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I managed to rescue somebody, but they disappeared when the party re-entered our home colony. Bugs, bugs, bugs.

Same. I rescued and healed them at the encounter site, then used "pick up and leave map" option to carry them away rather than wait a week to fully heal. When the caravan arrived back home, the refugee had gone.

I suspect that this method stops the game from ever reaching the decision point as to whether or not a rescued spacer joins your colony (as it can on your home map), meaning the only way to "rescue" someone from a remote encounter is to capture them and drive them home as a slave.

2 - The current in-game date is outside of the growing period for that particular map area. To check this - Click on the "World" menu option, and look towards the bottom of the information written on the left-hand side of the map screen, it should say "Growing period:" followed by two dates. If the current in-game date it outside those two dates then you won't be able to grow outside.

Do growing zones specifically tell you that a plant is outside its growing period, or do you actually have to have a plant in that cell to give you that detail? Obviously if it's the latter this info is of no use to the OP, however this next one might be:

Some crops have skill requirements. If your designated grower does not have the skill to grow the crop you want, they'll ignore the zone.

...it's hard for the game to distinguish "he was trying to kill us so we had to put him down" from "we're torturing prisoners for the fun of it and oops one of them died."  So the game punishes both."

Really? So how does it know when a prisoner should attack your colonists or just eat her dinner like a good inmate?

(Hint: their names go red)

Seems like you're assuming the temperature you set your heater/cooler to is the temperature it will reach. This is not the case. Like your household heating system, that is simply a thermostat controlling an on/off.

With a heater, if the temperature around it is lower than what it is set to, then it will activate and start to warm up. It only has a finite level of power, though, so given the right (wrong?) circumstances - the room being too big, the door being open, it being incredibly cold outside - the heater will permanently draw maximum power and not reach the required ambient temperature. Then you need extra heaters all providing extra power and, when it gets to the right level, they all shut off until it goes cold again.

Coolers work the same way but obviously inverted. If the ambient temperature is higher than their setting they activate and start cooling, but they aren't perfect and can't immediately hit the temperature you want. If you have a large room and a low temperature, you'll likely need a few running. As many have said above, you also need to make sure they're set up correctly so the cold air is pumped into the room you're freezing while the warm air is pumped out. Don't just drop them in the middle of the floor!

Beyond that, start mitigating opportunities for unwanted heat transfer. Keep your roof on and your doors shut; build airlocks so you don't lose so much air when people move out.

-200C is pointless, even if you could reach it. You'd waste a LOT of electricity keeping coolers blowing and it wouldn't improve your storage. AFAIK once something reaches -1C it stops rotting; I generally aim for -10 to -20 so there's some leeway for fluctuations like the aforementioned opening of doors (or power cuts!).

Couldn't you just change the word 'fear' to 'indoctrination' to fix that problem? The colonists would no longer be fearful of the playergod but indoctrinated into the way of the colony.

They already are; they're doing what the colony does

Yes, but they aren't being indoctrinated to it. Their opinion of the day to day activity's of the colony are the same in the 3rd year as they are on the first day.

Being indoctrinated simply means following doctrine; the closest thing Rimworld has to that is your priority system so by that standard they're entirely indoctrinated. What I think you're talking about is having them move away from that, having a different point of view. That's why I say it requires an external influence. The priority system isn't about belief, it's just a logic set. Social-type beliefs of the kind I think you're getting at require, by definition, a society of people - hence why I say that external influence has to come from a pawn.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would make for some amazing dynamics (and seems perfectly suited to the improved personal relationships we should be getting next update), I just don't think it maps remotely well to a simple slider bar. I've only been playing since A13 so didn't see the original implementation and had no idea they player had a god-like role over pawns; the previous explanation as to how and why things have moved on, why such a slider worked before but wouldn't not, makes eminent sense to me. Since the pawns have no concept of the player, they can't fear or respect him. If you want them to fear someone, you have to give them someone to fear.

Couldn't you just change the word 'fear' to 'indoctrination' to fix that problem? The colonists would no longer be fearful of the playergod but indoctrinated into the way of the colony.

They already are; they're doing what the colony does. If you wanted some external influence to provide additional effects it'd need to come from a pawn, then you get into the subject of traits covering leadership and morality - will someone attempt to become the boss of the colony? Will they rule benevolently? Will there be power struggles?

I'll use them when the terrain gives the opportunity; raiders constantly funnelling down the same natural chokepoint, etc. I don't generally go in for man-made killboxes so trap use is pretty much limited to random luck on a mountain map.

I don't use IEDs, particularly incendiary. I don't use fire weapons full stop as I find them more hindrance than help. Deadfalls have their benefits but I'm generally only using them to thin the crowds in a cheap way; I've never relied on them.

There is a significant amount of jiggery-pokery to be done with restricted zones to make sure people, and particularly tamed animals, keep clear. They also seem to be incredibly varied in their effect; the number of maps I've had three raiders pile through picking up nothing more than a scratch, but one distracted colonist loses his way and BANG, his head has been ripped clean off (literally; this is not an exaggeration. I've had two separate colonists have their heads completely removed by a deadfall). I'd definitely like to see a more consistent damage output; not lethal and constrained to the lower body with a view to reducing movement speed, perhaps.

