That was my first thought too, but the good news is that hearthlings are at least smart enough by this point not to work themselves to starvation – they’re able to interrupt a task if some other task (such as eating, or running away) becomes more important, even if they’ve previously chosen to ignore a similar task on the grounds of their assigned task being deemed more important. So a hearthling might choose to keep working through the first stage of hunger, but when they start being slowed by hunger they can now prioritise eating over other work; so they still get a chance to go from their job to find food before starvation damage kicks in.
I’m used to other titles in the genre where the workers won’t deviate from their assigned task unless they’re physically interrupted (blocked in or intercepted by an enemy), so I immediately began worrying about the impact of this tweak upon hearthling productivity; especially considering how much the hearthlings socialise (which is much the same as being attacked by the enemy in the sense that the interruption comes to them and they can’t really ignore it.) To cut a long story short, in those systems (which is what this change moves towards) it was all too common that workers would take on a task they didn’t have the food/energy to complete, and crate a “black hole” job where other workers would have to walk out to their corpse to either pick up the task or deal with the newly created task of burying a starved worker. Unfortunately, the seemingly simple solution of “make sure workers check that they can complete a task before they accept it” doesn’t really work in practice – for one it’s significantly more expensive to compute that decision, and for seconds the information can change anyway (particularly in complex tasks where the worker has to collect several ingredients). The “safer” option is to have workers interrupt their task to take care of survival, but as we’ve seen, that leads to a lot of dropped jobs. However, between the dynamically changing priorities and the fact that hearthlings have several stages of hunger and exhaustion, I think this new refinement will turn out ok.
That said, I still think there’s a risk that this will encourage bad habits among newer players; at least if the system is added as a “solution for” poor management decisions. This system should dramatically reduce the dropped items laying around the town, speed up hauling, and prevent instances of critical workbenches and gear being left almost-complete. However, it won’t do anything to stop players from making silly orders such as ordering 100 tables when there’s plenty of fresh-chopped wood but it’s all on the other side of the map. Granted, the old system didn’t actually tell players when they did something silly like that; it only provided slightly more of a chance to spot what was going wrong. However, since hearthlings will now soldier on through the silly tasks, it’ll be harder (and doubly so for rookies) to spot which tasks are putting a strain on the hearthlings – unless, of course, the hearthlings gain some visual hint or outright notification to the player when they’ve been forced to abandon a task because of survival.