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I saw some posters mention how they would avoid the chemical interest/fascination trait and thought I would add my thoughts/experience to that topic before I begin my next playthrough.

As I mentioned briefly in the last post, during my latest playthrough I set a Forced Trait: Chemical Interest to all characters 50%, with 4/5 starting colonists with it and the last one being a teetotaler. With this setup I was definitely having a contrasting experience.

My teetotaler was the saddest of the bunch! Through all the hardships AND the good times, my poor Teetotaler was consistently the worst off mood wise. Some of the Chemical Interest pawns I had also had some pretty harsh traits like neurotic, volatile, nervous etc yet they were still usually quite well off, although admittedly there were some touch and go points where I had to micromanage their drug/joy/work times but overall I only had what felt like a handful of mental breaks with them, whereas the teetotaler was 90% useless from needing so much joy to compensate for the occasional animal death/filth and just generally not having a well setup base-at the time. Keep in mind I had pretty much all the drugs and beer available throughout, so it wasn't like any one drug was doing all the mood boosting.

The downsides of Chemical interest are far easier to manage than the negatives of teetotaler, let's compare briefly
Teetotaler negatives:
-unable to do drugs for joy/mood, thereby making each debuff is more significant.
-unable to do drugs for performance increase, making them less effective in bursts for such things like construction/crafting/hauling/etc
Doesn't sound like much does it, but in actual play(on Rough Cassandra) these inabilities really set them back in terms of work output and mood management

Chemical Interest negatives:
-slightly higher use of drugs for joy purposes, this requires a higher drug supply/sustain
-joints use for joy, as well as mood, increase food consumption a decent amount as well as lower productivity via consciousness and move speed
-drug/beer use whenever they feel like it ie binges and hangovers, this leads to times when you'll schedule work and be stuck waiting for it to complete when you otherwise wouldn't need to with a non Ch.In. pawn
-more drugs/beer required to sustain addictions, productivity and mood.

Overall I think the negatives are pretty even when you think about them in the context of a more average playthrough. Which mine was not, being that I was focusing largely on the drug policy and drug use overall. Although personally I would be playing mostly the same way if it were just a normal a15 official.
I haven't yet played with any Chemical Fascination trait pawns so I'm not sure how much more extreme they are compared to Chemical Interest. I'll probably avoid those just to be safe, until someone skilled enough tempts me haha.

I was thinking it would be neat to be able to force drugs onto a teetotaler but inflict a heavy long term mood debuff so it would be possible to boost their performance, but not mood, for brief emergencies but that's likely just my bias showing haha.

I'll be doing a more normal playthrough this next run so i'll try to grab one pawn of each trait if possible and see how they do in a less...medicated scenario. Also, starting without drugs on hand will allow me a better perspective of the progression/economy. I can't even tell you how useful drugs are during early game when there's filth and chunks everywhere, little space/comfort/joy and you just want everything done fast!

So far the drug system has added alot to my games and i'm enjoying what feels like a new layer to the mood system and growing/trade economy. Not sure if you have plans to expand on the system some day or what but even as is on the 0.15.1274 version, with all my rest micromanaging lol, I've been having alot of fun so as always thanks Tynan and keep on truckin.

Cheers PK

edit awwww yea a new version, just on time, was literally setting up my next scenario <3
I was mainly trying a top-down approach for the drug system last run, this time I will try to focus on watching individual AI a bit more, the use for joy trigger especially seemed worth checking out, not sure exactly how that works as I was mostly dosing them manually.

[The ability to trigger drugs based on REST.]

Was hoping to keep this post short but....noope, sorry

Tutorial-
I went through the tutorial twice to be sure because I felt something was missing. After the raider attacks and you defend you choose your storyteller and it's over.
But what about graves?
I feel new players should have to build a grave to deal with the body after. One of the defining characteristics of Rimworld is that you gotta deal with them bodies...otherwise you can easily get alot of mood debuffs and things can spiral from there. New player's may not realize the associated debuffs until it's too late. In which case we're likely to see them complaining on reddit/the forums about mood spirals. It might be worth putting the joy part around the same time as that to allow some explanation of mood effects as a whole. With that said, I read your reddit post about not wanting to overload the player right off the bat and I absolutely agree so I understand the difficulty in keeping the tutorial limited but I feel graves and moods should be significant enough to make the cut.

