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Nothing's happened just yet but...

I started a new colony, and our starting pet is a warg. A pet. WARG. From day 1. I guess Randy's pre-gaming.

If we can keep Zane fed, there's going to be some epic goings-on.

But that begs the question; HOW did they, wandering off into the wilderness alone with no allies technologically advanced enough to achieve orbit, leave alone interstellar travel, get home? And within the year? It's unlikely they could come back within the century; it'd be a ridiculous expenditure to come back at all. I think it's a non-starter personally.

But it's problematic as-is as well.

Think about this for a second: Shit went terribly wrong on your ship and you just got unceremoniously dropped bruised and broken to bleed out on the dirt of some unknown planet. And then some guy you never met before scrapes you off the ground and nurses you back to health. He tells you that you're on one of those infamous "rim worlds", complete with rampaging pirates, and no prayer of getting home. Who, in this situation, would unceremoniously wander off into the wilderness? Maybe if you just wanted to die in the first place. The walls around you right now are your only real shot at surviving the week.

An argument can be made for throwing them into a cell as opposed to a random bed; you don't know their story or if they'll be friendly despite their circumstances. But punishing naive trust needs to have a solid in-universe justification.

Something is Wrong in Rimworld that defence relies so heavily on turrets and doors. It's extremely hard to defend your colony without using either.

It's because, plainly put, melee beats ranged. Knife beats gun. Even if guns didn't have dismal accuracy and very little stopping power, personal shields render them moot entirely. Which wouldn't be so bad if you had options for impassible cover. You don't; it's part of the game "balance". So in most cases, the fight becomes your gunmen fighting with their fists against guys with clubs. (By the way, this flies in the face of common sense, ESPECIALLY in a science fiction setting.)

So respond with melee, right? Well, no. You're practically guaranteed to take injuries with a decent likelihood of getting infected, and if you get mobbed, you're eating dirt, superior weapons be damned.

Your only viable options are to have surrogates (i.e. turrets, traps) thin out the enemies for you, or rely on doors to deny melee attackers a chance.

This is what makes sappers so dangerous -- it removes ALL viable combat options. If you don't provoke them into giving up on breaking your walls and your traps don't cut it, your colony is getting sacked.

Note that jobs with "same priority" are still considered from left to right. Once you understand how it works, you should no longer need higher numbers.

Need? Maybe not. But it makes for a lot more micromanagement for certain things. "grow -> haul -> craft -> repair -> build" is something I use a lot, and while you can do it with 4, it eats all the priorities you have, leaving you unable to also prioritize researching over cleaning without researching winding up in the middle of that.

On Permadeath, the "This story is over" dialog should delete the save, and not have an option to keep playing.

I think this is a bug with Unity in general, but bears mentioning here. I've ONLY observed it with Unity games; some kind of timing issue that prevents the framebuffer from being transferred to the "slave" GPU at a reasonable speed maybe?

In any case, in fullscreen, or if the window crosses/gets close to the boundary between monitors, framerate gets stuck around 30fps or lower. Even on the main menu. And there's a noticeable stutter.

I'm running a GTX 760 as my main screen, and my secondary monitor, above the primary, is run by my Intel ondie.

I've just been running the game windowed as a workaround for the time being.

Traits:

• Claustrophobic: +200% space moodlet effect (similar to how the psychically dull/sensitive traits work internally)
  
• Slob: -75% beauty moodlet effect (positive AND negative); cleaning disabled
  
• Dwarfism: lower creature size stat (which affects a LOT of things. Probably an easter egg opportunity here too.)
  

The idea that storytellers use only (or even primarily) wealth to determine how to scale threats is a myth.

The algorithm is quite a bit more complex than that and takes into account wealth, population, defensive strength, and several factors related to the time since the colony has taken damage, had people downed, or been at given population counts.

It would probably be a waste to spend a bunch of time trying to cheese wealth lower. Just enjoy the game.

Still worth talking about wealth mechanics. I've always been a bit puzzled by the "Very Low / Low Expectations" moodlets and exactly what a room "fit" for a greedy person would be.

