Your Cheapest Ideas

[AruBun]

I noticed that the coolers are still defective, and still produce excess heat and use excess power when successfully hovering at the selected target temperature. I first posted this over a year ago in this thread. And because higher temperature on the exhaust side reduces cooler effectiveness, this can cripple coolers where it makes no sense, such as an array of coolers dedicated to a small room, with an exhaust duct that is not directly connected to outdoors, but should still be adequate, producing runaway and persistent problems. See my posts from before, including a working code snippet that can be copy+pasted into the vanilla core, to fix the problem. Fixes don't get any "cheaper" than that. (Well, it won't work now, some of the code has changed, the fix needs minor updating, for example compTempControl doesn't exist anymore.)

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=174.msg154082#msg154082
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=174.msg154259#msg154259
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=174.msg156834#msg156834

Oh, and see this:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=18853.msg209266#msg209266
I wanted to reply there, but I could not, perhaps the thread was locked but it doesn't indicate so.

"(Originally I thought there was some actual issue with the coolers, but now I feel like this is too minor to warrant the effort of looking at!)"
There is an actual issue with the coolers.

"What you'll see happen in this save is the "hot" room will keep getting hotter, even though the outside temperature is below the cooler target temperature.

So to answer Tynan's questions:
1)   2 rooms, 1 cooler.   Cooler cold side in 1 room, hot side in the other room.     Outside temperature below cooler target temperature.
2)  Hot room keeps getting hotter (but seems to stop once the heat dissipation is high enough to outdo the cooler)"

This is an issue! The title of the thread is not useful, and is addressed by Tynan in the last post, but the coolers do have an issue. When you have one or more coolers that are doing little to no actual cooling, they should not be exhausting full heat and using full power, as if they were producing maximum cooling. That is the error in the code, because they *do* operate at full exhaust heat and power, even when only pushing out a very, very small amount of cooling, which leads to all sorts of other issues and unintuitive inconsistencies, which can be dramatically bad in certain specific scenarios, especially with an array of coolers on the same room set to the same target temperature. Especially when you consider that higher temperature on the exhaust side will limit how much cooling they can do.

This problem has probably affected every player noticeably at least once, though they might not have known it was a bug. "Why aren't my coolers working, there should be enough of them." "Oh, exhaust is hot, well why is it so hot, I don't have to do very much cooling right now." "Why do I have to stagger the target temperatures of the cooler array to get them to work semi-efficiently? Why don't they work properly in the first place?" (The last one is only for those who realized that staggering targets will result in fewer dysfunctional units in an array of coolers.)

Perhaps a better version than my fix should go into the release, such as one which changes all coolers on the same room to operate at the same level, rather than some high, some idle, and one in between. And perhaps it should have a separate string for "in between", rather than saying high or full. I could implement those as well, but it would take a little more work than my current fix, which only modulates one cooler, because the game ordinarily processes all things and their effects in sequence, not in parallel, including coolers. So two coolers might be determined to be high, then one is intermediate, then two more are idle, for example. Which results in the same total effect, and same total power draw, but it would be better if each cooler displayed an average level when selected, instead of only one out of an array showing an intermediate draw, with the rest showing maximum or idle.

[Scalare]

It seems logical to have places where the colonists can store their clothes instead of on a stockpile.
So wardrobes would be nice. Even low-tech people should be able to build them from wood.

[ttc]

Allow Permadeath to be turned on (but not off) after a game has been created.

I prefer to play permadeath, but the default is that it's not checked. When I roll a new start, it annoys me that I can't enable it. It should probably have a warning that this is a one way thing that can't be undone.

[Serenity]

Assigning animal beds to specific animals would be cool. Useful when you have different kinds of haulers and you don't want your bear to sleep next to your dogs.

[Frivolimous]

Hanging Art - made at an Easel Workstation (1 sq).  It can be placed on any wall and doesn't take up any space.  People can walk on the square in front only to view it and it adds beauty to the area.

[Tammabanana]

Event : clumbsy fall.

Colonist falls down and gets a random injury, either a cracked bone, bruise, or laceration.

Is more likely when consciousness is low / movement is low. Especially risky when colonists are drunk or high.

