Duplicants not eating the least fresh food

[Zarquan]

Has anyone noticed that the dupes appear to no longer eat the least fresh food, leading to early game rotting?  Or is it just me?  As I recall, they used to eat the least fresh food in the area.

[Xheotris]

I mean, do you always eat leftovers before they go bad? Seems to me like a feature, not a bug.

[Zarquan]

These aren't leftovers.  This is harvested food in the field going bad at cycle 12 during a food shortage.  That has never happened in my games before.

I usually don't bother with food storage until around cycle 20 because it has never been an issue before.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

1 hour ago, Zarquan said:

These aren't leftovers.  This is harvested food in the field going bad at cycle 12 during a food shortage.  That has never happened in my games before.

I usually don't bother with food storage until around cycle 20 because it has never been an issue before.

Isn't normal that the food spoils if it is just laying around? Why not just store it in your ration box?

[Zarquan]

7 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

Isn't normal that the food spoils if it is just laying around? Why not just store it in your ration box?

I have never had to do that this early in the game before.  I would be fine if food on the ground spoiled faster, but that is not the case..  I usually deconstruct the original ration box (which is in oxygen anyway), so I can put a research station there in the very beginning for the decor benefit.  This has always worked for the first 20 cycles (after which I build a CO2 trap to keep it the food in).  They always ate the least fresh food before the most fresh.  But in my latest game, they seem to be eating the freshest food first, meaning the least fresh food will spoil if I can keep up with the food demands.  My question is was this an intentional change in the latest patch?  Or perhaps is it a bug?

[Xuhybrid]

By cycle 20 you should have plenty of CO2 to sit your food in. Hell you could have it ready by cycle 5.

[Zarquan]

13 minutes ago, Xuhybrid said:

By cycle 20 you should have plenty of CO2 to sit your food in.

Yes, but I generally don't have a place that is going to remain CO2 yet.  My intention is usually to dig down asap, so if I put my food containers at the bottom of my base, eventually it would be oxygenated.  Plus, the mess hall is relatively high up in my base, so it would have been a significant amount of time to get the food then eat it.  So, I wait until I feel the need to build a CO2 trap and keep it there near my mess hall.  But I usually don't bother building it until my food stocks start reliably growing because they always used to prioritize the least fresh food.  Now they do not seem to, so I had to divert time and resources in the early game to solve a problem that did not used to exist. 

I am not annoyed that I had to build it so early, but I do want to know if there was a change in duplicant behavior that caused this problem so early in the game.

Plus, I don't need plenty of CO2, just 5 grams of it.

14 minutes ago, Xuhybrid said:

Hell you could have it ready by cycle 5.

I could have it ready by the end of cycle 1 if I felt it were a priority.  But it didn't used to be important.  It used to not matter when I did it as long as it was done before I started growing surpluses of food on my own.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I think you will just have to adjust to what is the new situation for you, mate. To be fair, I was a bit nonchalant with my food before too, storing them in ration boxes always but always keeping them in oxygen rich environment. I'd constantly loose food to decay until I finally moved my ration boxes to a CO2 environment. Now I'm swimming in 800k calories.

My recommendation is in the first cycles to never produce more then you need, and move the ration boxes down into CO2 environment. It's not going to take that much extra time, and you can always move your mess/great halls further below. If you dig down further, just rebuild the ration boxes further below.

[Lali-Lop]

Not sure if it's always been that way, but as far as I can remember, Dupes prioritize eating the freshest food.  I suppose it pushes you to control your food production for better efficiency.  I've learned to keep my food storage and my farms in CO2 so nothing will rot and be wasted.

[avc15]

there are very few differences between having food in a ration box or on the floor. Ration boxes don't directly prevent food spoilage. It just happens as a result of food being stored in a clean or contaminated atmosphere.

The ration box gives you two things: it helps to control surface germs, and a hatch can't eat out of a ration box. That's it.

[Zarquan]

8 hours ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

I think you will just have to adjust to what is the new situation for you, mate. To be fair, I was a bit nonchalant with my food before too, storing them in ration boxes always but always keeping them in oxygen rich environment. I'd constantly loose food to decay until I finally moved my ration boxes to a CO2 environment. Now I'm swimming in 800k calories.

My recommendation is in the first cycles to never produce more then you need, and move the ration boxes down into CO2 environment. It's not going to take that much extra time, and you can always move your mess/great halls further below. If you dig down further, just rebuild the ration boxes further below.

Like I said, I am not annoyed if I have to build stable food storage earlier, I just want to know whether there was a change in duplicant behavior.  I know they used to eat the food with the lowest freshness rating so that it wouldn't spoil. 

I also am not producing enough food yet.  I have been accepting every early dupe because I'm a masochist, so I have been relying on muckroot to solve my problems food problems.  Food being left to rot never used to be an issue this early in the game, which is why I suspect that the behavior of the dupes has changed.

6 hours ago, Lali-Lop said:

Not sure if it's always been that way, but as far as I can remember, Dupes prioritize eating the freshest food.  I suppose it pushes you to control your food production for better efficiency.  I've learned to keep my food storage and my farms in CO2 so nothing will rot and be wasted.

Dupes have been eating the least fresh food since the Thermal Update.  I bet its a change in how the duplicants find food that has happened more recently.

[Yucie]

27 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Like I said, I am not annoyed if I have to build stable food storage earlier, I just want to know whether there was a change in duplicant behavior.

The reason you're not getting the answer you want so easily is because like the people above, we simply toss the food into CO2 early on and therefore haven't ever noticed or dealt with the issue. Food takes a fair bit of time to rot, so the odds of you not having it in CO2 by then are slim.

I too can't answer your question because I place the ration box into a small 2x2 pocket in the ground near the dupe printer by cycle 3, just to get the box out of the way for a bed. (That's how I learned about sterility in my first game too.)

Honestly, you're better off downloading older builds to test the behavior yourself. You'd get faster results.