Messages

Well, messages are only a temporary thing and it's also much more important to be able to read them (which you can't if they're behind the colonist bar) than for you to lose access for a few seconds to your bar... You should probably think of another solution to this issue because hiding the messages behind the bar (thus making them unreadable) is not ok.

Definitely low priority - but considering it should be simple enough to program, it really feels like it's "missing" from the game right now. I mean, I just expected to have it out-of-the-box.

Once a basic version of this is done it would be great to iterate upon as well - maybe have the ability to hide some colonists if you feel like you need to, or make their icons smaller in order to occupy less space on the screen, etc. Anyway, that's for future talk and community feedback.

As the title says, it would be great if we could simply drag-and-drop with the mouse to decide for ourselves what order we want colonists to be in. Everyone would find different uses for it - not only in general but on a moment-to-moment basis too depending on what's happening in the game. Doesn't sound like a very hard thing to implement either?

EDIT apparently there's a mod that allows that. Even then would be a great addition to the base game http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=729908976

Hi Calahan, I haven't played RW in a while since I usually only do it when I have the time and feel like doing a single binge afternoon but I'll definitely come up with a vanilla save for you when I see this next. I have no mods installed so I'm a 100% sure this is a vanilla issue (it also didn't seem to appear before A17).

I fully understand your concerns, as I'm a game developer myself but this is definitely a bug. My colonists take their food from the freezer which is a couple buildings away from my kitchen (where the table and stove are). My only building in-between is quite small (maybe 5x5 squares) and the freezer and kitchen rooms themselves are pretty small too (normal, I guess), with distances short in-between them all.

The reason why this keeps popping up in the forum here, on Steam, etc is because, most likely than not the distance that has been set to lookup for a table is way too small (my guess on why this is happening anyway, if not a technical bug somewhere else that affects the lookup logic). I'd easily expect the lookup distance to be 3 times larger than what I'm currently seeing not work, as to encompass my small base.

I know my words don't mean much by themselves but I'll definitely upload a save here next time I have the chance to. All of the buildings I mentioned fit into a single screen with a very zoomed in camera and the number of people complaining about this should make clear that something is amiss and it's not like people are expecting their colonists to walk half way across the map to eat their dinner lol

[manual]

No, my friend, you have completely missed my point. I am not talking of changing the game AI, I am talking about how the behavior of right clicking and selecting "prioritize this work" should function. it's obvious that when you click and prioritize building a power grid that you don't want a single square to be built so this is why I propose this change.

Peril of starvation or lack of sleep needs to be handled just like it's already done when you manually prioritize working on a workbench: currently, the units are smart enough to stop the manual priority to eat or sleep, which is fine and should be continue to be the same even for repetitive actions.

As for prioritized actions taking too long, that's just the responsibility of the player to manage, after all it's a management game. Right now you can manually prioritize hunting, which can also take a long time (especially for a slow colonist and if the animal is far away) - it's your job to cancel it if you need too. The same way, I propose that if you manually prioritize hauling or building a certain type of item (like the aforementioned power grid) then the colonist should keep doing that action until you tell it to stop - or it gets hungry, tired, etc as discussed.

EDIT changed thread title to make my point clearer (manual prioritizing).

This is something me and others on the Steam forums have noticed. For me it seemed to become a bit better (not fixed though) when I deconstructed my big table and placed two smaller tables there instead. I also changed chair positioning but they were facing the right direction both before and after anyways.

Obviously this is bad beucase it gives you a penalty for happiness, not to consider breaking the immersion since they can't be bothered to go 20 squares away to eat their meals.

Steam has been talking about it for a while now:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/143388408895629990/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/144512526678951787/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/154644349169724298/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/154644349171215536/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/135509314046799776/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/135509823660645479/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/144513670981002484/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/135509823670586007/

I'll just leave a link to this very short Steam forums thread that explains it all but I'll quote my post here too:

It can be a bit tedious when you need to haul a ton of rice to your freezer but it's not like you're super busy doing other stuff when in normal speed, the game is pretty chill that way.

What I do think would fix this though is for, when you prioritize an action, your colonist to repeat that action for as long as relevant. For example: prioritize hauling rice = do that until all rice is picked. Prioritize building power grid = do that until the whole path is set.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1369506834138087188/

Basically, I think it would be easy to fix it so that when you prioritize some fast, repetitive action (hauling, cleaning, building floors, building a power grid, etc) that the unit remembers that priority after the action is done and just keeps doing it instead of you having to re-prioritize manually every time until the whole workset is finished it.

Sounds pretty easy to code too, something like: when action is done if action can still be done in a short distance radius, do not cancel current priority (resulting in a loop until the task is actually over). There would probably have to be edge cases for sleep and food so a unit doesn't work itself to death or utter misery but I think this is already handled when you prioritize long-term actions like crafting and making art.

Also, this is my first post here. Is this the official feature request/bug report forums for RimWorld? Do the devs also look on Steam and such? Is there a bug tracker? Can we please have this informations added to stickies on the Steam forum and subreddit too so it's clear where to post feature requests and bugs instead of there being 3 different communities where no one knows which one is actually taken officially by Ludeon, please? I've read the sticky guideline for this subforum and it doesn't seem to say anything about this, even though it's huge. Thanks