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That's a terrible way to play, btw. The game is designed for loss and recovery, you're totally neutering it.

I'm gonna redesign how permadeath is presented. Maybe on by default.

I'd like to push back against this a little.

I've been playing since A12, and have reloaded every time a pawn dies. It's how I play the game, and removing the ability would really dampen my enthusiasm. (I know you're not saying you'd make permadeath only, but...)

Basically, I enjoy Rimworld as a colony simulator. I usually play with 4-6 pawn colonies, lasting years and growing greatly attached to my few lonely friends in the wilderness. When they enter a relationship, it makes me very happy. When someone gets a disease, I sit on the edge of my seat. It's a story simulator, but it's one that doesn't contain death. The interest is in colony building and crisis management, relationships, wandering the world, etc.

Generally I'll mod in an "easy" raid level and an "extreme" everything else difficulty. I like higher difficulties because of the mood penalties, price reductions and lower crop yields, but am not interested in the combat mechanics beyond a very limited level.

Just wanted to add a perspective. I tend to quickly lose interest in games that ask me to invest emotionally in the characters and then force losses on me. Thanks for an amazing game, I love playing it in this terrible save-scumming way, and I very much look forward to 1.0 reaching a non-Steam audience (me).

Anyone else having a smug smirk at the fact that this is basically the Z-level suggestion?
Too hard to make, huh? 

Notice the lack of pathing between levels. It's all 100% player controlled. Getting the AI to path between levels, to consider things on different levels when making decisions, etc. is the part that's 'too hard' - which hasn't been done in this mod at all.

Which is no knock against DeepRim - it's a pretty neat little thing. But it's not z-levels like most people mean when they say that.

I recently came across this article, which might be of interest to you. If you're concerned about performance when making decisions around mounting (you mentioned that a couple times in the thread, I think?), it could be worth considering octagonal distance. It's still pretty accurate, but doesn't involve any square roots.

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Fast_Approximate_Distance_Functions.shtml

Switching over sped up the pathfinding in one of the games I work on, may or may not be worth it here (not sure how frequently Giddy-Up calculates distances). Interesting regardless.

I'm not sure that this is Giddy-up rather than another mod, but seems possible.

https://gist.github.com/HugsLibRecordKeeper/ae1833cbeea6087ff5bc463d5fad2158

Kay and Osmu (mentioned in the logs) are just standing around, and both have mounts. The target they're trying to feed is a tamed animal (not alien races framework). I'm not sure where the survival meal they're trying to fetch is (none in my stockpiles). If I remove one of them from doctoring, the other still just stands around generating the same error.

I thought this might be related to Smarter Medicine (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=39187.0) which I recently installed, but disabling that and loading the save still gives the same errors.

I'm also a fan of #1 - as someone who uses Giddy-Up, I didn't realize the mod used zones. I seldom use zones at all, other than for "toxic fallout" events. Any feature that makes me fiddle with them is a feature I'm likely to forget about or not discover in the first place.

Just one data point, I know many other on the forum use them heavily.

I believe something's wrong with the latest Core release, related to "Imprisoned enemy pawns no longer continuously try to ride the animal they were riding before".

https://git.io/vxBsp (Appologies for all the mechanoid error spam in there, hadn't opened dev mode in a long time. It's the TakeWoundedPrisonerToBed error I'm reporting on)

I've captured pawns in this save before, no problem - only change since then was to update the Giddy-up! quartet to your latest release.

1. Are animals useful in combat? Do you use them? If so, why?  If not, why not?

Very much so! I value my colonists immensely, and will reload if any of them die. Animals take the heat off the colonists.

But only early in the game. As colonists start getting better armor and weapons, animal's innate toughness starts mattering less, and friendly fire takes a greater toll. Also, once I've had a bear living in my colony for 6 months, it stops being cannon fodder and starts being a friend. And what sort of monster sends their friends ahead as bullet sponges?

