Cats eating cooked meat

[gata_bella]

Would you make it so that my cats eat raw meat before they go for the cooked stuff? My people are spending a lot of time butchering and cooking the food and not getting to eat, because my cats just eat the cooked meat (when there's raw meat in the same container).

[Philtre]

Have you unlocked the pet food bowl yet? If you put the bowl in a convenient spot, they will prioritize eating there, all else being equal. And since you can only put raw food in the bowl, it will effectively prioritize raw food.

Do note that pets seem to pay attention to the freshness of food, like people do; if the cooked meat is closer to going off, they may prefer it because of that alone.

[gata_bella]

I'm watching my cats eat cooked meat straight out of the freezer. I also have raw meat in the freezer; it's summer, so the raw meat has a lower freshness level than the cooked stuff.

I haven't made a pet food bowl yet, but I'll try that. Here's hoping they ignore the cooked stuff.

[Blorf]

Hi, the cats will first try to find rats/nearby bunnies, then the pet bowls, then nearby human food (whatever they prefer since they are cats), then far away rats/bunnies. I think the pet bowl should sort this out, but if it does now, please let me know.

[Rane]

So this just happened.

Test 307 at the time. I suddenly looked at my pantry in the middle of the night, and a female cat was in there just pounding away at some Cooked Meat. Like, she ate like 16 that I saw. I clicked on her and her Food bar wasn't filling. I paused, and when I unpaused, suddenly her Food bar was full and she left the pantry to go get some water from the barn.

I checked my 3 Pet Food Bowl and they all had more than 1/5 uses left.

When I looked at my pantry again, a male cat was in there just scarfing Cooked Eel. I hit save real quick and let the game play to see how many he would eat. At least 12 more, that I saw. The eating noise was going off and his Food bar was not filling up.

I quit the game (without saving the '12 more' that he'd eaten), saw that 308 was here, patched it, and loaded the game again. If he were to do the same action, he would eat the 12 Cooked Eel on the table. He did not do that, and instead meandered out of the pantry with a full Food bar.

So that's really weird, one way or another. Did my, idk, ram get full and the cat/food processing got stuck on some kind of weird loop? I'd been playing for several consecutive hours at that point. I mean, sure maybe I should set out a few more bowls, spread out more, but like... Even if they're gonna eat cooked food, surely the food bar should fill up?


I do feel like, overall and not just in relation to the above Really Strange incident, the cats don't prioritize Pet Food Bowl a... /lot/. Like, some, sure. But even in games, when I have bowls out, and they have food in them, I see them in my pantry sooner or later. Not usually eating entire half stacks or anything. I'll set out more bowls and see if I notice them in the pantry less.

[Blorf]

Hi Rane, If you can send me a save file with the cats about to eat just before this behavior is happening (so before they take the first bite, maybe hit F5 for a quicksave) and then if it happens please send the save to me. I may be able to reproduce the bug then. It sounds like it fixes itself on load, so I need to catch it before it happens.

Also could you please send me the logs from when you were playing v0.307. I would like to check them if there is any null ref issues in there.

If you have run the game twice since the bug though the logs will have cycled to versions from the new plays.

I really want to figure out what is going on here. It could be some kind of timing issue perhaps if you have a very large number of animals and are at 4x speed? The save will help me see if there are any contributing factors as well.