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No worries mate, I've got ya.
Taken straight from the FAQ on the main page,
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– It depends when you bought the game. If you bought the game on or before November 4, 2014 you will get a key when the game is released on Steam. If you bought the game after that, we will try to get you a Steam key but Valve's policies prevent us from being able to guarantee this."

Profile Created: November 05, 2014, 06:40:08 PM

The world hates me. 

Perhaps there could be an item (microwave / pasteurizer) that could 'cure' tainted meals? Grinding out meals to raise cooking while micro-managing throwing them away doesn't sound so great. 

Certain backgrounds always have certain names attached to them. IIRC pop-idols (very high art scores) will always be called Min, fighter controllers are always names Bashkire etc.

Neat Dune reference?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Teg


/tangent off

I think infection happens too fast/easy.  I guess you can micro dealing with it better but considering how often you fight and how many wardens/doctors you may have set up, you shouldn't need to micro it (making sure prisoners get medical attention) so much (IMO).  I feel like in my most recent game I had good doctors and wardens and a tight/efficient layout and I think my prisoners got infections every time I captured people.

Were you treating your prisoners in medical beds with medicine? Using no medicine guarantees poor quality treatment (what do you expect from rotting potato bandages from last years harvest?), and raiders typically get a lot of wounds before they fall. Have a look at their injuries sometime. I'm amazed at the damage some of them manage to take without dying.

Anyway, every poorly treated wound carries with it a chance of infection, so as the number of wounds increases, the odds that you'll get at least one infection becomes pretty high. To avoid that, give them medicine (herbal medicine is preferred as most prisoners are swine anyway) and if you can manage it, a couple hospital beds for 'em.

Disease =/= infection =/= combat wounds.


Quite the derail.

So I'm trying to figure out if diseases need rebalancing.

How would you say the disease balance is right now?

Do you see diseases sometimes but not overwhelmingly frequently?

What about in the jungle? Disease is supposed to be a much bigger problem here.

I'd argue that the issue with diseases at the moment is a structural  one: apart from the names and recovery times, they're functionally identical. The % spread chances are also illogical, with some diseases that shouldn't spread seemingly infecting multiple pawns at once. i.e. there's no difference between a communicable disease (e.g. the plague) where isolating a pawn would make sense and one where there should be zero chance of spread (e.g. malaria). At the moment it's very jarring for multiple pawns to fall prey to the same disease at once where the disease itself doesn't function like that in the real world.

I'd much prefer that diseases gave varying effects & some code was added allowing world<>pawn stat interactions to exist. e.g. Sleeping sickness gave -50% work speed / run speed, malaria had a % chance for psychosis ("the horror, the horror") and so on. Currently altering pawn behavior / traits is clumsy (usually via thinktrees). Oh, and jungles / swamps = leprosy, it'd be great if there was a chance that your pawn's fingers fell off - at the moment, apart from combat damage, I don't think there's any way for the base world to change pawns.

There's also no degrees to them at the moment that interact with the colony / mechanics. i.e. a medical bed is just as good as a normal bed, medicines don't effect them and so on. It'd be a better mechanic if there were 'tiers' to colony development that allowed various diseases to be dealt with or nullified. e.g. research / buildings should effect the outcome of disease management, and some diseases should be far worse than others.


Without trying to be an ass, at the moment diseases aren't a great mechanism - they're just a flat % chance of having to put pawns on ice in beds until they develop immunity. Dangerous at the starting stages of a colony, a mild nuisance at endgame.

The game isn't fun with them, because you have this relentless feeling of "there is no reason not to get others" while you play. I also feel like I'm just cheating.

I'd say that my impression is totally the opposite: some of the mods really do expand and flesh out RimWorld and show what's possible with the engine. There's at least three that I consider to be excellent.

Current issues:

1) Most mods aren't balanced at all. This is where your sense of "cheating" comes from. e.g. TTM is great, but fundamentally unbalanced (atm); same goes for Shinzy's Apparello.

2) Many of the mods, while good, are overly full of fluff. e.g. weapon mods with 100+ variants of essentially the same gun.

3) They're all using the existing framework of code that is in the alpha. Tynan has no issue with people adding code directly (.dll rather than XML), but this raises a whole new issue: adding code isn't so much modding as game creation. A few of the modders are happy to add code directly, which unfortunately makes their mods "non-customizable", which isn't great news (however much of the code itself is brilliant - looking at you miss JuliaEllie). I've held off finishing a mod I know would be good because it would require additional code, and there's no reason to imagine that the beta / gold product wouldn't have it included anyhow.

4) New features are being added, but sadly some of the changes aren't expressed in XML (I'm thinking temperature here). Ideally, core functions should be able to be modded via XML rather than pure code.

5) Some of the mods are just plain silly: vastly over-powered teenage fantasies that break game mechanics - but they're still viable if you like that kind of thing.


