Hearthling refuses to eat

Summary:

One of my hearthlings, Soar Homer a Master Carpenter, refuses to eat but constantly complains about no food. I currently have something like 3.7k in edibles and all 24 other hearthlings perfectly happy eating the food I have spread out around my town. I’m unfortunately not sure what caused this to occur.

I have tried turning off all of his jobs so that he sits totally idle. I tried changing his job from carpenter to worker. Nothing seems to change him. He just works through dinner time every day and then complains about it every night.

Steps to reproduce:
Unclear

Version Number and Mods in use:
Base Steam version release-559 (x64) with no mods.

Can he reach the food? Is he too far from it?

He walks past food constantly. His carpenter workbench is actually right next to my main food storage.

So I stalked little Soar for a while with all of his jobs turned off. It turns out he never even gets the hunger symbol above his head. However, it did appear as though he walked over to a chest with food in it, stood next to it for a second, then turned around and left.

The approach:

The contents of the chest:

Leaving while hungry:

For the next day, I let him haul items. During dinner time, all the other hearthlings were eating and he was just hauling carrots while hungry.

It seems as though there is something wrong with his hunger state, but it’s not very clear to me still. It’s possible that he got trapped down a hole at some point and wasn’t able to eat for a day or two (dug a tunnel straight down and didn’t realize he wouldn’t build his own ladder to get out). Is it possible that his hunger level caused some kind of underflow? Is the format of the save game files, particularly the Hearthling stats, available somewhere?

The save files are just serialized Lua tables. You can see this data using the debug tools mod, clicking on the problematic hearthling, and checking either “object explorer” or “ai inspector”. Though I suspect you’ll need to do a bit of digging through source code too if you want to narrow down the exact piece of data you’re after. Good luck!

Does his info indicate he is starving? Pretty much every hearthling will get the hunger symbols above his or her head… but then they should go eat at mealtime.

What version of the game are you playing? There was a bug in an earlier version where food in crates wasn’t “seen” by hearthlings – if there’s food in the open (e.g. in a stockpile) will he eat?

Does his info indicate he is starving? Pretty much every hearthling will get the hunger symbols above his or her head… but then they should go eat at mealtime.

What version of the game are you playing? There was a bug in an earlier version where food in crates wasn’t “seen” by hearthlings – if there’s food in the open (e.g. in a stockpile) will he eat?

Thanks! I’ll take a look.

He never gets the hunger symbol and never eats, yet he complains about starving every day. Nothing bad happens to him though, he just goes about his business.

Journal message:

Personal message, last entry:

I’m playing Base Steam version release-559 (x64) with no mods.

If you have the debug tools ‘installed’ you could also try if it’s an one-time error. Shift + left click on your (if I may add: female) carpenter and choose “Make full” from the opened window.

Can you upload your save? It’s weird that one hearthling isn’t eating if the others are – we need a save to diagnose.
Thanks!
(You can zip it and post it here.)

Will do, I’ll post when I get home. Thanks for taking a look!

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Save file attached. Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help. Thanks!

1467125212479.7z (7.8 MB)

Hi,
I have a fix for the carpenter in your save, although it’ll be in A17 unstable when the fix does get pushed to steam. In the meantime, that carpenter is immune to hunger … she’ll complain about it in the journal, but her hunger will never go down and she will never actually starve, so … feel free to ignore her complaining for now? XD
Thanks
-Yang

Awesome, thanks! I was using the debugging tools and noticed that her calories never seemed to go down naturally.

Just programmers curiosity, did she spawn that way or did something happen to her that turned her into a being that seemingly can survive on photosynthesis?

@Quay
It appears there was some kind of a save issue where her timer for ticking down her “calorie score” got messed up – the list of timers completely forgot about her, which meant her calories would never update, meaning she would never get hungry. I fixed it up on load, but I’ve only got a hypothesis as to how it happened. I suspect autosave (if you don’t have auto save turned on, then I am surely perplexed)
-Yang

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Huh, interesting. Gotta love concurrency related bugs. I do have autosave turned on so that could very well have been it. Thanks again!

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