I've noticed the UI drastically overreacts to simple bruises, which are little to no lasting threat and usually don't warrant treatment, leave alone medicine. To that end, I'd like to also see sparring. Colonists fighting each other with training props (e.g. foam swords) or even just their fists for the express purpose of training.

Alcohol consumption should lower minimum comfortable temperature. This might seem pedantic, but it works this way in real life. People living in cold biomes are advised NOT to drink alcohol when they're about to go outdoors. The feeling of being warm is there because the body is pissing the heat away.

This random bit of knowledge picked from a computer game might save someone's live, no harm done if it's implemented.

As for gameplay, it would diffrentiate extreme hot from extreme cold biomes. Currently they're largely symmetric, you just swap coolers for heaters and wear appropriate clothes.

Min CT also currently affects thresholds for hypothermia (indeed it probably should be called minimum safe temperature), so the concept needs a little more finesse than that. It'd make more sense to raise min CT but eliminate the "cold" moodlets.

And I wouldn't call hot/cold symmetric as-is:

Extreme cold has a drastic effect on food availability; plants die in the freeze, farming is impossible for a good chunk of if not the entire year without building a greenhouse, and animals migrate off the map in search of food (or simply following their prey). But with clothes it's quite easy to bring min CT to stupidly low levels; -30F can be achieved pretty trivially from stripping a few raids' worth of bodies. Hypothermia is a serious concern only in the very very early game or in certain (unrealistic) fringe cases like a naked incapacitated person.

No clothes increase max CT. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself from the heat directly. Your only line of defense against heatstroke is going inside. Getting your walls bashed in during a raid becomes far more dangerous because you can't get away from the heat. In addition, coolers take twice as much power and you can't double-dip on your freezer's coolers like you can when it's cold out. But you can grow year-round and foraging/hunting opportunities are plentiful.

So they present VERY different challenges.

Yeah, and? That is realistic.

Contrary to what movies tell you, unless there is a significant disparity between combatants skill or equipment, in hand-to-hand combat both combatants usually get severely wounded.

The same is true of a gunfight. And that very concept is anathema to the premise of the game and already pointedly averted.

The changes necessary are fairly easy to brainstorm, but everything is. The implementation is another matter. Almost none of the problems created by taking player control away from research can be solved by tweaking numbers. You need new sprites, new game mechanics, new assets, and then you need to balance those with the rest of the game. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this has a good chance of taking more time and effort than the entirety of the changes in Alpha 13. And there's a huge risk of breaking the game balance anyway. A game as intricate as RimWorld has a very delicate equilibrium.

How did I imply a lack of emotional investment? The game does quite well building it in other ways.

And we're deliberately leaving it up to chance whether a game will be viable, without hope of player input? The odds don't matter, that's bad design. You need a more direct response to the early game walls problem, even if it's as blunt and thoughtless as eliminating stonecutting as a research and giving the player stone blocks immediately.

When colonists take cover behind walls, those walls are getting shot. I didn't mean deliberately shooting walls. I've seen many walls crumble while fighting off centipides. It happens especially if your shooters are mediocre.

Ah, see, I was thinking in the context of vaulting up. Yeah, walls fall quickly as collateral when against minigun centipedes.

I still have to question how well that would work... that shield would probably get worn down pretty quick under that kind of fire.

I'm talking about repairing a wall shot by centipede, not a wall the centipede chose to headbutt.

A cooldown could work.

I don't think I've seen a centipede ever deliberately shoot a wall. Wrecking cover from trying to hit my colonists, sure, but never actually aiming at the wall as an attempt to gain entry. Like any other enemy, they roll up to it and beat on it.

As such, his presence would actually be counterproductive, giving the centipede good reason to shoot in the direction of the wall...

Starting with melee would put your colonist on the queue for the doctor. IF you have one. And if you have the medicine; it's the beginning of the game after all, and a shiv infection could very well spell doom for your pawn.

FWIW, bruises really don't need meds, and you can usually get away with not treating them at all; even in the earliest game, "brawler-sniping" a dangerous gunman is a valid and effective tactic if you have a shield or other means to get your brawler to him.

What makes fists dangerous is how easily those bruises incapacitate. Yeah, your dude's gonna get up because it'll heal away quickly just from him laying there, but that's only if the guy he tried to beat down doesn't decide to haul him off.