Drugs-
Giving the pawns the ability to pick up more than one of any drug seems to be a bit moot->When a pawn picks up more than one drug they can't use it from the Gear tab, instead it must be dropped, then used from the ground. This leaves the remainder of the drugs on the ground, which besides making hauling more pesky, makes it a bit pointless to carry more than one.
I could understand carrying drugs to bring go-juice to where drafted pawns are for the occasional defense. But as is the player can simply place the drugs at defend stations-unfortunately at the moment this is made very difficult due to stack size via lowering and raising stockpile priorities.
Perhaps allow a pawn to carry a drug in their gear, without being under a policy which allows them to use said drug freely. Like a "carry extra" tick/untick option or a "use when drafted"

Tolerance feels good, it rises and lowers at a decent pace, not too fast or slow. I feel tolerance is still a bit muddled in terms of the player knowing what is actually happening-I don't know how long a drug should last under x, y or z level of tolerance, I don't even know if it's x doses per tolerance or if it just lasts shorter.
Perhaps some time estimate would be handy- even just the default no-tolerance duration would be very useful.
EDIT I can see you added the % to tolerance multiplier, looks great. which was updated as im typing haha

Marijuana yield feels too high, with just a small 8X8 field I was able to get enough joints for long term use and still have plenty to sell. Somewhere along the production chain it feels like too much, not sure if its even worth bottlenecking though as the downsides don't go away even with a steady supply, if not I think the value for joints may still be a bit high. The so-far reduced value feels better but i'm not sure it's enough.

Coca growth time/reward feels right as does the flake to yayo conversion.

Amphetamine production is a bit too easy, with minimal starting silver I can easily get a huge chunk of neutroamine (which is quite hard to pronounce, I suggest a hyphen). then it's just a matter of time for the research, during which i can get even more. The low cost of neutroamine combined with the ability to mass produce and sell joints makes it really easy.
Considering Amph's huge gain of rest, consciousness, work speed, and moving, I feel like it should either be more addictive, harder to buy in large quantities, higher research, require more neutroamine etcetc.

Withdrawl-
Being able to see the % is super handy.
Felt like it was too harsh before but now it feels too weak. Had a guy with Amphetamine addiction get to 45% and didn't see a single mental break or anything. Not sure if i'm imagining it or not but did you replace all the mental breaks with long term debuffs? Going that route makes sense as a sort of mild but long term negative, requiring other drugs or joy to make up the mood loss.
That plays into making random/stray drugs be the real danger with withdrawing pawns.
I'll try to play around with withdrawals more in my next game session.

Drug Policy interface-
The updated tick/untick style display looks much better than before. Being able to have multiple triggers is great. The "drug policy name" (Chemical interest) identifier is great, no longer have to check and re-check character tabs
I kept thinking that having both mood and joy triggers for policies was a bit redundant but after some thinking it makes sense to have both, otherwise you cant do drugs for one level of joy and another for mood.

My understanding is that the drug system is designed to (other than the obvious emergent gameplay) improve mood and performance. But I'm having some issues with the performance enhancement aspect.
After playing with a stable colony for a while and really seeing the effects in action it felt like something obvious was missing.
At first I was using the default restrict schedule with only sleep and anything. Issue with that is that they would end up being active during the SLEEP periods, during which they only sleep or do joy if not tired-that makes sense to me so no issue there. This didn't feel very effective though as Pawns were overloading on joy and hardly any work was being done.
So I've been using the restrict tab with NO SLEEP, only a few hours of joy and the rest anything. This allows them to get mandatory joy while sleeping and working whenever they want. But even doing it this way I have no idea when they will tire.
The ability to trigger drugs based on REST.
As of writing this I can only get my colonists to do drugs when tired manually, by watching the colonist bar for who sleeps, which feels exactly like what the drug policy system was designed to make easier.
At first I thought a REST trigger would be overpowered but here's my idea after some thought.
The gain of increased productivity could be balanced with my pawn's risk of overdoses for short term usage, and tolerance levels for long term usage.
So say I want to rush my guys to finish a building or craft whatever->Schedule some work hours->Dose them up->Do the work
In that scenario the pawns lose mood and rest from increased work hours but that could be made up for by rest+ drugs and mood+ drugs. But riding them too hard like that would increase the risk of OD.
For a more long term situation the tolerance level would balance out the doses per day so as not to have some supermen colony of drug addicts, this is where knowing how many doses per tolerance (or however it works) is useful to know.

I'm sure there's some things i'm forgetting but i'll leave that for next time, thanks again for taking the time to read my post, and the last one, Tynan. Feel free to respond if you would like to clarify anything.

