Topics

I've seen this happen several times. It's an old bug. The below YouTube video has a good example, but there are many other configurations that create this problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKovD5VPUe4

One obvious way to debug is just to run a bunch of random checks across random points on the map, ensuring that A-can-shoot-B = B-can-shoot-A in all cases.

Official discussion thread for this blog post.

Cheers!

Hi all, just a quick note on translating for Royalty.

You can do it in the same repo as the base language, just by making a folder for Core and one for Royalty.

The German translation has an example. See here: https://github.com/Ludeon/RimWorld-de

As always, thank you deeply to all translators.

Official discussion thread for this post!

The ideas board is a place for players to discuss ideas for the game with each other. Modders can also use it as a source of ideas.

For legal reasons, Ludeon developers won't be reviewing this forum or any of the threads in it (or any game development suggestions/ideas posted or sent by any other means). I haven't had time to look at the forum for many years anyway, and unfortunately, there is too much risk that someone could try to claim ownership of an idea that we implemented because they happened to have sent/posted something similar here. It wouldn't be a valid claim, but people can still file invalid lawsuits, and I really don't need the trouble. Combined with the fact that many of the ideas for this game are fairly obvious (thus people often suggest things we were planning to do anyway), and it seems too legally risky. I'm sorry it had to be this way, but I hope players can still enjoy the forum together.

This thread is for the related blog post.

Thanks to all who give it a try. Please let us know if it works, or doesn't work, in this thread.

This is the comments thread for discussing this blog post.

[Modders]

Hey all. Version 1.0 is now content-locked. That means we'll only be changing it if there's a serious bug to address.

It's on the Steam unstable branch. Please, everyone who wishes, take it for a test run! It should be less buggy than Beta 19. We focused on bugfixing, so the only notable new feature is the food restrictions, which you can use to control what people are allowed to eat. If you do find a bug, please report it in the Bugs forum.

To enable the unstable branch, open your Steam library, right-click RimWorld, click Properties, go to the Betas tab, and select 'unstable' from the dropdown menu.

Modders
Modders, it'd be great if you could update your mods and make a version for 1.0. In general mods should require few to no changes to work for 1.0 - mostly just a recompile if you're using code.

The Beta19 release caused a lot of anger as some mods were updated in-place, while other mods weren't. So a lot of people had their savegames broken, often irrevocably. Heartbreak and anger, and it was pretty justified. As a player I certainly don't expect updates to trash a treasured save with no warning. Even going back to the old version didn't help if a mod was updated in-place to the new version.

That's why this time I'm placing the game up content-locked for a period before release, and recommending that modders please do not overwrite your Beta 19 versions of mods with your 1.0 version. It would be better to upload them separately onto the Workshop, to prevent breaking peoples' games when they change versions. (Many modders already do this but if everyone does, the mod version confusion disaster will be solved).

I won't enforce this in any way, of course. It's a request, motivated by a desire to not break that implicit "we won't trash your game" contract with players.

(EDIT: Backstory and reasoning why I'm requesting this).

I'm still working on selecting an exact release date. But the day is coming closer.

Translations and creative content

Though I hope to not update the code if possible, to preserve compatibility, I will be continuing to update the translations and creative content both before and after 1.0 release. This kind of content doesn't break compatibility. So translators and people entering creative content can continue to enter content without worrying that it'll be left out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/9fx95i/i_saw_a_message_on_my_screen_saying_area_revealed/

This thread is for discussing this blog post.

Discussion thread for the blog post. Discuss away!

Just a design discussion.

This isn't really new but as we approach 1.0 I've been thinking about it more. Basically I've seen a variety of variants on messages like this:

I just started a colony with no reloadable saves

I dont know how I'll like it, because when I reloaded it was for BS unlucky stuff

for instance: a melee guy I had (decked out in plasteel plate armor and advanced helmet) was one shot KO'd by a friendly fire bullet to the back of the neck

instantly died, wearing full plasteel, pure BS

It concerns me because this really goes to the heart of what RW has always been designed to be.

The original design intent of the game is that sometimes unlucky things will happen (especially if you take risks like with friendly fire), but the game is also designed so you can recover from bad situations. So it's up-and-down. Mostly you'll succeed, but sometimes you'll lose things, even if you play well. And that's part of the game. Kind of like poker.

