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Hmm the only way i would be interested in flaming arrows would be if you could only use them by standing next to a campfire.

Something with fire.

Having fire arrows in your inventory is.. unrealistic

Dunno how hard would such thing be to implement, though I agree with the realism issue. One thing I'd propose that seems plausible-but-not-that-good would be to make a "Brazier" buildable item that would act like a man-operated turret that shoots flaming arrows. Crude but would probably work.

I like the idea overall. One solution to THIS problem:

It would be nice to require components too, but I don't see a way to use less than 1 component pr. tile which is too much...

Could be that a new resource could be added, let's name it "conveyor belt". Such resource would be produced at a machining table and it could use as much steel and components per N conveyors as you'd like, so for example recipe for 10 belts would be 25 steel and 1 component, and the floor type itself would only require such belts as a resource to build.

Since it'd take time to be crafted at the machining table, you could cut the time it takes to actually lay it on the floor - it'd balance itself out that way.

Although I have no idea whetner or not the floor tiles can have built-in conduits, since those are operating on two different layers.

historic_os - added a Polish translation a couple days ago. The least I can do in return for such an awesome mod

Now thats just nasty...

Aren't we all? 

I think that may be too many bells and whistles. If anyone were to try their hand at this they should just start off by seeing if they could do some sort of trade value per biome kinda thing. I think that's more or less the core idea.

It is, indeed, and that would be a simple but sure start for such a mod.

Which would basically be just a higher markup for selling from a caravan. At least in the simple version of the system.

I disagree with the notion of establishing per-unit price to cover transportation costs, and consider it an inappropriate inversion of measurement. It is possible but not useful to say that if I shipped 500 corn, then transportation cost adds shippingCost/500 to each unit of corn, but it is an error to claim that corn should get a shippingCost/500 markup.

Transportation costs (the value of transportation) should be kept as a separate overhead. That overhead is currently represented in the service fee for calling on a trade caravan.

A plausible improvement to the detail of that system would be inclusion of a distance metric in calculating the service fee for calling a trade caravan, and a faction event offering that fee for delivery of goods for which they have an unmet need.

And that post shows perfectly how divergent our opinions are. I'm talking about a genuine trade and merchants, and you're talking about... an on-call courier service, which is an entirely different thing. For this I propose we cease further discussion simply because I see there is no way to convince you that trade, which mankind has practiced throughout the history, is actually a thing, and "buy cheaper, sell high" is what has driven World's economy for a long time (hell, this - apparently arcane - practice still exists to this very day). You see no reason for such thing, and I respect that, but this is absolutely not what I meant proposing the title mod of this thread and I, as I mentioned before, I see no point in continuing discussion with you. Thank you for all your input, and have a pleasant day.

The use of the term trading seems a point of confusion; what I see is a middleman who is neither the producer nor the consumer, both of whom can perform caravan transportation.

Point is that not everyone is (or shouldn't be, at least) capable of running caravans. You need animals for trasnporting cargo, people to help with it and to ensure caravan's safety, you need food for all of them and (probably most imporant) you'd need all those people away from your settlement for a long time, during which they could for example produce stuff etc. So naturally not every tribe or village should be able to regularly send caravans to their heart's content.

What value does this middleman contribute? If the answer is 'nothing' then to give them any credit is a disservice to the concept of value. And if the answer is 'something' then what is the measure of that credit?

Based on humanity's experiences from real life, the only measure that was ever important was "how much is the buyer willing to pay" - have I brought that oh so needed salt to a place where it's scarce? Let's haggle for a better price! If the buyer can either take it or be left without something they need, they'll likely pay more.

I suggest the credit under consideration is the cost of transportation, a type of overhead that applies to the shipment rather than the items within it. The time away of pawns taken off the roster to make the trip, the risk of loss, and the efforts a player may take to reduce that overhead by making one large trip instead of many smaller trips.

Which would basically be just a higher markup for selling from a caravan. At least in the simple version of the system.

Otherwise we'd need to think about a larger system that would need to track in which settlement was each item bought, and then apply the distance from that settlement to the settlement we'd sell the item in, to calculate bonus from the distance travelled. That would be closer to what you're all about, it seems, but the system would still be flawed. For one it'd be far less realistic than people paying more for what they need. And two: it'd be exploitable as well, by purposefully travelling to the farthest accessible settlement to artificially pump the value.

Generally your aversion to gaining profit from caravaneering is odd to say the least. Buying goods in a place where it's in abundance and selling where it's scarce at a higher price was the base of world's economy at its beginnings. Merchants from around the world were gaining their riches from doing exactly that - being a middle man. There wouldn't be a single merchant in our history if everyone was somehow bound to buy and sell always at the same price, which is basically what dburgdorf tried to explain to you in this post to which you've responded with just being a dick, and that, my friend, is far from constructive.


