Separate cooking from butchering in work overview?

[Mystic]

As the game goes on, I am finding that one of the biggest micromanagement chores I have to deal with is telling my chef whether to prioritize cooking or butchering.  Normally I want to prioritize butchering so that killed animals don't have the time to rot, as long as I have enough prepared meals on hand.  Whereas the opposite is true if I am running out of prepared meals.

Currently the game seems to always prioritize cooking over butchering.  This leads to a lot of spoiled meat unless I constantly micromanage my cooking bills to suspend all of them anytime there is an animal carcass waiting to be butchered, and then turning the bills back on immediately afterwards.  This quickly becomes annoying.

What I would like to see is separate categories for cooking and butchering on the overview.  This would allow two things:

1) I could use the manual priorities to move butchering to a higher priority than cooking whenever I have enough meals on hand, and then be able to just switch butchering off entirely anytime that I need cooking to be the priority.  (This is the biggest issue for me.)

2) Currently if I have two cooks, they often seem to get in each other's way.  I'd love to be able to assign one to butchering only and the other to cooking only.

Both of these advantages would go a long way toward relieving some of the micromanagement of cooks that I currently seem to spend half of my game time doing.

Thanks for listening!

[ChrisW]

Seconded.

If my crops just died the third day in a row leaving my potato and berries warehouse emtpy, but I got a warehouse full of dead insects and lizards, my cooks still actually go idle rather than using the table to make meat, so they can continue food production.
It seems to be some sort of bug, actually - since as soon as I tell someone manually "prioritize butchering", he keeps at it. Yet let the warehouse run dry, and the next time you got animals around again you will have to manually tell a cook to stop idling about and do stuff all over again.

[Mystic]

It seems to be some sort of bug, actually - since as soon as I tell someone manually "prioritize butchering", he keeps at it. Yet let the warehouse run dry, and the next time you got animals around again you will have to manually tell a cook to stop idling about and do stuff all over again.

I didn't even know about being able to choose "prioritize butchering" by right-clicking on the butchering table, and that does help a bit.  But you are correct that it doesn't "stick" ... as soon as any available animals are butchered, the priority reverts back to the cook stove.  I agree that it should probably be set to stick to whatever was selected until the player selects differently.  (Still, the separate items on the overview would allow for even more flexibility, so I would still like to see that available as well.)

[StorymasterQ]

It looks like the priority part of the game code was...butchered.



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