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... why would moonlight COOL a tile?

Defaulting to permadeath would have a seriously negative impact on the new user experience, though: Joe Gamer buys Rimworld on Steam, starts a game without thinking much about the settings, and an hour or so in something bad happens. Discovering he can't reload an earlier save is the sort of thing that makes people rage-quit.

(Remembering the permadeath option between games is perfectly reasonable, though.)

I'd love to see firing ports — constructable walls that colonists can fire through, but enemies can't path through. That would give me a lot of new flexibility in creating pillboxes and other defensive structures. (By all means, little raiders, conga-line right up to the front door while death rains on you from the sides...)

Fighting positions (foxholes) would be nice, but I don't know if they'd be worth the development cost for what they'd add to the game, nor whether their advantages would fit easily into existing game mechanics.

Abatis (terrain that is deliberately slow and dangerous to traverse) or concertina wire would be nice as well. You can somewhat do it by creating a stockpile and filling it with rock chunks, but I believe those provide a cover bonus to enemies; ideally I'd want something that slows attackers, but doesn't make them any harder to hit.

First part is true. However, with those cultures that devolved (advanced, and perhaps devolved again), do you think something as simple as the need to procreate was left out? Only two technology levels, from what I can tell, seem capable of maintaining their population in the face of overwhelming numbers of sexually deviant individuals.

"Sexually deviant individuals"?

"Overwhelming numbers"?

Primitive tribes of hunter gatherers wouldn't be able to sustain themselves with large populations of deviant characters as they are, in general, of smaller numbers. The gene pool requires additional contribution to prevent defects.

I'm convinced now, that removing sexuality from traits may very well be the best thing. Instead just making it another, separate statistic. However, I also believe that the numbers reflect whatever is required (based on technology level) for the continuance of humans through procreation. The only issue I see, when it comes to higher tech levels increasing the amount of deviants, is that the technology actually makes up for the lack of standard procreation. What this means is that deviant couples could still be fertilized artificially and deviancy loses it's usefulness as a form of population control.

You're arguing from a false premise, i.e. that a society would fail if a non-trivial fraction did not reproduce every generation. While that would certainly be true if NOBODY reproduced, historically the hard caps on population size and growth haven't come from how many people are having heterosexual sex or how often. It's also worth noting raising children takes a lot of time and effort, and the role of kin selection in our species is significant — e.g. even if you never have children, but help raise your niece and nephew, you're still contributing to the survival of your own genes. (Interestingly, this may be a contributor to why humans survive so long past breeding age when most animals don't — if grandma and grandpa help take care of all their grandchildren, even though they can't have any more children of their own, they're still contributing to the success of their specific bloodlines and also the tribe overall, most of whom are also likely to be relatives.)

Also, would you mind not calling gay, bi, and trans people "deviants"? Thanks.

Thrumbos are cute, and distinctive to Rimworld; perhaps it might be worth making and selling a plush thrumbo doll? My girlfriend and I would totally buy one.

But honestly, that's nether here, not there. We're not talking about futuristic attitudes toward homosexuality, bisexuality, etc. We're talking about how they exist within the playable portion of the game, and how that portrayal impacts purple playing that game in the here and now.

Very nicely put. Thank you!

The "it's the future, it's space" argument is deeply flawed for one simple reason: We are dealing with people from all eras of humanity. Maybe glitterworld colonists might have a higher chance of deviating than urbworlders who'd be similar to us. But what of Indworlders? During our industrial age, women hadn't even had the right to vote yet, and homes were incredibly nuclear with gender roles still in place. Medieval worlds, well, we can imagine some church involve there. . .Caveworlds, while we can't say for sure what they did back then, we know that only men and women can have children together, and since we are here to talk about this, we know that lgbt inclinations must not have been to much of an issue.

Traits don't describe what is socially normative, just what is. People who would be described in modern terms as homosexual, bisexual, or transgender have always been around, even if the societies in which they lived attempted to suppress such behavior.

I love that Rimworld includes explicitly gay (and trans!) characters, but I agree that decoupling it from the Trait system would be a nice idea, assuming it's not too much of a headache from an implementation point of view. It might even be nice if it could be something along the lines of the Kinsey scale — after all, some people are totally gay, some are totally straight, and a lot of folks fall somewhere in between.