Dogs not eating

[SiegeStorm]

I have a bunch of Huskies and they will not eat unless I force them into a tiny zone that only includes part of my freezer with meat. Their current zone includes almost the entire map excluding some rooms. Within their normal zone, they have a stockpile of kibble and my freezer full of meat and other food but they will NOT eat anything if set to this zone. They will only eat if they are set to that tiny zone I made in the freezer to force them to eat. Why is this happening?

[Astasia]

Animals have a small range of awareness for these things which expands as needed, at low levels of hunger they will not look very far for food, when starving they eventually see the entire map. If you leave it alone and just let them do their thing your animals should eat on their own, they just might go hungry for a while before doing so (if they are collapsing from starvation though while still having access to food, then you might have a mod breaking things). If you want to avoid hungry animals and potential miscarriages, make sure your animals sleeping spots are right near their food storage, when they wake up in the morning if the food is right there then they will eat it, and this is generally enough to keep them going for the day.

[SiegeStorm]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Animals have a small range of awareness for these things which expands as needed, at low levels of hunger they will not look very far for food, when starving they eventually see the entire map. If you leave it alone and just let them do their thing your animals should eat on their own, they just might go hungry for a while before doing so (if they are collapsing from starvation though while still having access to food, then you might have a mod breaking things). If you want to avoid hungry animals and potential miscarriages, make sure your animals sleeping spots are right near their food storage, when they wake up in the morning if the food is right there then they will eat it, and this is generally enough to keep them going for the day.

That's the strange part. Their sleeping beds are in the same room as the kibble stockpile and this room is adjacent to the freezer. Both rooms they have access to but they insist on not eating unless I force them into a space with food like the freezer. If I don't do this, they will starve until I need to rescue them.

[Astasia]

I would guess then that there is some error happening, the animals might be trying to eat something else which is generating an error and causing that to fail so they keep doing other things. By restricting them to only the valid foods this stops the error from happening and allows them to eat. If you look at the log in game when your animals are starving you might see an error happening to see if my guess is correct or not.

[SiegeStorm]

Originally posted by Astasia:

I would guess then that there is some error happening, the animals might be trying to eat something else which is generating an error and causing that to fail so they keep doing other things. By restricting them to only the valid foods this stops the error from happening and allows them to eat. If you look at the log in game when your animals are starving you might see an error happening to see if my guess is correct or not.

I think it might have been a mod error because I removed a few mods that I had been needing to remove for a while and added a new mode (all unrelated to animals) and they seems to be eating again. I don't know if it was because of the mod changes or restarting the game but it seems to have worked

[CloudSeeker]

Animals are very stupid. They can easily get lost or starve to death all on their own.

The way you solve it is to have a dedicated kennel for them, and a food storage of kibble next to it or inside of it. That way they will always walk home to sleep, and after they slept they eat the kibble.

[hardy_conrad]

I've never had issues with animals refusing to feed themselves, definitely a mod thing. If they're starving to death despite food being available that's not simply them being stupid.

[CloudSeeker]

Originally posted by hardy_conrad:

I've never had issues with animals refusing to feed themselves, definitely a mod thing. If they're starving to death despite food being available that's not simply them being stupid.

It isn't a mod thing. It is a AI pathing thing. Animals do not have a very large search area for food. If you have a large base they can easily find themselves wandering around far away from the food storage and starve themselves to death. Unlike Pawns, animals do not look at the whole map and see what can and can not be eaten.

[hardy_conrad]

Hmm, interesting. Perhaps I simply haven't encountered it because my bases haven't been that big. Or luck, heh.

[SiegeStorm]

Originally posted by hardy_conrad:

Hmm, interesting. Perhaps I simply haven't encountered it because my bases haven't been that big. Or luck, heh.

Yeah I started a new base biotech and it is way more spread out than usual, almost covering the entire map since it has mountains on 3 sides so I just blocked off the only entrance and put a kill box there. Consequently it takes forever for pawns to get anywhere but the dogs sleep next to the food so idk why that is an issue.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by CloudSeeker:

It isn't a mod thing. It is a AI pathing thing. Animals do not have a very large search area for food. If you have a large base they can easily find themselves wandering around far away from the food storage and starve themselves to death. Unlike Pawns, animals do not look at the whole map and see what can and can not be eaten.

Like I said, this is only true when they aren't very hungry. As their hunger bar gets close to 0 their map awareness becomes larger until they can see the entire map. Occasionally seeing an animal at 0% hunger starting to dip into malnutrition before they go eat is normal. Once an animal reaches 0% hunger they still have more than a full day of being mobile before malnutrition drops them, they will finish whatever task they are doing then immediately go get food, it should never become a serious issue. Having them starve to death with food available is not normal and is likely some sort of mod issue.