Cooks need to stop Farming

[FlareFluffsune]

I'm repetedly getting "No food" alerts despite having 18 items queued in my cooking list, ALL THE INGREDIENTS AVAILABLE, I have 3 cooks and THEY DO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ NOTHING but FARM.

This needs to stop! I wouldn't be having food problems if the damn cooks would COOK!

[YetiChow]

Sounds like you have more farms than your farmers can manage, if the cooks are also spending all their time farming.

Once you have a couple of cooks, you can basically fields in half -- particularly if you're supplementing the veggies with trappers or hunting or even just buying meat from traders -- and easily maintain the same food supplies as before. The reason is simply that cooked food is much more filling, and as your cooks keep cooking your food gets better and better, so you don't need to make as much of it.

Cutting back on the size of your fields as you upgrade farmers to cooks means less time farming and more time cooking. If you're worried about food security, you can grow things like berry bushes to have an emergency backup of food that only gets harvested when you order it -- and it means that you're ready to start pumping out cakes and pies when the cooks reach that level too!

[Covfefe]

Are you sure you have the correct ingredients for the recipes you have queued up? I've never had cooks prioritize farming over cooking if they have the ingredients to cook the recipes I wanted and had the correct crafting station (cook pot, grinder, oven) available. But, this AI can break at times, so anything is possible.

[FlareFluffsune]

I have 4 farmers and 3 fields, I don't think I have too many farms. And unless I'm blind I have enough ingredients.

[YetiChow]

In that case, there's a good chance that the cooks are "stuck" on a task which can't be completed -- there's a few possibilities for why*; but the solution is the same for all cases: cancel your queue of crafting tasks, demote your cooks back to workers, promote them back to cooks and then re-order the crafting tasks. This will "refresh" the crafting queue and un-stick whatever was stuck.

*generally it's because of an old bug which has been fixed in the vanilla game but keeps popping up in certain mods, where the crafters can get into a "race condition" where both are trying to use the same exact item and of course only one can because they use it up... but the other is stuck trying to use that specific item, and doesn't know to cancel the task. Cancelling the task is normally enough to fix that, but the extra step of demoting and re-upping the crafter in question also clears/resets their AI, which lets the game "garbage collect" all of their unfinished queue tasks so there's no risk they get stuck in the computer's memory somewhere.

[BrunoSupremo]

Could be also that they can't reach their workstations. Check that too.
For 3 fields, 4 farmers is too much. Usually 1 farmer handles 2 fields just fine. You can experiment moving one of those farmers to workers again to help in more tasks in the town.

[Matti9845]

I figured this out as i had the same issue, the cooks ovens had run out of fuel and werent being restocked