[B18] Pets eat off stacks of forbidden food - is this a bug?

[Vuelhering]

Just started a lone survivor game and the bonded yorkie ate from a forbidden stack of Packaged Survival Meals. Has this always existed? Should it?

[Teutorix]

Not an expert, but I believe this is intended behavior. Animals can sometimes access food outside their "allowed area" also. I think Tynan did it to make animals more realistic and difficult to manage.

[grrizo]

You have a forbidden stack of food or a stack of food outside the permited animal area?

[Calahan]

WAD. Here's a comment by Tynan (it's in reply to a different non-bug report, but the answer given applies here too).

It's allowed, animals don't follow 'social properness'; they're animals!

Edit - Here's some more info from (a Mantis report) about the JobGiver_EatRandom command, which AFAIU is what causes animals to have a small chance to ignore the player's set restrictions: https://ludeon.com/mantis/view.php?id=2829. Here's a quote by Tynan from the aforementioned link.

"So it sounds like there's no bug? Since EatRandom is supposed to ignore forbiddenness. It represents animals' willingness to randomly eat things. Let me know if there's a bug I didn't realize." - Tynan, 2016-12-11 10:20


Closing this now since it's not a bug. Thanks for reporting it though all the same. Reopening this for now in case anyone thinks the OP's issue isn't related to the JobGiver_EatRandom command, and/or that command isn't working properly.

As my understanding is that whether or not the PSM's the OP is referring to were forbidden and/or outside of any allowed areas for the animal (the OP doesn't specify), the JobGiver_EatRandom command will allow a tamed animal to ignore both. And this is also what I've observed while playing as well. It's a bit annoying, but it does seems to be WAD and in accordance with how JobGiver_EatRandom is intended to work / the animal behaviour is it intended to simulate.

[Vuelhering]

It was a forbidden stack, not an area denial.

In fact, I had just opened up the allowed area to feed that annoying animal, which had a chunk of meat (allowed, which I expected him to eat) and a stack of survival meals (forbidden). The yorkie ran in and ate a forbidden survival meal instead of the meat right next to it.

I think I happen to have the game saved moments before he did that, if necessary to reproduce.

Edit: just read that bug report. I believe the yorkie is hungry, so I don't think it's an eatrandom issue. If it was from eatrandom, he would've eaten when it was disallowed by zone. I will fire up that save and confirm.

[Calahan]

If you can post a (vanilla) save game where this is reproducible then that would be ideal. Details on where to find and how to post your save file can be found in the pinned "How to Report a Bug" thread at the top of the bugs forum.

[grrizo]

Animals don't care about forbidden stuff. They'll eat and drink and sniff everything that they encounter in front of them. Here's an example:



Oh, wait. That... well.

In orden to restrain the consuption of your pets, you need to make an area were they can do what pets do, and of course, the stockpile were you have the stuff shouldn't be part of this area.
Thankfully, the "invert" option is usefull in this case. You can make the area right were the stockpile is, invert it, and voilà! The area now is everywere except the stockpile.
I had a lot of dogs and cats with cyrrosis and cocaine Wake-up addiction until I figured it out.

[NeverPire]

I accept that animals don't respect rules to eat anything that the player has let free, but when a player specifically forbid one thing, it's exactly the same thing as he could restrict the area on this item. In these circumstances, I think really that animals should respect forbidden food as they respect forbidden areas.