At the time of writing this Mind Over Magic Splitting meals between staff and students guide, we don’t know if or when the devs plan on adding stock limits and prioritization to the game. The question of how to split meals between staff and student areas still comes up from time to time.
In the current state of the game there are two straightforward ways to do this.
Mind Over Magic – Splitting meals between staff and students
Option 1: Split Consumption
The first option is to use the food consumption restrictions (Shift + 3) between staff and students to ensure that they will not share a given meal type in common. For example, you could assign all gruel pot meals to students, and all dragon wok meals to staff.
From there, ensure that you have a chest that exclusively accepts gruel pot meals in your student dining area, and a chest that exclusively accepts dragon wok meals in the staff dining area.
Then ensure that no other storage items in your school accept meals. The copy/paste settings feature on storage items will be your friend here. This includes pantries.
As a bonus, you don’t need to alter chest access rules as the consumption rules themselves will restrict access as to what storage staff and students can eat from.
The downside here is that it means you cannot share the same food type – such as bitter stir fry – between both staff and students.
Option 2: Overproduction
The second option is to take advantage of tiny chests having less storage and overproduce each meal type enough completely fill two tiny chests.
For each meal type you want to provide to both students and staff, place one tiny chest in the student dining area, and a second tiny chest in the staff dining area.
Set both chests to only accept that specific meal type. For example, set both the tiny chests to bitter stir fry.
As with the previous option, you want to ensure that no other chests in the school will accept your chosen meal type.
Set the access rules on the student chest to quilted and students only. Set the access rules on the staff chest to quilted and staff only.
Then use your cooking orders to Do until X to overproduce enough of your target meal type to exactly fill both tiny chests.
The upside here is that you can now split a meal type between students and staff. The downside is you need to take up more space to dedicated storage per meal type supported, and you also need to overproduce your meals to the point of filling the first chest before you can guarantee that any overflow will make its way to the second chest.