Your Cheapest Ideas

[aper]

sorry if these are posted often:

More auto-zones: Right now we have the Home zone, which can be automatically created and expanded, but it would be useful to have more, like "under a roof" zone - created for every square under a roof, and the player could manually expand on that to link the different areas... or "Inside the base" - for the biggest enclosed area created.
at least these two are some I manually create and use in every game.

Banish colonists: while you can release captured enemies, there is no straight way getting rid of trouble making colonists after you arrest them, I mean without killing them. Right now you can exploit the system of prison break, and purposely let the unwanted imprisoned colonies escape, hoping they'll make it to the edge of the map before the next berserk break.

Make food health related: Colonists that feed on mostly one kind of food get sick more often, while others whose meals are made of all sorts of different foods, including meat, are more healthy, as in real life

[DelianMode]

New player & first post here. This idea may have been mentioned before, but reading back through 234 pages...

As a struggling new player, picking a good mix of initial colonist characteristics is proving essential - but time consuming, often resorting to pen and paper. Something that would make this process much speedier would be:

An extra 'overview' panel on the colonist select screen that totals up all of the stats & 'experience flames' for each skill. Also, if you hover mouse over each skill, you see the list of characters currently selected and their level (or inability) in that skill - to save you clicking back through the character tabs to check.

[Nikitteh]

Cheapest one I could think of would be having the ability to smooth walls just as you can the floor for beauty effect.. the ability to research agriculture allowing for farmers to get higher temps out of crops and the Ability to till soil and work up stone flooring OUT side of mountains so you churn it in to rich soil but this must be done after every harvest. Another idea a bit more costly would make radiation poisoning and mutant creatures appear for 1 season after toxic fallout. Depending on the biome there are alien races friend and foe that can be traded with. Even the ability to have an alien pet that must be fed specific foods (insect jelly, or human parts) to keep it from going berserk. I dunno just ideas.

[mumblemumble]

TRAITS:

Hardass - pawn takes 25% less pain

thick skin - Pawn takes 10% less pain

Thin skin - Pawn takes 10% more pain

Early riser - pawn needs 25% less sleep to feel rested

Tank build - Pawn gets 15% more hp per body part, because hes built like a tank - also with a 5% boost of pain tolerance, and 15% boost in immune system.

Meticulous efficiency - Pawn is very careful about not having waste in any thing they do. Production of items uses 5% less materials, mining / reaping crop produces 5% more, and deconstructing things gives 15% more materials, but is 10% slower at all these tasks

[SpaceDorf]

Give Animal Beds the ability to switch between medical and normal.

( I may have suggested this before, I am not sure )

[SpaceDorf]

TRAITS:

Hardass - pawn takes 25% less pain

thick skin - Pawn takes 10% less pain

Thin skin - Pawn takes 10% more pain

Early riser - pawn needs 25% less sleep to feel rested

Tank build - Pawn gets 15% more hp per body part, because hes built like a tank - also with a 5% boost of pain tolerance, and 15% boost in immune system.

Meticulous efficiency - Pawn is very careful about not having waste in any thing they do. Production of items uses 5% less materials, mining / reaping crop produces 5% more, and deconstructing things gives 15% more materials, but is 10% slower at all these tasks

Trait :

Stalker : Follows a Pawn of the fitting gender as a "joy"-activity

[Warwood]

Unsure if this was previously recommended, but:

Cooks hauling their complete allowed quantity of food when hauling from a non-stockpile.  I am not sure if this would be easy, but a great deal of time can start to be eaten up by a cook walking to a grow area, grabbing 10x potatoes of the 50x around them, walking back to the stove, and repeating.

Toggles for fueled items. It would be nice to have emergency stoves, generatos, etc without needing them to be constantly fueled.

Perhaps less cheap:  Toggles for growing areas.  I would like to have my non-plant cutting growers still harvest, but not waste time planting an area that will freeze before the crop can grow.  Maybe just seperating grow from harvest, and not allowing growers to be unable to "cut plants"   It seems odd that growers will harvest on time, or I can flag to harvest, but flagged won't be worked by the grower when manually directed.

Restricted areas.  Opposite of permitted, for when you will always/almost always want your people to stay out of an area.  Trap areas for example.

[CannibarRechter]

>   I am not sure if this would be easy, but a great deal of time can start to be eaten up by a cook walking to a grow area, grabbing 10x potatoes of the 50x around them, walking back to the stove, and repeating.

