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Not that I'm aware of, though wiki says they do 12 melee damage so just a couple unmitigated hits could cause some damage if you're unlucky.
I feel like my colonists always lose a finger any time they fight a pikeman, but this has been true since they were added.

Only mods used were Prepare Carefully and Hide or Show Hats with Hair.

Just recently finished off a game by hosting the Stellarch and they arrived with all tattered clothes and no crown, giving them the mood debuff for lacking royal apparel, doesn't seem right for their stature.

As for the cobra oddity, something common I see with them hunting is that their prey will instantly rot due to toxic buildup, and so they have to hunt another animal. This will likely be more common with the new patch increasing the buildup. Personally I'd like to see their bites reworked into a proper venom debuff that builds a large amount over time from a single or few bites, more similar to infections. This would prevent the current issue and make them more realistic, nobody's ever been like "I got bit by a cobra but it only bit me twice so I'm fine."

Also I was wondering what counts as obstructing a landing pad for shuttles. I had a properly sized, unroofed, and powered set of shuttle beacons that highlighted a green rectangle when selected and even had animals set to avoid it, but when the Stellarch's pickup shuttle arrived it landed in a marsh in the very north of the map. Don't have a save right before the shuttle arrived, but here's an image of my colony with the pad in the northwest corner. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054391685
I do have post-game saves showing the pad was intact and powered after leaving, even my animals are forbidden from standing within.

I suppose that is a contradiction brought about the changes to royals. Originally it was pretty clear that you should stick to only a couple royals at best since they would stop doing work, now it seems like you should have more but the speeches will keep eating half a day each. Plus there isn't really any sort of hierarchy with having different ranks within the colony, another opportunity for more interesting interactions.

It looks like Royals continue to be quite a tricky balancing act, with today's update removing most of the restrictions from Royals as players found them too burdensome.

So I thought I would give my own thoughts on what exactly the problem points are as I see them, and some ideas to make them more appealing.

The biggest flaw with Royals in my opinion is that the main reward for having them is only useful for combat. Why not have psychic powers based on the colonist's passions? What if your Gourmand Duke could make illusory meals that effectively transmute them to a tier higher, so everyone that eats their plate of corn thinks they're eating a Fine Meal? Chief Surgeon-Praetor Mary could actively accelerate her patient's healing and deal with the Psychic headache later herself. And I'm sure the War Smith Baron could use a second psychokinetic hammer helping him to arm his loyal followers. A new baseline power could be to teleport items to an appropriate stockpile zone. Honestly there's so much potential you would probably have to add a limit to how many powers a single colonist could have, if there isn't a limit already. This could also introduce toggled Psychic powers that give a constant minor hangover and hog some of the Entropy meter but can stay active for long periods, like passively skipping through doors instead of opening them.

And since we're dealing with passion-based powers, just let colonists have their passion skills be exempted from being blocked by title, perhaps with Count only exempting Burning Passions depending on balance.
Another option is to go with the "Pawns are Capable!" mod route and have non-dignified work and food instead reduce the Royal's Authority stat, thus requiring more Reigning to make up for it.

It's harder for me to comment on decrees as I've only had one, but from what I hear it sounds like they operate on negative reinforcement by simply punishing the player for not doing them with little positive for fulfilling them. As a solution, decrees could be about trying to appeal to the Empire Faction. Instead of making a decree to make half a dozen Coronets for shits and giggles, do so to help lobby with the Empire for their military support to prevent random raids for 5 days. You might still be a bit annoyed at having to undertake some odd request out of nowhere, but at least at the end you can be like "Neat, I got a thing though."

The most interesting choices are ones have drawbacks, and it'd be a shame for Royals to become pure upgrades you don't have to think about. Please share your thoughts on my ideas and provide your own 

Is your colonist on a food restriction that doesn't allow those taming foods? I think I had an issue like that but thought it was part of Animals Logic mod.

An idea is to rework psychic entropy to be a cooldown override. So every ability has a cooldown instead of just the particularly strong ones, but you can use them more often at the cost of psychic entropy, which in turn could have more severe drawbacks.

If a Royal Tribute Collector arrives while you're also doing the quest to harbor prisoners for the Empire, those prisoners can be offered as tribute to the Empire for Royal Favor, often much more than the Warden quest itself.

Probably just for the vanilla lore, it wouldn't make sense for a new/vanilla player to be able to biocode a low tech weapon since magic doesn't exist in the vanilla lore.

Looking through the XMLs, it seems to just be a tag you can add to weapons, so it will be very easy for a modder to make a biocode enabled sword.

Edit: Looks like my game updated weird when I switched to the unstable branch and it was still using some 1.0 data. After uninstalling and reinstalling completely to fix it, it seems in 1.1 melee armor penetration does scale with quality so this thread is unneeded. 

Probably more of an oversight than a bug, but melee weapons that use <armorPenetration> (only spears in Vanilla, always 50% for point attack) don't scale with item quality. Guns are able to use <armorPenetrationBase> to have scaling armor penetration, which shotguns do in Vanilla. It would be better for balancing modded weapons if melee had a scaling armor penetration tag.

I really like the changes to the mineral scanner, feels better knowing minerals will always be more readily available.

Also something I wanted to bring up that I noticed when working on one of my own mods, there doesn't seem to be an Armor Penetration XML tag for melee weapons that scales with quality. Shotgun Bullets have ArmorPen that scales, but Spears have a flat 50% penetration independent of material or quality. Unless Lord Google failed me and there is such a tag, think this should be changed?

I'm fairly new to modding and have been working on fixing up various issues for mods that don't seem to be in development anymore, currently I'm looking at Rim Disorders.

Specifically I'm trying to change how the chance for a pawn/creature to develop Autism and ADHD works. Currently the mod use HediffGiver_Birthday with an L curve, as the conditions develop early in life.

However this has the negative affect of causing longer lived creatures, especially from other mods, to have disproportionately high chances to have these conditions. Forsakens for example are hundreds of thousands of years ago, and therefore almost always have severe Autism and ADHD.

Currently I think the best way to apply these conditions would be a flat % chance, unless there's another way to limit the Hediffgiver to the first 15 or so years instead of the first 15% of a creature's lifespan.

Awesome update, I'm curious about the eels.

Have you considered taking a look at the Byakhee from the Rim of Madness - Cults mod? It's a creature that acts as a transport pod, but has been bugged for a while, essentially it can only be used between world tiles that have player colonists already on them both during and after launching, otherwise it ends up being lost as it considers all pawns downed if they're all loaded in it.

They haven't been able to fix it according to a reply I got on their Discord, so it could be an opportunity to help two mod communities at once by creating a similar animal for this mod that could be adapted or patched into the Cults mod as well.

No problem,  try using Notepad++ if you aren't already, it helps a ton as it lays out files much better than regular notepad. XML files are fairly easy to understand just by reading them and are a good way to help tune most mods to your preferred balance and overcome incompatibilities.

You can probably edit the XML file to make the Black Spider tamable, steam workshop path is steamapps>Workshop>content>294100>1541721856>defs>ThingDefs_Races>Races_Animal_BlackHive

The Black Spider is the last animal defined in the file, look for <wildness>1</wildness> and change it to like 0.95 to match the difficulty with the lesser Black Hive bugs. I take no responsibility for any wonkiness this may or may not cause.

Need to add Plant_TallGrass to things Decay Drakes can convert otherwise they're just carnivores in Tropical Swamps, tamed one and couldn't feed it meat or corpses while tamed and nearly had it starve before I went code digging.

Also found that the rotting mounds don't 'grow' into an edible version at night, not sure if this can be changed.