2. Are there annoying/weird points about animals in combat?

They will. Not. Stay. In. Cover. Which means, as others have mentioned, I have to decide at the beginning of battle - leave all the animals behind at home, or mass-charge immediately when the enemy's in range. It'd be nice if they had behavior more like "hang out behind me, but swarm anyone who gets within 5 squares."

Milling out into the open in a big firefight is a death sentence.

3. How are you using animals in combat?

As said above, since they will get into the line of fire and die quickly, I release them the moment the enemy enters firing range. A charge with half a dozen big-ish animals (wolves, dogs, bears, muffalo, whatever I have handy) to accompany a fulsade of survival rifle and assault rfile fire can be a big help.

@kaptain_kavern: yeah I just finished the patch and I'm just about to post it on the first post.
@BlueWinds: see above line.

Now to actually do something for fun today...

Thank you very much!

The patch is definitely not happy with "A Dog Said - Lite", causing huge runs of run ink in the log. Would much appreciate a trimmed-down version if you have time. Thanks for the update!

My experience has been that max range is a mistake - Scythers are pretty good shots, while my colonists tend to suck. Firefights at short range have done better for me than those at long.

Also, yes, dogpile them with animals. Tame everything. Release everything. Eat the furry friends that die, praise, pet and name those that survive.

I suppose that could work for no-crafting, but 'lite' would be difficult, since you want to remove not only crafting the new items, but also them getting drop-podded, supplied by traders, showing up in the Prepare Carefully list of goods, etc.

Basically, not sure adding mod options is easier than than just maintaining a couple releases containing different XML files. Just my thought, I'm obviously not one of the actual modders here.

Have you seen Vanilla Animals Overhaul? Does what you're asking for, and a bunch more. If you don't want the 'bunch more', it should be easy enough to look in the files and pull out just the pack animal changes you like.

Thanks for Passive Coolers Refuelable, it's quite a nice tweak. One request though - can you rename about.xml to About.xml? I know it doesn't make any difference on Windows computers, but those of us playing on linux, the case matters. Mod still works, just throws a big red dev console error because it can't find the file. Thanks.

I'm sorry you're frustrated. I'd be frustrated too if I felt like people were stealing from me.

With that said though, this seems like the very opposite, something to be proud of rather than upset over. Let's look at what actually happened - your mod got incorporated into the game. This is awesome! The game's creator thought your work was so good, that now everyone gets your mod, and you don't have to maintain it anymore. Sweet! It's not 'screw modder's rights', it's 'win-win.' The game is better for everyone.

Rather than get upset over the abstract 'intellectual property', be pleased over the concrete - your hard work is now available to everyone, making the game better. Sharing is caring.

ANY plagiarist can use the same argument, you know.  "My code is better, for the presence of your stolen contribution" simply does not fly, either morally or legally.

In other words, neither you nor anybody else, including me, gets to define what is an "honor" for any other person, especially if it also violates copyright/IP laws; that's up to the person in question, period.  Furthermore, if Ludeon happens to be caught violating the GNU GPL (or any similar license), that's NOT going to somehow "help" the game; in fact, it could very well be the death of RimWorld, entirely.

I'm not attempting to define it for you, and I'm not telling you how you should feel. I'm saying it's how I would feel if my mod were incorporated, and how some other mod authors do feel.

Also, as others have pointed out, the EULA's pretty clear, and given the repeated history of exactly this happening (every alpha that I've played has incorporated mods from the previous one), it's something you should have seen coming. Being angry and self-rightous isn't very productive. I'm suggesting a different way you could look at the same set of events, one that results in happiness rather than anger.

I'm sorry you're frustrated. I'd be frustrated too if I felt like people were stealing from me.

With that said though, this seems like the very opposite, something to be proud of rather than upset over. Let's look at what actually happened - your mod got incorporated into the game. This is awesome! The game's creator thought your work was so good, that now everyone gets your mod, and you don't have to maintain it anymore. Sweet! It's not 'screw modder's rights', it's 'win-win.' The game is better for everyone.

Rather than get upset over the abstract 'intellectual property', be pleased over the concrete - your hard work is now available to everyone, making the game better. Sharing is caring.