Forcing duplicants to eat / do asks

[Hyperforce]

So i wanted to discuss an issue ive been having in my base. And how i get around it.

Maybe its just because im using top priority a lot. Or because my base is getting bigger. But i often run into dups that refuse to eat, usually because they want to do a forced task over taking care of themselves, or because some other dupe has locked onto the only food in the room even though the dup standing next to the food is about to starve to death. And i've also found they would often rather go to the bathroom halfway down the lenght of my base before eating, no matter how close they are to death. 

 

Other issues are when duplicants need to do certain tasks that dont have priorities like upgrade certain generators or kill critters like paku's for emergency food.

This was frustrating me and driving me nuts. So many dups died from needless starvation.  

Now i dont know how common knowledge this is, i can't t find much about it.

But i found a way to force duplicants into eating, and even sharing food (except with binge eaters). 

Simply put your food production, mess hall or food box behind or between doors. And when you need to force feed a dup, restrict access to only go INTO the room with the food. Then tell the hungry dup to walk into this room. The dup cant leave to do other tasks and will resort to doing the only thing it can do, eat. Or do other tasks that can be hard to prioritize, such as kill critters, or tune up generators. Whatever is available in the room and needed. 

You can also make them share food in a pinch. Just get a dupe to force eat by locking them into the room using direction access, then tell them to move once they started eating, they will drop the food half eaten and another hungry dup fill pick it up and eat the rest. Good in a pinch when you have a bunch of hungry dups about to starve to death and only 1 or 2 liceloafs. 

 

On the other hand, If you want to stop a binge eater from reaching your food and regain control over them. Simply set the food to compost before it has picked up the food it locked onto. You can also lock the door access to the food in case its goinfor your food box instead.

If you do interrupt their action by preventing the binge eater from reaching the food, you should have a moment to force him into a room and lock the door access so he can cool off. 

 

Anyone else found another way to work past these issues? 

 

 

[Xuhybrid]

I admit i skim read but the moment i read "binge eater" a red flag went off. Why is that a concern? Why is anyone stressed? Under no circumstances should anyone be building up stress from not meeting morale requirements. Also, if your dupes can steal food from each other, you don't have enough food, duh.

[Prince Mandor]

Sounds like something terribly wrong with priority and schedule.

Lets just pause for a moment, and think "Why"?

Why your dupes do not eat? What they do instead? Do you have some tasks you demand to do at any cost? Why you set such task with so high priority?

Why they need to go to bathroom across half base, do they have enough time to use it at morning? If not, ask yourself again "why?"

If they really need to use it at middle of the day, then why there are no toilet near them? Just lavatory, sink, door and some pipes, why don't build it near their working place?

Why your Duplicants so stressed?

Read their info, what stresses them out? Do they have a good rooms, and clean environment with beautiful art? If all else fails, why they do not have massage table to reduce stress? You do not have any ore on your map?

And why you don't have enough food for them, having enormous base? What exactly prevents you from growing enough mushrooms or hatches?

Lets analyse roots of this strange situation

[Hyperforce]

Well the biggest reason is because i was running out of power, water and eventually food. This is only my second base so im still strugling with some of the basic conventions. My first base starved to death due to heat in my farm. This one is better but i ran out So i had to rely on algea ter. For oxygen and basic toilets.

 

In fact, Things in my base were running fine until the point that my water started to run out. I've been putting them in emergency tasks just to keep them alive after an initial starvation death wave. I probably made my farm too small, didnt wire my microbe musher up to its own backup power wheel etc. so im trying to sort that out now. 

But my first issue was them running out of clean drinkable water. And unlike in my previous base where i fed them their own filtered waste water... Here I had them set up a cooling loop from a steam geyser looping through a cold biome. Then i started to run out of coal, so i build a large electrolyzer powerplant. But getting that done while the clock was ticking meant i had to force some jobs. Which makes them not take care of themselves. Hence force feeding them. 

[Nightinggale]

There was a mod at some point, which would give you more FPS by making dupes update their chores less frequently. It was removed from steam because it turned out that it could cause dupes to forget to eat. Due to the way ONI works, it is possible that you still have a copy of that mod in your game despite it no longer being present on steam. Maybe it isn't the case, but your report of failing to eat sounds suspiciously very similar to that bug.

