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Topics - bobucles

#1
For the most part rimworld traits fall into two hard categories, there are good trait and there are bad traits. Skilled players have learned through hard experience to filter the negative traits extremely harshly. After all nothing good happens and everything bad happens, and the bad things tend to happen VERY often. But if players never pick them then they may as well not exist. Their humorous shenanigans stop being part of stories.

So let's add some good to the bad. Give players reason to pick up a troubled colonist even if it's not much. Things like

Pyromaniac: this trait lets a colonist mysteriously start fires whenever it suits them. Add it as a skill unique to the pyro. Select them, click a special attack button, and they start a tiny fire wherever you want. Perhaps not the most useful thing but it also isn't that bad! Another option may be to have unique behavior bonuses such as gaining a mood bonus around fires and having a unique rec activity: enjoying campfire. It's a handful of nice things, and the price is that sometimes they'll burn stuff for free. ;)

Chemical fascination/interest: Very easily argued to be the worst trait in the universe, these pawns spend a quarter of their life in a broken daze seeking out enough drugs to kill themselves. The world is filled with drugs yet they only overdose days after joining your your colony so it's a wonder how they live at all. Aside from this trait being horribly broken and needing a fix (heh), why not add some fun to it? Let them be creative and craft/invent/spawn drugs on their own. Everyone knows that resourceful guy who always seems to pull something out of nowhere and druggie colonists can enjoy the same bit of flavor too. Who knows, maybe one day they'll mix up something similar to go juice? That's always nice.


#2
Ideas / Less free traps, more useful traps.
July 24, 2018, 12:58:55 PM
The recent changes to turrets mean that defenses become expensive very quickly. Traps however did not get these changes. They got a huge relative buff with the new armor system, which punishes ranged weapons severely and makes melee weapons much stronger than before. Because of this traps have become the de facto "free" defense of choice. Entire raids can be wiped out with a pile of traps, and the only upkeep cost is a little bit of your pawn's time. I'd like to suggest a few changes to traps to make them more useful yet less of a super defense at the same time.

1) Trap cost overhaul. Decrease the setup cost of traps to 25-35 material. Traps now take 5-15 resources to recharge after they get tripped.
Comment: The main idea is to boost traps early game while nerfing the piles of infinite kill traps that plague late game. For example with 30 cost and 10 recharge you can start off with over twice as many traps, and it only becomes more expensive than vanilla after four raids. That's maybe a half year or so of value, pretty decent.

2) Ensnare trap. Deals minor damage (0-5) and stuns creatures. Small/tiny creatures are stunned longer. Reduces melee accuracy/defense while inside.
Comment: The main goal is to offer a decisive advantage for melee defense. Stunned enemies are easier to attack and the penalties let you fend them off better. This kind of trap is ideal for caravans since it is easy to set up and lets you have something for defense.

3) Tear gas trap. Deals minor pain (10-20%) and afflicts Tear Gas, which reduces sight/manipulation for a few hours.
Comment: A type of IED that debuffs enemy raids and makes them easier to assault. No effect on mechanoids.
#3
The Campfire and Passive Cooler are resource commitments. Once you build them you can't get a refund and once colonists put resources in them they're gone forever. Therefore it is very important to control how resources go into them, but you can't tell pawns to avoid putting wood in these structures!

Please allow a simple forbid option so that players can control when these structures consume resources.
#4
Ideas / Simple hauling priorities.
July 13, 2018, 08:38:43 AM
I find there are two major types of hauling in Rimworld. There's the main hauling where your pawns look for a resource on the map and bring it to a stockpile, then there's the consolidation where they sort the items you already have. I find that once a pawn starts to consolidate, they give up on trying to find new items to haul. They can go for days or months without leaving the base because they need to, NEED to haul 5 meat onto the kitchen shelf and absolutely MUST do it again 5 seconds later. Haulers turn into a hornet's nest, juggling items around the inventory while precious food rots in the field. I'm stuck forcing manual priority on EVERY single rotting piece of food because my colonists absolutely refuse to do important things first. It's very annoying and renders the inventory priority system one of the most useless systems in Rimworld.

