[Food Waste] How to stop survivors from eating too soon?

[( * )]

Hello,

From my observations, survivors begin to look for food, when their stomac is half empty.
So, when they eat a meal, half of it is wasted.
If they had waited until they're really hungry, we'd have 2 times more food in the end.

How to stop that behaviour and force survivors to eat, only when they are trully hungry?

Thanks for your help. :)

[Flin Fredstone]

Store the food in a separate room and use the locked doors mod to determine the access.
Can't think of any other way.

[Jaggid Edje]

It's only 'wasting half the food' if a single meal would actually fill the bar from empty. Does it?

[Jaggid Edje]

I'm starving my survivor right now to observe the amount a meal gives to the hunger bar.

Worth noting that they get the mood debuff for "hungry" at 40%, and "ravenously hungery" at 20%. I'd say it makes sense that they are looking for food before hitting 40%, as you wouldn't want something as trivial as not having time to go eat to be the cause of a meltdown.

But yes, one meal does fill the bar from 20% all the way to 100%, so the OP is definitely right that they are wasting a LOT of food.

That was a fun experiment, as I've never interfered with survivors getting food when they wanted to, so had't seen those effects in the game yet. :)

[76561199056944839]

Originally posted by ( * ):

Hello,

From my observations, survivors begin to look for food, when their stomac is half empty.
So, when they eat a meal, half of it is wasted.
If they had waited until they're really hungry, we'd have 2 times more food in the end.

How to stop that behaviour and force survivors to eat, only when they are trully hungry?

Thanks for your help. :)

If your survivors are performing a task set to priority 1 or 2, they tend to skip a meal until they're very very hungry. So that could help you curve some of their tendency to eat a lot.

[( * )]

Thanks for the info. :)

[Hastighet]

So Ember woke up with 59 or 60% of her hunger bar filled, and immediately ran for the fridge where I keep my cooked food. I get that I could assign my people jobs that might mitigate the issue, but I feel like it'd be better if there was an update to the survivor's behavior of when and where to fill their needs. IE: Jack, Emelin, and Ember's favorite past time is target practice, but more often than not they relax by running over to my drakkas in the backyard and visiting them. Melody too, even though now I have an arcade machine for her to use, and Vanessa seems to rarely if ever play music unless I manually tell her to, even though doing so would give everybody nearby a slight buff to their mood. Also, it seems playing a musical instrument or petting one of the livestock animals/pets gives way more relaxation than any of the other items, especially the arcade machine that only gives about 20% or so relaxation. Just seems like some of these things are disproportionate on their usefulness.

I know quite a bit of this was slightly off topic, but the food things was my main concern. I have to monitor everybody in the morning and evening to make sure they're not eating food that will fill them about 80% when they need only half of that. Maybe if some of the food items filled different amounts and they would only choose the ones that would fill them up but not waste potential filling, that could be a possible fix I suppose.

[Flin Fredstone]

You can try this and see if it solves your meals issue. I used it once but didn't like it. I don't like to see them go hungry. But maybe you have less problems with it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3002088480&searchtext=one+meal

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Hastighet:

I know quite a bit of this was slightly off topic, but the food things was my main concern. I have to monitor everybody in the morning and evening to make sure they're not eating food that will fill them about 80% when they need only half of that. Maybe if some of the food items filled different amounts and they would only choose the ones that would fill them up but not waste potential filling, that could be a possible fix I suppose.

Unless you use mods to change it, survivors will always waste food, without exception. In an unmodded game, all foods are the same caloric value and the need to eat is triggered far sooner than needed as compared to how much the food fills them up.

Even scheduling will not prevent them from eating more than needed, because all of the schedule options allow for eating in an unmodded game.

There are mods to alleviate all of those things. In addition to the mod that changes the need-to-eat game logic which is linked above, there are mods that disable eating entirely during "work" scheduled blocks, so you can use that to limit when they eat, which in turn limits how much they eat.

But absent any mods, you will just need to live with it.

[BioFringe]

Haven't tested but could you restrict all food and still manually tell them when to eat?

[Flin Fredstone]

Originally posted by BioFringe:

Haven't tested but could you restrict all food and still manually tell them when to eat?

Just tested it for you. Layla is at 55% fed and i can only select the drink if she needed it, not the food.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3147116299

[BioFringe]

Originally posted by Flin Fredstone:

Originally posted by BioFringe:

Haven't tested but could you restrict all food and still manually tell them when to eat?

Just tested it for you. Layla is at 55% fed and i can only select the drink if she needed it, not the food.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3147116299

Well thank you.

I was just spitballing a thought but too bad it didn't work.

[Stimpacker]

Yup, one of the things you gotta micro-manage early game when resources are low, people are few and you are busy setting up base, defenses, equipment, tech, etc. Default script sets the idiots to run for food at 60%, get hungry at 40% and ravenously hungry at 20%.

Thank you to those who suggested locking doors, 25% mod, restricting all food but what I found works for me is:
Don't stop them from eating at 59%. Just wait till their fullness gets to 100% and immediately send them off to work. Enable "eat on foot". Then when they're hungry later, they'll "finish previous meal" and get right back to work. This way, they work productively the full day (instead of running back to base twice) while the sun is still up and only needed 1 meal instead of 2.

On a side note, Hastighet was right about dumb idiots running off to visit animals and neglect their favorite relaxation activities. I stopped having farm animals. Was too irritating - you can turn off petting, but not visitations.

[Flin Fredstone]

I might be wrong but when i turned off petting of the Ulfens, the survivors also did not visit them anymore. I do that when i just herd them for their poopies.

[Stimpacker]

There is no petting option for the "lesser" herbivores. I tried turning off Activity > Ranching. That stopped the dumb behavior of idiots constantly running off to refill the hay through every time an animal took a bite (down to 95 from 100). That was thanks to you - don't feed them, just plant a bunch of hay grass.

[Jaggid Edje]

I wish the game actually had bias toward favorite activities, or even better, a way for us to define exactly which relaxation activities are allowed for each survivor on the Permissions tab.

Now that I typed that, I really, really wish that was something on the permissions tab. Never thought about it before.