Frequently asked questions

During working hours, employed beavers keep a three-hour buffer on hunger and thirst. They leave far jobs in time to reach food before the penalty, top off when food is near, and eat at the closest stocked storage. Off duty the game's own behavior runs unchanged.

A working beaver leaves the job only once the need is already at zero. Then it picks the food that restores the most need points, and only then the closest storage that has it. Most foods also fill a "variety" need, so plain berries next to the site lose to bread at the district center nearly every time.

No. The game lets a beaver eat only when a whole unit fits, so eating earlier wastes nothing. Daily consumption stays the same; only the timing moves.

Yes. Thirst gets its own three-hour buffer, like hunger. Water is the only drink, so the base game already goes to the nearest water; the gain is leaving in time to avoid the movement penalty, and topping off before a shift.

Nothing new. The mod acts only for employed beavers during working hours. Evenings still use the game's own picking, which is where beavers chase variety and wellbeing buildings.

The game gives every need an "hours of warning" value. Bots use it, but every beaver need ships at zero and beavers ignore it. The mod sets Hunger and Thirst to three hours, so a working beaver reaches food with about a tenth of the bar left.

Yes. Set WarningHours in HungryPathing.cfg to the hours you want; 0 keeps the three hours. A bigger buffer means more walking during the shift, and pays off only when storages are very far apart.

Yes. JustInTime, PreFuel, BuilderJobCheck, WorkTimeClosestFood and RedirectCriticalTrips each switch one rule. The daily log line says how often each fired. CONFIGURATION.md lists every key.

The Needs key takes any need met by a good in a storage. Hunger and Thirst are the ones that matter for work; variety needs are better left to the evening.

Yes, it's built for co-op. Every player needs the same version of the mod, the same game version and an identical settings file (co-op setup). The first live run was a BeaverBuddies session, and three replayed days gave identical counters and co-op hashes with and without the guest.

If a dialog says the mod switched off on one computer, see what to do.

Yes. The mod stores nothing in saves. A trip the mod started is saved as an ordinary game trip.

It requires Harmony. Mods that change storages, goods or districts are fine. A mod that also edits the Hunger or Thirst blueprint can change the buffer (WarningHours forces it), and one that replaces how beavers pick food would overlap.

Folktails tested; Iron Teeth expected to work, untested. Bots are untouched. The mod measures only the storages nearest in a straight line, so in a colony built around tubeways or ziplines it can miss the one they reach soonest: a rule may not fire, or a beaver goes to a storage that is closer on foot.

No. The mod only asks the game how long a walk would take, and uses the answer to decide when and where to go.

It ran 36 in-game days in one 355-beaver colony, nearly all as a BeaverBuddies host with a guest, and the one error found there is fixed (the numbers). The current release has offline checks but hasn't been played in a live colony yet, and the builder rule hasn't seen a construction-heavy day. "Beta" is the mod's label, not a GitHub pre-release: the Latest release on GitHub is a regular release.

Play it in a colony that builds a lot, so the builder job check gets used. Post the daily [HungryPathing] lines and anything that looked wrong on the issue tracker. Saves from an hour before the shift ends, with and without the mod, help too.