I'd like to suggest a minimum of two tiers of hauling priority. The top tier priority is to draw items from outside storage into storage. Pawns should ignore storage priority when they do this, and simply draw items into nearby storage as quickly as possible. Generally anything outside storage is something that's going to rot or decay and therefore pawns should always try to bring items into the safe haven of storage first and foremost. The secondary hauling priority is to organize storage. In this secondary mode the items are already in a safe location, and the task is merely to sort items between existing storage to make it pretty. Consolidating loot is generally not that important and if I REALLY need to sort items NOW I can just force a pawn to do it.

This 2 tier system should help pawns be less blatantly retarded. It is absolutely silly to be forcing pawns to pick up 20 stacks of rotting vegetables, berries, cloth and milk because a duster needs to go on a shelf.
#5
Ideas / Disturbed sleep renders barracks unusable.
July 09, 2018, 09:29:41 AM
Disturbed sleep single handedly ruins the barracks as a viable option for anything. You could have a perfectly silent room but the instant everyone isn't on synchronized schedules and goes to bed at the EXACT same time the entire barracks gets whacked with a -4 "disturbed sleep". Someone sneaks into bed 5 seconds late? Disturbed sleep.  The barracks already has a -5 penalty for rooming up but this debuff consistently whacks you for another -10 or more. It's safer to sleep in a 2 tile crack in the wall compared to an ornate barracks and that's ridiculous. Please change disturbed sleep to only be a response to "loud" activities such as social, gaming, snusnu, any work activity or pawns with annoying traits.
#6
Ideas / More gentle tiers of Food poisoning
June 30, 2018, 08:58:47 PM
The food poisoning system seems overly lethal to early colonies and mostly harmless to developed colonies. I'd like to propose some systems that help smooth the difficulty of nutrition across the board. So without further ado:

1) Thought: Food fatigue. A thought that stacks up as colonists eat the same meal over and over. Does nothing for the first few meals, but eventually colonist will get sick of it (ugh, corn again?!) and suffer a mood penalty. This thought stacks up with raw food, low quality meals and is drastically increased by food poisoning. Stacks are removed by having better and more diverse meals.

2) Food contamination more closely tied to bad ingredients. Food has a chance to be contaminated based on how a creature died (old/diseased animals) and dangerous types of filth (blood, vomit, etc.) Meat gets contaminated far more easily than vegetables.

3) Contaminated food may be discovered and discarded. Colonists with a good cooking skill will know what not to cook and what not to eat, at least for ordinary foods.

4) Minor food poisoning. Chiefly caused by poorly made or aged vegetable meals, high quality raw meat, or well made meals that colonists hate (human, insect). Causes unpleasant thoughts (that was GROSS), minor stat debuffs and possibly vomiting (loss of food). Causes large amounts of food fatigue.

5) Moderate food poisoning. Caused mostly by poorly made meals containing meat. Causes vomiting, reduced metabolism and sluggishness similar to cryptosleep sickness.

6) Major food poisoning. Caused mostly by meals humans should not eat (human, insect etc) but can be caused by contaminated food. Creates the severe bedridden sickness that happens currently.

So the results of these systems end up being:
- Early game colonies mostly have to worry mostly over raw food. Fresh food like berries and rations are in low supply but are safe to eat. Doing stupid things like eating sickly animals is asking to die, but ordinary maps rarely have a shortage of food to choose from. Unhappy thoughts get negated by low expectations.

- Mid game colonies have to avoid running out of healthy food. Resorting to human meat, insect meat or contaminated food is asking for trouble. Minor illnesses may stress the food supply and low quality meals will build up fatigue. Sickly raiders and animals bleeding all over your crops is a recipe for disaster.

