idea to have your email address as your username (if that is indeed your email address), for a variety of reasons. Not sure if this was intentional on your part or just a mistake when you made when creating your account. Moderator's have no power to change an account name, I assume admin's do (although please don't quote me on that). So if you want to change your username please PM Ramsis and ask him to kindly fix it if he can. Here's his profile page: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?action=profile;u=3647

[Dashthechinchilla]

You don't need to unforbid for caravans. The food will simply be forbidden if you select the pack animal and tell it to manually drop gear. Pawns will also load forbidden items. This fixes some of the issue of caravans. If you leave the forbidden food on the animal, your hauler will take it to the correct zone and place it forbidden.

As far as I can tell on food priority, pawns will grab the nearest edible substance, regardless of quality. It is important to keep the meals you want them to eat near where they will be hungry at. For example, I have joy as the first activity they do when they wake up, so I keep my meals on the side closest to the social gathering spots.

[jman66]

Hey Everyone thanks for the good responses here. There are some in-depth mechanics going on about which I was unaware. Especially the distance and reserve aspects of raw/meal/npd. I guess the poster who said I'm not really suggesting anything was right - but now that I have used the Smarter Meal Mod (and I DON'T like using mods - I believe in authorial intent all the way, auteur theory here right?)I would suggest something along those lines- and I know its been suggested before. But meal policies? awesome. Having the NPD pump out meals, even at the cost of labor/Hauling? awesome. I just found the other workarounds to be... counterintuitive.

I guess what I'm saying is that I can send a colonist to certain death, But I can't tell him to quit crying and eat some sludge? I guess i base my judgements about this game on a rational actor principle? Hope that makes sense. Same reason I don't get the "work/dont haul goods produced from work at mealtime" actions of colonists - but thats a different post ha ha 

I love this damn game, and I know its a work in progress so I shouldn't be griping, but when something's that close to perfection....

[Hans Lemurson]

You can actually process the entire Hopper's worth of ingredients into Nutrient Paste in a single sitting with just one hungry pawn:

Wait until they grab a meal, but stop them before they walk off to eat it.  Pause the game when they are standing right next to the dispenser nozzle:

• Draft them, and they drop the meal on the floor.
• Forbid this meal.
• Undraft them, and they grab another meal.
• Draft them again, and they drop the meal onto the same forbidden stack. (This is what makes the trick work)
• Undraft them and they grab a new meal.
• Repeat steps 5 & 6 (hold down R key for rapid toggling) until forbidden stack is full and they start picking up their dropped meal.
• Go to step 1, and repeat until hoppers are empty.  Be amazed at the great distance at which meals can be "dropped" by a drafted pawn.

Now you can have as many Nutrient Paste meals as your heart desires!  Enough to take with you on cold journeys!  Enough to feed into a Chemfuel Reactor!  (Call it a feedstock pre-processing step)