You should be able to designate personal resource over area resource to be used
Also, forbidden resources should still be used in case of emergency (if not doing so would cause you to die), as forbidding is the only way to prevent consumption when your water/food level is mildly lower than full
In what situation would you want to use personal resources before area resources?
There was a big debate about the DoNotUse priority when it was first added. It was decided that having it still consume them when you get low makes it way to easy to min/max them. Only a small percentage of players ever change priority away from auto, and most of those that do would rather keep it as a bit of a challenge to manage.
This actually calls up a bit of an inconsistency, that:
- Laurion uses power to make air
- Your rover makes air without consuming power, but only while it has power
- The lost rover is implied to have run out of power due to using it all to make air
You're talking about min/maxing your air production by always using it from the source that makes the air for free whenever possible.
This inconsistency has been know for a while, but continues to exist because everyone agrees that it would be extremely un-fun if your rover was constantly draining power for air and water because it'd be unnecessarily complex. Since the game also doesn't currently have the features it'd need in order to do that, it seems silly to spend dev time making a feature that the majority of players would dislike.