People keep starving cause of this.

[FDru]

I have one dude with cooking as their priority but whenever he goes to the kitchen to cook, he makes ONE meal then wanders off with another job because the cooking pot only had enough ingredients for one meal, despite the pantry with all the hundreds of ingredients literally 2 tiles away from the pot and with dozens of other recipes that need cooking.

Is there a solution to this that DOESN'T restrict my fire mage to explicitly cooking? Cause he's also my hunter and I should be able to keep it that way...

[Eltoron]

Weird. Mine cooks nonstop while he has enough ingridients. Can you please show your staff priorities? I set my cook on high priority for cooking and hunting and left others untouched. Works perfect for me. Also I'm using "Do Untill X" order on my craft stations to keep my supplies. So my cook can go to hunt or do some other buissiness if my food supplies meets my demand.

EDIT: Also, can you please show "Tasks" panel for you cook? I'm pretty sure we can find an answer here.

[richarduitt]

You could always increase priority on the cook pot.

[krezubica]

I have the same problem and come looking for if anybody else reported it. Seems like I'm not the only one.

The priorities on my fire mage are as follows (listing only the ones different for default):
- Medical Rest ++ (same as everybody)
- Cook ++
- Destroy +
- Hunt +
- Research +

(Used to have Research on ++, as my Lvl2 Fire Mage has better Lightning than Lvl1 Lightning Mage, but reduced it to + just to rule out that's causing the bug. No difference in behaviour)

My gruel pot priority is set to 5, and I have three recepies: Bitter Gruel do until 40, Honeyed Gruel do until 45, and Slop do until 10. Just like OP said, I'll find my Fire mage cooks one dish), and then wonders off to do a non-priority task: tend a plant, bring something to a chest, or some other random priority task.

I just let her go uninterrupted for a day, and she decided to do the following activities after waking up and eating, in order:
- go hunt a croa at the far edge of the map
- changed her mind halfway throught and came back to the kitchen to cook 1 Honeyed Gruel
- go harvest Biterrice
- changed her mind near the door to the scool to go cook 1 HGruel (when my Quilteds filled the pot with ingredients)
- refilled the pot with biterrice but decided to go for a little wander (didn't see the task) before getting interrupted in the task when the Honeydrop was delivered to the pot
- go plant an Iceflower (ended up planting and tending a few plants)
- at that point a Water Mage with no priorities for cooking took over the pot and actually cooked 3-4 Bitter Gruel at once refilling the pot in between with ingredients available at the Pantry just next to the Gruel pot
- when pot became free again, the Fire mage preferred to stay harvesting and tending plants, despite there currently being plenty Bitterrice and Honeydrop in the pantry just next to the Gruel pot, and a definitive need for food (1/45 Honeyed Gruel available)
- instead, she went to do some research
- went and cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to harvest Honeydrop Planter
- (went for her scheduled afternoon nap and dance)
- cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some Smokereed; didn't quite make it out of the building and came back to
- cook another single Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some Smokereed and tend to some more plants
- cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some more plants
- cooked 1 more Honeyed Gruel
- went for dinner, and then on to her dancing and sleeping

I double checked, and the Fire mage definitely only has default priority for harvesting and tending. Obviously, at this pace, the food keeps running out.

For the last couple of days, I would grab her in the morning and player ordered her to cook -- then she went and got her own ingredients just fine. But that's extremely micromanage-y and I can't keep doing it (not to mention that I'll occasionally miss her meal or sleep time and end up making her Very Hungry or Exhausted).

Not sure if the Quilted Carriers have anything to do with it -- as they tend to be very active during my preiods of resource gathering, but often idle around inbetween. So maybe they "latch on" the carry task for refilling the Gruel pot with ingredients as soon as the previous dish is cooked, since there are no other carry tasks on the map, and since the tasks have already been assigned to the Quilteds, the cook can't continue the cooking until they grab the ingredients and wonders off to do any available task. And since the kitchen is fairly high up so it could have a chimney, my Fire mage basically just ends up going up and down the central spiral stairway quite a lot, the pot often gets refilled before she's reached whatever task she had in mind, she gets called back to cook the one dish when the pot is filled, and then the cycle repeats again?

Any workaround that doesn't include banning the fire mage from all other activities would be highly appreciated, and I sure hope this gets fixed in an update soon.

EDIT: Her tasks panel only lists cooking (as priority: Top) when the Gruel pot has all the required ingredients for a dish, otherwise cooking is just not there. The task panel of the Gruel pot confirms that a Quilted got the delivery job.

[FDru]

I haven't played much since posting this but I did a double-check on the ingredient storage and it seemed like 1 ingredient wasn't being stored properly nearby (and so was being hauled from further away). Fixing that helped. It's still not perfect but it seems like when I check the cooking pot now the meals are mostly completed instead of being mostly non-completed.

