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Rimworld has a pretty good ecology setup. Different biomes, different flora and fauna, a fairly realistic enviroment. Biomes grow plants, herbibores eat plants, predators eat herbivores. it's good. Most of the time.

There is something wrong with predators though. I don't know what it is, but I know it's somewhere in the predator AI. Something that ranks the animals on the map from most appetising to least is broken and human pawns somehow end up at the top of the dinner list. This makes no sense. Human pawns, with armor, and guns, should be one of the last things to eat on the map and that is not the case. Nothing has shown me this more clearly than my current colony is an arid brushland.

To set the scene, it's a hot and dry enviroment. Plants are scarce and so are animals, so when a predator does show up the options are limited. This is just part of living in this area, you deal with it. My colonists have been hunted from day fucking one but that's just the challenges. I would accept this if it wasn't so stupid though.



I'll give you Exhibit A. My colony(which has been absolutely pounded as of late) was attacked by a bunch of Manhunter Geese(which I totally believe). Fortunately Bullet > Goose, so we were fine. Only injury was a colonist who decided to go berserk in the middle of it because he had gut worms...I'm not starting another thread on mental breaks. So we're cleaning up afterwards and what magic should befall us? A cheetah is hunting one of my colonists. After a manhunter pack. With fresh goose carcasses LITTERED about the ground. In what universe does this make sense that my colonists are somehow easier food than the dead birds already on the ground. They're not claimed. I have six colonists, not all of whom are hauling and there are six dead birds still outside. This is a choice by the AI and it's a stupid one.

It's hardly the first time either. Day one of my colony we had to fight off three predators hunting our people. Day fucking ONE. No shelter, no stockpile. Packaged Survival Meals sitting out in the sun, but my colonists are of a higher priority to eat than food sitting readily available. This is wrong. I don't know how the AI assesses what food gets eaten first but it needs to be fixed. Unless an animal is specificly a manhunter or there is nothing else you shouldn't even need to think about predators. It's not even a dangerous event, it's not "Drama", just an annoying one that grinds everything to a stop two or three times a day.

So mental breaks changed with 1.1. No longer will your pawns wander aimlessly, ignoring everything until  they fall over from starvation or from exhaustion. Now they are smart enough that they can take care of their needs while being uncontrollable, aimless liabilities to your colony.

The last mental break I had(ironicly enough, the Last Straw for me to make this post) was a sad wandering. A sad wandering that lasted for THREE DAYS. During that time obviously he was useless, walking around eating raw food because why not? Eating without a table despite it's right there? Sure. In fact it was an aimless wander with the sole purpose of finding every single thing that could possibly make his mood worse. The ONLY reason it came to an end is because he was DYING of hypothermia and finally fell over as a corpsicle.

Mental breaks before ran the gamut annoying to disasterous. Now we've shifted that window to make the annoying ones just as bad. It's not just a matter of a tantrum that might blow up your whole armory. Now you'll just lose your colonists for whole chunks of the year. Three days, five days, without knowing if there's a cap what's to prevent a mental break from going on indefinitely.

There needs to be some kind of mitigating action besides beating them unconscious and hoping they don't die in the process. I agree with the way the breaks were changed but it was never balanced.

So I was listening to the Royalty soundtrack and got to the track called Strings and to took note that it added all the instruments we just got into the song. It features a harpsichord, a harp, and a(little bit of) piano. And that is awesome.

So where's the rest?

I want a guitar(electric or acoustic) and drums in my game!
A new Trait called Musician that gives the colonist a mood boost playing an instrument for rec
A job tied to Art that lets them play music as a task to boost other colonists around them, like a psychic emitter but powered by a pawn.

Maybe the concert could even be retooled to involve multiple colonists, and we can get black suits as clothing options, I can name my colony Chicago and two of my colonists can get the band back together. They're on a mission from God.

So I have this pirate faction in my game, Anton's Swords. They're pirates. They will never be my friends. All the same, I get this quest, an IMMENSE BUILDING. Built it, protect it, and we give you good stuff. So i took it, why not. I'm about 2/3-3/4 done with it, and I get a raid. Sappers, of course(are there any other kind of raiders? They're not raiders if they don't grenade most of your base), and they're from who else? ANTON'S SWORDS! So I fight them off with relatively few casualties, set everyone to haul and clean to recover from it, only to be informed that the quest IMMENSE BUILDING from ANTON'S SWORDS failed because I ran out of time. Because ANTON'S SWORDS decided to raid me.

There's just no making some people happy.

I've got a lot of hours in this game, I've played a lot of colonies, and I've noticed a trend with the mech serums both Res and Heal: It's all or nothing. I've had games where I grew fields of drugs to buy the literal dozens of serums that were coming by on traders, traveled the world picking them up as quest rewards. I had suicide attackers because death was cheap. Die now, come back in five minutes.

But then I have games where I never see a single one. No rewards anywhere in the world. Traders have never even heard of the things and accuse me of witchcraft before trying to burn down my base(not really, but exageration is fun). The point is, I've only ever seen the two extremes, it's either all or nothing. I've never had a game where I found one of each and said "I can hold on to this for an emergency". I'm wondering if there's a switch that flips in the game code on world generation that turns them on or off for that specific game. I can't imagine why there would be but I can't explain it otherwise. I'd blame bad luck but bad luck over dozens of colonies just doesn't hold water.

I've beent thinking about this for a long time and I've finally had enough to the point that I made an account just to put it out there. I love Rimworld, I have nearly 2000 hours into the game, and while there are plenty of things that frustrate me (It can be a frustrating game), THIS makes me angry.

I am tired of getting hit with a cold snap or heat wave nearly every single game. In earlier editions, the heat waves were an automatic dead colony unless you were tribal. Getting a heatwave in the first three days was impossible, but this has been fixed. What hasn't been fixed is cold snaps. Now, full disclosure, I do play with Randy exclusively, so I know the options are out there, but I have kept track of my games and in a full 83% of them I have been hit with a cold snap in the first five days. THis is not even enough time for RICE to grow. All plants die, most of the animals leave, and the colony scrounges for food before they even had a chance to try and establish. It is one of the most singularly frustrating and demoralizing events in the game to start a colony, build and plant, then get a cold snap on day four, watch all the plants die and the colony follow. And THEN to start a new colony and get hit by the SAME THING.

I get cold snaps. I don't think they're bad. If you have a chance to prepare for them, they're easy to deal with, and if you're growing long term crops like corn or 'shrooms it's frustrating. But to play five games in one day and lose four of them to a cold snap that happens in the first week is beyond the pale.

Either the probability of a cold snap should be reduced to make it more rare, or there should be a window of relief for a new colony. As it stands now, a cold snap is just a cold death for anything in the first week.