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On a related note, it might be cool to have a 'suspend mining' button on the GUI somewhere, so that if you've got a billion tiles designated for mining, but you currently don't need any ore, you can suspend mining temporarily to let your miners do other jobs without having to cancel all the mining jobs and re-add them later.

The shooting system can bring up some fun moments, but it does have it's ridiculous scenarios like the above too. I'm not sure I'd want it changed too much.

Maybe give a large buff to hit things that have been incapacitated? I've seen the above scenario (thought not as extreme) a couple of times too where a deer or boar is essentially dead, but the hunter still only hits once every 4-6 shots. I usually just tell my hunter to melee a target when it's incapacitated. Perhaps this should be an automatic thing (but only against critters you've told them to hunt. Not pirates :p).

Or perhaps a buff to accuracy depending on the urgency of the situation?

- If you're being shot at or attacked, you get no buff because you're under fire.
- If you're shooting at something that's still healthy, but isn't attacking you (like most animals when hunting) you get a slight buff because you can take your time over aiming.
- If you're shooting a non-humanoid that's incapacitated, you get a huge buff because... well... it's literally a stationary target. UNLESS you're being shot at, in which case see the first option.

That way the system will behave normally in actual combat, but your hunter won't be so frustratingly piss-poor when it would be easier for him to go and slit the boar's throat.

For me it's drop pods. Not even close.

Setup-then-attacks are by far the easiest for obvious reasons.

Immediate attacks are fine, you can see them coming even if you don't have time to repair. You know in advance both how many there are, where they're coming from and what they're armed with. Plus if your base is well designed they'll still have to go through the areas you WANT them to go through to get to your squishy bits.

Sieges are a mixed bag for me. IF I have sniper rifles and guys capable of taking the fight to them, they're pretty standard. However if I don't, or I don't have enough rifles, then they can be pretty tricky, especially if they have incendiary rounds.

But drop pods are by far the most difficult. They drop anywhere they damn well please, so you can't prepare a defence in advance (other than getting everything inside a mountain), and you don't know what's coming until it's too late.

Not saying they necessarily need to be balanced, as they're not unfairly difficult, just by far the *most* difficult for me personally.

I'd append that by saying that *anything* is made harder if it's got incendiary weapons, even just a molotov.

When you're feeling sick, drop the thing you're carrying, throw up everywhere and then wander off to do something else, ignoring both the puke and the thing you were carrying.

I've noticed more and more some of my colonists just standing doing nothing.  If I look at their info it just says "standing". They have jobs to do and at the very least they should be cleaning or hauling.

Is this some kind of bug or is there some kind of game mechanic in action here that I'm not understanding?

I've noticed this happens a lot of it's too hot/cold outside and the colonist's job involves going outdoors. He sort of stands arounds thinking "not going out in that...". Not necessarily a bug (although there was a bug regarding temperatures, so make sure you're using 9D).

I forgot I had this mod installed. When I started a new A9 game, I immediately noticed I no longer had this mod installed.

It really is that good. :p

Certainly wind turbines have some disadvantages now, but I still don't view it as an "either/or" choice ... I tend to use a mixture of both turbines and panels, in order to mitigate the disadvantages of both (especially now that turbines correctly experience periods where there is very little wind to drive them, because before they were so OP as to be the obvious choice).  I look at the turbines as a way to keep at least trickle-charging the batteries during the frequent eclipses, for example, or to at least power my automated defenses when the inevitable attack comes right during an eclipse, or at night right after a conduit has shorted and depleted my batteries.  I look at them as a way to have a chance to occasionally counteract Cassandra's capriciousness.

Completely agree with this.

In A8 they were the obvious no-brainer choice until you got steam power. So much more effective than solar panels. They made solar panels pretty pointless.

Now they're much more realistic, and complement solar panels instead of completely eclipsing them (if you'll pardon the unintentional but thoroughly excellent pun).

The only disadvantage they had in A8 was that occasionally a tree would grow in front of one (which you could completely counter with a floor or solar panel).

Anyone understand the quality on clothing?

I mean i have some awful quality clothing with 249/250 health then some normal quality with 6/100 seems abit odd :/

The former is brand new, but bought from Primark for £2. The latter is Gucci designer wear but well worn and full of holes.

Totally agree with this. If I tell a colonist to prioritise something, I want them to prioritise the whole job - until further progress is impossible (running out of materials, etc). Not the next individual task like hauling materials to it.

Same with power lines/walls. If I prioritise one section of power lines or a wall being constructed, it'd be good if they prioritised all connected power lines/wall sections too. Not just that one particular section. If he dies of starvation because the player has told him to prioritise construction of a power line which runs the entire length of the map, that's the player's fault.

This happened in A8, but is still happening in A9 with a fresh install.

If a colonist sits on a seat next to a table one on one of the corners, he'll often (but not always) put his meal on the floor next to the table rather than on the table, then get the "Ate off floor" debuff when there was no need for it.

For instance:

WWWW
WTTS
WTTs
WSs*
W

Where T is table and S is stool (W is a wall). Colonists sitting on the small 's' stools will often eat off the floor from the asterisk, instead of the table next to them. It doesn't happen to those on the capital S stools, they always eat on the table.

Just seems silly that there's a table right there, but they choose not to eat off it.

This happens no matter which orientation the stool is placed in.

Perhaps a more elegant solution would be for the colonists to remember what you last told them to prioritise, and keep prioritising that until you tell them otherwise?

For example, if you tell them to prioritise tailoring, and they go off to eat something/sleep, when they finish eating/sleeping they'll currently just go back to doing whatever is closest. It'd be better if they remembered "I've been told to prioritise tailoring" and go back to that.