To wrap it up - I propose a system that would basically be a hybrid of mine and yours, which in short could be described like this: Any given settlement would pay more for goods they are in need of, but it'd also be governed by their seasonal/annual need for said product. In this case merchants would still make their profit from the trade, but wouldnt' be able to drain all medicine-producing settlements and pump 10k of medicine in the one settlement that needs it and pays more for it if said settlement will only ever buy 500 of medicine per season.

I told you already - I understand this part and I very much agree with the fact that this model will make producing more profitable.

However, it does absolutely nothing to make actual trading viable. If one village sells 500 corn per year, which you buy and then transport to another village that buys 500 corn per year and sell it to them for the exact same (or lower) price you bought it at the first village, then good for you being a philantropist, but you won't gain anything. And the very point of my idea is to make wayward trading a viable source of income.

Since it might be considered rude to post a thread in foreign language on an English forum (although it isn't against the forum rules), I'll translate the above text for whomever it might concern:

Title: Mods proposed for Polish translation!

Post: Do you want a mod translated to Polish? You love a mod, but you're repulsed by English language? Post your proposition in this thread and I will consider it!

The trouble with installing silver as a tweak-able variable is that it invites the nerf via expense trolls into the control room, and all they ever do is look for a big red button to push. So for example, maybe expressing demand as a need for some amount of product, or some amount of product per season. And then supply as the ability to provide for need in the same way. Counting demand as a usage rate then makes the stream of products (and maybe eventually services too) the subject. So a colony might be well-suited to raising crops because the nearby faction bases are in a biome that increases their consumption of those imports. Or maybe they won't buy much crops because their usage is small, but they'll take all the medicine you can produce.

Very constructive input - I like where this is going. However, if I understood your post correctly, you mean that the only real effect of high demand would be that, quote "they'll take all the medicine you can produce", and that's it. No higher price involved? This is the way I interpret your words and correct me if I'm wrong, but just in case I'm not, let me say this:

I understand where you come from and that approach is generally ok, but it only takes player's actual production into account. This system of supply and demand is ok when you - as a player - are producing specific goods that the nearby settlements want to purchase in high amounts - then you can use said good to just trade for whatever they produce and sell. This is all fine, but it nullifies any sort of trade.

If the price multiplier would be like it is in current vanilla or the one you've presented in your thread, the player would be unable to make actual profit as a caravaneer merchant, because if you buy medicine at a settlement that produces it for, let's just say, 20 silver, and then go to the settlement that has high demand for medicine and will buy all of it for 20 silver or less, then it's far from profitable (again - fine if you produce and sell, terrible if you buy and sell somewhere else). Value of the trade goods should still vary in different settlements for the trade to be profitable.

What started as a generally interesting idea by AngleWyrm in this thread, turned into another one that came up in the thread. In particular, I mean the idea of selling items at a higher value and buying at a lower one when trading from a caravan. It's a good idea to encourage caravaneering some more, however all this gave me an idea for a mod, but since I'm not a programmer, I'll post it here, hoping that mayhaps someone would like the idea enough to make it happen.

The idea is to create demand and supply lists for each biome with some additional modifiers of which I'll talk in a moment. The supply and demand lists would govern the prices in any given biome, based on what would logically be in abundance and what would be scarce in any given region. A couple of examples:

- Temperate biome would be the closest to "vanilla" or "base price", since it technically has a bit of everything a colony might need.
- Mostly/permanently cold biomes would pay more for furs and warm clothing, weapons (for hunting) as well as most crops. If it's a treeless tundra or an ice sheet, wood might be in demand.
- Tropical and moderately warm biomes would have cheaper food due to the longer/year-round growing season. All sorts of medicines, penoxycyline etc. would be in high demand, due to increased disease risk. Wood would be rather cheap in tropical forests.
- Arid shrublands and desert biomes would demand wood and food, but due to the problematic storage (spoiling food) they'd prefer livestock and long-lasting food above anything else. Gold and gems would be cheaper there.
- Orbital traders could count as a "biome" themselves, having glitterworld tech and high-tech in general slightly cheaper than what you'd find on the planet's surface.

