Solved & Confirmed - 0.11.7 BT - Feeding Priorities

[Mello Tonin]

I've had a situation where my food production wasn't keeping up with demand, and while I added the necessary structures to increase capacity for my food chain, Imps keep getting in the way of my other creatures from eating. They eat up all the food before more can be produced causing a small colony collapse. Not all was lost but it's been almost 2 hours of game time and we're still trying to get everyone fed properly even though the food is coming out regularly.

[Sebt]

Yesss! That was once a very hard situation once I've got about 100 Imps. They ate everything, even trade was not enough.
I wonder if Imps could have their own special meal or at least eat only roasted rats, because rats seems to be a little underrated and it seems if there are rats on the table, but no bread creatures will riot anyways.

[Rasmus]

Added to the list of Bugs/Issues & Crashes!

[Mello Tonin]

I kinda like the idea of if an Imp is in the way of one of our other creatures from getting a meal when they're annoyed or angry, that creature would push them out of the chair so they could eat, and not move until they're served. Maybe a pounding fists on table animation could be added for their waiting until they get their food or beer?

[Rasmus]

I made the imps much less hungry, now they eat a third of what they did before.

Version 0.11.10 released, this bug is solved but need confirmation!

[Sebt]

I don't know if we could call that's solved - is situation like this when hungry creatures even choose enemy side and attack others all hungry Imps will go and eat, when food appear. It's still possible that this situation can occur when Imps didn't eat for a long time, player played a map for a bit and suddenly run out of food. IMO idea of giving priority to feed creatures first and workers last could really made this issue solved.

[Rasmus]

Well, at some point they all need to eat. By letting only all other creatures eat first during one hours time will kill all the imps and thereby there will be no food production, what I did here was that even if there are a big shortage the imps will take up much less space, but they will not die.

[Sebt]

True... Than I see only other way to do it - either making much larger production chain or give Imp something else than bread to eat like rats? So they could eat rats even those found in dungeons - in DK if you drop chicken somewhere and a creature will be nearby it, that creature will go eat it.

[Rasmus]

Well, perhaps in the future. I'm a little reluctant to solving a issue like this by adding more complexity to it. Perhaps we can see how this works out now with the imps eating a lot less.

I will keep this one in solved but need confirmation for now and see if this issue repeats itself.

[Sebt]

I've just tested this out. Still Imps gets the most of the food first, but making them less hungry than before helped a bit...
however Imps getting hungry was not the only problem - food doesn't appear fast enough to fill all the plates (even if the production chain before was made to make a little surplus of food), Piggehs works quite slow, Impanzees have to deliver food to tables, Imps have to take resources from rooms to storages and from storages to rooms - I made an idea of Receptions that could help shortening that quite a bit.

I had to make 3-4 more baking tables and made more roasted rats and found some fish (however they are kind of slowly producing in comparison to bread or beer - antroots are IMO not enough frequently delivered to mouse traps to make them working on 100% delivered, they're being filled out again if have quite low production efficiency), so making more rat traps and finding more fishing spots was needed and everything went better - different food needs can help if creatures that have rats and fish as favourite food will it them first - than bread if there are no rats and fish. Still that took about 40-50 minutes on 1x speed to get everyone back to work happy again.

[Mello Tonin]

Perhaps the threshold for all creatures needs to be lowered? I've seen creatures go eat when their in the 70s as far as percentage goes. I would figure that 25% would be a better time to go eat if the food fills them up fully otherwise this is a lot of food waste.

[Sebt]

But... what about having 5-6 meals per day? That could ruin creatures' diet! :O

25% is when creatures gets angry. I noticed that it's not that there's so much Imps eating everything, but bread production is too slow to feed them all. As fast you bake a bread as it will take longer for creatures to get really pissed of. I had once situation of bread scarcity, but 2 backing tables and 2 mills more solved the issue.


I was also thinking about something - what if in Bar Room could be option to disable Imps from eating? So we could enable them to eat again when we think it's time to feed them?

[Mello Tonin]

Yeah I could see maybe extending the production feature to enable/disable creatures from eating.

Seems that a 2:1 ratio works well with farms to mills and from mills to table.

[Sebt]

So we could say it's solved. Good that you said about this ratio, I was always keeping 1:1 ratio for mills and baking tables and wasn't satisfied with that when some hunger appeared, it seems that I just need to make diggings for about one tile wider on each side of DM.

[Rasmus]

Thank you I will set it to solved!