The fix for that is already part of the game. You want to create a couple of relevant stockpiles next to your stoves.

[Warwood]

>   I am not sure if this would be easy, but a great deal of time can start to be eaten up by a cook walking to a grow area, grabbing 10x potatoes of the 50x around them, walking back to the stove, and repeating.

The fix for that is already part of the game. You want to create a couple of relevant stockpiles next to your stoves.

That works until the stockpile is empty, in the instances you are trying to catch buck up on food production. It does not happen often, but when you are fighting to recover from massive food loss, it becomes frustrating to watch a cook or 2 walk to the grow area to only haul 10x potatoes.  I agree it is perhaps not a frequent problem, but it has hampered my post catastrophe recovery, especially with so many pawns unable to haul.

[DariusWolfe]

Toggles for fueled items. It would be nice to have emergency stoves, generatos, etc without needing them to be constantly fueled.

Perhaps less cheap:  Toggles for growing areas.  I would like to have my non-plant cutting growers still harvest, but not waste time planting an area that will freeze before the crop can grow.  Maybe just seperating grow from harvest, and not allowing growers to be unable to "cut plants"   It seems odd that growers will harvest on time, or I can flag to harvest, but flagged won't be worked by the grower when manually directed.

Restricted areas.  Opposite of permitted, for when you will always/almost always want your people to stay out of an area.  Trap areas for example.

Generators can already be turned off. Not sure about stoves, but I believe they only use fuel when they're in use.

Growing areas can also be set to disallow sowing (unless this is CCL?)

I would like Restricted Areas too, but the functionality is already in the game, via the Invert Area feature. Set an Area, then invert it, so that it includes everything EXCEPT that area. I use this for my animals, setting an animal area to include everywhere except the food storage area, and I've used it once for a trap area; It was a bit of a pain in the ass, as my colonists wouldn't touch the bodies in that area until I turned it off. It's less intuitive than an actual Restricted area, and it makes the mini-map on CCL look kind of weird, but it works precisely like you're asking for.

[Piso]

Perhaps we could have trade caravans, to trade with friendlies.

[MikeLemmer]

Unsure if this was previously recommended, but:

Cooks hauling their complete allowed quantity of food when hauling from a non-stockpile.  I am not sure if this would be easy, but a great deal of time can start to be eaten up by a cook walking to a grow area, grabbing 10x potatoes of the 50x around them, walking back to the stove, and repeating.

Toggles for fueled items. It would be nice to have emergency stoves, generatos, etc without needing them to be constantly fueled.

Perhaps less cheap:  Toggles for growing areas.  I would like to have my non-plant cutting growers still harvest, but not waste time planting an area that will freeze before the crop can grow.  Maybe just seperating grow from harvest, and not allowing growers to be unable to "cut plants"   It seems odd that growers will harvest on time, or I can flag to harvest, but flagged won't be worked by the grower when manually directed.

Restricted areas.  Opposite of permitted, for when you will always/almost always want your people to stay out of an area.  Trap areas for example.

I would suggest changing it so that for quickly-produced items like meals, the cook/crafter/etc grabs enough mats for, say, 5 meals & then crafts all 5 meals in a row.

[MikeLemmer]

When you claim completed buildings, don't automatically turn it into a roofed zone. I had a collapsing roof cut off my deconstructer's nose because he automatically put a roof over a 2x1 building before deconstructing it.

[InertFurry]

Perhaps occasionally make bad mood modifiers take a little while to hit.  Like a "My Friend Died" that sits at 0 for a day until it actually hits, perhaps with different behavior past that. 

Also mood modifiers with linear or near-linear decay.  It's weird when someone just gets over something and is now, a year later, completely not bothered by something that just yesterday was causing him great mental distress.

Prosthetics for missing hands/feet/ears/arms beyond full bionics.  There are Victorian Era prosthetics and even a hook hand/arm is better than no hand.  Not sure how cheap (adding limb parts/joints is), but also changing arm from an at-the-shoulder and leg at-the-hip to a jointed system with a lower and upper leg that can each take damage or be lost.  It's strange for someone to get their whole arm shot off consistently by rifles.
Also, if we're looking at A15, a proper painkiller that's not a serious narcotic.

Some form of self-treatment option.   One shouldn't need another person to bandage their arm.

[MikeLemmer]

The only low-tech prosthetic I really want ATM is a pirate hook to replace a severed hand.