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[loses]

Researching does need some work to become more interesting, and the ideas suggested here seem very logical.
Definite +1.

I do wish to add something that bothers me a lot regarding skill decay as it was brought up here - experience is
decaying even while doing matching activities! This is ridiculous, as it means a level 20 researcher operating
a long range scanner (uses intellectual) actually loses more exp than gained throughout the day! That's
absurd. Skill should never decay while doing a matching work, it is counter intuitive and makes no sense whatsoever.

I hope you won't mind, I've included some of your suggestions in a poll I've made.

After arriving at the conclusion that I simply have too many ideas on how better to convey information
to the player, and how to make complicated tasks easier without impacting the game's difficulty, I've
decided to put them all in a single thread. This is in part because the pinned "cheapest ideas" thread
contains over a hundred pages by now and in part because I felt like incorporating a poll would demonstrate
what the community feels is most essential to improve first.

I've also took the liberty of adding some ideas I've seen in other threads around. If you wish me to remove
your idea from this thread, don't hesitate to tell me and I will (consider however providing a link to your
original idea thread for me to include here instead).

I've tried as best as I could to separate the suggestions into categories and provide examples where I felt
was necessary.


Less wording, more icons:
Suggestions in this category are not meant to provide new information, but instead to make going through
the menus and screens easier and provide the ability to skim over repeated tasks.
Most of these will also make translating different parts of the game less demanding.
- Growing Zones: When picking what to sow, show an image of the plant beside its name.
- Workbenches: When picking a bill to add, show an image of the resulting item beside its name. Original Thread
- Workbenches: In bill details, provide an image of each requirement beside its name.
  e.g. "Make Component" bill: requires 12 steel [image.of.steel]
  Note that this may be limited to bills requiring specific constant materials such as marine armor, and not
  for statues or apparel.
- Animals bottom-bar menu: Show an image of the animal beside its name.
- Animal information window: Provide images of food types on this animal's diet. Also consider moving this
  information to the left hand side of the information screen, since it is mostly empty and this is likely
  the most important information when raising animals.
- Animals on the trade window: Show pregnancy or bond icons, as this information is either hard to access
  from within trading (pregnancy) or simply unavailable (bond).

Colors make a difference:
Suggestions in this category are not meant to provide new information, but instead to make the information
already available stand out where important.
- Trading window: When buying an item, make the directional arrow colored differently than when selling an item. Original Thread
- Connected objects: Lines drawn between dressers, tool cabinets, vitals monitors and such to their counterparts
  need to be more visible or have the connected objects highlighted considerably.
  The reason being sometimes the connected objects are too close making the line hardly visible, or the floor
  is white (such as sterile tiled hospitals).

Information is key:
Suggestions in this category are meant to provide more information, rather than amplify already existing data.
- Various is useless: Provide an option to show a list of contents when selecting "various" objects. Original Thread
- Power plans: Selecting any object to build should also state its power requirements (or provided amount)
  e.g. hovering over electric stove icon shows:
  "Electric Stove: 80 steel, 2 components, construction needed: 4, power needed: 350W, description" Original Thread
- What's my job again?: For some workbenches, it is unclear under what job they classify. Is mechanoid disassembly
  considered crafting or smithing? Is smelting considered crafting or hauling?
  If the workbench itself classifies under a specific job, it should state so.
- Stack Overflow: For each material, provide information on how much of it is stackable. e.g. steel would state 75
  while herbal medicine would state 25. This will be more tuned towards new players not knowing the stacks by heart.
- Tile Info: Push the hover-description (for the tile the mouse is hovering above) up when another window is open
  such as when an object is selected, so that we could still see what we're picking next.
  This would be useful for creating grow zones while knowing what type of soil we're adding to the zone, or when
  selecting a tool like the harvest tool and figuring out which wild healroots are ripe.
- How many are there?: The total number of colonists you currently have should be shown someplace, perhaps under
  "work" or "restrict". Similarly, the number of animals should be shown in the animals tab.
- Proximity of cabinets: Selecting end-tables, dressers, vitals monitors or tool cabinets should state needed
  proximity in their description.

Less clicks to get what you want:
Suggestions in this category are meant to provide means of getting the result you wanted, using less clicks.
- Related objects: Beds provide buttons to create end-tables and dressers. Provide this functionality to create
  chairs for workbenches, stations such as mineral scanners and recreation items such as telescopes and chess
  tables (and tables in general). This could easily be expanded further by providing such 'links' to power conduits
  from power generators, doors from walls, trade beacons from the comm console and fermenting barrel from the brewery.
- Select similar: When selecting an item, have a button that allows selecting all similar items on screen. This is
  needed because sometimes an animal is standing on top of an item such that you cannot double-click the item, or
  you wish to know how many cotton plants you have, or just wish to deconstruct all power lines inside your walls.

Blueprints are important too:
Suggestions in this category are meant to provide additional information and usability while planning your base.
- Blueprint overlap: When placing a trading beacon blueprint and hovering with another on top of that blueprint, the
  ranges overlap. Doing the same with any other blueprint will make the range disappear. The first behavior is the
  better of the two for all such 'range' operating objects.
- Mass forbid / unforbid blueprints: For when you're done designing your base after landing, but still haven't the
  resources to build it completely.
- Warnings for power generators: Placing blueprints for wind turbines or solar panels should bleep a log message at
  the top of the screen if blocked by anything (roof for solar panels, objects in path of turbines).
  Imagine noticing that unremovable mountain roof AFTER building your turbine...

