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It's not compulsory to use artificial psi-link implants, so what is the problem here?  You could ask for the ability to remove psi-links from the brain through surgery, is that a thing already?

Unfortunately, the game doesn't differentiate between artificial psylinks and those gained through anima tree worship at all once a pawn is augmented with them.

As the title says, the link between psycasting and transhumanism has always slightly annoyed me, since having a technology-sceptic tribe of anima tree worshippers that had to defend itself asymmetrically against more advanced societies wasn't really a combination that could be pulled off without taking increasingly severe permanent mood hits.

While I understand the current state of things from a purely in-universe mechanical perspective - they ARE artificial implants, even if they perhaps just restructure the brain and dissolve afterward - I was hoping for that to change with the release of Ideology, but found out just now that this is still not the case. Can Tynan make an exception here? The justification could be that maybe body purists aren't as bothered by it because it doesn't stay in the body and leaves no visible changes?

EDIT: Perhaps body purists could allow psylinks (and only psylinks) to be used by religious figures without causing strife if the ideology also contains something like tree or nature worship?

Like everyone else, I've been playing around with the ideology builder, and one idea I keep gravitating towards is the wish that all Animal Personhood would do was give animals the same status as humans, with only other human-related memes deciding what that would mean specifically. So, for example, if an ideology had both Animal Personhood and Cannibalism, you would still be able to eat animals, because they are people and you eat those, too. Though you might have to limit yourself to wild animals, if butchering your own colonists wasn't allowed. I'm sure there are quite a few things one could combine this trait with. I'd like to see the already robust combination system become even more flexible in general, and this seems like a good start.

I don't want to put this in the bug subforum until I'm really, really certain that it's actually happening, but can someone confirm or disprove my suspicion that the reason for my tribal characters' recurring chronological/biological age disparity - I keep fixing it in the save file, but the values eventually drift apart again - is that they stop aging while travelling on the world map or away on quest duty? The one character I always leave to hold down the literal fort suspiciously never had this problem, ever.

Aww, that's a real shame... Although couldn't you dance around the real-star-distance problem by having the origin of a character just be the planet name and a distance to the Rimworld, without any more granular resolution? Since no extrasolar planets have official names yet (and won't for quite some time) and there are billions of stars in the galaxy, any one '58 light years away' planet from your Rimworld could be... anywhere, basically, without running the risk of running counter to current astronomical knowledge.

Anyway, would this kind of thing be within the scope of modding, or are there hardcoded barriers to that approach?

They're all from different places. Many are from the rimworld itself, since you recruited them there.

Plus, given that it takes decades to travel between stars and many of them were in cryptosleep for centuries, there really is no "home" to go back to. Even if one did go back to his home, many years would've passed.

This is something that I wish the game would display or recognize on some level simply for reasons of immersion, since it already respects chronological age versus biological age. Have an 'Origin World' tab in addition to the two 'Origin story' ones. I actually made a thread on that subject a very long time ago, but like so many other suggestions, it just fell off the first page unnoticed.

Since Rimworld is nearing 1.0 and development will presumably taper off at that point, I thought I'd bump my old topic about colonist ages again. I don't know if Tynan is still reading this particular subforum at all, but it cannot hurt to try!

That is actually possible already, as of Alpha 14 at least. My last colony was situated on exactly such a coastal mountainous region.

It's just extremely rare for the game to generate that specific constellation.

After reading through my previous post again two days later, I thought I'd clarify that 'generating a bunch of planets' refers to only creating a name, a type, and a distance from the Rimworld for each of them. Not an actual planetary map! That seemed more clearly spelled out in my head than it ended up being in the final suggestion.

This suggestion was born out of my mild but constant annoyance over having to edit almost every new arrival's chronological age in the game files to better match their backstory. I'd often get people from escape pods with Glitterworld backgrounds that were only a few years older than their biological age - Not really likely in the Rimworld universe due to the stated definite unavailability of FTL travel. Even if we took into account that - in spite of the game's name - a colonizable planet might not actually have to meet the strict lore-definition of 'Rimworld' (i.e. out in the distant galactic rim), but could simply be an uninteresting place close to a much more attractive Glitterworld, that still wouldn't explain professions like the 'Explorer' (who should always have clocked up at least a few decades in cryosleep) potentially only being as old as their biological age.

So here is my suggestion: Make the game internally generate a bunch of planets during worldgen*, and have colonists who come from space mostly originate from those. There could always be a low chance of people being from 'places unknown' (which would generate them with a random age like now, but weighted towards being very old). Everyone else is aged by the distance to their homeworld (plus whatever is appropriate for certain personal backgrounds). This way you would automatically have people from the same family be generated with matching ages during setup, or people who come from the same Glitterworld, et cetera. The name of someone's homeworld could be displayed on their character screen for flavour.

I hope this suggestion is both interesting and manageable in terms of workload for you. It's actually already been scaled down from its original concept, which would have seen me posting cheerfully about a local star chart with homeworld positions coloured by type - Like the current planetary map and its settlements. I figured my idea would have a better chance of survival if I pared it down to its essentials.

*Like it currently does with settlements. So you'd have maybe one Glitterworld, usually quite far away, several Urbworlds and Midworlds within a more generous distribution range, and a loooot of Rimworlds everywhere. Note that there is no need to generate a full galaxy for this kind of thing - Only the 'neighborhood' is interesting when it comes to barely-spaceborne Rimworlds, and that distant Glitterworld might simply just be the closest one there is!