All in all it's still an alpha: the modding community here has some serious talent and many of them show what is possible with the engine.


TL;DR

You're doing yourself a disservice by not at least trying out the mods - however, I think that it will be beta / gold before they really come into their own.

Check him for cataracts?

[massive]

note: to any mod maker who reads this, you might notice Tynan allows for disassembly of his game so long as it's only for a mod.
Take this opportunity and learn about the game's secrets and inner workings!

From someone who is known for saying things like "that'd be easy to implement", adding netcode would be a massive job, even if you were adding only co-op LAN style connections (i.e. no central servers).

Being honest, I'm not sure what real payoff adding MP would give: although everyone loves their minecraft / Terraria servers, the entire focus of Rimworld is a timed experience (generally, 3 years). Too long to play in a day, too short to have as permanent servers.

Added to that is the mechanics - you'd have to have separate colonists / player if playing on the same map (rather than just world map), but what happens if a player wants to grief another? How would you handle build orders? e.g. you want to build a wall at point X; player two wants to build a farm - what happens when colonists try to 'over-lap'? What priority is given to zones and ownership? (and what's to stop someone laying out a 100x100 dumping zone on your base to prevent you using the real estate?). How would you prioritize resources? e.g. player 1 picks up an item; player 2 wants it - how do you set ownership?

Also, pvp would be entirely not-fun; without the dumb AI, bases are impossible to defend, and mortars would just be a griefing war.


That's just 5mins of thinking about it.

This made me lol!

And yeah, in Al Reynolds' books, the Glitter Band is a specific set of orbiting habitats around Epsilon Eridani. In RimWorld, a glitterworld is one of many planets which, at various times, have reached peak non-transcendent levels of sociotechnological advancement.

Thank Glitter (but not Gary). I had anxiety that I'd just pulled a "easy" comment and crapped all over Rimworld's lore.


p.s.

Very happy that Rimworld's creator is an actual science fiction fan. Geekgasm.

The term is taken from Alastair Reynolds, a science fiction writer.

For the next few centuries, the so-called Belle Epoque, humanity enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, with several planets being colonised. The most successful planet of all was Yellowstone, a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, site of the Glitter Band and Chasm City. Technologies developed included the Conjoiner Drive, a gift from the Conjoiners (who resumed contact with humanity at an unknown time), advanced nanotechnology, and numerous other devices. With the exception of an attempted takeover on Yellowstone, no major incidents affected humanity during this time.

The Belle Epoque was terminated by the advent of the Melding Plague in 2510, a nanotechnological virus that destroyed all other nanotechnology it came into contact with. Only the Conjoiners were unaffected by this disaster, which devastated the civilisation around Yellowstone. War between the Demarchists and Conjoiners erupted as a result of the plague.

Glitter Band / Rust Belt, a conglomeration of 10,000 exquisitely unique orbital habitats around Yellowstone. One of the most famous locations in human history, it was the home to billions of people from across the galaxy. It was also a place of cultural, philosophical and physical diversity and a central hub of business and trade in human space. In regards to its socio-political organization and importance in the fields mentioned previously, the Glitter Band strongly resembles Classical Greece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Revelation_Space_locations#Glitter_Band
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe


Essentially it means a culture with nanotech. In Rimworld, it's used to represent spacers.


If you've read any of A. Reynold's work, you'll also know that hostile AI wiping everything sentient out is a common theme of his.

Glad to see you're confident on how easy these things are.

Yeah, ok came across a bit wrong. Add an implicit with the coding skills shown in Rimworld.

To be a bit less jarring: the temperature system is great, it just needs the numbers slightly altering. e.g. upper bounds lessened, heat stroke / frostbite etc kicking in at more normative temps.

As a programmer, whenever a non-programmer says something is 'easy', it isn't. Ever.

Given that food consumption is already in, water consumption would just be a version of this. Making temperature increase the # required would be interesting, but doable (food is already on a timer).

Rimworld: the swimming pool, sauna and bathing mod would be a little harder.

But you guys are right, some of those weather events are a little crazy. However! We should remember that this isn't Earth. At least, that's my wimpy explanation.

If you have trees, mammals and humans existing on your not-Earth, they still have to conform to realistic genetic variables. 40-45oC should be the upper end of desert biomes. 50oC+ = entire map should die off.[1]

Sure, colonists could survive if you added in water dynamics - something that could be easily added (there's a mod that adds rain water barrels / wells). Dune world - windtraps / plastic sheet condensation etc. Swamp water needing purifiers.

A basic game calc would be:

1) Each colonist requires X litres fresh water / day
2) If not purified then chances of disease (malaria, dysentery etc) increases
3) Base temperature of biome = mod on 1) requirements (i.e. desert biome = *1.4 mod on water req)
4) Food type effects this (would require typing foods to biomes - e.g. no strawberries in tundra or desert without either glasshouse or irrigation; add species like cacti to desert biome - long growth, but gives water as well as nutrition)

As stated - there's mods out there that have water as a resource - it isn't hard to add. Storage would be simple - from barrels to ponds to humidifiers to melting snow.