This is as opposed to making good play always lead to an unbroken string of triumphs (like many games). The unbroken-triumph thing works fine but I thought it was also worth trying to do something different. Specifically focusing the game on story generation kind of requires that it can't just be unbroken perfect triumphs; a story of continuous victory isn't that interesting as a story. Every good story has setbacks in it.

Traditional games handle this by putting the failures in cutscenes and making the gameplay 100% victory. But if you generate the whole story as RW does, the failures have to be in gameplay too.

But very few games are trying to generate stories. Most games are skill test/reward pumps. We test your skill, and reward you in accurate proportion to the skill you showed. This is what people are used to, to a large degree, which may explain why they emotionally reject outcomes that fall outside these boundaries.

Is the anger reaction a consequence of caring about characters, or them being not easy to replace? Nobody minds that much when a marine dies in StarCraft because they're replacable. But either for story or gameplay reasons, people do tend to at least care about when people in RW die. Which sounds like a design success. But it also creates this anger reaction in some circumstances.

So basically there's some kind of complex psychological/design conflict going on between the traditional skill-test/reward pump game design and the story generator goals, and it creates this friction. Because RW is to some degree trying to mix both, but the goals of these two conflict strongly.

I'm thinking about how to handle this sort of thing. Thought it may be worth discussing. Questions to consider:

1. Should the game have a such a thing as bad luck outcomes that's not induced by some obvious, non-pressured, voluntary player decision? Or should I make a universal design standard that nothing bad ever happens unless the player actively induces it or makes some clearly-traceable mistake to cause it?

2. Should I just ignore some classes of player feedback as simply not linking up with what RW is? Are some players worth leaving alone to try to make a game that's different from the usual assumptions? Even if it leaves them pissed off because they intepreted a story generator as if it were a skill test?

3. Should players be able to consistently avoid losing people/resources even at high difficulty? At any difficulty?

4. Is there a way to set expectations (relative to the whole game, or relative to a given difficulty level) to encourage players to accept some degree of randomness to game outcomes? Or will they always reject this randomness and demand to be rewarded in accurate proportion to their skill/effort?

We just added a tool to the latest unstable build: The translation cleaner.

You can access it on the main menu in the translation info window on the bottom right, when any non-English localization is selected.

It does various things:

• It inserts the English text in comments above each translation for reference, so you don't have to look back and forth at the English data.
• If a translation key has been renamed in the game, the tool automatically renames it in the translation data.
• If any key (in any category) isn't translated at all, the tool inserts a "TODO" translation. These are ignored by the game and also come with English reference text. So it's impossible for you to make a mistake in the translation keys since the system writes them for you.
• Other useful tools!

The tool explains itself in-game when you click the button to use it.

Every translation team should be using this! At first if just one member of each team runs the tool and pushes the results to GitHub, most members may be able to translate without the game at all, or at least without integrating their translation files into the game.

Once you run the tool, it'll be very easy to find missing data by just searching for the string TODO on all the translation files, using either Visual Studio Code or any other program that can do a text search on all files in a folder.

Let me know how it works!

Game over screen activates as soon as the game starts if you load a save from 1.0.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/8voias/unstable_indeed/

I've been reading feedback pretty intensely in the last few days. Most of it's positive but some players are writing concerns about things like animal taming maintenance or turret maintenance. I figured it might be worth offering some of my thinking on the balancing process. It could enrich the feedback process if you guys knew *why* I was making some of these changes. I can't guarantee I've got everything right (yet), but I can guarantee there is a thought process behind every change.

The first thing to note is that nothing is final yet. The whole reason we do unstable builds is to get feedback so that we can fix the problems. So if there's something you don't like in the unstable build, don't worry too much - if it does turn out on broad testing to be a bad idea I certainly intend to change it. And in fact I've already adjusted quite a bit in the few days since unstable came out. It's best to not get sad about something that may not even happen.