I'd also like to see them hooked more into hunting. Having them baited has been suggested already and I agree wholeheartedly, but baited or not I'd like to see any animal killed by a trap automatically flagged as permitted so a hauler can go fetch it. Preferably I'd like to see this extended so anything caught in a trap sent a flag to a hunter to go collect the body. If you combined this with the aforementioned lessening of lethality, perhaps the animal gets automatically downed and flagged to hunt so someone can go finish it off without the usual risk of going on a hunting trip. This could further be related to previously-mentioned ideas on differing trap sizes; what traps work on which animals, etc. An elephant probably wouldn't notice a rabbit snare but equally a squirrel wouldn't crash through a pit built for a Thrumbo.

I think the auto-rearm option works well and keeps them viable, though I never realised raiders learned their position and avoided them on later attempts. I shall bear this in mind in future base design! Not knowing the ins and outs of this, I'll make some additional suggestions that might be pointless: if you completely wipe an attack out, there are no survivors to learn for next time. Locations should only be learned by raiders who triggered the trap (and those who saw it triggered?) providing they survive the raid - the old, blind guy with the bad back and bum leg who'd barely made it halfway to the attack before routing almost certainly didn't see and make notes of the traps that killed his friends a mile away! Finally, and probably already in the code, lessons should only be learned by the clan that attacked. Pirate Band 1 should not know your traps simply because Tribe 2 attacked a week ago.

Next step: crabs!

Plus they are NOT worth keeping as pets. They're a nightmare to  train and they eat all your food. Kill it and sell it.

I feel like cataracts are ridiculously common, incredibly debilitating and bloody expensive to rectify. I've lost count of the number of times I've had three or four pawns walking about almost totally blind, waiting months on end for an exotic trader to bring me one bionic eye (by which point two more cataracts have developed in the colony). Beyond pawns, most of my livestock tend to be blind as well. I'm fairly certain the condition isn't that common in the real world!

I propose a slightly shallower slope towards age-induced blindness, with levels of sight loss creeping in as pawns get older. Like infections, you could have minor, major and extreme levels of astygmatism (sp?) or whatever variation of eye problem you like, that gradually decreases sight rather than jumping straight to the bottom as you get with cataracts.

To "cure" the condition, glasses can be installed as an operation that consumes a level of resource (likely steel). Operation failures wouldn't harm the pawn but would assume you'd been given the wrong prescription and therefore no sight improvement is given (or indeed sight gets worse, particularly on a critical fail) until the operation is repeated, more steel is consumed and the doctor gets it right.

Glasses could be damaged in combat, reducing the pawn's sight back to base levels until they were fixed.

If you wanted to stretch it a bit, you could make it so a prescription only fixed sight for the level it was at when the operation was performed. If you get glasses to fix "Left eye: Astygmatism (minor)" but advanced to "Left eye: Astygmatism (major). Right eye: Astygmatism (minor).", you would no longer get the improvement from your existing glasses and would need to get a new pair made up.

Part of me thinks this should involve the machining bench or other production facility in some way, but maybe that's taking it a bit far - unless of course you could readily implement the following: The "operation" doesn't involve the patient jumping in bed and waiting for the doctor to stand beside them, resources in hand. Instead the pawn carries on as normal but the doctor disappears to the machining bench, crafts the appropriate glasses and takes them to the patient once they're done. I appreciate this is likely way outside the current implementation so won't qualify for "cheap", plus I don't see how much extra value it adds beyond the original suggestion, but I thought I'd throw it in there for consideration.

AFAIK relations improvements are cumulative... release one now, release one later, eventually you'll get good enough relations that they stop attacking you.

You are right, but depending on your play style and also luck it can take more than a year to actually do that, so with young colonies, you may want to recruit a prisoner instead of letting him go to win the factions favor 1+ years later.

So you're essentially saying that by having about three or four prisoners from one faction simultaneously, you can guarantee they'll stop being hostile with one single bulk-release - but if you've only got the one prisoner you could potentially be wasting a perfectly good recruit and still get a kicking off his tribe for another year.

Makes sense to me, though sometimes I like the idea of keeping hostile tribals as more raids means more prisoners. Then again I've not played for long enough at high enough difficulty to get the 100-man+ mega-raids I've heard about so maybe I'm a little naive

Random aside: can you ever get pirates into positive, non-hostile relations? I assume not but I've never tried. Sometimes I'll release a useless prisoner if I can't afford the mood hit from harvesting them, but then I worry the pirates will get so friendly I'll run out of target practice!

TBH, this is kind of realistic. As much as I like modpacks like MVP and SK, the idea that some crash-landed guys can manufacture anything from beam weapons to bionic gear in a couple of years is a little silly.

Maybe, but some basic stuff would be nice. Peg legs are one thing, but I'm fairly certain I could smash together a few pieces of steel and leather to make improvised body armour if I really needed to. I've seen enough Max Max-type fiction to know what "wasteland style" looks like

There used to be a mod which added a beanbag shotgun turret... it was surprisingly proficient at removing heads.

That's why governments stopped using the term "non-lethal weapons" and started with "less-than-lethal weapons". It probably won't kill you, particularly compared to a .50, but no-one's making promises.

Ha, well it seems to be contagious as I've finally bitten the bullet and started butchering corpses as standard. Sadly this also ties in with my progression to Rough Randy (I never thought I'd say that out loud) over Freeplay Cass, so it's wreaking havoc with everyone's mental state.

Maybe some slider bars against priority? A way to dynamically change priority based on current levels. If you have two stockpiles (paste hoppers and storage freezer) you could have the freezer at Preferred from 0-80% full, normal above that, but your hoppers at Critical below 20% and normal above. That way your haulers would generally ignore the hoppers until they started emptying and by the time they needed attention you'd be bringing a worthwhile load in, rather than just a couple of units.