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That's a beautiful mod, and I'm a subscriber for sure. Wish I knew the decision behind the mechanics, though.

[incapable]

Why is it pawns are incapable of doing specific tasks, instead of just taking mood & learning hits with tasks they don't like?

Mechanically I get it, but it never made sense to me perceptually as realistic behaviour. If I forced John to carry rocks, best believe he'll carry rocks, nobody's incapable of doing much, disabilities and phobias not withstanding. But he'll be miserable the whole time, and likely not learn anything because he hates it. Doesn't that system make more sense? Mood hits for doing things they don't like, and apathy towards learning them? Why was the decision to make people incapable of things the go-to?

A few things I noticed that are still off and frustrating with rivers and bridges:

• Pathing still defaults to the shortest route to a given spot, more or less, and in the case of rivers that means right through them even if there's a bridge, assuming the bridge is a marginally longer route. This means if there's a river right smack through the middle of the map, and possibly buildings and worksites, colonist will almost perpetually carry a 'Soaking wet (-3)' mood penalty. I don't know about the folks on the Rim, but I'd sooner take a slightly longer route if it meant I didn't need to march through a river. I think mood penalties should be prioritized over travel speed for the most part.
• Bridges are constructed like most projects, prioritizing speed of each square built, which often means (again) colonists will march out into the middle of the river and start building there (like so), giving themselves another 'Soaking wet (-3)' mood penalty, and more perpetually as long as the bridge is worked on while they run for more resources. Logic dictates a less frustrating job would be prioritized over a faster one, so one would think bridges would begin at the show and move across. As with pathing, I think mood penalties should be prioritized over work speed for the most part.

Does a content lock include sound effects, music and iconification/UI assets? Always felt the buttons, menus, etc. were a little alpha-looking still.

Either way, I've sunk more time into this game than most games I buy, and it's made it to my top 10 all-timers without so much as a shrug. Genuinely happy with it, and wouldn't hesitate on any future DLCs, etc.

I think the mood hit makes perfect sense, but I think having a bonded animal should come with more of a mood buff while they're around. I think right now they're undervalued in mood impact.

When success or failure happens due to the actions of a player and not just randomness, then it's a story.  Because the player understands why it happened. They can trace back their decisions and see what they did right or wrong.  Feeling like the results are due to your choices and not randomness is satisfying, even when the outcome is bad.

This is entirely fair and you're right, RNG can produce bad stories by killing off key actors without a climax, but RW doesn't really have a Luke or a Vader. Every pawn is unique but replaceable, and their value (and ultimate role in the story) is random by design. They may turn out to be an unlikely hero, or they may not, the story isn't linear like Star Wars is.

And from a tech progression perspective, RW always builds easier and safer. You start with sticks and scraps, where any real mistake could kill everyone, and build towards power armour and laser rifles where, outside of the occasional bad raid, you don't sweat much anymore. The reason a degree of RNG is important is eventually you hit that progressive 'safe spot' with what buffs and protections you acquired. The raids scale, but weather doesn't become worse, moods only improve outside of event spikes, food needs scale linearly, body parts and skills are improved not worsened, so eventually you hit a mid-to-late game lull where, without a little RNG, you'd grow bored. You 'beat the odds' and now just sort of exist.

This should go without saying, but there's always a degree of confirmation bias that comes with issue-reporting forums like this. Small voices will sound louder, small issues larger. It's always the end of the world when you're freshly mad. The vast majority of your players aren't going to complain here, and arguably if they're not complaining anywhere, they haven't much to complain about.

I personally like getting dealt a bad hand sometimes. I find the 'flawless game through flawless play' mindset towards games like this dull, as RW's supposed to simulate life to a tiny degree. There should be dangerous accidents, and lopsided odds against the wilds. That's what makes this game fun to me. Ironman or bust.

If there was no RNG, and I knew I could min/max my way to a flawless colony, then most of the fun in the game would be lost.

Eh, this whole new prisoner system is kind of ridiculous. 

Pre-1.0:  no resistance, extremely low expectations. 
current: takes a week before you can even start recruiting, and they're whiny bi%^&es

Main issue is that in the beginning of the game, you're forced to spend time you don't have building a snazzy prison because even the low expectations is going to hurt, and towards the end of the game, prisoners usually start out with about -50 from mind shattering pain, being imprisoned, seeing a bunch of their friends die etc.  So it's just a recipe for unstoppable berserk every prisoner.  If this hits live, chopping prisoner legs off while be standard practice, not a joke.

There's ways of going around that, but I just think a total reversion of the expectations part is best imo.  You're already forced to making a somewhat decent prison just to make the resistance process go quicker, which already feels punishing.