The second thing is that theorycrafting is really dangerous. Theorycrafting is when someone just reads or thinks about a game, imagines how it might play, and gives feedback based on that without actually playing it in significant depth. The problem is that games are frightfully difficult to imagine and hard to predict from a description. Even professional game designers with 15 years' experience can't theorize accurately at how a game design will play. I can't! So we use tons of coping mechanisms (constant playtests, short iteration cycles, unstable builds for feedback) to escape from our own mental incapacity. So it's best not to get sad about something you've just imagined - it may not turn out that way at all in real play.

The theorycrafting point I think is especially important on something like the animal training maintenance. Consider this: We all know they need maintenance now, but how much maintenance do they require? There's a huge difference between needing to re-train each animal every 4 days and needing to do it once every 60 days. But from the changelist, nobody can tell this since no numbers are written. Which means that theorycrafting about this change requires simply inventing a certain balance point - which could be off by more than 10-fold! From this alone, any imagined outcome from this must be suspicious since there's a really good chance it's off by 10x or more in terms of impact. Even those who think training maintenance is a negative change might be okay with it if it was 10x milder than they're imagining.

The actual intent with this change is specifically to make it so that super-swarms of attack animals are still viable and still powerful, but require commitment. In B18 you can have 100 attack boars for almost free. They feed themselves automatically by eating grass. They haul stuff for you, rescue your people, fight your battles with zero risk to colony or colonists, provide meat and leather (even when killed in battle), reproduce themselves for free. All this can be done for the price of training each (free) boar once. It's an insanely OP strategy in B18 to the point of being quasi game-breaking.

Animal training maintenance is quite mild; it should be barely noticeable at "normal" animal herd sizes and even if you have a mega-swarm it just means you need a few dedicated beastmasters to keep them all together. A few dedicated beastmasters is still a a small cost for the benefit of a mega attack animal swarm, it's still a bit OP compared to the core strategy of straight-up gunfighting. (Though I still plan to watch for more play stories about this and see how it really plays when someone tries it, the balance can still shift either way.)

---

Regarding how I'v approached balancing the game, here's one of the ways I see it. The way Beta 18 was, we can imagine there are 7 player strategies. Label them Strategy A, B, etc. What we had was this:

B18
Challenge level: 6
Strategy A strength: 9
Strategy B strength: 8
Strategy C strength: 6
Strategy D strength: 5
Strategy E strength: 4
Strategy F strength: 3
Strategy G strength: 2

A few observations about this:
1. People love strategies A and B. They're super strong! They always work! They give you what you want, which is victory.
2. People don't even think about strategy F or G. These are newbie traps. You try them once, get your ass handed to you, and never touch them again. Bad for newbies, irrelevant for everyone else.
3. Much of the game mechanics are wasted. Since only 3 or 4 strategies are even viable, we've got whole game systems supporting strategies EFG which aren't really being engaged by players.
4. There's not much choice. If you want to do really well you pretty much have to use A and B. If you want to survive at all you can do a few more things, but you have to force it.
5. Strategies A and B are really easy, so you don't really have to engage the game much to play them. Not much risk, not much drama, not much thought.

Overall it's not a great situation. But how to remedy this?

Well, we could power up the challenge level to 9. Then strategy A would be nice and challenging, solving problem 5. But we've now totally obsoleted all the other strategies even more. There's even less choice; problem 4 gets way worse.

It's impossible to power all the strategies up to 9; there are inherent constraints in the game that make this impossible in some cases. E.g. if one strategy is "open field melee combat", it's almost inherently symmetrical between player and enemies; there's no elegant way to make this favor the player more. There are other constraints like, "does it make sense thematically" or "is it intuitive", etc. All these constraints are the fundamental challenge in balancing.

What I've tried to do is rejigger things so it's a bit more like this:

1.0
Challenge level: 5   <--- reduced slightly
Strategy A strength: 6    <--- nerf but still OP
Strategy B strength: 6    <--- nerf but still OP
Strategy C strength: 6    <--- the rest are unchanged
Strategy D strength: 5
Strategy E strength: 4
Strategy F strength: 3
Strategy G strength: 2

Some observations on this:

1. The old strategies that everyone loved are now nerfed! But...
2. The whole game challenge level is lower to compensate, which means...
3. A bunch of previously useless/newbie trap strategies are now viable.
4. It's still not perfect because it can't be due to the abovementioned constraints. We can't freely turn these dials. Some strats are still better.
5. But, overall, there's more choice, more variance. The player can, for role-playing, situational, or personal preference reasons, succeed in more ways. There are more ways to design your base, more strategies, more variant stories.

