Packaged Survival Meals can break the game

[reasonpolice]

I just lost a pretty well-developed colony because for some reason colonists prioritize the survival meals instead of the closest meal. The survival meals were left over from a siege - not even sure how or why they became un-forbidden. Both of my doctors ran all the way across a 400x400 boreal forest in the middle of winter to eat MREs when there was a pile of fine meals stocked up. This resulted in the neglect and death of two of my colonists that needed medical treatment, including my only cook. On top of that, both doctors got the flu from the journey, and wound up dying because I was out of medicine and no ships were nearby. Half my colonists died to survival meals.

Has anyone else had problems because of this?

[Zael]

I've had this issue in the past. I remedy it by taking a few colonists after the siege to chain haul the meals so people don't have to run after them. It's a lot of unnecessary micromanagement in my opinion, but if you want to use the meals, that's the safest way to do it. Otherwise, just leave them forbidden till spring. Sucks that they accidently got unforbidden and people died getting to them. I would say if you still have an autosave before that ordeal, try and backtrack and save your map.

[bertscha]

yes

[Ford_Prefect]

What causes this bug is the fact that survival meals are considered of being "fine" quality.  Since colonists prefer higher quality meals, they will go any distance... even if they are nearly dead from starvation, to go to them, even if there is a normal meal right next to them.

There are two things that could be changed:
1.  Set survival meals to a lower quality (normal or inferior) so that workers won't ignore the simple meals that are in your base.
2.  Have the worker AI take in consideration how far off the meal is.   For example, have the ai pick the best meal available within 50 blocks, and if it can't find any within that distance have it check the entire map for food.