Food sharing for starvation prevention/food priority over stress reaction

[Dovahkick]

I have restarted my games of ONI a lot of times due to the starvation of my dupes, but there's one thing that I had noticed is when there's a starvation crisis (I mean when multiple dupes are starving). The microbe musher is quite helpful for its cheapness with mush bars, the dupes are (logically and thankfully) desperate enough to eat the mush bar as soon as it gets made, but what I hate the most is that they are selfish when it comes to food, I had some dupes who starved to death because their friends had more kcal than them but ate the food anyway without caring about those who had less.

To clarify, I had duplicants with less than 100 kcal and some others with over 800 kcal, those who had less than 100 kcal died because those who had over 800 kcal ate the remaining food before them.

Another thing, dupes who have 100% stress and who begin their stress reaction (crying, vomitting and destroying) have a higher priority on their stress reaction than food (with the exception of binge eater). A destructive dupe who's starving will put a bigger priority in destroying buildings than eating when urgently needed for example, and I'd like to mention that one of my dupes starved to death because she prefered to destroy a manual generator rather than to eat a mush bar wich was right aside her.

So my suggestions would be that dupes who are stress reacting prioritise food as soon as it's made and that starving dupes with higher kcal than other dupes share their carried food or only eat a portion.

[Lurve]

I would suggest that if your dupes find themselves in these situations, they are having a very bad time and you probably shouldn't hold it against them.  You will probably have more success just finding more food than handling the particulars of starvation.  There's usually quite a lot of muckroot buried in the temperate biome.  Excavate all of the buried tiles in the starting area.  It'll either be food, a hatch you can kill for food, or seeds you can grow for food.

[Dovahkick]

Except that what I'm experiencing happens after 60 cycles which means that I had harvested all the muckroots already, the plants are overheating at 30° due to the batteries so I can't grow them (I'll make smart batteries next time).

Plus, I'm making a suggestion to the devs, I was explaining that there are some flaws with the priority of food. I played the game enough to know the basics and the first steps, enough to get over 100 cycles.

[Lurve]

And I'm explaining that your concerns are always going to be very niche cases, because if they ever do arise you have bigger problems to worry about.

Without seeing your setup it's hard to provide concrete advice, but cycle 60 is well beyond what it should reasonably take you to get food going, and batteries really should not be the culprit in any overheating issues.  Even so, there are still good options: mushrooms are my go-to early game food these days, you can stick them in any neighboring slime biome and their temperature will be fine; and in the process of excavating all of your muckroots you've also rescued a lot of hatches.  Try starting an early ranch and living off eggs.  Each set of 8 hatches should feed three dupes (give or take) on bbq and omelettes with eggs left over for replacement.

[Sasza22]

16 hours ago, Nathan06250 said:

the plants are overheating at 30° due to the batteries so I can't grow them

Plants can be safely grown if you put your batteries far away. Just make sure all your machinery is far from your farms. Best put your farms in the middle of the starting zone and close to the water tanks (this will make the temperature stabile in the area). Don`t put farms close to the edges of the biome.

Iwhen you find an ice biome bring back some wheezeworts and plant them near your farms. They should be enough to keep them cool for the next 100+ cycles.

[Dovahkick]

It's a suggestion thread, isn't it? I was first talking about the dupes being selfish with other dupes and prioritising stress reaction over food. I prefer to keep that on-topic.

[Zarquan]

I find the mirco annoying if you run out of food, especially in the early game.  I feel that if there are starving dupes, the lowest kcal dupe should eat first.

[Dovahkick]

3 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

I feel that if there are starving dupes, the lowest kcal dupe should eat first.

That's exactly what I was talking about at first. One of my dupes died because they couldn't get the mush bar before the others.

[yoakenashi]

I just had a duplicant die from stress. I didn't think that was possible, but Mae chose to vomit to death; a little opposite of the direction I was hoping her food would be going. A reload doesn't help as I cannot do anything to make her eat the nearly 1 million food that is available to her.

I definitely suggest prioritizing eating over stress reaction. Eat, and then go back to crying, vomiting, breaking things, etc.