Jan 24

Revert ingredients consumed by shelf life.(Bring back top-bottom, left-right!)

The undocumented change/bug from 11.1.2 that now consumes ingredients based on shelf life instead of placement is infuriating. Could we get that fixed? As it sits now, you have to babysit every salad work order and create multiple chests to use only certain ingredients or else you will lose the ingredients specific to a certain recipe. If I want to make topped porridge for example. It won't matter if i have 1000 huckleberries at 95% shelf life, it will consume the only 40 pineapple I was using for jungle campfire salad that is at 94% shelf life. Or if I'm making fern campfire salad which requires fiddleheads as well as a "vegetable" tag. But the beet salad already consumed the fiddleheads instead of the agave or beet greens I had to the left side of the storage. Or it consumes the taro root for that salads "vegetable" tag which was saved for jungle, instead of the multiple other vegetables I have in excess.. all because the shelf life is just a few percent under. This makes it increasingly difficult to queue up multiple recipes or save ingredients that require specific types and not just a "tag". Unless you have 1 campfire for only 1 recipe, with each of them having their own storage that you have to manually add ingredients to JUST for that recipe to save your other ingredients. Seems a little excessive if i had to have 4-5 campfires with each of them having an icebox just for their 1 recipe. So please please please. Fix this consume by shelf life disaster and bring back the Top to Bottom, Left to Right priority for consumption. Edit for more info - It's even worse with Wild Stew. It requires Beans and a general "vegetable" tag. Beans are also vegetables.. so because my beans are slightly older; it consumes 2 beans per stew instead of 1 bean and 1 corn/tomato/corn/camas/taro. Thus ensuring I run out of beans yet still have plenty of "vegetables" that aren't a named vegetable requirement. You can't separate these into multiple chests to limit it.. so because stock is low I have to again.. babysit each craft. Add 1 bean into the chest, let it progress, consume 1 bean, then a random "vegetable" and then add 1 bean again to that chest. This has been a nightmare for organizing crops, and limiting what recipe uses what. All because of this shelf life priority on consumption. Please fix this.

Closed

changed status toClosed·Jul 6, 2026

Jul 6, 2026

For Update 14 we have implemented the ability to select which items in a tag can be used by a work order, which should alleviate the problem brought up in this suggestion. The suggestion itself is unfortunately not going to be implemented, as when doing that we have decided internally that we prefer the current approach that feels more natural for casual and singleplayer players.

Mar 26, 2026

As always: Why dont give the player the option to choose which system they like more. give us 1 more button in crafting tables "Consume intelligent" If this is set use the new system. if not, use the old. For me / our group of veteran players we would also love to see a better system in production management. Its what Shizuka Satsuki wrote 31. Jan. 2025... We need a option to set which specific item should be used when a recipe use a "TAG".

Mar 26, 2026

When you remove using items that rot versus items in the order to be consumed, you forced complexity for the sake of complexity, being forced to have other special storages to keep the wrong item from being consumed is ... I can't even put a word to it and remain respectful... SORT moves items by age among other things so if I wanted things to merely be consumed by age there is already a mechinism that meets that need.

Oct 11, 2025

Just got done making a post about this on Steam, and the dev led me here. I made pretty much all the exact same points, right down to the topped porridge example (popular staple food, I suppose). I agree that this needs to be reverted ASAP until a better system is implemented for prioritization. I practically can't have long term projects running when I'm offline because of this. There's a mod for Rimworld I use that lets each work order on a table use different prioritization methods, and also a table setting that defaults every work order to a specific mode. I think that would also work well here. For example: "Prioritize larger quantity, prioritize expiring sooner, prioritize by placement..." etc.

Jul 22, 2025

I completely agree, please at least revert. I've done a fair share of cooking before the change. It was never great (because of the impossibility to 'tell' a recipe which generic ingredient to use) - now it's a real nightmare. I started a game on SP and it seems completely random which ingredient is used especially when you start, because on mouse-over all the ingredients tend to have the same 100% shelf-life... Ideally, we'd have more control over the order in which the ingredients get taken (as in: the possibility to craft variants of the recipes). However, I understand if that is difficult to implement. But then at least give us back control over the order in which storage is used (left to right, top to bottom). Pretty please...

Jan 31, 2025

As previously mentioned, production recipes involving a tag rather than a specific item should have the option for specific ingredient(s) to be used, meaning that certain items could be excluded by player command.