Colonists and pets prioritize eating packaged survival meals

[Khajiit]

I use very few mods, mostly graphical things like more floors and spoony's hair mod. Maybe a mod is causing this, but I can't understand why. People and animals both eat packaged survival meals before any other. I didn't mess with the default meal settings.

Any ideas what is doing this and how I can fix it? If I forbid packaged meals, will people on caravans starve rather than eat it?

[Preechr]

Look under your "Assign" tab at the bottom. Set a food policy that excludes travel meals. Best to include pemmican, raw food, corpses, animal feed... all that stuff. If you make that your default policy, then any new colonists will get it automatically. You will still have to remember to set your caravanners to a different policy that allows them to eat travel meals and berries while on the road.

Even with the food restrictions set, your colonists will tend to grab a travel meal to carry around with them for some reason. Not only does this affect their productivity, as the meal they carry around is supposed to allow them to eat lunch on the go instead of stopping work to go all the way back to the cooler, but it also means your stack of travel meals will be light by however many colonists you have.

If this matters to you, you could set up a small kitchen with room enough for a stove and some storage, create a zone around it then invert it, then assign everyone except a lower level cook you want to train up to that zone and leave the cook unzoned. Set up a travel meal bill on that stove for just that cook to do and only allow cheap and plentiful ingredients. Do a load of hunting and an extra harvest of rice, maybe. When you are all stocked up on travel meals, stuff the cook back in the zone that doesn't allow entry to that special kitchen after you make him/her drop the meal in their pocket.

[Khajiit]

But this isn't normal behavior, it's a bug or something added by a mod. I'd rather fix the problem than just use a work-around.

When colonists take a meal to go they should take a regular meal, not a packaged survival meal. That's the way the AI behaved all along until this issue popped up for me.

[billy]

As far as i was aware they have always taken a packaged survival meal if it was the closest meal

am i wrong on that? i have without doubt seen them take them when others were available.

i just never have it as the closest meal and store them out the way to save room in my fridge so its not something that pops up for me.

[M.K.]

They will always go for the tastiest meal that is in range and allowed.
Survival meals taste "fine", so if all is allowed and available, they will be taken in preference before raw food or simple meals.

Just forbid packaged survival meals. (and remember to re-enable when needed)