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Ugh.. no.. I didn't think about it until it was too late.  Ironically, the recent change to make mortars more damage resistant allowed for Remy to make a heroic last ditch effort to put the fire out before the massive explosion took out about two city blocks of my base.  All I could think was how I should have made a slo-mo video of Remy rushing into the chemical fire and sacrificing himself for the good of the colony with "I will always love you" from The Bodyguard playing in the background.   

[Starting the ship]

I just finished my 2nd complete play-through of 1.0

Started with build 1946 and finished on build 1954
Storyteller: Cassandra classic
Difficulty: Medium
Map: Large hills with year-round summer
Scenario: Crash landed modified to start with 4 colonists
Total play time: 45 hours 59 min
Final population: 23 colonists
Colonists killed: 3 + 1 severe brain scar
Left on spaceship on day 358
Final colony wealth: 822,248

A few thoughts:

Starting the ship
-This being my 2nd time through 1.0, the significance of the 15 day onslaught after starting the ship was much more influential in everything I did, pretty much from day 1.  IMO, having to prepare for and (hopefully) overcome this rather difficult final obstacle pretty much completely solves the issue of feeling like the game never reaches a satisfying conclusion.
I love that surviving the 15 day period is legitimately difficult and the possibility of losing everything in one last epic struggle is real.  In all my past play-throughs I just played until I got bored or wanted to try a new base design or try some new mods.  Now the game has much more of a center of gravity.  If you want to survive and get off the rimworld, you need to build a base that is defensively sound and able to ward off a number of different kinds of threats.  Likely all at once and with half your colonists in the hospital at some point.  Both 1.0 play-throughs had me literally watching the countdown clock until the ship was ready and launching immediately as soon as it was.  It felt satisfying like I had earned it and like (for lack of a better term) I "won" the game.  This is such an elegant solution to what I saw as a major problem before.  Awesome!

Deep drilling
-I had said before that the changes to deep-drill mechanics made things feel like more of a grind.  Since then, deep drills were made re-installable and it seemed like the "to deep" infestations were less (maybe much less) frequent.  I think there were some other tweaks too.  This time through, it felt better.  Still slower than the good 'ol days but reasonable.  This play-through was about 3.5 hours shorter than my previous but I could have wrapped it up sooner if I had really wanted to and the fact that I didn't is a good sign.

Sappers
-These new sapper raids are hard to deal with.  Personally, I love it.  I think this game is at its best when I find myself pausing and staring at the screen for 5 min straight and thinking "how the hell am I going to deal with this?"  These new sappers have me doing that a lot.  I also like how raiders are showing up with different sets of weapons and (I think) a lot more triple rocket/doomsday launchers which meshes well with the longer range of the autocannon turrets.  All-in-all the defensive strategy aspect of the game has improved significantly IMO. 

Sandbags
-I feel like it takes too long to repair sandbags.  Again, just one man's opinion but they take so much longer to repair than to build them.  Just feels bleh.

Crafting quality
-Definitely liking the reduced number of quality levels and the rarity of masterwork and legendary items.  In this play-through I came across a legendary charge lance and legendary power armor.  That comes to 2 legendary items in around 800 in-game days over my two 1.0 play-throughs.  I think that feels about right but I wish they would have been more impressive, given their rarity.  Especially the charge lance.  I feel like for legendary weapons, things like higher damage per shot and shorter warmup/cooldown time could be on the table.  In the end, the legendary charge lance was only marginally better than the excellent charge lance.

Melee
-In the past I very rarely used melee as a strategy at all unless I picked up a brawler who was good at something else that I needed.  This time through I had about 50/50 shooters and melee fighters, mostly to adapt to the frequent drop pods of mechanoids in the base.  Turns out melee fighters are extremely useful in a number of different scenarios... who knew? (probably everyone else).  I'll definitely be using them in the future.  Balance-wise, they felt good if not a little OP once they had power armor, plasteel longswords, and shield belts.  But maybe that's because I've never really used them in large numbers before.

