Under The Yoke · published · build 14028016
Huge in effect rather than in size, this update has rationalised the cooking system, so that characters will no longer continue to starve after being assigned a valid meal.
This is most likely the cause of a lot of seemingly random character deaths, and also random crashes wherein the system had not been designed to expect characters to die so suddenly and early on.
I've also updated the systems to handle these early character deaths but they should no longer occur save for in fringe scenarios where someone is intentionally trying to kill their starting character quickly.
There may still be other crashes that I am not aware of so keep reporting your bugs to me but I think this update should eliminate the cause of a lot of people's frustrations with the game.