Basically what I'm getting at is that sometimes good game design really does require nerfing stuff that players previously liked to do. But if you evaluate the game from the point of view of a new player, instead of from the POV of someone who had a valuable strategy taken away, it's obviously a better game.

---

Looking at other specific cases:

---Turret maintenance is a targeted resource sink for late-game killbox-heavy colonies. The idea is that killboxes remain perfectly viable, but they are now an *economic* solution to *military* problems. Which I think is interesting.

Another goal with this was to minimally affect colonies who use fewer turrets. This is why I didn't just debuff the turret straight up. I want turrets to be useful even when there's just one, but without some other cost there's no way to do that without making turrets OP in large numbers.

So the turret maintenance is quite cheap, and takes several battles to even kick in for the first time.

Another goal was to make it possible for us to put in more powerful turrets (autocannon turret) without totally breaking the game. The mini-turret was already OP in B18, there's no way we could add an autocannon turret and keep it balanced without some sort of structural disadvantage. So turret maintenance allows more powerful turrets, further emphasizing the economy <-> combat relationship.

Finally there's a high-level issue with late-game colonies getting super ridiculously rich. Turret maintenance forms a long-term late game resource sink. Also note that the ship is a lot cheaper to build now, which opens space for this.

-Like I mentioned, animal training maintenance is a targeted change specifically to bring the "mega animal swarm" strategy somewhere in the neighborhood of a reasonable level of effectiveness.

It also addresses the late-game resource overflow issue. You can eschew turrets and instead us an animal mega-swarm, but now you need some good handlers and a good amount of food to keep all those animals trained and healthy. Again, perfectly viable, but no longer trivial.

And now, since the overall challenge level is lower, some more basic strategies should become more viable. I'm talking about things like "build sandbags and just fight them in a gunfight" or "draw them indoors and melee their asses".

Other changes relate to that too. For example, armor is now a chance-of-damage-cancel instead of a damage reduction. This means there are less wounds, but the wounds you get are significant. But, medicine is spent per wound, so this reduces time and medicine spend tending wounds, which on the econ side makes straight-up combat more viable. It also means that if you can get some really awesome armor, sending melee fighters to actually fight should be more viable since there's a real good chance you can win without getting hurt, as opposed to previous builds where you might win but you'd have a bunch of damage-reduced (but still bleeding) wounds - possibly on your eyes or brain.

There's a million more relationships like this too.

----

There's lots more to write. In fact I could probably do a book on this (har har) but I figured this is enough for one day. I don't think everyone will agree with my thinking, but I figured everyone would at least understand the portion of it I'm capable of writing down here. Please do keep on with the feedback!

[Warning:]

An unstable build of the next version is available on Steam. Today I'm only announcing this for loyal forumgoers only. I'll be progressively publicizing this as the build stabilizes.


Warning:
-This is an unstable build. It will get updated without warning, may randomly break your savegame or become unplayable for periods. Please only test if you're willing to put up with some technical issues. There are some known bugs and we expect to find many more.

On topic:
This thread is for giving feedback and discussing the build as you've played it. Open-ended suggestions go in the suggestions forum, bugs go in the bugs forum. Questions, theorycrafting, and really low-effort posts are likely to get removed.

To access:
-In Steam Library, right click RimWorld -> Properties -> Betas tab -> select the unstable branch. Restart Steam and play.

Streaming:
-I'm not going to enforce it or be mad or anything, but I'd prefer if streamers would hold off streaming until the game is stable. I'd hate for bugs and imbalances to give a bad impression. That said, it's your choice.

Feedback:
-Feedback from play experiences is much much more worthwhile than theorycrafting. Please don't spend time giving a ton of feedback just from reading the changelist.
-I'd love to hear play stories in this thread or any other thread. (Play stories are often more useful than suggestions).
-Please report bugs in the bugs forum using the simple guide How To Report a Bug!
-If you have suggestions, we welcome them. Please post suggestions in the suggestions forum.

