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So here I am, playing the current version of the pre-alpha, and having a grand old time. I was thinking that to give colonists something to do we should have expeditions.

Expeditions would be an off-game map scenario where the player could send his colonists to retrieve resources, weapons, etc. It would begin by finding coordinates from travelers, raiders or traders and the player would organize a party with food metal and weapons to make sure they are well prepared to handle the frontier. The difficulty can change based on the reward, and the story teller can create accidents on the expedition to cause injury or death. It can also choose to give the player a good reward or not based on the reliability of the expedition. If anyone is familiar with the game Anno 2070 there was a similar idea where the player loaded up the ships with coordinates and resources, and the more they gave the better the result allowing players to get items they may not normally be able to get.

Hi all,

I'm not sure if this belongs in bug reports since its more of a feature that may not yet be in, but I noticed while playing build 254 on windows that if i placed floors on the ground there is no way to sell them or get rid of them unless I build another floor over them. I also cant smooth stone if there is a floor placed.

There is also the issue of being able to select something (colonist, item) if they are on the same square.

(Note: first paragraph is an intro so you can skip this) Ok so newbie on the forums today. Let me just say I've been following Rimworld's development since I saw Quill18's Let's Try video a little while back. It's great publicity I've heard of a lot of people seeing Or hearing about Rimworld from his video. Anyway, I was intrigued enough to pledge in the Kickstarter which I actually upped so I can get the alpha when it ends. Needless to say I'm pretty excited, but let me get to the point of this post.

As a side note everything I'm saying is based off of YouTube videos of the game as I have not actually played it myself.

I was looking through the proposed modules on the Kickstarter page as well as suggestions on this forum and reddit. My understanding is, in terms of the end game, it's more or less set that the goal will be to build a space ship to leave the planet. I understand that having a defined endgame gives the player the motivation to finish the game for lack of a better term. But I feel like there are a few inconsistencies that I noticed with that.

The first thing is the idea of setting up a colony in the first place. Assuming the survivors goal is leaving, wouldn't the priority be gathering materials and constructing a ship to leave the planet right away? It almost doesn't make sense for the player to set up a colony if the goal is to leave it.

My second issue is that there are ships (the traders) coming through the planet. So why don't the colonists just hop on one of those ships and just leave? I mean if they can sell prisoners to the ships there is obviously the capacity to send all of the colonists to a ship given room on board so there is no reason to try and build their own scrappy rocket to get to a civilized world.

My first suggestion to simply give the player multiple endings. The player develops their colony, and in the late stages they have the option of leaving the planet and colonizing a new one (sort of like a new game+ thing?) or staying with the colony they have. The resolution in that situation could be either surviving until the colony falls apart, or if the player reaches a certain condition like colonists or resource wealth the game ends on it's own and the player is assigned a score based on stats. Not really my preferred idea but I'll leave that to the community and Tynan to decide one.

My second suggestion is to make two game modes. One mode would be tailored so that the goal is to just survive until the colonists acquire the ability to make a ship to leave the planet. This can be something simple like a tutorial mission or more developed as a true game mode. In this mode things like traders, passing ships, etc. would all be limited as to set the fact that these people are like Tom Hanks in Castaway and their goal is to just survive until they can build a life boat to get home. Also the actual colony population would be limited, or in the end like Tynan was thinking the player would have to choose who to bring and who to leave. I think it would be a shorter game mode, somewhere around 4 hrs more or less depending on other game features as to keep it fresh and to reduce player attachment to their colonies when the game comes around.

The second mode would be a more sandbox/true colony building game. Admittedly this would be a lot tougher to implement because there would have to be a lot of feature described in the modules to keep the game and the story interesting. I'd say this is more of a long-term development goal if it were to be implemented. The way I envision it, the game starts out with the player outfitting their ship for a colony, choosing starting resources, colonists and their traits. The ship would either crash on a planet or be an actual colony ship that would land and leave the colonists to build and expand on their own. I see it as similar to dwarf fortress; the goal is to survive as long as possible before it inevitably crashes and burns. The thing is I could not envision a mode like this without more complex systems like relationships, children, aging, larger research tree, more and varied events, interconnectedness with the Rimworld universe (as in feeling as though the map is a part of a bigger world; I'll expand on that in another post) all of which will come together to give the player an interesting story with many great moments. Like I said though, I can't imagine this being implemented right away as the depth of the game has to be relatively deep to keep the player engrossed in the gameplay. Besides that, I feel that this would be the better option looking forward.

Anyway my suggestion would be that in the current stage of development the goal should be to implement a definite endgame that keeps the game short and interesting to increase awareness and interest. As the development goes on and more modules get implemented, the idea of a sandbox mode might be more appealing but that depends on a lot of parts coming together. I am still very excited for the development of this game and I have a lot of faith in it as it is the first Kickstarter project I have backed. I would like to hear both Tynan and the community's thoughts on the story as well, to see what ideas other people have.

p.s. Excuse any weird spelling errors or word/grammatical errors, I wrote this on my phone. Also I know this is essay sized but I'll try and write up a TL;DR summary when I get a chance to sit down at a computer.