Duplicant Ai and Priority System is seriously useless.

[Luux]

I cannot for the life of me understand why i just wasted 30 cycles, and several real-time hours trying to fix a colony starvation issue that literally should not be an issue.

My duplicants literally will not harvest the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Mealwood plants, at least 20 of them active at a time, and they don't do ♥♥♥♥!

The only way i can fathom that they would ever actually listen is if i turned off all priorities for all other tasks to X and put them all on farming/cooking. Because their ai cannot handle more than 3 available tasks anywhere in the world, or else they'll always half-do tasks. Legit, cannot get most carry errands to even complete, they just drop them cause they needed oxygen or some ♥♥♥♥ and forget about it. Abandoning the task. Just plant more food, you might say, but no, i have several actively harvestable plants ready whenever they're dropping dead. Cause they just refuse to even walk down there and collect it. I shouldn't have to put the entire map on 1 priority and put the farm and kitchen on 9 just to get the dupes to have a simulation of a survival instinct. Where's their desire to actually eat and stay alive? I swear, has the ai gotten worse since the new updates? (last played seriously before Ranching)

This is a serious problem that's made it near impossible to progress in a save i was actually doing ok in. Just because the dupes can't recognize that food has been available for 3 days now and they still won't do anything about it.

I can't put anything on high priority, even then they won't do it, and they ignore tasks quite harshly to the point they rarely get anything useful done. I can't leave things on the same priority, their scatter-brained tendancies just worsen. You literally should just dump the entire ai system of these guys and give them realistic behaviors, like AN ACTUAL WILL TO SURVIVE which they seem to lack since they're obviously salivating for some other reason than starvation, considering they ignore completely accessible food in plain sight.

A starving dupe should never put jobs higher priority than food imo, unless you make it so or it's red alert. Or you should be able to set a threshhold, cause ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the dupes themselves certainly can't figure out how to do it.

The only way i could possibly save this save game, realistically, is if i put the tasks i want them to do on 9 and everything else on 1, systematically. Until everything is done perfectly, or if the game had an actual orders system, where i could just tell dupes what needs to be done, and THEY RESPOND. Cause this priorities thing just doesn't work. It's killed 10 dupes over the past 25ish cycles i've wasted trying to get them to figure out how to harvest a plant that is obviously food.

Honestly, if i'm doing something wrong, please tell me. I would love to know, if there was just one thing wrong that sent this whole thing spiraling into hell. I just wanna be able to play the game without worrying that my dupes aren't intelligent enough to figure out they don't run on just oxygen.

[Hedning]

Dupes are unable to "ignore" high priority tasks. Literally a dupe standing next to a prio 5 task will run all the way across the map to do a prio 6 task you just placed. If you follow a dupe around with the follow cam you can see how their to do list is constantly being updated with the highest priority on top.

If your food isn't being harvested and you want to farm at the highest priority then either make one or several dedicated farmers by going into the job priority screen and give selected dupes +10 or +20 priority to farming, or take the priority tool and drag +6 to +9 across all farm tiles.

Yes dupes need oxygen. Who knew with a name like oni.
As you have seen attempting to do things without o2 just wastes their time, so the first thing to do would be to stop wasting their time. Give your dupes o2 where they are working, or give them exosuits, or cancel the orders until you can provide either.

The next step would be to sort out your priorities. If prio 6 isn't enough to have all dupes rush in and do a thing then you have selected to give other tasks higher priority. Don't blame the game for this. Go around your base and change the priorities to what you actually want.

A hungry dupe gets +100 priority to eat during break time. A starving dupe gets more regardless of time. I can't remember exactly but it goes up to +400. It's possible they may do a yellow alert order first since yellow alert is +300, but they certainly will never do a regular task before eating when starving.

Dupes can't plan ahead. They don't know that if they get sleepy and need a bed they can construct one first and then sleep in it. Similarly they don't know that they can harvest a plant first and then eat it, or if they need o2 they can construct an oxygen diffuser, construct a generator and some wire, dig some algae and fill it and then breathe. It is up to you to do the planning.