Or old. Falling is a serious problem for the elderly - fall and break a hip, and you're pretty much bedridden for the rest of your life. And being bedridden reduces your life expectancy from then on.

Wheelchairs! Ideas:

* Pawns who can't use their hands to move the wheelchairs themselves could be pushed outside by other pawns, so that the wheelchair-bound could get some outside joy.
* Pawns who can still use their hands should be able to move themselves around in wheelchairs.
* Sick pawns should be able to use wheelchairs to get out of bed, go eat, do joy, but still retain some of the healing benefits of resting.
* Once you've researched (whatever) to enable motorized wheelchairs, those should ZOOM. And there should be versions with baskets in which the pawn can Haul more stuff.

[MeowRailroad]

PLEASE MAKE THE SUCCESS RATE OF SURGERY HIGHER.

I'm so sick of an extremely skilled doctor KILLING SOMEONE during a robotic hand installation. I understand that it is a hard operation, but HOW ON EARTH do you screw it up so badly that someone dies of 3 cuts to the chest?

I know this gets said a lot but it really needs to be fixed. It would be ok if it made sense and there actually was logical, reasonable risk in surgery but I just don't understand how much and how badly the colonists are able to mess up. One time it took 5 tries to install a peg leg and the colonist doing the operation was probably around 12-15 medical skill. Installing a peg leg basically involves attaching a carved piece of wood to the stump of a limb. The stump doesn't have to be reopened, no veins have to be connected, no nerves either, etc.

[Boba Phat]

i.e. I have a colony and don't want/ can't handle any more people right now, and I get a random wanderer who joins and have to deal with negative modifiers for something I didn't want in the first place

Yes, I just love when an abrasive, highly neurotic, pessimistic pyromaniac with a pegleg and asthma who refuses to do dumb labour shows up at my door and invites himself in.  Free kidney and heart, I guess.  (I really did get a pyromaniac inflict himself on me, and the first thing he did was set fire to my warehouse while everyone was sleeping.)

[RunningTree]

Cheap idea: Punching Bag

* Provides Joy
* Trains Melee

* Might be destructible after many uses
* Might not be usable by 'Incapable of Violent'

[1BadPanda]

Would it be easy to have the material count of architect jobs listed with the types you can build? 

Example: I want to build a wall but don't know what type of stone blocks I have.  Have the count listed next to each wall type when selecting?

there's a list of everything you have in the top right. just use that.

That's not always expanded, but since it is already a variable it should be pretty "cheap" to include a number on a tile, or maybe a hover-popup of all of the ingredients?  It saves time doing things that aren't "fun" like opening a tree list and it happens enough that I think it would be a valuable addition to the overall game play and interaction with the user.  Lets also get serious for a second, the list in the top left isn't exactly a professional looking HUD (even for a 2D game).  Yes, it is intuitive and easy to use, but it's bulky in that it shows too much information for the screen real-estate it takes up.

Also, are you facilitating ideas, or managing them?  If you're trying to get ideas from a community via a brainstorming session, squashing ideas doesn't incline people to suggest more.  Good ideas or not... 

Reference:
http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/facilwsh.pdf

[avilmask]

Can we make power conduits "break" instead of "destroy" during short circuit? After 100th time of rebuilding them and microing a builder, it gets really annoying. And you could actually use your repair guy for it, not a main builder.

Someone already requested building roles, right? You know, doesn't matter, who makes walls and flooring, but it's important that only main builder makes chairs and beds. And other leading roles as well. I remember it was something like "noble roles from Dwarf Fortress" a couple of years ago?
The same way about hauling, decaying stuff always top priority over any job (not only general hauling), but it doesn't matter, how long chunks and bricks gonna lay under a rain...

[Boba Phat]

Some way to give clothing to prisoners.  When I capture naked raiders, there doesn't appear to be any way to give them clothes.  For that matter, I'd like to be able to choose the quality of food they receive.

[Serenity]

Some way to give clothing to prisoners.  When I capture naked raiders, there doesn't appear to be any way to give them clothes.

Place a critical stock pile in the cell. It's a pain though as you really need one pile per item to make sure they get for example 1 pants + 1 shirt.

[Drazhya]

Trait idea. Unobservant: learns slower, smaller area in which he reacts to danger, corpses etc

[14m1337]

add an option to rename animals