Unresolved issues:
-Back compatibility is a bit spotty, some buildings will vanish and you'll get errors here and there. We're still solving some back-compatibility issues. But, unmodded saves from B18 and probably A17 should load.

For translators:
-Extensive improvements have been made to the translation system. Read about them here.
-The "Translation report" button on the main menu will give a detailed text file which lists all the issues to be resolved with the current translation. Use it!
-Some unresolved issues remain: The backstory titles won't match right now. That's okay. We're going to change the game so they match automatically, so you can ignore this problem at the moment.
-I recommend Visual Studio Code for editing translations. It's called "code" but it's great for editing XML too. Just use it to open the translation folder.
-Collaborate on the translations forum.

Feedback request details:

A lot has changed, so it would be really good to get feedback game-wide. But especially on these topics:
General raid difficulty progression, noting that the system probably deploys its points more efficiently now and some high-cost pawn kinds were costed down.
How much wealth various colonies actually have. I'd love to see screenshots of wealth graphs of long games to help balance the "Expectations" thought thresholds.
Profitability of various crafting paths. Art should probably be better.
Ally assistance frequency and usefulness.
The difficulty and interest of the ship ending sequence.
The difficulty of training, maintaining, and using a large amount of animals both for economic and warfighting purposes.
The difficulty/balance of maintaining recreation and the clarity of the system.

[Our goals with this community are (in no particular order):]

Welcome! This post lays out rules for the Ludeon community, and the guiding philosophy behind them. These rules apply to all official parts of the RimWorld community, including but not limited to these forums, Reddit, Steam forums, any official Discord or chat server, and Steam workshop discussions.

Philosophy:

Our goals with this community are (in no particular order):

• We want the Ludeon community to be enjoyable, informative, and inviting to as many people as possible, while also supporting respectful disagreement, unpopular views, the right to freedom of speech, and edgy content that is posted in good faith.
• We want each participant to have the same rights and responsibilities, and to have rules enforced the same way, regardless of identity, connections, or viewpoint.
• We want all participants to be able to predict what is allowed and what isn't instead of being subject to penalties based on standards that seem arbitrary, whimsical, personal, or invented on the spot.

In an open online community attempting to include people with wildly diverse experiences, tastes, worldviews, and cultures, creating and enforcing rules is very difficult. Moderation in such a context requires great personal maturity, a strong sense of responsibility, solid coping strategies when facing conflict and emotionally offensive material, and a dedication to introspecting one's own thought process to ensure it carefully incorporates others' views and judges evenhandedly. Nothing about this is casual. It requires emotional steadiness, a circumspect thinking style which considers different angles carefully and attempts to probe its own biases.

Moderation should be consistent. We want rules to be applied consistently over time, including by different moderators, and to be logically and philosophically consistent with each other. Moderators should enforce the rules, not make up ad-hoc judgments on the spot without reference to rules. This may mean that something apparently "bad" might not get immediately moderated, if there isn't a rule for it. That's expected and acceptable - it's better to have consistent principles and to take the time to think through how rules need to change, instead of wielding power arbitrarily, emotionally, and unpredictably. Many rules changes have second and third-order effects beyond the obvious impact, and these must be considered dispassionately.

Don't scar on the first cut. Local disturbances shouldn't get transformed into permanent, global rules changes too quickly. When there's a disturbance that might seem to need new rules, we should take our time in considering what those changes might be, wait to see how the community to adapts by itself, and let feelings cool on all sides before making permanent changes. Often, no change is necessary.

Each participant in the community has both rights and responsibilities (since rights are almost the same thing as responsibilities when seen from others' point of view). For example, while participants have a responsibility to be mature enough to not lash out destructively or post trollish, deliberately-provocative material, they also have a matching responsibility to maturely cope with challenging material or material that violates their personal moral beliefs. We must balance these responsibilities carefully.

