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(and it would also provide more incentive to not hole yourself in a mountain)

See, I could imagine a whole industry chain based on this, with glass walls, mirrors, focusing lenses and other stuff, making a whole elaborate system to fill up a mountain hold with natural light.

A simple idea that would reward careful design of rooms and smart use of haulers: Add an 'output range' slider to workbenches, stoves, etc., much like the current "ingredient range" slider.

Now you can speed up the crafting process by managing small input/output stockpiles close to workbenches.

This could also open up room for a new option for "until" crafting, "until all output stockpiles are full".

Here's an idea to add some simple auto-ordering capabilities for mods:

In About.xml, you can declare a set of other mod names and say for each whether this mod should go before or after that mod, or whether they conflict.

Then on the mod screen, there's an "auto order" button that uses this info to re-sort mods appropriately, with some simple detection for infinite loops, and with mods highlighted in red if they're noted as conflicting.

Inspiration for this comes from LOOT for Skyrim and Fallout, which uses a simple data format to automatically determine sorting for large sets of mods, as well as warning about conflicts between mods.

'Nuff said. Clicking all the little arrows is really annoying. This'll continue to become more of an annoyance as people use Steam Workshop more and more and people who previously avoided mods start using them.

Let's say I want to make a custom bed.

If I make that bed have variable materials, I could have a wood, steel, silver, or gold bed.

Or I could have a hay, cloth, or devilstrand bed.

But I can't have both!

If I could select materials from two menus (e.g. "frame" vs "cover") and both materials can have different effects on the final product, the number of options goes way up, while the clutter on the construction menu goes way down. Now the single bed entry can take care of every variation from simple to luxury beds of that size.

The same applies to other furniture, and even to walls. For example, there could be walls of X material that include tapestries of Y material.

For forced traits, forced health conditions, age ranges, etc, it would open up some interesting opportunities if it could be set per player character.

The simplest way would be to do it by number: instead of "all player characters" you pick "player character by number: 1", "player character by number: 2", etc, with that line ignored if the number is greater than the number of starting player characters.

Then you could have stuff like, for example, a Gilligan's Island-style setup with a cast with predetermined ages and traits.

It would make sense to me for sexual orientation to be something other than trait-defined. As already mentioned, as long as it's part of the pool of starting traits people will be selecting against it because other traits have more mechanically valuable effects.

from what i can tell, almost all the floors give 100% move speed, and the only real difference is how beautiful it is. how i see it is there are 3 qualities of a floor:
movement speed
cleanliness
beauty
if a floor is really good in one, it should lack in the other two.

That seems kind of silly to me. It's not like marble or hardwood floors are any slower to walk across than linoleum.

It seems like most of these could also use a "grass" version as a lower-quality/quick to deteriorate version of the straw item. You'd get grass as a byproduct of cutting tall grass and other wild plants, and it could also be used as a low-quality food for tamed herbivores.

That would allow for expanded production of some of the default early game furniture and items that currently get logical requirements handwaved for gameplay purposes. For example: grass bed (construct immediately with some plant cutting), straw bed (construct once you have some hay farming up and running), cloth bed (construct once you have cloth production in place), with increasing mood benefits.

Creatures as heat sources would be an interesting idea, and would make the really cold starts in the game more practical, since "dig a hole, hide in it, and warm up for a while" would be practical without dealing with all the immediate infrastructure needed to make heaters.

Some back of the envelope numbers suggest that humans give off heat in a range about the same as a 50- to 100-watt light bulb. A "heater rating" could scale off that based on food requirements for different creatures, and act as a minor heater for each creature indoors. (Divided by space ratings to take into account very large rooms/hallways, maybe?)

Stripe is fine. They're a popular credit card servicer for small businesses, with established partnerships with major ecommerce and payment companies, as well as Apple and Facebook. They even do some physical manufacturing for card readers that allow using iOS devices as point-of-sale kiosks.

I like the idea of a force field generator of some kind that requires being deployed in an open space. If it deflected mortar shells and drop pods (presumably they'd end up in an unblocked square outside the force field), it'd help with the biggest reasons for people to automatically decide to burrow.

Maybe it could be something like the Gungan force fields in Star Wars, where it blocks shots going in either direction, but can be slowly walked through (giving the border square a low walk speed like shallow water).

To go along with the idea of anasthesia, a "happy drugs" bill on colonists could be interesting as a way to deal with really nasty circumstances. A mood boost with a tradeoff of lower work efficiency, and a risk of addiction if repeatedly used?

I like both.

The visitor zone could also open up some secondary gameplay - say, you could set a bill to deliver high-quality food or other goods to visitors there as gifts, and if they like what you give them, word will get around and the next group of visitors might give you gifts in return (lower total resource value but of things that are harder to acquire) or might hunt animals for you.

Similarly, I think that killed raiders shouldn't be set forbidden by default. It makes it way too easy to lose track of guns and bodies instead of being able to trust your haulers to take care of it for you.