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Robinson Crusoes building objects requiring specialized, 20th-century-and-beyond manufacturing bothered me, though I recognized it was required for gameplay purposes.

A solution that occurred to me was this: Components as resources.

Want to build a turret? Each one will require a "turret controller" (the computer, sensors, and servos as a kit), as well as metal and the desired weapon; the weapon and controller available from your friendly neighborhood Combat Supplier ship.

Solar array? You'll need the panels/cells from an industrial supplier. However, your standard escape pod's SHTF bag might just happen to include one when you make an emergency planetfall.

Nuclear reactor? You'll need a core for that.

Geothermal generator? Turbine/dynamo kit.

Battery? Nutrient paste dispenser? Ditto. The NP is another you might drop with a component for.

This gets around the problem of suspension of disbelief, while simultaneously making these more complex structures more valuable (i.e. you'll have more invested in protecting them). To buy a little leeway though, there could be a % chance of the essential component surviving, should the structure you used it to build suffer an unfortunate mishap.

Did I miss something? Or is this thread a false alarm?

Nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs are two distinctly different things. The former do not explode any more than the latter would be useful for powering a light-bulb.

It's not so much levitating as it is a lean-to roof hammered into the rock wall.

No, I am referring to a structure built completely separate from the rock wall.

As a note of curious game behavior, if you build a roofed structure outside, within 7 tiles of a cliff, and then sell its walls, it leaves you with levitating roof tiles.

I was looking to enable those character backstories which are not available during character generation; Assassin, Courtesan, etc. Has anyone found where these and their traits are listed in the .dll?

A lot of ideas being bandied about here aren't sounding very cheap, and get into a lot of very narrow and complicated mechanics. One of the great strengths of gameplay like that Rimworld provides is rooted in simple mechanics that interact and/or randomly come into play simultaneously to create complex situations.

Raiders, as they are now, have some issues - they show up, shamble into our gunfire like Chinese conscripts at Chosin, and appear to have no goal but to smash furniture and set walls on fire. I have a few ideas that may be sufficiently "cheap" to implement, and which could broaden the potential situations and options players face:

1 - Split hostiles into two potential factions, "raiders", who attack for material gain, and "cultists", a faction roughly akin to the Thugees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee). The Cultists would also be seeking loot, however, their ideology would also cast their acts of murder as benevolent - they're sending their victims off to paradise, or providing human sacrifices that will prevent some great catastrophe.

Either way, as far as game mechanics go, the Cultists would behave in a manner more like the present-game raiders; they come to destroy, will destroy everything and kill everyone if allowed, and will trudge onward into gunfire with little concern for their mortal existence. Maybe later on down the road a Trojan horse/colony infiltrator mechanic can come into play as well.

2- Alter the standard Raiders' behavior in two (relatively) simple ways. First, make them less suicidally aggressive. Give greater weight to their AI seeking cover, and lower their threshold for punishment before beating a retreat.

Secondly, change their goal. Their aren't after your doors, walls, and furniture anymore - they're after your stockpile. If they reach a stockpile, they will begin taking resources (perhaps only cash, for simplicity's sake) out of it, and will continue to do so until either driven off by losses or they extract a certain amount of loot, which would be based upon the size of the raiding party. Attacking them while they do this will kick them back into attack mode until all -drafted- colonists are out of sight again. At that point, they'll return to looting the stockpile.

And here's where strategic options come in: the maximum amount of resources that can be taken from any one stockpile, would be the total colony resources divided by the total number of stockpiles. So, for example, if you kept one stockpile outside the front gate, and one inside your base, the most the Raiders could loot from the outside one would be one half of your total wealth. If you keep one outside and three inside, the most they could get from outside would be one fourth your total wealth.

And if that's enough to sate the raiding party's numbers, off they'll go, and no one has to get hurt. But if it isn't, they'll start moving deeper, seeking out what else you might have hidden away somewhere - the next stockpile. And if that's still not enough, the next after that.