- End game colonies mostly have to worry about food fatigue and contamination from all the blood spilled by raids. The most permanent solution is to upgrade to higher tier meals and protected food supplies, which are expensive.
#7
I enjoy making frequent trade runs with the new world system. However the moment my guys leave town they end up completely forgotten. Colonists swipe their rooms and couples forget who they were sleeping with. In some cases it's pretty detrimental as a "Greedy" colonist no longer remembers that he had a sweet bedroom and gets cranky about it.
#8
Bugs / Caravans: Addicts won't take their drugs
March 08, 2017, 08:44:11 PM
I have two colonists on a luciferium diet to take their pills every 6 days. They went out into a caravan with a full supply of pills,  but they absolutely won't take them. Naturally they went into severe withdrawl as a result.

Edit: This can even happen when they have the drug in their inventory.
#9
Bugs / [A16] Colonists form convoy on traps
March 08, 2017, 10:27:12 AM
The location they rally around is random (annoying in of itself) but they do love collecting around traps. When a trap inevitably springs the convoy gets broken.
Traders have been known to chill on traps, and blame me for getting delimbed.
#10
Ideas / Melee skill should be more meaningful
March 08, 2017, 07:16:16 AM
Currently there isn't much benefit to the melee skill. Characters have decent chances to hit regardless of skill and most of the lethality is in their weapon instead.

Some ideas
- evade chance: high skill gets an extra chance to dodge. Probably 1-2% per skill point.
- damage boost: universal damage multiplier. Like 80% base damage plus 5% per skill point
- melee damage resist: just plain tougher in combat. .5-1.5% per point
Characters with 20 melee skill should be extremely dangerous and feared on the field.
#11
Bugs / "unloading inventory" unloads assigned drugs
March 07, 2017, 02:31:33 PM
Some colonists carry spare drugs as part of their drug policy. When they return from a caravan trip they unload these drugs even though they are told to carry them.
#12
Bugs / Does armor work at all?
August 19, 2014, 01:19:04 PM
So I've been shooting my colonists to check out the health system. It seems that armor doesn't factor into damage calculations. All weapons seem to deal full damage regardless of what armor is equipped.

The test weapons were a glock 19 and a minigun. The armor was a spawned in armor vest and a spawned in power armor.
#13
General Discussion / Do turrets gain tactical bonuses?
August 08, 2014, 07:08:24 AM
Title says it all. Turrets are structures, so their behavior is likely different from pawns in combat. So do they gain any type of bonus from combat? I'm referring to things like:

- cover
- lighting/illumination
- distance

And any other factors that adjust aim. Your other pawns can end up incredibly durable when these bonuses stack up. But turrets seem to go down quickly even when they're backed off behind cover and all that.

To test, I drafted a guy to shoot at my own stuff. The game doesn't show the odds of him hitting anything, but a live fire exercise suggests that turrets don't get a cover bonus.
#14
Ideas / A bunch of the local X have gone insane.
August 07, 2014, 08:29:00 AM
This event is super fun, but after you run out of animals it becomes pretty pointless. Please, spawn an invasion of X whenever a psychic wave drives them insane.
#15
Bugs / Super lag!
August 02, 2014, 09:26:51 PM
This save file uses the AIO super mod 1.3.1.

The title says it all. I've been running this fortress for a long time now, with each raid getting more laggy than the last. But this latest raid has done it. On my laptop I peak out at 2 seconds per frame (my i7 920 desktop is marginally faster). This file may be useful for some debugging purposes.

The raid is a siege type with human invaders on the west side of the map. They fought the last bits of an AI core drop party to the south, and were wandering back up to do whatever they do. I think the monster lag started about when their supplies spawned. As you can see there are three huge piles of metal laying around the map, which are forbidden from use. My base also has a single choke point on its west side, where enemies cross the slow ice in order to invade. My next plan was to terraform it into a swamp trap. ;)

Looking at or away from the raiders does not change the frame rate. Zooming in or out is not effective. Paused or unpaused does nothing. The game is super slow no matter what. So I figured I'd post the colony, since it's a type of super slow behavior I have not seen before.