As for the "modifiers" mentioned before: Those would be just slight variations in prices based on many different things that aren't biomes. Examples:
- Less profitable (for the player) trade depending on roads. A village deep in a forest would have significantly fewer traders than a town located by asphalt highway. So no road = good prices, then dirt road, then stone, then asphalt and then highway).
- The more mountainous the area is, the higher supply of gems, stone, steel etc. and the higher demand of wood and food (smaller farmable/forest area).
- Flat areas would demand mineable resources more.
- Riverside and coastal areas would generally have higher supply of food (due to [currently imaginary] fishing and better soil).
- Tech level also matters: Tribes would generally have more basic demands like food/livestock/clothing/weapons and industrials would demand art and joy-related things (TVs, telescopes etc.) while being able to spare some industrial tech and weaponry at an acceptable prices. Orbitals would want mostly precious metals and gems (since they take it back to glitterworld which I personally view as a decadent society that has all its needs satisfied so they waste money at jewelry and other useless stuff).
- An area with lots of neighbouring towns and villages would naturally both buy and sell things at a lower price, due to the abundace of traders.
- The more dangerous an area is, the more willing its people are to pay more for stuff, due to the fewer traders. By "dangerous" I mean an area with raider bases nearby. The more raiders, the more people will pay the traders, especially for weapons and armor, turrets and mortars etc. Naturally, they'd sell weapons and armor at higher price as well, since they wouldn't want to part with those (if they'd sell them at all).

A note regarding biomes: The "distance to biome X" should also factor in, by which I mean that a village in the desert that borders with a tropical forest tile-to-tile should't pay for wood and food as much as a village in the middle of a damn desert, far far away from everything. In that case players would be able to abuse the system to the extreme (find 3 neighbouring biomes and you're basically set with a trade route).

And that's the idea, basically. I have no idea about how hard would it be to code and if anyone would ever like to undertake this, but there you have it. I hope you enjoy the idea.

I shall support this thread. YOU. FU**ING. ROCK. People

And the best thing about all this is that there are extremely polished and creative mods even despite the game being in Alpha stage. Hell, one guy (sorry I forgot your nick, mate, mea culpa) even made a MULTIPLAYER MOD. In Alpha...

Just imagine the mods after the main release, when the core game will be full of new features and mechanics for modders to explore and thrive on, and there will sure as hell be even more amazing modtools to extend the possibilities to the extreme.

Both the Devs of RimWorld and its modding community make the game's future painted in bright colours, and I thank you all for that.

Love the idea. And a tiny suggestion regarding the name (should you even want to change it from Underground Exploration). How about "SpelunkeRim"?

Ooh, I see. Well, that's what you get for being a freshman to a game with years worth of history Not knowing what was distorts "what could be".

I rest my case then, and thank you, Granite, for making things clear.

After receiving well thought answers to my previous inquiry (thanks again) I feel encouraged to ask you, wonderful modders, another question from "would X be possible?" series. Thank you in advance for any and all answers.

The question I have raging in my mind is somewhat influenced by this mod mixed with my idea of a special type of silent raids (it's a different mod idea entirely, but to put it short - a type of thief 'raiders' would enter your map without any notification to steal your stuff and leg it), and the question itself is:

Would it be possible to introduce a line-of-sight check to both pathfinding and event detection? Splitting it into a bunch of smaller, more precise questions to explain what I have in mind:
- Raiders/manhunters not charging straight to your colony from the far end of the map like they've had some sort of preinstalled GPS, but instead having to search for you first, until they aquire line of sight.
- Your pawns only detecting some types of events (not all would make sense, but most) only by line of sight so: raid is detected when someone spots a hostile, fire is detected on sight and so on. As an extension to this idea there could be different items like watchtowers (increase sight range of a pawn who mans it), security cameras and cctv screen (cameras detect threats if a pawn mans the screen), motion and heat detectors (for hostiles and fire respectively) etc.
- Perhaps even introducing some sort of stealth mechanics (since detection would be based on LoS rather than magical "I am 2 mountains away but I'm already moving to attack Jerry's bed specifically") for your pawns to utilise (guerilla suit sniper, anyone?).
- This one is probably even more far-fetch'd than the stealth, but mayhaps even a kind of Fog of War would be possible, so that you have to discover your map bit by bit, instead of being all-seeing god.

And a follow-up question: If (a big IF) all/some of the above would be possible, how much performance impact would it have, do you reckon, in bigger raids when dozens of bandits would frantically search the map for your pawns and buildings? As far as I know, now when a raider falls into your trap, his whole faction knows the exact location of said trap, so maybe it'd be possible to utilise this mechanics to make factions remember the location of your buildings so they don't have to search everytime, but I don't know whetner or not this would actually ease the game's calculations or further complicate them...


Thanks for reading all this stuff.

Allright. Thank you all for your answers - you've put way more thought into it than I've originally anticipated.

Seems RPG-ish game mode would be plausible enough and that's a happy thought, even though I'm not nearly good enough to code such thing. Maybe if I start with some tiny mods and get better, then in due time I could find someone to share the project with.

Thanks for shedding some light onto the idea.