Participants come from diverse background and have diverse interests and feelings, so many things will create a negative emotional reaction in somebody. We don't want to enforce rules against anything anyone finds disagreeable, because we'd have to ban huge swaths of discussions and much of our own games. So each person is expected to have and use coping skills when faced with challenging content. This community is an open space full of diverse people - it isn't a place to post in bad faith deliberately to provoke strong emotions, nor is it a space for mental health treatment (which we are not qualified to provide in any form). In a community of millions of players, with hundreds of thousands participating online, there will be rare individuals with extreme emotional fragility simply because of the numbers of people involved. We wish anyone suffering deep emotional issues the best and hope they will get the individual help they need. At the same time, exceptional cases like this are not by themselves accepted as reasons to lay restrictions on what the rest of those millions of people can talk about or enjoy, because the alternative leads to a sequence of perverse incentives that result in very negative outcomes over time. This community works on the principle that in general, people are anti-fragile, which means they benefit from challenges, the same way a bone grows strong over time under moderate load. We recognize that harmless contact with difficult ideas in a safe environment (like an online discussion about a video game, which unlike many of spheres of life is very easy to detach from) is healthy and generally beneficial, and support the rights of very diverse users to express themselves even if some others don't like what's being said.

Community-wide rules:

1. No personal attacks or criticism of individuals: Even oblique or implied personal attacks or criticism are disallowed. Limitation: Feel free to criticize a game, mod, idea, philosophy, viewpoint, religion, plan, social practice, company, or non-human entity. You can also criticize public figures. Discussion: We all have flaws; pointing them out may very occasionally be useful, but is so often destructive and so outside the purpose of this community that it's better to simply disallow criticism of individuals in any form.

2. Sustained hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry tone: This rule isn't so much about the content of what you say, but how you say it - you must express yourself in a way that doesn't feel persistently hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry. For example, there is a difference between criticizing a game mod constructively, and criticizing it derisively; doing so derisively is against the rules. Discussion: This doesn't mean everyone has to be happy or have good opinions of everything and everyone all the time - it means that phrasing complaints in constructive ways and without a negative emotional tone leads to much better results all around. We don't want a community where anger, resentment, derision, and hostility are behavioral norms.

3. Do not respond to rule violations: If you see behavior that seems out of line to you, report the topic/post using the report button. Don't make a fuss about it in the topic itself. Do not message or respond to people who you think are breaking rules. Simply report them, and move on.

4. No self-promotion: No promotion of your own channel/mod/product. Limitation: You can mention your product or channel in context of other discussions, as long as it's a non-forced mention.

5. No penalty evasion: If your account is penalized, do not create another to get around the penalty. Doing so will result in more severe penalties.

6. No doxxing: Posting personal information about anyone is prohibited.

7. No impersonation: No impersonating other people or forum users.

8. No piracy: No posting of game pirate links or material. No discussions of game piracy.

9. No porn: No posting or linking of not safe for work (NSFW), pornographic, or X-rated material. Limitation: This doesn't ban all possibly racy photos (though they will be off-topic in most forums), only specifically pornographic ones.

10. No sexualization of minors: No sexualization of minors in any medium, or linking thereto.

The following rules affect modders only:

11a. No copying someone else's content or code into your mod without permission: You're not allowed to copy and paste code or content from any other mod, or from an expansion, into your mod without permission from the original author.

11b. No linking code for users who don't own the product it belongs to: For technical reasons, all our code is packaged up and shipped together, but it's not allowed to make a mod that accesses expansion-specific code unless that mod requires the expansion.

• Q: What is expansion-specific code? A: Code belongs to the product that runs it. If a line of code never runs without the expansion (and without dev tools or mods), it's expansion code.
• Q: But I can see the expansion code. Does that mean I can use it? A: No, for technical reasons all the code is shipped together, as is common practice in many games. However, code belongs to the product that runs it.
• Q: There are expansion checks in the code. If a piece of code doesn't trigger one, does that mean I can use it? A: Not necessarily. These checks are just reminders - they aren't applied before every single line of expansion code because that would be impractical. The rule is as described above.
• Q: Can I use expansion content in my non-expansion mod, if it's disabled for non-expansion users? A: Yes, this is a good solution. You can disable expansion-specific content with conditional patches or code checks. For example, code can check ModLister.RoyaltyInstalled before calling any expansion-specific Ludeon code.
• Q: There's some code where I'm not sure it's part of the expansion or not. A: We're happy to resolve any ambiguities. Please just contact us with the class and method name you're interested in and we'll see whether it runs without the expansion or not.
• Q: Are there any exceptions? A: Code for gendered apparel and the class Sketch are arbitrarily excepted from this rule.

