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Variety Matters Dinner Time

A collection of optional features to improve the eating system.

Allows adding meals to a pawn's schedules. If it's close to dinner time, non-starving pawns will wait to eat until dinner. During meal time, pawns will eater sooner than they normally would. Pawns that don't need to eat will treat meal time as recreation time with a preference for gluttonous recreation and social relaxation. Television is highly discouraged during meal time.

Prefer Food in Dining Rooms, Hospitals, and Prisons

When selecting food, vanilla pawns prefer food that is closer to them. This mod removes the distance penalty for food that is stored in a dining room, or in the same room with a prisoner or patient. Other factors, like bonus thoughts and time to spoil may still cause pawns to select food not in a dining room. When selecting food for their inventory, pawns will still prefer the closest food.

Prefer Spoiling Food

The vanilla game gives a slight preference to food spoiling within 12 hours. This mod applies an additional sliding preference based on how close the food is to spoiling from start to finish, but only when the food is not in a freezer.

Allows customizing foods (including mod-added) into the following:

• Normal - Food follows vanilla rules. Includes meat, animal products, and most meals by default.
  
• No Table Required - When consuming these foods, pawns will look for a table, but won't get the "AteWithoutTable" thought if one can't be found. Pawns are slightly more likely to pack these foods in their inventory. Includes fruits and vegetables by default.
  
• Travel Food - These foods don't apply the "AteWithoutTable" thought. Pawns are very likely to pack these foods into their inventory. Includes pemmican by default.

Revised AteWithoutTable Thought - Recommended for use with the Tables Are For Meals, this setting replaces the AteWithoutTable thought with a stacking (-3/-5/-8), longer lasting (1.5 days) thought.

Chefs below a certain skill level have a chance of preparing cooked meals poorly. Poorly prepared meals can be too small (provide less nutrition), too large (positive mood thought + overate hediff), under/overcooked, burnt, under/overseasoned, or given a weird flavor, which result in bad thoughts of differing severities and duration.

Like food poisoning, pawns can't see if a meal was poorly prepared until they eat it. The chance for a poorly prepared meal depends on the skill of the chef. Simple meals range from a chance of 25% (level 0) to 0% (level 7+), fine meals range from 24% (level 6) to 0% (level 12+) and lavish range from 45% (level 8) to 0% (level 18+).

Poorly prepared meals stack with regular meals without contaminating the whole stack.

Revised AteLavishMeal Thought - Balancing option for quality cooking, to make lavish meals more viable before level 18, there is an option to change the lavish meal thought to a longer-lasting buff that fades from +12 to +8 to +4 over the course of 2 days.

Optional, 2x stacking mood thoughts for eating freshly cooked meals (+1) and for eating meals that have cooled to leftovers (-1) or been frozen (-2).

You can adjust how quickly (and at what temperature) warm meals cool and how quickly they turn to leftovers. By default, warm meals turn to normal after 20 hours below 60 deg. C and turn to leftovers after 40 hours. The time is halved for refrigerated meals (below 10 deg. C). Frozen meals turn instantly to frozen leftovers.

With XML Extensions - Added special filters for frozen meals and leftovers.

Meal Time

Q: Doesn't Real Dining already let you set dinner time?
A: Yes, but I didn't like the interaction between some of the other features of that mod and Variety Matters. The food selection from Real Dining also uses a destructive prefix, so it doesn't play well with other mods that do the same thing. I originally set out to create a patch for Real Dining, but it turned out to be easier to write my own version from scratch.

Prefer Dining Room Food

Q: This doesn't work, pawns keep choosing food not in the dining room.
A: Use the room stat display to make sure it's a dining room. If you combine your dining and rec room, the game might consider it primarily a rec room. If pawns still aren't taking food from a dining room, something must have made the other food more attractive (better mood thoughts, closer to spoiling, other mods).

Q: Doesn't Room Food already make pawns prefer food in dining rooms, hospitals, and prisons?
A: Same concept, different execution. Room Food makes pawns look for food in a room before they look elsewhere, which means they will always prefer Room Food (even if it violates their restrictions). This mod increases a pawn's preference for food in a dining room, but they will still likely prefer a lavish meal in the kitchen to a fine meal in the dining room. Use whichever you prefer. Technically, they are probably compatible, but using them both would be like microwaving food that is already hot.

Prefer Spoiling Food

Q: Doesn't Common Sense already have an option to prefer spoiling food?
A: Yes, although it uses a different formula. Use whichever you like. Alternatively, if you really hate meals spoiling, use them both.

Q: Does this work with <Mod Name> that also affects food choice?
A: That depends on how the other mod was coded. This will combine with other mods that tweak the vanilla system but the feature won't won't work with mods that overwrite the vanilla food selection like Smarter Food Selection and Real Dining.

Tables Are For Meals

Q: Does this feature work with mod-added foods?
A: Yes, but you will need to adjust the settings for most mod-added foods.

General

Q: Can I add this to my existing save?
A: Yes!

Q: Can I remove this from my existing save?
A: After adding new features, it's not advisable. Just disable the features you don't like and don't set meal-time schedules, At a minimum, you should remove any meal times and make a new save before removing this mod.


Gastronomy - Waiters won't prefer room food. This is because Gastronomy skips the vanilla methods for finding food when fulfilling orders.

Github version[github.com]
[ko-fi.com]