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Uranium and plasteel were quite hard for me to discover until I got to the super late game (drills) -- could have been bad luck

The annoying things are disease prevalence with simultaneously low neutroamine availability. I'd suggest either keep the disease rate and give a late-game way to make neutroamine, or reduce disease rate -- this was a standard forest, not a jungle map, and 2-3 times a year 3-4 people all got plague, malaria, etc. at once.

I also wonder about brain damage's impact on all activity, including movement. Makes someone with a missing leg/arm almost useless, constantly falling and getting hurt, etc.

I know we don't prescribe Alphas to a cycle in contrast to a monthly update process (a la Introversion) so I'm inclined to feel an Alpha should add features and feel like a significant step forward in the game.

That said, performance, especially game balancing, is a feature, IMO. A refined game experience that adds more logic to existing systems (how characters react, relationships, combat, etc.) sounds like an Alpha update to me.

Nice post Laos, I just wanted to point out that Tynan did in fact Greenlight RimWorld.

Fair point. I guess to rephrase you can't buy it and hes not pushing it out in steam sales and so on to cash in the hype

[books]

This thread is a great example of what a double edged sword the idea of "community involvement" can be. Tynan trusts us to come on board, take suggestions, help craft the vision, and when he decides to take a break and focus on his personal life after over two years (i think it was like two and a half years of active development or something if you include pre-kickstarter stuff) of hard work people begin to get resentful. The game has offered me hundreds of hours of gameplay -- something I can't say for the dozens of $20 videogame kickstarters I backed. It's getting so much more in the coming weeks, and yet people continue to act entitled or conspiratorial. So now I can't imagine the frustration Tynan is having after putting this much effort in, and the community feeling "betrayed" for something they hardly deserve at this point. He's promised future developments, and it's clear Tynan has many ideas he hopes to put into an upcoming build. But now we have this kind of rhetoric over and over which is extremely toxic to game development. He didn't promise any road maps, timelines, or features that are being ruined or lost over this personal time off. In fact, the lack of any Greenlight or steam releases demonstrates he's not trying anything sinister like a cash grab or something before he just jumps ship. Considering he's someone who writes books on game development I imagine Tynan isn't looking to tarnish his reputation.

I agree with Granath. Trying a steam release or new build right before this big a release would have been a disaster. I think what i'm also getting at is that Tynan owes no one here very much as an indie game maker. He's already gone above and beyond what he was framing in his kickstarter in November 2013. Unless you're one of the 225 people who bought the "pirate king" package, you're patiently waiting on those high tier features, but the game has developed and offered a lot of amazing mechanics none of us expected when we backed it. And even then, hardly anyone paid close to the AAA experience that is like $100-120 for all the bells and whistles in a Battlefront or a Fallout 4, and this game already offers tons of replay value, etc. etc. I don't want to try to come off like a fan boy. I mean hell, he's still answering backer support questions via Twitter -- he doesn't have to do that, but it is the right thing to do, so he does it.

That said, I look forward to seeing Tynan continue builds once he's back in full swing. "Ran off with the kickstarter money" is an embarassing claim for a game that received more updates than other indie kickstarters I've been a part of. Not to mention compared to kickstarters where the developers after just one year call it quits. I think Train Fever is one that comes to mind, or other, one-man shops that push out even fewer updates and don't communicate at all with the community. This isn't on Steam and Tynan isn't going on some marketing blitz trying to show off a game he is asking people to buy unfinished. He is pretty transparent compared to most devs I've beta tested with.

The only "problem" here TLHeart is that Tynan trusts the community, so he gives us a much looser leash than other development groups do. So he decides to focus for a while on his personal life and you feel cheated, so now maybe Tynan will keep a tighter leash, which bugs me and the others who choose to reciprocate that trust in Tynan's work decisions. Maybe we won't get so much in-depth access in later builds because of the way people acted in his absence.

I really hope you choose to update this for A12!

One thing that can drive me a bit crazy is when pawns refuse to make themselves feel better in order to bring them away from the brink of a mental breakdown.

In a game-logic sense, if someone is unhappy, they'll often do something to adjust it and improve their overall comfort. In Rimworld jobs like the need to mine, the search for food, and so on get in the way of the free time we all enjoy watching TV, reading, or just sitting and talking.

I think we should add a "Comfort" Job at a lower priority than even Researching. This is different from satisfying needs, but instead is a priority that pawns will spend some amount of time (an hour or two per day) being comfortable. You can decide the priority to ultimately decide how to address comfort of your pawns.

This is a great way to incorporate a bonus (comfortable bonus) for pawns to address early-game environments where sharing bedrooms and other negative effects lower morale. It can also help to address some effects that appear such as cabin fever among the miners, but there's no way to right click and tell them to go outside and relax to get rid of their cabin fever.

Ultimately it's a sort of catch all to help take advantage of controlling pawns better to prevent mental breaks. You can also right click and tell a pawn to go sit or rest to force them to be comfortable for an hour or so and get that bonus to help prevent a mental breakdown, or prevent them from just running back into an overheated mine, etc.

With all the extra categories it'd help to have a 5th category so we can put the absolutely low priority needs (art, crafting, cleaning ) before things we think that are more important (researching) so that our pawns research before they clean.

Concrete isn't just the surface - many houses are built on concrete slabs dug into the ground - you'd just need to dig deep enough to remove the improper ground (just like digging out a cavity from a tooth)

Foundation is the same premise though, just different wording. Sand, concrete - anything to make unusable ground usable.

I noticed at some screenshots that users were beginning to use coolers, which subsequently pull heat out of one room or area and bring it to another.

With this in mind, if you have a freezer in a cave, but want to be able to move that hot air out of the cave or more evenly distribute it, in a sci-fi situation we have vent systems, often in the walls and ceilings, to move such hot air out.

With this in mind, what are the thoughts on perhaps adding "air vents" to the "conduit" feature, allowing you to stream air from a cooler to the outside, where you can put a vent fan or something along those lines.

I'd post this to the suggestions area but since this is alpha-related stuff I'm just leaving it here as food for thought. Ultimately I also imagine water may become a factor for moving, so electricity, water, and air heat/cooling would cover the basics of a conduity or movement.

Alternatively being able to lay "piping" on the ground to lead from a room to an outside / other area could be ideal, especially if "green rooms" will now require higher temperatures to more effectively grow plants. Essentially you could use the heat from that room to assist in heating other rooms, adding to the efficiency of your faciliy.

Thoughts?

I wasn't sure if this was suggested already though I think I couldn't find it. Basically concrete involves digging out the ground and filling it in - so why not let it work with mud, swamp, and shallow water, which in a real world sense you would do exactly that with - dig out and fill with concrete to make into regular floors - especially with the indoor caves.

Thoughts?

Some "cheap" item ideas:

A "Pillar" that looks nicer than a wall and helps to support rooms when you make them really big

Switches that turn on/off power feeds.