I can't remember the name of the mod. It was less brain or something. You might have it in your mod list as a blank mod.

[Prince Mandor]

In most situation you do not need any forced jobs. Except literally lifesaving. If most of you tasks have priority "3" then any task with "4" is important. 

If you make all of your tasks "9" and some of them "!!" this not in any way makes them faster, than "4" and "5", with added bonus to let your Duplicants take care of themselves.

One of basic rules of crisis management: decide which tasks NOT to do.

In ONI this means "lower priority", not "raise priority". You, as I think, do not have idle dupes. This means all their time already used. So, important decision must be "I want them to do this important task instead of ...what?"

Again, you can make this decisions on paused game. Without trying to run faster than train coming. Click dupe, open his errands list and looks there. Which tasks is not important? Is them not important for this specific dupe, or for everyone? And set low priority for things, you think not important now.

Try to run your base on priority "3", with priority "2" for tasks "do it, if you do everything regular" and priority "1" for "do it, if you really have nothing to do"

So, you will have you priorities from 4 to 9 to really mark important things and order them by importance.

But, again, priority not about speed, they are about sorting. Dupe have 50 tasks, wich one to do first? If everything "9", then everything have equal priority.

So, answer to your original question is "not use Forced priority for anything" and let your dupes care for their needs.

BTW, do not spend water on food - grow mushrooms before anything advanced. They needs only slime, not water

[Lurve]

You have your priorities backward.

Find the dupe priorities menu. The one that lists each dupe separately with the jobs they can do, some of which will be Xed out because that dupe refuses to do that job. THIS is the tool you need.

ONI's priority system is a bit of a relic of several different attempts at making priorities, that all sucked and so Klei just said "frick it, let's mash em all together." The system you're using, the 1-!! one, is the SUBpriority system. Dupes pick jobs based on their own priorities first, and then order those jobs by the job priority. A farmer dupe will do a priority 1 farming task before a 9 non-farming one. Which is why Klei made it even more confusing by adding a !! that temporarily overrides personal preferences. It also overrides personal care, which you've realized quickly becomes a problem if you depend on it too much.

So. Leave everything at 5 at first. Make sure each job type has at least one dupe with elevated priority. If something is not getting done, find the dupe who's supposed to get it done and see what they're doing instead. Odds are you've simply given them too much to do (of *that particular* job), and this is where you fiddle with numbers. The stuff they don't need to do right now gets a 4. The stuff they need to do first gets a 6. The stuff they need to do RIGHT NOW MOVE YOUR KEISTER NISBET gets a 7. Use 3 or below for planning expansions and "ignore this" orders. When you start building up too much stuff and they never get around to the 4s, consider getting another dupe or slow your roll until they catch up. Your rate of expansion in this game is typically limited by the workload of your dupes.

[beowulf2010]

Lurve's got it right. 

From what I can tell, each dupe assigns a number to a job and does the highest numbered job available. 

The up and down arrows in the "L" job priority menu is worth 10 points per tick ranging from 10 for the double down arrow to 50 for the double up arrow. Then the sub-priority you set via the 1-9 priority controls (yeah, I know, you use the priority controls fornsub-priority...) adds 1 point.

So, ignoring the !!, the max you can get is 59 for a double up arrow dupe looking at a sub-priority 9 job. 

Also note the there is also an order to the "L" menu job priorities so avoid having multiple double up arrows on dupes if you want them to concentrate on jobs further to the right as they will prefer like weighted jobs on the left (life support, combat, etc) over those on the right (dig, build, supply). 

[Hyperforce]

Thanks for the advice. I did somewhat use the job assignment system and i see how the guy i put on farming will mostly farm. 

!! Overrides everything though, even assigned or lower priority tasks. They will all start to build unless perhaps i forbid them from building completely. 

 

But ill apply some of the advice you gave me. Thanks for that. 

[beowulf2010]

2 hours ago, Hyperforce said:

!! Overrides everything though, even assigned or lower priority tasks. They will all start to build unless perhaps i forbid them from building completely. 

Yep. !! was implemented to override literally everything, including eating and going to the bathroom. I would recommend ignoring !! except for true emergencies like dupes entombing themselves.