For cooking/butchering, it's tricky because it depends on the needs of the player at the time. As to when it's preferable for them to prioritise butchering.

For instance, I keep all my carcasses in a freezer. So the only time I need them to prioritise butchering is when we don't have enough raw ingredients to make a meal. The colonists seem to realise this on their own, I think it's their default behaviour. "IF we have enough food according to the cooking stove bill OR we don't have enough ingredients to make the thing on the bill AND we have animal carcasses, do butchery".

The only reasons I can think of off the top of my head for colonists to get butchery "wrong" is:
- If you have the stove bill on Do Forever, which will mean they only do butchery when they totally run out of ingredients and can't make the next meal. Frankly this is your own fault for having cooking on Do Forever in the first place. How many damn colonists do you have that a full time chef is even an option for you? :p
- If you have animal carcasses stored outside and they go rotten because you never have enough cooked food but loads of potatoes or berries and are only cooking simple meals, which prevents butchery because the pawns only use the vegetables. Again with the 'it's your own fault' thing, and there's always the option to force the colonist to prioritise butchery manually.

Maybe there's a problem with butchery that I'm not seeing, but...


As for the other things though, totally agree. It'd be nice to be able to have a "tailor" and a "stonecutter", instead of two "crafters". Not suggesting that they use different stats, just that we should be able to tell each colonist what to prioritise when crafting.

Assigning them a workbench might work. The only issue with that is if your assigned Tailor is busy doing something else (or gets his leg blown off, for instance) then nobody else can work the tailoring bench without you manually reassigning/unassigning it. It could be argued that this would be a rare enough occurrence for it to not matter, though...

And in response to the actual OP, my GOD is it annoying watching someone walk half way across the known world to get that packaged survival meal that a raider dropped, when there's a fridge FULL of fine meals right next to him. I once had this happen TO THE COOK. She was RIGHT THERE next to ALL THAT FOOD but thought "nope, I'ma walk for 10 minutes to get to this packaged survival meal, that's some tasty stuff right there. Then I'ma eat that s*** off the floor and moan about eating off the floor for a few days".

Perhaps splitting it into two would be better.
- Unskilled Crafting (anything that involves taking a raw material and turning it into something used in construction. Smelting, stonecutting, etc, or anything which would qualify as 'unskilled labour' like smoothing floors (unless that's already under Construction instead of Crafting, which would make sense).

- Skilled Crafting (anything that involves turning materials into an end product; tailoring, smithing, etc)

Perhaps a medium way (almost) within the current system would be to have a single crafting skill but add additional traits (similar to green thumb, but for smithing, tailoring, etc...).

These are both reasonable and good ideas.

though Monkey's new category should be "Unskilled Labor", not "Unskilled Crafting".  Possibly "Plant Cutting could be merged into "Unskilled Labor", there would really be more control, but no new job categories.

Yeah, this! I forgot all about Plant Cutting. It's mildly amusing that crafting a sword uses the same skill as cutting stone into blocks, but yet planting a seed and harvesting the resulting potatoes use different ones.

The Unskilled Labour thing would be a great compromise.

We've all been there, right? Super-awesome Shooting guy gets owned by a wild boar because it closed to melee range before he could kill it?

Dunno about you, but if I was Mr Srs Hunter, I'd probably take a knife or something with me?

I'm not sure if the game recognises weapon sizes (if so, can just limit the 'sidearm' to the smallest category, if not maybe limit it by the base damage it does or something?) but it seems that a system like this would work well:

If a pawn has more than x Shooting (lets go with 10), he can carry a small melee weapon with him.
If a pawn has more than x Melee, he can carry a small ranged weapon with him.

Brawler, etc would still work normally (so if a guy with good melee is given a pistol as a sidearm, he'll still be unhappy).

That way when a boar sneaks up on my sniper his chances of survival without help will be more than about 1 in 10 as it seems at the moment. Just lost two good men (two!) to one boar this way. It was, to be fair, an insane boar. But they were both wearing armoured vests.

It seems currently that if you're caught in melee without a melee weapon, you might as well be trying to headbutt the boar to death.

It strikes me as a little odd that 'Crafting' currently covers:
Tailoring
Smelting (smelting slag)
Stoneworking (chunks>block)
Blacksmithing (making items)

Plus probably other stuff I've forgotten.

I wouldn't expect *every* crafting job to have a separate skill, that'd be silly and would make some skills useless in some situations (tailoring in a hot climate, for example. Other than to make money), but it does seem odd to me that the current category is so broad.

Perhaps splitting it into two would be better.
- Unskilled Crafting (anything that involves taking a raw material and turning it into something used in construction. Smelting, stonecutting, etc, or anything which would qualify as 'unskilled labour' like smoothing floors (unless that's already under Construction instead of Crafting, which would make sense).

- Skilled Crafting (anything that involves turning materials into an end product; tailoring, smithing, etc).

That way it would make more 'logical sense'. You couldn't get better at making weapons by cutting a billion stones and then making one sword. Plus you could have a dumb labourer who goes around cutting the stones, and a skilled labourer doing the actual crafting, without the skilled labourer wasting his time stonecutting just because he happened to get out of bed first that day.

It just feels like the skilled crafting jobs are too different (in terms of how important they are and what type of colonist would be good at them) from smashing stones to bits to be considered the same thing.

Simple one that might've been mentioned in here before (I mentioned it in another thread earlier and realised 'hey, that actually sounds really cheap!' so thought I'd put it here too).

When a colonist hauls a corpse, have them strip it first (as part of the same task). That way, you don't end up burying/cremating precious armour and bionics because you forgot to strip that one corpse manually.