Not sure, maybe already proposed, but i can't find one.
Game already has a "Temperature" value. Outdoor/indoor, heaters, freezers, fire ets.
What about pressure?
- Main 'outdoor' pressure
- Change with weather - higher values when sunny days, lower when rain
- Pressure in the building remains as it was at the end of construction.
- Open entrance or interior door allows you to match the pressure on both sides (this takes some time, in proportion to the size of the building, as well as the temperature)
- Compressors, air pumps. Same as heaters and freezers.
- Random events, when pressure doing high up or down, like temp already.
- All pawns and mobs on map has max|min pressure to feel fine or stay alive.
- Pawns may get ill (hypertension, hypotension, maybe more, i'm not a doctor) when not in comfort zone
(Make vacuum in danger room, wait some, and none of those bugs will hurt you. Or will. )
--- additional features ---
- indoor pressure may go some up or down with temperature (thermal expansion of gases)
- when creating game, when you can select average temperature and frequency of rain, you has additiona slider, for planet pressure. Add some hardcore?
- Show pressure as color map overlay, like Heat Map mod
- ...
Could prove interesting with indoor explosions having a pressure shockwave propagating through your halls.
As neat as this is, it seems like a needlessly complicated system for not a whole lot. I don't mean to be harsh, but don't we already have a system like this in the game. . . temperature? The rules are basically the same. Additionally, there's not a lot of climbing or spelunking in the game. Maybe if there were a race of Anglerfish-people who needed intense pressure, it would make sense, but we've got a single plane of existence (feel free to call it three if you want, roofs, walls, floors). There's not a whole lot of traveling around it.
It would mean quite a bit of coding and testing work to add pressure calculations for the whole system.
A while ago, I was involved into a mod that was creating pressurized gaz networks (a bit like power nets), with temp., volume and pressure calculations. But this is different yet.
Just to comment on the fact this is no small feat, particularly now, in the current state of the game.