Mounting Animals? (Riding Muffalo into the sunset!)

[Reidson]

With the introduction of the new planet map, in my opinion, it makes sense to add some sort of animal riding into the game. Here are a couple reasons:

1. Reducing travel time on the map - Travel time currently can be slow on its own, and just gets worse the more people you have in a group. It would be fun and quite useful to be able to ride an animal that would increase the speed of a caravan group. It would open up the opportunity for new skills, new types of groups traveling on the map (Say like a group of fast moving, mounted colonists to scout out potential settle locations, or for planning an attack on a hostile base.), and even new animal types (types of horses?)

2. Mounted Combat - Probably the most fun reason. This would open the doors to so many different things. Imagine a group of tribal horse archers coming across a poor group of colonists just trying to get by. Next thing you know, the tribesmen storm the camp, shooting and kiting every people in sight, never stopping once to aim. Or even a medieval group of thrumbo-mounted armored warriors, besieging the walls of a settlement, only to storm in with the cavalry mounted lancers. There could be a charge bonus for piercing enemies at high speeds, or just outright running people over. This would add an entire new aspect to taming animals, training them up, disciplining them, giving them armor, etc.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestion. RimWorld is my favorite game of all time, and this was just one of my ideas.

[Nomsayinbrah]

Oops - responded to another thread like this.

But I'd love this!! Movement buff, but aim penalty? And this can be reduced through higher skills like shooting or handling?

Really good suggestion, would love to see this in game

[Lightzy]

+1
for sure

But it has to be skill/perk/study based.

In another thread I suggested that pawns get perks on levelup/study, so that a pawn who doesn't know how to ride, for example, can learn it from someone who can, or by reading lots of books, or by falling many times on his head, until he gets a perk called "Rider", which them allows them to ride without risk to life and limb.

[Thirite]

If I had a dollar for every time this suggestion was made without looking for an identical thread to post in first, I could quit my dayjob.

[Reidson]

If I had a dollar for every time this suggestion was made without looking for an identical thread to post in first, I could quit my dayjob.

My bad. New to the forums, and just glanced at the pinned thread on frequent suggestions, which this wasn't on. Kinda figured this might've been suggested before because I feel like it would be an obvious addition.

[krinkels69]

Hey guys

I'm pretty sure I am not the first or last to come up with this idea but how about having colonists being able to ride a pet into battle or as a beast of burden such as a bear, warg, muffalo, etc?

Maybe with the potential addition of horses this could even be more worked out. I just came to the conclusion that I don't see how this is not impossible and seems rather likely to be added in the future so I'm just venting my ideas towards it here while I still have them in mind.

There could be a research tree added such as 'basic animal riding' and 'advanced animal riding' and then a skill like taming where with the basic variant you can ride horses, muffalo's and so on that add little or no melee combat value but a higher speed or more HP. And then there is the advanced animal riding where you can ride a bear, warg, into battle and get a multiplier in damage and/or speed or HP done in melee.

It would add a very more strategic aspect to the game so as you can rush an enemy to soften them up with mounted gunners or archers. It could also potentially be used to distract the enemy who focus on maybe 2-3 riders when your infantry moves up towards the enemy back to lift a siege on your settlement without having billions of dead and injured when you rush their sandbags and mortars.

You could perhaps even add animal armors, give them the ability to help deconstruct stuff faster (I would love to have a muffalo deconstruction team tearing down walls) all while mounted by a character.

There would of course also be possible events or debuffs to being on an animal for example: if you ride an animal into a fire it can panick and toss the rider off of his mount with some minor damage and a potential fatal fall with a very small 1% of happening where the rider breaks his neck and dies/becomes paralyzed.

It would also be possible to give by example a muffalo rider the ability to carry more stuff when he's mounted. This is for example useful when a large field is being harvested of potatoes and then a muffalo rider could drag 500 stack worth of potatoes, rice, corn, ... to the storage i.e. the tedious parts of harvesting being a lot less tedious in the future allowing less colonists to focus on annoying work.

Let me know if there is any interest in this and I might just do an attempt to mod this myself although I don't have the right experience for it yet I already learnt quite a bit of modding for Rimworld so far with at least 1 working mod. If a veteran modder would show interest in this feel free to add me on Steam (Krinkels69) and get my full p.o.v. on the opportunity. Although I haven't yet found any mods who allow this sort of thing I think there are some in development or already exist that I do not yet know of, let me know

Greetings from the little country of Belgium,

Krinkels69

[Calahan]

@ krinkels69 - Animal riding has been suggested ad infinitum, so I have merged your suggestion with one of the (many) previous suggestion threads for this. Please can you use the search function in future to check for existing threads (especially for suggestions) before making a new thread for it (as per the forum rules, which all users should read at their earliest convenience).

And regarding the suggestion itself, IMO it's very doubtful that animal riding will be added to the vanilla game. Here is a quote by Tynan (on reddit) about some of the reasons why. The bolding is  mine for emphasis (this was in response to a comment about adding boats, which is basically the same as adding riding):


"It would actually be very, very difficult. Not to make it work (that's always easy), but to make the AI interact with it non-stupidly (that's always the limiting factor). It would create problems that could never really be fully solved (and we've already got lots of those).

You know how the spaceship doesn't actually fly around the map and nobody actually rides animals? Yeah, there's a reason for that..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/75h89t/deep_rimworld_comics/do7kg1w/

[krinkels69]

I know that it's something that could cause some silly issues but is that not mainly due to the fact of the limitations of the current programming language or am I wrong with that?

Either way I think if Tynan asked some of the more veteran modders amongst his supporters to come up with something, I am very much sure they can come up with a decent solution or mod. =)

And could you perhaps give some more info regarding this limiting factor that Tynan speaks of? I don't quite follow that very well or am I just not reading it correctly? Is it because Tynan does not know how to code it, or is it just impossible or extremely difficult to do? Or perhaps another reason?

Thanks in advance for an answer and Calahan, I am very sorry for causing you the pain of having to move this, it's not my intent to give you extra work!

Kind regards