Right on top of you mechanoid raids
-Still felt too frequent to me.  I think they were tweaked recently to have more non-mech raids late-game, but I still got a bunch.  I'd say close to 50% of all mid to late-game raids were of this type.  I'm really not a fan of this raid type because they're basically just an unavoidable resource drain.  No matter how well prepared you are, they're probably going to destroy a bunch of stuff and set you back at least a little (maybe a lot, depending on where they land).  It's not usually a huge deal but it just feels like random punishment for no reason.  The tornado of raid types. 

Quests
-This time through, I went on a number of caravan quests.  I had 3 or 4 with antigrain warheads as a reward which I took to help prepare for starting the ship.  In the end when I started the ship I had stockpiled 22 antigrain warheads.  Guess what?  I put them in the same stockroom as the chemfuel.  If you put the antigrain warheads in the same stockroom as the chemfuel, you're gonna have a bad time.  Juri and Remy sure did...   Anyway, I liked the new changes to caravaning, all of which have made it easier and more of a realistic option.  Still haven't encountered a tornado generator yet though.

1.0
-I know there are apparently a lot more tweaks and changes coming for 1.0, but I would just like to say that if it dropped as-is today, I'd be perfectly happy with it.  Imma build the watermill next time through.  and sniper turrets!?... awww sh*t.

Hey thanks Tynan.  I grew up on age of empires and diablo II and I would say this is my favorite game of all time.  Kudos! 

As far as the deep drills go, I would agree that they were probably OP before.  IMO the simplest remedy would be to have pawn mining speed and/or yield scale more aggressively with mining level.  This would keep the early balance similar to the current level which I thought was challenging but fun and eliminate the need for a large number of skilled miners mid-late game.  Other things I thought might help with the "grindey" aspect would be to just make the yield a little higher.  Another option might be to have more deep steel near the center of the map where people are most likely to build bases.  This would at least alleviate the hauling aspect and would bring the infestations in closer to established defenses. 

I liked the addition of the "too deep" infestations.  RNG is a factor here so it's hard to say exactly how frequently they are occurring but for me, having them be less frequent and more dangerous would have helped make them a little less annoying.   

[Difficulty:]

I just finished my first play-through of 1.0

Started with original 1.0 build and finished on build 1946
Storyteller: Cassandra classic
Difficulty: Medium
Map: Large hills with year-round summer.
Total play time: 49 hours 27 min
Final population: 17 colonists
Colonists killed: 6
Left on spaceship on day 447
Final colony wealth: 445,698

My thoughts on a few things:

Difficulty:
- I actually found the difficulty to be much harder than I anticipated.  I usually play on Randy extreme and my plan was to do a quick play-through on Cassandra medium just to get a feel for the 1.0 build.  Instead, my colony teetered on the brink of total failure for the first couple of years and I never really felt secure at any time during the 49 and 1/2 hours it took to launch Kjelt into space.  This was my first vanilla play-through in ages so I'm sure that's part of it but I also feel that the overall difficulty was more intense.  Some of the things I was dealing with early on have been revised in more recent builds such as nerfing the centipedes (thanks for that) and no longer downing food poisoning victims.  I read the post about how overall difficulty was lower but that cheese tactics would be less effective.  I'd like to think I don't use those kinds of strategies and I still feel the difficulty was harder. 

Deep drilling:
-The nerfing of the deep drills was the biggest change to the feel of the game IMO.  The lower yield coupled with the "too deep" infestations routinely destroying all my drills and the need for turret barrel change-outs made getting enough steel the definite rate limiting step of progressing in the game.  I wouldn't say that made the gameplay harder necessarily, but I would say that it made the game feel like more of a grind.  I combated this by picking up any pawn with passion for mining (roughly 8-10 for the majority of the game) and a team of 15-20 dogs for hauling.  Even then, I eventually found myself wishing the game would just be over soon.  I'm not pretending to know what the ideal length of a play-through should be, but this one felt long to me.

