Smarter Food Selection Mod

The Smarter Food Selection Mod allows you to restrict the food for your pawns (prisoners, animals, ascetic, cannibal).

Smarter Food Selection Mod features

• In-game UI to individually assign food policies.
• Force your pets to eat grass, human corpses, hay…
• Better food selection algorithm.
• Upgraded and smarter nutrient paste dispenser.
• Make your pets hunt for their own food.

Use Hotkey (default “\”) to display food search information. Useful to check the behavior of the mod with custom policies.

Policies and food assignment

• Assign policies individually to your pawns.
• Policies will favor or forbids some foods or hunting.
• Visitors and other friendly/neutral pawns have their own policy and you can not change it.
• Create your own policies with XML (comes with presets). Example here.

Nutrient Paste Dispenser

• Force the dispenser to output meals.
• Visitors will use the NPD instead of picking the food from hoppers.
• You can use the NPD from a prisoner’s room to feed injured prisoners.
• NPD will select the best ingredients according to the eater. When possible, cannibals and animals will get human meat. It will avoid human and insect meat for others.
• (Optional) The dispenser will create a specific nutrient paste item if it contains human meat. Useful to avoid to stack with other meals and mix ingredients.
• Fixes the vanilla bug where attempting to deliver food to a prisoner room with an empty NPD produces an error.

Animals, pets and handling

• Your pets become miraculously smart, they will even respect the policy you assigned to them. The default pets policy makes them pick food in the following order (when they can eat it):
  [Grass > Hunting (predator race) > Humanlike corpse > Hay > Nutrient paste > Kibble > Human raw meat > Insect raw meat > Raw food bad > Raw food tasty* > Corpses > Insect corpses > Simple meal > Fine meal > Lavish meal]
• Avoid your pets to get hurt while hunting. You can set a maximum predator/prey strength ratio beyond which they will not target a prey.  (Vanilla is 0.5, mod default is 0.25). Check mod settings, not policy.
• Colonists will prefer using the best food for taming and training.

Special traits (Ascetic, Cannibal and Incapacitated)

All of those have their own preset policy:

• Ascetic will always prefer nutrient paste meals instead of being indifferent.
• Cannibal will prefer meals with human meat and the dispenser will give them human meat meals.
• Incapacitated can’t go berserk, right? Just feed them like ascetic colonists or even animals.

Creating your own custom policies in XML

• Use this example.
• Place your file in Defs/Policies.
• You can also use files in Defs/Policies as examples !
• Watch out for unique label and defnames
• The mod root folder should be somewhere in \SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\294100\887716138
• To see how your policy acts, assign a pawn with your policy and select it. then press “\” (default key) to cycle through display modes.

Compatibility  notes

• Major issue with Combat Extended when trying to tame/train with hay or more.
• Potential conflict with “hunt for me” (to be tested).
• The mod should be compatible with most mods that add more foods. Such as Vegetable Garden (to be checked).

The Smarter Food Selection Mod dynamically categorizes all food definitions from every mod. This affects how policies affect their selection. You can see all those information on the “compatibility report” of the mod printed in the log on start.

If it appears that some items are not correctly classified, the mod supports XML “compatibility patches”. They will force a set of foods to appear in a given category. Everything needed to create those patches is the Defs/Compatibility folder of the mod.