How to choose what food is eaten?

[Wunderforce]

Does anyone know how to control what food gets eaten at the end of each moon? I thought it might be from the closest stack or from the top of each stack but this doesn't seem to be the case.

My villagers keep eating berries instead of apples :/ ....

[zhilly]

I'm not sure either, but I have noticed that my villagers will avoid food in work piles (ex. at the market ready to be sold, cooking, combining into milkshake/salad) so maybe right before the moon cycle ends you could put the food you don't want to be eaten in that sort of pile and remove it before the action completes.

[Taklu]

I think this could be resolved by adding a Kitchen building to the game. It'd be a storage building that would be used first before food outside the building.

[Dschinghis Pan]

I think food has an internal priority of how it is eaten.
Dev said in another thread he plans of adding a card that could deprioritize food.

Anyway, berries have a high priority, propably because they are only one food per card and thus it's generally beneficial to use them up quickly to not waste cardspace. Plus they are easy to come by.

[YetiChow]

The default priority order is: cooked food [low money value] -> cooked food [high money value] -> raw food [low money value] -> raw food [higher money value], so e.g. fritatas and omelettes (3g IIRC) will be eaten before fruit salads (5g) and berries (1g) will be eaten before apples or onions (2g). On top of that, food which has a progress bar active will always be given lowest priority - so sami.zeng03 is correct that you can "preserve" a food by starting a job with it assuming you have other food that can be eaten instead.

In cases where the gold value is tied, it seems like fill value also plays a role, however I've never been in a situation where I could watch exactly which food items get eaten first when the villagers are pillaging my last couple of carrots and onions lol.

To the OP: if you have both berries and apples available, make fruit salads! Not only will that ensure that raw berries and apples are lower priority for being eaten, there's also a chance that you'll be left with a fruit salad that has 1 'serve' remaining (this happens consistently if you have an odd number of adults and no babies/dogs, or an even number of adults and 2 babies/dogs) -- when that does happen, you can sell the single serve of fruit salad for the full value of 5 coins, which will buy you a Seeking Wisdom pack (or a Humble Beginnings and 2 coins towards a second one) and you'll likely get a whole berry bush back!

[Wunderforce]

Thank you all for the replies. YetiChow's summary seems to be correct. The main reason I wanted to save the berries was to combine them with milk to make milkshakes. This seemed preferable to me since fruit salad costs two cards (of harvesting effort) and 3 food value whereas milkshakes cost only one card of harvesting effort and 2 food value but still sell for 5g.

[Kastalia]

on a side note:
milkshakes are also preferred over omelettes.

I tend to produce both in excessive amounts mid/lategame and observed that.
(1 shed of cows, 1 shed of chicken, 2 stoves and 4 farms with berries, while 1 villager is harvesting berries 24/7)

[DUCK]

low food ones like 1 food cards is more valuable for some reason.
while cooked food often have higher value, and is also more wanted.
so if you make milkshake it will be before berries, so good luck wasting 5 coin worth of food, for not that great of a food item.

food with the same value, not sure. but it seems cooked food is a bit prefered.
apples get left unused, compared to berries by being in th middle.

[jamiegactor]

Having played way too many hours of this game, I can update this. The order seems to be:
cooked meat, milkshakes, fruit salad, omlettes/fritatas, then stew. With the ingredients, anything worth one food is eaten first which leads to the utterly infuriating "Great Onion Famine" where all of the onions will be eaten before they touch the apples and carrots. Seems to happen almost every time as you reach mid-game when you're just getting a good veggie patch going for stew production. It would be nice to see this fixed (make onions inedible raw) but honestly once you get used to it, it's a quirky part of the game. Heck the village is already summoning demons, why not also have a weird thing for raw onions every so often?

[DUCK]

Originally posted by jamiegactor:

Heck the village is already summoning demons, why not also have a weird thing for raw onions every so often?

stat card, when vampire on the board, if not eaten, villager will die/attacked that round. ouch

[jamiegactor]

Love it! XD Quick sell all the cooked food, we gotta get everyone onioned up!

[Vental]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

The default priority order is: cooked food [low money value] -> cooked food [high money value] -> raw food [low money value] -> raw food [higher money value], so e.g. fritatas and omelettes (3g IIRC) will be eaten before fruit salads (5g) and berries (1g) will be eaten before apples or onions (2g). On top of that, food which has a progress bar active will always be given lowest priority - so sami.zeng03 is correct that you can "preserve" a food by starting a job with it assuming you have other food that can be eaten instead.

In cases where the gold value is tied, it seems like fill value also plays a role, however I've never been in a situation where I could watch exactly which food items get eaten first when the villagers are pillaging my last couple of carrots and onions lol.

This from my experience isn't "entirely" correct. I've noticed that if you have a bunch of different food in a stack, stack order seems to also take a priority. The ones on the toppest of a mixed stack go first (but I could be wrong about that) while still prioritizing meals over ingredients.

[DUCK]

Originally posted by Vental:

This from my experience isn't "entirely" correct. I've noticed that if you have a bunch of different food in a stack, stack order seems to also take a priority. The ones on the toppest of a mixed stack go first (but I could be wrong about that) while still prioritizing meals over ingredients.

stacking might be true. Not tried, as its best to sort things.

[Vental]

Originally posted by DUCK:

Originally posted by Vental:

This from my experience isn't "entirely" correct. I've noticed that if you have a bunch of different food in a stack, stack order seems to also take a priority. The ones on the toppest of a mixed stack go first (but I could be wrong about that) while still prioritizing meals over ingredients.

stacking might be true. Not tried, as its best to sort things.

If they are all cooked meals, why is it good to sort things (salad vs cooked stake as an example) if you can't control which gets eaten first or do anything with them since they are already in their final form?

I was always under the assumption if something has the same food value then there's pretty much no reason to categorize them. Even for selling purposes, you are better off just selling the ingredients than wasting good food that you are trying to stock-pile. Or is the price difference that extreme that you are actually better off selling full meals and making them back later???