11c. No close copying of expansion content: Don't make mods with close design/artistic/text similarities to an expansion but which don't require the expansion. This rule applies even if you didn't copy/paste anything directly and didn't link our code. Discussion: If you wrote a book about a wizard boy who goes to Bogwarts named Barry Lotter you'd get sued, even if you wrote all the words yourself. You can still write about a wizard boy, but it's well-established in law that there is a line when you're copying even if you didn't actually use copy/paste on your computer. I intend to be as flexible as I reasonably can, but I think everyone understands that having no rule at all about this is an invitation to problems. Just talk to us if there's any question. This rule has never been enforced and is really just a guard against bad faith copying. Unless you're acting in conscious bad faith you're almost certainly fine.

12. No hostile incompatibility: Your mod can't treat any other mod or product in a hostile way. For example, it can't deliberately break another mod's functionality, or deliberately stop the game from working if another mod is loaded.

I'm balancing skill learning rates.

It's tricky because the learning rate really depends on what the pawn is doing, which is something that only comes out in long test games.

My question to you, good players, is: What skills seem to have higher and lower learning rates? Is there any skill that seems really easy to level up? Any that seems really hard?

In principle I'd like to even them out so they all take similar amounts of effort/time to level.

Thanks for the feedback!

[this is not an open thread for new ideas, related to animals or not]

I'm investigating whether there's a problem with the current design of animals with regards to using them in combat. Some players do definitely use them, but I'm curious if more could be done to make this useful. So I'm opening the discussion and inviting players to answer the following questions:

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

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

3. How are you using animals in combat?

You don't have to suggest any solutions at all, of course. I';m very happy to just collect notes on player experiences. However, suggestions are also welcome. But, this is not an open thread for new ideas, related to animals or not. I'm only attempting small refinement-oriented adjustments, balancings, and fixes to animal combat mechanics. Off-topic posts are likely to get deleted.

Thanks all!

[This version is unstable]

RimWorld Alpha 18 unstable version is now available on the 'unstable' branch in Steam.

This version is unstable. There will be bugs, imbalances, and other annoyances. It won't be as good as the final build. Your game may get ruined by something really dumb. The game will update with no warning and anything can break or change. Please only test if you're willing to put up with that!

To use the build: In Steam, click RimWorld -> Properties - > Betas tab -> select 'unstable' branch. Restart Steam if necessary.

To report feedback: I love to hear play stories, balance feedback, and so on. Please feel free to post feedback in this thread, or make another thread. I can't reply to everything but I do read everything and take notes. The most useful feedback reports what happened in the game, and is based on longer experiences. Suggestions are cool, but stories and bug reports are really the best!

Please only post feedback specific to things that are new in A18; long-standing issues, suggestions and discussions should not be posted here please.

To report bugs: A bug is when the game isn't working as designed. If you find a bug, please report it in the Bugs forum, following the instructions in the How To Report A Bug thread. Much appreciated - public bug reports are essential!

Compatibility: Saved games from vanilla Alpha 17 should still be loadable, though some things may change. It'd be great if players could report any bugs with loading A17 maps. Complex mods won't be usable. Very simple mods may still load.

Announcement: I'm not trying to spread the news wide because the game is still unstable; I'd rather get some dedicated test time from the dedicated players here first! So of course it's fine to talk about it, but I won't be spamming all the PR channels with this. I will be spamming them when the alpha is actually done.

Video makers: I won't stop anyone from making videos of Alpha 18 in its unstable form, though I'd prefer you didn't. The experience may not be up to the standards of the public builds, because it hasn't had that level of testing, and I don't want people getting the wrong impression.

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Rough features list:

-New swamp biomes: Swamp biomes are hard to move through due to choking vegetation, and hard to build in due to swampy terrain. Many new plants were added to fill out these and other biomes.
----Tropical swamp
----Temperate swamp
----Cold bog

-New incidents:
----Meteorite impact. A meteorite impacts, leaving a lump of mineable ore.
----Aurora. A beautiful aurora lights up the night sky, improving mood.
----Tornado
----Peace talks quest
----World refugee quest
----Prisoner rescue quest

-Storyful combat:
----A major rework of melee combat, and a new way to report all combat interactions. Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat. During or after a fight, you can review the combat log to see what happened, to generate a richer story.