I like the extra character details with prisoners, but I mean at very least all prisoners should start with 'Extremely low expectations' buffs. I don't think anyone gets dumped in a cell and thinks eating without a table is unconscionable.

As for the point, handling flawed useless people is part of the game. RimWorld is not intended to be an RTS. If you want a game where every unit is a fungible optimized robot, there are some great RTSs I can recommend. However, if you want a game with dynamic characters and generated story, that means some of the characters will be more useful than others, and some will be worse than useless, just as people are in stories. It means many of the problems you face will come from inside your group, not outside, just as in stories. In truth I'd like to turn RW more in this direction, because as we've discussed here, external attacks are still far too big a part of the game. There average pawn in this game really should be worse than they are, and many more should be entirely useless (and I mean actually useless, not, "he can only research and art" useless).

I just wanted to say, thanks for this approach to your game. A lot of us fell in love with the game, not because it's a needs-juggling RTS, but because of the challenges that come with making a bunch of flawed people work together towards something. That there's enjoyment is chaos and failure.

A good chunk of the top-downloaded mods out there are glorified min/max toolkits, used to maximize pawn strengths, and minimize their flaws. Clearly many enjoy playing this way, with grinding towards a fleet of perfected robots, but a lot of us enjoy the flawed internal turmoil that comes with having to host a bunch of lazy assholes.

I'd love to see the game take less of a combat-focused direction, but so far there are plenty of settings to satisfy more internal-focused stories so I can't complain, and I thank you for that.

Pawns don't take off their coats when they come inside, either. 

Maybe they should. At least with heavy clothing. Automatic or manual dressers are possible. There are mods for it. And people wouldn't have to use them if they think it's a waste of time.

Yeah, an automatic dress down/suit up system to support combat vs. casual vs. labour routines in a given pawn's life would be a better system than just saying eff it, armour doesn't impact stats anymore. Sure, it solves the gripe of having to micro-manage armour pre/post combat, but that's part of the sacrifice you make with wanting the best combat armour and for your pawns to work well, too.

.......flak jacket definitely needs a buff because right now, a bearskin duster is decisively the better piece of clothing to go for. Hope this is useful, and if there's any more of this sort of testing you particularly to see the results for!

This seems to be working fine. The thing is, bearskin is a lot harder to come by than flak jacket ingredients. Bearskin is a specifically "elite" leather type, so it's supposed to give great stats. IIRC it also does better in cold than flak.

You can mass produce flak because you can mass produce steel, cloth, and components. But it's hard to mass produce bearskin because farming bears is difficult and slow.

But scarcity shouldn't deem something's value. Chinchilla pelts are arguably very rare compared to steel, but that doesn't mean they should produce bullet-stopping armour because of that rarity.

The whole idea behind flak jackets being what they are, and requiring steel, is that steel could've been used in other necessary production. It could've been used to fix the defensive walls, or build a gun for the new recruit, or build a much needed generator. You make production compromises with flak jackets, power armour, high-end weapons knowing you're taking a gamble with your steel.

Bearskin and Chinchilla skin are rare, but that doesn't mean they're flatly valuable. Plus, from a player-clarity perspective, how many players do you think are going to assume 'bearskin jacket' is better in combat than 'flak jacket'? It's confusing.

If I can be blunt, I feel like this decision, and armours not hindering stats, and some quality weapons not impacting damage, is removing a lot of the sacrifice and compromise you need to make when taking production routes in the game. It's feeling a lot clearer scaled, and less give-and-take, sacrifice-and-gain when deciding what to wear, what to build, and what to work towards.

Can I request a tool to allow me to mine an entire node? Or make steel easier to see? As is, I'm having to dev-mode it to mine full nodes and, frankly, steel is way harder to see than it needs to be (especially around granite and sandstone at least for me. I have the same problem with Uranium and Marble.)

I don't much care for mods, but there's one mod I refuse to not play with and it's that Mine-it-All thing that lets you just select a whole vein and be done with it.

I'd love to see this simple tool get added to the base game. It's such a huge quality-of-life timesaver.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarshipTheory/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/574760/Starship_Theory/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgx7xkCInEU

On the subject of season names i'm a very if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of person, and while it probably makes a lot of sense to have the new naming system, for the average person like me it just obfuscates things, but in the end it's whatever.

But it was broke! It didn't make sense anywhere except in the range of 20 degrees north through 80 degrees north, on planets with default temperature and rainfall settings.

Anyway maybe I'll just change them to standard month names and skip months.

Maybe a lot of us were missing it, but could you explain what was broke about the previous naming system?

Also, could we not just skip the names entirely (is this even Earth?) and refer to seasons by what to expect weather-wise? 'Hot Season', 'Cold Season', etc? It's less engaging but it solves the confusion of hemispheres and seasons not lining up.

Infections seem really easy to acquire now.