[attachment deleted by admin: too old]
#16
Ideas / Citizen waypoints/work points
August 01, 2014, 10:50:30 AM
When looking for a task, citizens will consider working around their current location. In some cases it means they will never go out to the work site where you WANT them to be. This is very obvious after they grab a lunch or go to bed, which in Rimworld is the quickest way for them to abandon the job.

Enter the waypoint! Its function is simple. Rather than looking for tasks using the civilian as a point of reference, they will look for tasks around the waypoint. It essentially becomes their "work zone". This way important locations can be highlighted and given an indirect priority. No other AI is forced; if they have nothing to do in that area, they won't bother going there.

Two commands are required for citizens. One to set a waypoint, and one to clear it.
#17
Ideas / Hauling hauling hauling!
July 31, 2014, 10:11:42 PM
Heya! I picked Rimworld up from a friend and have been losing weeks of my life. As such I've become fairly intimate with how the hauling system works in Rimworld. In short, it's become REALLY annoying. There are several behaviors in particular that have been causing me some strife, mostly due to the extreme inefficiency they cause. They are:
- Micro hauling. Citizens are given recurring tasks at their most miniscule level, rather than waiting for full hauls. In some cases they'll never leave the central base to pursue other hauling duties.

The biggest cause of micro hauling comes from farmers. They drop piles of 3/4/5 crops all over the place. While citizens are smart enough to gather piles in a local area, chances are EVERYONE has a 3x berry pickup task before the pile behavior kicks in.  Fixing this is pretty simple.

* Have crop gatherers hold on to their "basket" of crops until their stack is full or they have to drop it (harvesting another crop or walking away). Less crop spam means less hauling duties overall.

- Stockpile transfers. The threshold for moving between stockpiles is way too small, and citizens are FAR too eager to move goods which are already comfortable in storage. This is highly visible with the conveyor mod or with the mulcher. Similar items are a complete nightmare to use with current stockpile behavior.

I chose a few major angles for this issue. Put together they should both help the stockpile priorities behave in a desirable way, and prevent most cases of wasted hauling.

1) When an item is in a proper stockpile, it can ONLY pull from other stockpiles that are TWO or more priorities lower:
- Preferred pulls from low
- Important pulls from normal and low
- Critical pulls from preferred, normal and low. It should probably ignore the distance penalty for preferred storage.
Most mod machines are classified as important or critical storage, so citizens will never transfer out of these. Citizens will no longer run an endless conveyor loop pulling preferred storage back into the important loaders.

2) Citizens will have altered behavior based on priority. This is done by modifying the "work distance" that citizens use to pick a nearby storage. On average they'll want to keep moving items towards the highest priority storage, but will accept lesser options if they are convenient. This replaces the current system of "ignore everything but the highest priority storage".
- Citizens will go slightly out of their way to avoid storing low priority piles, (plus 10-20 tile distance) and will give more effort to pull out of them (minus 10-20 distance).
- Normal is normal.
- Citizens will put more effort to store in preferred piles (-10'ish distance), and will shy away from using preferred stock (+10'ish distance).
- Citizens want to fill up important piles (-20'ish distance), and hate using items from them (+50'ish).
- Citizens MUST fill critical piles (-40'ish) and will pull from them as a last resort (+100'ish).
New option?: Critical Store is like critical, but citizens will NEVER remove resources from them.

3) Important and critical piles are the typical target for a "storage to storage transfer". In addition, give them the following behaviors:
- Important piles will not be the target of a storage transfer until the important tile is 100% empty. No more hauling 2-3x wood for the mulcher a dozen times, one trip a day should suffice.
- Critical piles will not be the target of a storage transfer until the critical tile is 25-50% empty. Anything that uses fuel will keep a healthy supply without spamming hauls.

If you read this far, thank you. I look forward to what Rimworld has for the future!