-Various research has been split up
----Gun research is now broken into several stages, so making advanced guns like assault rifles takes more research than making simple revolvers
----Melee weapon research is now broken into several stages

-New furniture
----Bedroll: Portable bed
----Dresser: Passively improves room
----Endtable: Passive improves room
----Various new table sizes

-New quest reward special items:
----Psychic emanator
----Vanometric power cell
----Infinite chemreactor
----Techprof subpersona core
----Healer mechanite superdose
----Resurrector mechanite superdose
----Orbital bombardment targeter
----Orbital power beam targeter

-Tribal content upgrade:
----Ikwa melee weapon
----War mask
----Tribal headdress
----Recurve bow
----Tribal hunter
----Tribal heavy archer
----Tribal berserker

-New world site components (used in various situations):
----Sleeping mechanoids
----Animal ambush
----Enemy ambush

-New mental breaks:
----Insulting spree. Randomly go around and insult people.
----Targeted insulting spree. Follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly.
----Tantrum. Go around randomly smashing furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
----Bedroom tantrum. Go to your own room and randomly smash furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
----Targeted tantrum. Go to destroy a single, specific, randomly-chosen, valuable item or building.
----Sadistic rage. Melee attack prisoners for a while. Fists only. Only occurs when there are prisoners to attack. Does not attack downed prisoners.
----Corpse obsession. Dig up a corpse and drop it on a meeting spot table or in a random high-traffic area. The mental break then ends.
----Catatonic. Collapse on the spot into a downed state with a psychological breakdown. Recover some days later. This can be implemented by a "catatonic breakdown" hediff.
----Jailbreaker. Colonist goes to a random prisoner (who is capable of prison breaking), and upon doing a special "spark jailbreak" action with them, induces an immediate prison break in that prisoner.
----Slaughterer. Slaughter random colony animal(s) periodically.
----Murderous rage. Hunt down a specific colonist or prisoner (randomly chosen) and attempt to kill them by melee attack. Uses melee weapon or fists, as equipped. Keep attacking until the target is dead.
----Run wild. The pawn basically starts acting like an animal. You can tame him to try to get him to rejoin.

-New mental inspirations. Basically reverse mental breaks - these give temporary bonuses to colonists in high moods.
----Work frenzy (1 day): Global work speed 2.5x
----Go frenzy (1 day): Walk speed 1.5x
----Shoot frenzy (3 days): Shooting hit chance improved as though the pawn is 10 skill levels higher.
----Inspired trade
----Inspired recruitment
----Inspired surgery
----Inspired art

-World features like lakes, mountain ranges, and bays are now detected and named. Names are displayed in the world view.
-Caves now form sometimes in mountainous maps. Inside there are special cave plants. There can also be dormant insect hives.
-Many new tale types were added. So, the game will record many new types of events, and colonists can make art about them. Art descriptions should be much more diverse.
-Crop blights now appear and spread over time instead of instantly destroying crops
-Spaceship is now bigger and has one more component, the sensor cluster
-Spaceship quest ending phase: When going to the hidden space ship to finish the game, the game does not end instantly on arrival. The map generates with the ship intact. To take off, first you must power up the ship, which takes some days, during which you must survive raids.
-Space ship construction now requires advanced components, which have their own tech tree and production method
-Split pistol into revolver and autopistol
-Boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel
-Added chemfuel generator, which generates electricity from chemfuel
-Artillery works differently now. There is one type of mortar, which can fire any type of shell, with each shell creating a different effect. The shells are explosive, incendiary, firefoam, and antigrain (a special high-tech warhead).
-Seasonal latitudes: Seasons now more reasonably adjust depending on latitude. Instead of flipping at the equator, there is a seasonless crossover zone.
-Redesigned alert letter types and sounds to be more specific.
-Pawns can now be banished. This is analogous to abandoning pawns in caravans.
-Technical: The save file now contains the actual contents of the planet map, instead of just the seed to generate it. This speed up loading, makes forward compatibility possible, and makes it technically possible to modify the world map during play.
-Many many tunings, bugfixes, and redesigns.