Cheers PK

PS where can I find that changelog? <3

[Pet zoning/hunting bug]

First off thanks for the great new set of features, I have been having a lot of fun trying out the new drug system, so far I have not touched the mining stuff yet, but here's my feedback so far. Bit of a warning as it may focus on the negatives, with love. Telling you my problem is better than giving you a solution you didn't ask for amiright

For the opening tutorial: it felt good overall, my only comment is that there should be some mention, upon world generation, of what the purpose of map size is ie: 200 x 150 vs 400 x 300 simply meaning more map variety, having no game play impact- seems to be a very common newbie question.

Grow speed and effort:
The increased work to sow fields and allow them to grow feels more appropriate given how much of a gain growing has always been, especially now with drugs added. The added grow time makes up for the increased work load so you're not spending more time harvesting than growing, which definitely feels better than before where you were practically racing your crops to get them harvested and hauled.

Beer:
The new fermentation process is really cool as it feels somehow more rewarding to wait for your wort to ferment, without being much more work overall. The Fermenting Barrel is absolutely beautiful, i can tell you spent time on making it graphically intuitive. Seriously its amazing man, this is the level of detail I love about this game.

A few criticisms now-Perhaps it's worth mentioning somewhere that they need to be refrigerated as this may not be obvious to non-brewer types, unless you want alot of angry people to ruin their first batch, that's ok if so lol

One main thing with that though is that I was unable to simply empty the barrels when the ruined wort was in there so I had to deconstruct then re-construct, was pretty sad to lose not only the hops but all the steel/wood.

Beer feels great now, but with that said I really have no clue where it's intended to fit into the joy meta, at least compared to Joints. PRE-POST EDIT-After doing some basic comparisons it feels like beer is in the right place, being a more addictive and productive mood booster, with Cannabis being the easier/cheaper version that costs move speed and consciousness.

Drugs:
The drug progression research has been scaled down and it feels good where it's at now I think. The actual "tech progression" of which drug does what could be a bit more clear, for example Flake's description might fit better as Yayo's current description.

-Flake states a "short but powerful euphoric state" but would be more accurate as "reducing the user's need for rest, and suppresses pain" Yayo's description should mention it is a less addictive and more "expensive" alternative that adds a speed boost as well. Also as of now there are no mouse-over descriptions of the "pain" "rest" and "tiredness" in the stats for drugs, the later two of which are a bit confusing/mistakable. Beer's stats also don't seem to be updated to a similar format as the new drugs, which makes comparing their effects quite difficult.

Stack size?!
Why can i stack 300+ joints on one tile? it seems unreasonable for drugs to stack any higher than beer does. If/when damage occurs on that one tile i'm gonna lose ALOT of manhours/resources, which may be intentional, like gold/silver but just seems a bit odd to stack 100 yayo when a large colony might only use 20/30 a day.

Drug policy has nothing to do with telling pawns what drugs *not* to take. It's in the Assign tab, not the Restrict tab

I can understand that fitting into the big picture, but let's be honest, you go into the drug policy menu and see the option "no drugs" and it's blank. So it feels like it SHOULD prevent pawns from using at all. Perhaps just rename it to "No Policy" or something to clarify the difference.

Now for some bugs!
I haven't had the time to get acquainted with debug mode so I haven't tested much at all but here's my observations as-is:
Pet zoning/hunting bug
step 1 pet is trained by a hunter.
2 pet is assigned a zone away from the hunting area.
3 hunter hunts.
4 hunter either finished prematurely, or is interrupted, not exactly sure here.
5 pets assigned to hunter will be stuck "wandering" wherever they were when the hunter finished/was interrupted
6 only way to unstuck them is to draft the hunter/trainer and move him to the allowed zone so they either follow there or just reset their pathfinding to that location
7 in A14 pets would just go between where the hunter was hunting and their zone seamlessly

Second issue, not sure if this is a bug or what.
I use windowed borderless mode via the shortcut trick on one monitor and browser/etc on the other screen. When i move my mouse on my second monitor the little bottom left area of the gamescreen where it says the items/terrain/light etc will actively change as if my mouse were moving across the game screen, but it's on the other monitor, alt tabbed.
it's only a minor gripe, one I can live with but I thought i'd mention it as it's been bugging me and it never happened in A14

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the drug system but overall it feels like a nice addition that will add flavour for alot of people. Hopefully I can spend some more time writing out some feedback later this week.

Cheers, PK