Other:
- Material specific zones: Filter zones by item material, such as wood vs. steel spears or cloth and devilstrand apparel.
- Material specific bills: Expanding on the former, make bills for such items able to respect material specifications.
  e.g. I want to craft spears until I have 10 normal 75% steel spears.
- Rough stone corners: We need to be able to smooth corners, as these are currently impossible to reach, or not get
  a beauty penalty from them.
- Doctoring priority: Currently, after a doctor finishes tending to a patient he will most likely run to fetch a meal for
  them. This, in most cases, is a less desired use of the doc's precious time. Feeding patients can be made a lower
  priority than tending, such that it still is carried by doctors but after actually tending to the rest of the wounded.
  To clarify, it should be separated from the tending process so that it gets carried out not immediately after tending
  to a patient.

Isn't growing a tree a time consuming enough task? Are you that desperate to find something for your cooks to do?

Give players incentives to attack other bases to lower their threat level. Add additional quests to incentivize offensive attacks.

Based on human history, isn't attacking others basically causing more counter-violence?

For what it's worth, in B19 you can basically leave a door permanently open and it still will not affect room temperature (as if the door is closed).

Anyone who attempts selling some animals will run into these two issues fairly fast:

1. There is no way of knowing which animals are bonded. Not even through the information tabs.
A heart icon or something similar would be a quick and easy solution to this lack of information, instead of forcing
the player to exit the trading screen >> take a look at the animals tab >> go back to trading only to forget (again)
which of the 20 animals are bonded.

2. There is a minor price fluctuation when selling pregnant animals. While this serves as a sort of 'indication' that
you're about to sell a pregnant animal, it is easy to miss and mistakenly sell an animal for a lower price (if you don't
mind getting the babies) or completely facepalm yourself when you realize you did want the babies.
While pregnancy information is accessible during trade through the information tabs, it would be a lot better to
have a straight-up indication on the main screen.

Brilliant.  Recreation, skill buff and antidote to heatwave all at once.

but...answering a threat of heat in this game takes an investment...you need to spend wood (passive cooler) or cloth/leather (cooling clothes) or metal/electricity (air conditioner).

Considering a "fan yourself with your hands" or similar action was never put into the game to solve heatstroke, why would the devs suddenly now be OK with a no-cost heat solution?

Because this is not a complete solution, just an added thematic fun. If you want to survive heat waves, you're still
going to need AC (or passive coolers) in your barracks, kitchens and such. Unless of course you plan on letting your
colonists spend all day doing nothing but recreation activity with the balloons, and still eventually they will reach full
recreation bar and go to work.

I remember at one point pawns were actually building snowmen in winter... Could be nice expanding on that idea!

+1 for extra outdoors activities!

I feel that "installing Bionics" happens rarely enough, that I can manually define who does it.
My best doctor is always set to the highest piority as Doctor. So most of the time, he will get
it anyway.

Note that while bionics are quite rarely installed most games, there is not a single game
where I'm not replacing basic organs anywhere between 5-10 times. Having a bad doctor fail
at installing a heart and wasting it, just because I was not paying attention for a second who's
operating, is just a severe hit because most likely that means I'll have to capture a prisoner
again and suffer a colony-wide mood debuff again for harvesting his heart and killing him.
Then of course, the doc might fail again.

Could be nice seeing the more useful information at the top, certainly. Meanwhile, I believe
you can easily see who the animal is bonded with at the animal tab.

I remember asking for the same thing in the pinned 'cheap ideas' thread, it only makes sense to support it here as well.
Players NEED to know how much power a facility is going to use before building it, as well as how much power a generator
will provide once built.

I definitely support this. +1

I believe this trait was supposed to imitate exactly the French meaning.

You are certainly free to believe whatever you like, but the english meaning of the word gourmand means glutton, more specifically towards food. That means the person enjoys eating more food or eating more often, not necessarily "extremely good food". This is reflected by the way the game behaves, i.e. the pawn eats more often.
It's quite clear to me the intention behind it, that is why I'm offering an alternative way of displaying the characteristics of the behavior without the "game breaking" issue discussed by the OP by focusing on the "eats more" aspect rather than on the "more often" one.

Kind of missing the point here... Even if installing a peg leg requires level 3 in doctoring, I'll still
want my level 10 doctor to do it every time because of higher likelihood of success, this is the idea
behind my suggestion.
Think of your tailor benches, you want to make 10 parkas for your colonists but you don't want
normal or poor ones, you want excellent. So you set the task to be assigned to level 10 (for example)
or higher tailors. Why not use the same formula for surgeries where the impact of skill level is so
much more important?

It's a pretty bad trait, and it doesn't even make sense... you don't need to eat more because you have refined taste.

A much more sensible take on the trait would be double bonus or penaly from meals - gourmands would really hate eating nutrient paste, but they'll go through hell and back for you as long as there's a lavish meal waiting for them at the end of the day. Maybe even add -5 for eating simple meals, because it's too bland for them. This means a bigger demand on the player to have varied resources, but doesn't drain any extra resources by default.

As mentioned earlier, you are confusing gourmand and gourmet. Gourmand means glutton.