Make sure those pantries and w/e are higher priority than other storages and have the things you need.

[Eltoron]

Originally posted by krezubica:

I have the same problem and come looking for if anybody else reported it. Seems like I'm not the only one.

The priorities on my fire mage are as follows (listing only the ones different for default):
- Medical Rest ++ (same as everybody)
- Cook ++
- Destroy +
- Hunt +
- Research +

(Used to have Research on ++, as my Lvl2 Fire Mage has better Lightning than Lvl1 Lightning Mage, but reduced it to + just to rule out that's causing the bug. No difference in behaviour)

My gruel pot priority is set to 5, and I have three recepies: Bitter Gruel do until 40, Honeyed Gruel do until 45, and Slop do until 10. Just like OP said, I'll find my Fire mage cooks one dish), and then wonders off to do a non-priority task: tend a plant, bring something to a chest, or some other random priority task.

I just let her go uninterrupted for a day, and she decided to do the following activities after waking up and eating, in order:
- go hunt a croa at the far edge of the map
- changed her mind halfway throught and came back to the kitchen to cook 1 Honeyed Gruel
- go harvest Biterrice
- changed her mind near the door to the scool to go cook 1 HGruel (when my Quilteds filled the pot with ingredients)
- refilled the pot with biterrice but decided to go for a little wander (didn't see the task) before getting interrupted in the task when the Honeydrop was delivered to the pot
- go plant an Iceflower (ended up planting and tending a few plants)
- at that point a Water Mage with no priorities for cooking took over the pot and actually cooked 3-4 Bitter Gruel at once refilling the pot in between with ingredients available at the Pantry just next to the Gruel pot
- when pot became free again, the Fire mage preferred to stay harvesting and tending plants, despite there currently being plenty Bitterrice and Honeydrop in the pantry just next to the Gruel pot, and a definitive need for food (1/45 Honeyed Gruel available)
- instead, she went to do some research
- went and cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to harvest Honeydrop Planter
- (went for her scheduled afternoon nap and dance)
- cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some Smokereed; didn't quite make it out of the building and came back to
- cook another single Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some Smokereed and tend to some more plants
- cooked 1 Honeyed Gruel
- went to plant some more plants
- cooked 1 more Honeyed Gruel
- went for dinner, and then on to her dancing and sleeping

I double checked, and the Fire mage definitely only has default priority for harvesting and tending. Obviously, at this pace, the food keeps running out.

For the last couple of days, I would grab her in the morning and player ordered her to cook -- then she went and got her own ingredients just fine. But that's extremely micromanage-y and I can't keep doing it (not to mention that I'll occasionally miss her meal or sleep time and end up making her Very Hungry or Exhausted).

Not sure if the Quilted Carriers have anything to do with it -- as they tend to be very active during my preiods of resource gathering, but often idle around inbetween. So maybe they "latch on" the carry task for refilling the Gruel pot with ingredients as soon as the previous dish is cooked, since there are no other carry tasks on the map, and since the tasks have already been assigned to the Quilteds, the cook can't continue the cooking until they grab the ingredients and wonders off to do any available task. And since the kitchen is fairly high up so it could have a chimney, my Fire mage basically just ends up going up and down the central spiral stairway quite a lot, the pot often gets refilled before she's reached whatever task she had in mind, she gets called back to cook the one dish when the pot is filled, and then the cycle repeats again?

Any workaround that doesn't include banning the fire mage from all other activities would be highly appreciated, and I sure hope this gets fixed in an update soon.

EDIT: Her tasks panel only lists cooking (as priority: Top) when the Gruel pot has all the required ingredients for a dish, otherwise cooking is just not there. The task panel of the Gruel pot confirms that a Quilted got the delivery job.

I have an idea. Try to put your pot on lower priority.
My guess:
Since your Quilted Carriers have highest priority in haul and the pot is a priotity 5 - every time the task is finished it's your Carriers who get the job to haul ingridients. And they drops everything and hastes to fill the pot. I assume if you put your pot on priority 2 your Carriers will not bother themselfs (if they have any other normal priority job) but you cook will do the job since he will try to cook.

If you are going to check this work around - please let us know about the results.

[Lucius]

I know this is a very old comment but I just experienced this today similarly and it was driving me nuts for several hours. I finally found out the cause. The ingredients were coming directly from the planters so all the delaying was due to new crops needing to fully grow and get harvested.

The tell is going to the cooking pot and seeing if the ingredients were idling for long periods at 0/X unfulfilled.

My Reason for this
- the source food was being stored in a special pantry with permissions limited to not "TAKE". I did this a while back and forgot i did so. I was experimenting with the Dragon Wok in a dedicated new room and was trying out some rules based controls and forgot to reset the pantry permissions