This gives the player the option of bribing non-Cultist raiders, avoiding at least some combat, cutting down the risk of losing colonists, and cutting down on combat-related hits to happiness.* That is, if the colony's initial offering is sufficient, or if it isn't, that you're willing to let them come in and help themselves to more.

And of course, if you're too low on resources, or the raiding group is too large, well, a dairy cow with dried-up teats isn't much worth keeping around, is it? If they take everything you have and still haven't hit the group's pay-off limit, they go hostile again, and show you what they do to cheapskates who fail to give them everything they want.

Similar to the slave/prisoner prices, the pay-off limit could simply be based off of the experience and health of the raiding group's members, albeit with a formula tweaked to put greater weight on backgrounds/skills with combat bonuses - a bunch of healthy assassins and marines will expect more, a gaggle of wounded oafs, far less.

Of course, players will still have the more challenging option of building high fences, keeping what's theirs, and just shooting the thieving bastards on principle.

*- It occurs to me there could still be a negative morale effect attached to allowing raiders to take resources, albeit one still less than and "witnessed death", "witnessed corpse" - much like the way hunger/ate raw food or paste works now. On the flip side, a positive bonus could be attached to successfully driving raiders or cultists off, perhaps one that is multiplied by their numbers, and then adjusted according to the number of colonists you have. A big colony driving of a few raiders or cultists would only get a small bonus, a small colony driving off a big group would get a big bonus. For those who were manning the line during the fight, this could balance out or even exceed the morale toll of witnessing deaths and dead bodies. A hard fighting colony is a happy colony, as long as they do win in the end.  A colony that engages in paying off the barbarians had better offset the undermining psychological effects with a lot nice carpeting and entertaining distractions.

And if they get hit by a Raider group that wants more than they have, or by a large group of Cultists who will kill them all regardless, well, it's just a shame their soldiers didn't get more combat experience. Those extra levels in fighting skills might have been handy.

It's a system with complex options, but as you can see, the rules and mechanics behind it aren't complex themselves. Most of it comes down to a few simple math formulas, a splitting of hostiles into two groups, and a tweaking of what Raider AI pursues.

Thanks all for the replies. The problem appears to have been JustDecompile itself. Downloaded the trial version of .Net Reflector and was able to find the variables without difficulty. Only problem I've noticed there is that the variable for the number of shots per burst can't be changed; the variable is there, the code up top shows its value, but the Reflexil box just shows the value field as blank and won't save any changes to it.

I like Randy as is, but do see room for a more aggressive variant. I've been thinking it would also be nice for a "Bipolar Betty", as it were - a story teller that would consist of unpredictably long periods of calm, and sudden, alternating mood swings of generosity or destruction. If your luck suddenly turns to hell in a hand basket, you would know the chance to recover will follow - if you survived. But also if a period of calm was broken by a lot of sudden good luck, you would know the worst is likely to soon follow.

Have you enabled Reflexil

Yes.

If yes scroll till you find what you want to change

Cannot do. What I want to change isn't showing anywhere. I can find power plants and solar panels, I can find the skills and their rates of experience gain, and so on, but the guns simply do not appear anywhere.

I'm using JustDecompile with the Reflexil plugin, could this be the reason why I'm not seeing what you're pointing me towards? Should "Movenext(): Boolean" be in the code of the .dll, or is that a control in Reflector?

The closest thing I can find to what you describe is this little bit, under "ThingDefsHardcoded":

public static IEnumerable<ThingDefinition> Definitions_Guns()
    {
        ThingDefsHardcoded.<Definitions_Guns>c__Iterator29 variable = null;
        return variable;
    }

But that's all I get; no list, no variables. Searching for the weapons by their names (Gun_Uzi, for example), gets no results either.

I.e. range, damage, accuracy, etc. Is there a way to do this at the present time? I've seen how you can change which weapon is used by turrets in Plasmatic's thread, but while poking around with a .dll editor, I couldn't find any of the weapons themselves in Assembly-CSharp.dll.