Food consumption - Villagers

[Addamz]

This annoys me no end and needs fixing in my opinion;

Food is in storage, villager gets hungry, villager goes and grabs a stack of 10 berries lets say, villager eats 4 berries, villager then wanders around with the rest of the berries till they rot or he he eats them, even if the other villagers are starving.

Can we please make it so villagers eat what they need and put the rest back? And I don't mean eat their fill, I mean enough to stave of starvation for 1 more day, like any community would, share and split, stretch out the low food.

Yeah it might take a bit of work to implement, but it would help not having one greedy idiot and 2 starving artists.

And can you get them to eat magic mushrooms a a last resort, I have loads. They would be tripping but at least they wouldn't be starving. And can you add a herb container for yellow mushrooms and any other substance they can't eat, they keep filling my storage with them.

While we're on the subject, weeds grow way faster than the food and constantly have to be cleared destroying the rakes, so they go through 4 rakes per day per villager, and then run out because you can't keep up with the production materials, and then the crops are ruined and so on, it's a vicious cycle.

Also it was winter, I was growing beetroot, it was 99% complete it turn to spring and BAM dead crops. You need to stop that, shouldn't matter if it's out of season if it's past 90%, or they should be able to harvest a lower yield before crops are destroyed.

[ThunderfulPaige | Community]

Hey thank you for the feedback, we will take it on board!

[Mervin]

Make them pay for food...... Soon stop wasting it 😊

[Sweepwinguser]

The wooden rake isn't the right tool maybe (the material) ... Edit/addition: it breaks fast, but with skill-up and iron getting scarce (maybe) you'll can revert to wooden rakes later, the breaking of stuff is somewhat annoying, BUT the skills can get high and really improve the handling of tools/weapons, skilling is awesome!

[War_Donkey]

I traded with a villager to give him a rake to farm and spoiled food for fertilizer. When I opened up his inventory he had THREE full stacks of meat and stacks of vegetables.
It shouldn't be too difficult for developers to limit the amount of food villagers can take.
Looking forward to the first big update, my fingers are crossed that they address wood, stone, and iron running out.

[Jibaro]

The solution for me was I set 1 cooker in BBQ and for whatever reason they stop doing that. They just go and grab from the BBQ not the food place.

[ArgonGas]

Agreed - some villagers pick up excessive amounts of food (I've seen 8 meat soup in inventories before). Villagers clearly aren't eating all the food they pick up since I frequently find spoiled food in their inventories.

It also makes it virtually impossible to stockpile food for winter. I have around 55 villagers, two cookhouses and one grill and I have yet to be able to build up a stockpile of cooked food.

- Food consumption should prioritize cooked food over raw food.
- Cooks should be able to deposit their food in a warehouse when their station is full.
- Cooked meals should maybe be able to stack in the cookhouse and player inventory (for whatever reason they do stack in food storage).

[Aurelius]

Originally posted by ArgonGas:

Agreed - some villagers pick up excessive amounts of food (I've seen 8 meat soup in inventories before). Villagers clearly aren't eating all the food they pick up since I frequently find spoiled food in their inventories.

It also makes it virtually impossible to stockpile food for winter. I have around 55 villagers, two cookhouses and one grill and I have yet to be able to build up a stockpile of cooked food.

- Food consumption should prioritize cooked food over raw food.
- Cooks should be able to deposit their food in a warehouse when their station is full.
- Cooked meals should maybe be able to stack in the cookhouse and player inventory (for whatever reason they do stack in food storage).

I agree with all points here.
That said, two points:
1) I believe they do prefer cooked food, as I've seen them run past the gatherer who has veggies in stock to get it, but they will grab too much, and given the limited storage at the cookhouse it doesn't take many villagers to bottom one out in the morning, for instance.
2) A staffed warehouse will pull food from the cookhouses into storage pretty rapidly.
3) Others have suggested building 1 cookhouse over multiples and running multiple shifts so it's producing constantly.
4) Also important to build cookhouse near a well and firewood storage to minimize turnaround time for cooks. Supplement with rain-gatherers near the cookhouse if you don't have a well handy. The AI doesn't handle refueling well if there's a pot cooking, as far as I can tell.

[ArgonGas]

Originally posted by Aurelius:

Originally posted by ArgonGas:

Agreed - some villagers pick up excessive amounts of food (I've seen 8 meat soup in inventories before). Villagers clearly aren't eating all the food they pick up since I frequently find spoiled food in their inventories.

It also makes it virtually impossible to stockpile food for winter. I have around 55 villagers, two cookhouses and one grill and I have yet to be able to build up a stockpile of cooked food.

- Food consumption should prioritize cooked food over raw food.
- Cooks should be able to deposit their food in a warehouse when their station is full.
- Cooked meals should maybe be able to stack in the cookhouse and player inventory (for whatever reason they do stack in food storage).

I agree with all points here.
That said, two points:
1) I believe they do prefer cooked food, as I've seen them run past the gatherer who has veggies in stock to get it, but they will grab too much, and given the limited storage at the cookhouse it doesn't take many villagers to bottom one out in the morning, for instance.
2) A staffed warehouse will pull food from the cookhouses into storage pretty rapidly.
3) Others have suggested building 1 cookhouse over multiples and running multiple shifts so it's producing constantly.
4) Also important to build cookhouse near a well and firewood storage to minimize turnaround time for cooks. Supplement with rain-gatherers near the cookhouse if you don't have a well handy. The AI doesn't handle refueling well if there's a pot cooking, as far as I can tell.

I have two cookhouses right next to my warehouse and hunter's house and very close to two wells. Both cookhouses are staffed with a day/night shift. The warehouse also has two villagers staffed to it (usually) also on day/night shift. As far as I can tell in the interface, cooked food is high priority over everything else. There's also multiple firewood storage racks in the warehouse and several raw food storage containers (they are inconsistently stocked depending on the season).