Too deep infestation:
-That's what she said?  But I digress... I didn't mind this addition for the most part but I did feel that it was too frequent.  I didn't keep track of every event but I found myself getting around 3-4 of these new infestation types per year.  I liked that they didn't seem to scale with wealth so they were manageable but the thing that made it more of a setback was loosing all my drills every time this happened.  Which was not infrequently.  I tried spreading my drills over several patches of steel which helped but meant more micro-management. Also, it would be awesome if the infestation critters showed up on the new wildlife tab.  The little guys kept getting away from me and I could only find them by waiting for someone to get bit.  I didn't care for the stone drilling once the main resource was depleted mainly because it made deconstructing the drills more of a pain.  I had to unforbid, then power off to keep a miner from trying to use it.  Then deconstruct.  Any error in this sequence led to giant piles of unneeded stones 10 min later.

Autocannon turret:
-Love it.  The buff given a couple builds ago was needed.  I think the cost has also been increased since then which is appropriate.  Having a 2nd turret type with a min range made defense planning more strategic.  I like the barrel change requirements.  One thing I noticed is that my colonists wouldn't do the barrel changes as early as I would have liked them to and this led to guns going down during raids.  Would be nice to be able to control this somehow without micro-managing.  Otherwise, I hope they stay as-is-ish.

Caravans:
- I think the value of the caravan request quests has bounced around in a few different builds and was most recently nerfed (could be wrong there).  In any case, even at the higher values I still didn't take any of these offers.  The risk of leaving my colony less well defended and possibly loosing valuable colonists early-mid game made the risk too great.  Later in the game, nothing was really tempting enough to get me to take even a small risk.  For me, the issue is that a lot the things that came up were not particularly useful (I'm thinking of a silver spear, luciferium, masterwork parka, etc) and the value wasn't high enough to justify going to get them for the purposes of selling them given the 50% loss when selling.  For me, they would need to be much higher to be tempting.  Overall, I thought the changes to caravaning were great.  Especially the "form caravan" screen.

Escaping on the ship
-I definitely like the idea of one last major hurdle to survive a million raids while waiting for the ship to start and I think it adds to the feeling of completion once it's over.  That said, I got 19 raids over those 15 days.  I did survive, but barely.  For medium difficulty I thought this might have been a little excessive.  But I guess that's the point.  And I did learn a thing or two to try next time.  Overall, I liked it.

Other random things:
-Having colonists rebuild before repairing was a solid add.  Having them re-arm deadfalls before other hauling tasks would be equally awesome.  Especially when getting raids every 5 min while starting the ship.

-Having the poison ship radius of 50 tiles made it pretty easy to ignore completely.  I had one land earlyish on and it sat there for 400 days until I left on the spaceship.  Legend has it, the poison ship is still there to this day.

- I had approx 15-20 Labradors and thought training decay was easily manageable with 1 trainer.

- I liked the friendlies aspect of the game.  Makes diplomacy more important and they actually made a difference in several raids.  Great changes to diplomacy in general.  Felt balanced.

- For some reason I only had 1 escape pod in 7.5 in-game years.  Not sure if this was some bad RNG luck or what but usually I get a lot more.  I also usually play on Randy so that might have something to do with it. 

- I got a ton of "right on top of you" mechanoid raids.  Like a lot.  In general, I like these raid types as it forces me to come up with new strategies for how to deal with combat inside of my base without blowing everything up.  But they seemed out of hand.  I think at one point I got 5 or 6 in a row which got old after a while.  So many dead dogs.

- Much better control of animals during battles.  Feels good.

- Did we nerf high-explosive mortars?  I don't remember seeing that but they seemed less effective.  At one point I shot literally 100 of them in 16 shell volleys into 2 simultaneous raids and they basically had no impact on the battle. 

-Charge lance is awesome.  Build time and materials seem balanced to me.  As do the new armor types.

-I liked the deflection chance for armor rather than the previous method.  It's intuitive and easier to factor into an overall defense strategy, IMO.

-Advanced component and build level requirements seem fair enough.  Glad to see the advanced component requirement for the multi-analyzer was removed though.  I feel like there are enough gates early on without having to wait 2 years for a trader to come along.

-As others have mentioned, adding chair to deep-drill doesn't improve comfort level. 

Overall, I thought my first go at 1.0 was great!  In the end, this game is so flexible that there's no way I can imagine not being able to play it in a way I find entertaining.   Thanks, Tynan!