Would it be fun? Sure: it'd also give incentive to settling near open water[2].

At the moment, you have tundra biomes with temperatures of 40oC+ even without heat waves. This is borked - feel free to spank your beta testers already.


[1] An interesting dynamic would be to allow changes to base biome. e.g. colonists do X enough, then biome changes to Y. Might be a little unrealistic in terms of colony lifespan (5 years)
[2] Yeah, and you could add rivers to biomes. Atm water is a bit lackluster - the auto-generation of swamp around it is a bit meh.

Although, that said, people seem to survive better than I thought in places where temperatures regularly exceed 50C. That is to say, they actually can survive there!

No, no they cannot.

They can import a stay of execution through the expenditure of energy and resources that the local ecosystem cannot produce, but as the average temperature rises, so does this cost. The cost differential between living in 40oC and 50oC is something fierce, as Australia is about to discover.

Survival / fending off inevitable death; the two are not synonymous. Both McMurdo and Dubai rely entirely on imported energy - one for heat & calories, the other for water. (98.8%[1] of water in Dubai is produced by desalination plants, which are notoriously energy intensive; I'm sure you can work out the energy costs in transporting food to the antarctic).

Dubai's average temp. is only 40-42 oC in summer. If the gas was turned off tomorrow, Dubai would cease to exist within a few months. Same for Vegas and the abuse of aquifers and Lake Mead[2] that allows it to function.

I find it scary that people don't instinctively know that 50 oC = end of life, or quite understand just how much energy / resources are spent to maintain the illusion they're living in a place that isn't on the very threshold. The 20th Century - 4 billion years of life squandered to make the impossible happen in order to make glitzy casinos and societies based on slavery. Ceci ne pas un pipe.


On topic -

Temperatures are currently nonsensical - it'd be nice if beta testers had noticed this, but it needs fixing. Small hope of SimAnt levels of ecological modelling, but it'd be a better game if it wasn't totally History Channel about the topic.


[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/desalination-plants-supply-98-8-of-dubai-s-water-forum-is-told.html
[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10932785/The-race-to-stop-Las-Vegas-from-running-dry.html

I've been holding off working on mods 'cause I knew 0.8 was coming out.

Taking a look at the new build, I can't see temperature settings done in any of the XML files I assumed would hold them (i.e. in biomes.xml).

Can anyone confirm that it's all in the .dll code? If so, arrgh.

[huge]

check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subarctic_climate

then check http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/others/features/weather-goes-crazy-in-siberia-with-record-high-temperatures-then-july-snow/

i admit, that 50 degrees is a bit high, but around 35 is possible.

The lowest temperature recorded in Yakutsk was −64.4 �C (−83.9 �F) and the highest was +38.4 �C (101.1 �F).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutsk#Climate


Without getting into a massive debate over just why Yakutsk is so varied, the average for Siberia is still roughly 20oC in Summer (it has a lot to do with specific geography of that region - cf. microclimate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microclimate ). However, there's a huge qualitative difference between 40oC and 50oC.

It is, quite literally, the difference between a functioning ecosystem and one where no life can survive.

In contrast, the upper limit for eukaryotes is about 60�C, a temperature suitable for some protozoa, algae, and fungi. The maximum temperature for mosses is another 10� lower, vascular plants (house plants, trees) about 48�C, and fish 40�C.

http://www.nss.org/adastra/volume14/rothschild.html



Having a heat wave that raises local temperatures by 30 oC isn't a "heat wave" it's "massive solar flare, death of all life, bye bye colony". Having 67oC in jungle climates is just ludicrous - I hate to think what the desert biome produces.

I've lived in a house that has gotten to over 50*C inside - granted there was a bushfire on at the time. The days before and after were all around 48-49

I presume you're Australian then - in which case I'd advise moving, as your climate is not going to be pretty in the next 100 years.

The temperature is set to hit 44C in the west coast town of Ceduna, with 39C forecast for Adelaide, which would be a record early November maximum.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/07/south-australia-bushfire-danger-catastrophic-as-temperatures-soar

http://www.ozcoasts.gov.au/indicators/greenhouse_effect.jsp

The regions of Australia that have recorded temperatures over 48oC simply aren't parts where there are bush fires, fyi:




So, yes, this fits the thesis. Parts of Australia are already uninhabitable without serious outside energy / resource inputs, I'm not sure why you think that as temperatures go past 45oC that this region won't spread. Once you start hitting 48oC+, say goodbye to bush fires because there won't be any large vascular plants surviving to burn. If you need proof - that large brown splotch on the South - South West part of Australia is called the "nullarbor plain". From the latin, Null - none Arbor - trees.


It is quite literally called the place with no trees.