With all that, I've still found it impossible to build up any kind of reserve of cooked food.

[Abraxxus]

Originally posted by 【Jiba®oBo®icuA】:

The solution for me was I set 1 cooker in BBQ and for whatever reason they stop doing that. They just go and grab from the BBQ not the food place.

Just this morning, but before today's patch, I had 5 mushrooms on the BBQ cooking. Villager walked up, took all the mushrooms before they finished cooking and starting eating them. I couldn't believe it, homeboy must have been an idiot.

[Onibaku]

Cookhouses are by far the way to go to keep villagers fed. Stick with soups unless you have several of them going for stews since stews take about twice as long to cook. The storages for the cookhouse products is far too small, so make sure to have someone grabbing and storing them enough, even if this means a dedicated warehouse for only finished food so the workers only do that so your cookhouses keep producing.

[Addamz]

Originally posted by ArgonGas:

With all that, I've still found it impossible to build up any kind of reserve of cooked food.

I know your pain, I have 104 villagers, 5 cook houses surrounding 4 farms, and 2 gatherers with 3 hunting lodges around them, and 2 warehouses dedicated to meat, fish and raw vegetable collection, coal and firewood in between them too. I have a market to ferry fish from the docks to the warehouses. With all of that, all cooks on a day and night shift rotation starting 1 hour before everyone else's shifts, (and warehouse storage for cooked food) I always have a total of 0 food in that storage because it's eaten as soon as it's cooked. 5x15 = 75 meals per pot, which means on a 50/50 shift rotation food should get cooked and stored more often than not.

However, there is a problem with villager hoarding (and it's been mentioned to the dev's) where villagers will take 4 meals each and then wander around all day with 2 meals rotting away. You must have seen a villager now and then say "that wasn't quite fresh" because they just ate the 2nd or 3rd meal of the 4 and the 4th gets wasted, instead of getting enough to fill their bar till the next time they are hungry and/or on leisure time.

This means half you villagers are getting are getting no meals and eat raw food instead, making less cooked food as well, meaning warehouses cannot stock any cooked food.

Added on the fact that after the first use food resource flags are useless, the villager will not go back each season to find food after they first cleared the area around the flag, unless you rebuild each flag, every season for seasonal growth foods. Farms plant food out of season unless you micromanage them, every season, wasting seeds until the food is back in season, by which time they have no seeds left, (my problem with cabbage and beetroot at the moment) so you are not producing enough food anyway, and there is no compost bin, so they randomly have to pickup rotten food for compost. There should be a bin that takes 1 food and 5 fiber and makes 5 compost for exactly this problem.

[GeorgeShtuller]

Originally posted by Adahmz:

Originally posted by ArgonGas:

With all that, I've still found it impossible to build up any kind of reserve of cooked food.

I know your pain, I have 104 villagers, 5 cook houses surrounding 4 farms, and 2 gatherers with 3 hunting lodges around them, and 2 warehouses dedicated to meat, fish and raw vegetable collection, coal and firewood in between them too. I have a market to ferry fish from the docks to the warehouses. With all of that, all cooks on a day and night shift rotation starting 1 hour before everyone else's shifts, (and warehouse storage for cooked food) I always have a total of 0 food in that storage because it's eaten as soon as it's cooked. 5x15 = 75 meals per pot, which means on a 50/50 shift rotation food should get cooked and stored more often than not.

However, there is a problem with villager hoarding (and it's been mentioned to the dev's) where villagers will take 4 meals each and then wander around all day with 2 meals rotting away. You must have seen a villager now and then say "that wasn't quite fresh" because they just ate the 2nd or 3rd meal of the 4 and the 4th gets wasted, instead of getting enough to fill their bar till the next time they are hungry and/or on leisure time.

This means half you villagers are getting are getting no meals and eat raw food instead, making less cooked food as well, meaning warehouses cannot stock any cooked food.

Added on the fact that after the first use food resource flags are useless, the villager will not go back each season to find food after they first cleared the area around the flag, unless you rebuild each flag, every season for seasonal growth foods. Farms plant food out of season unless you micromanage them, every season, wasting seeds until the food is back in season, by which time they have no seeds left, (my problem with cabbage and beetroot at the moment) so you are not producing enough food anyway, and there is no compost bin, so they randomly have to pickup rotten food for compost. There should be a bin that takes 1 food and 5 fiber and makes 5 compost for exactly this problem.

Did I understand correctly that the collectors do not check the point every time, but only once in its entire existence?
Then there really is no point in them and it would be better as in "mediaeval dynasty".

[SerBucky]

Below is my new farming and food production setup. It is essentially 2 farms, 2 warehouses, 2 cooking huts each using whitelisting to block villagers eating raw food. IT works really well and I have 50% more food currently than villagers and don't see anyone snacking on the raw food anymore except the farmers (who just eat while working I guess) or when berries spawn in the world and villagers pick them up as they meander around.

https://youtu.be/5WRZChla6W4

[GeorgeShtuller]

By the way, is there a way to get hunters to bring meat instead of hunks? When I turned off the task for hunks, it seemed to me that they started leaving them on the ground, rather than cutting them up and carrying them to the village.

[Green Odin]

Originally posted by GeorgeShtuller:

By the way, is there a way to get hunters to bring meat instead of hunks? When I turned off the task for hunks, it seemed to me that they started leaving them on the ground, rather than cutting them up and carrying them to the village.

Could try setting their priorities at the work place with meat at high and meat hunks at low.

Gods know if you forget to switch fiber down to low at the woodsman they will never stop processing bark rather than bringing it home.