Topics

[The Fog Chamber]

We already have the random raids and joy aspects nailed in this place. I think there should be some micro-management of the forum to adequately represent the RimWorld atmosphere!. I suggest child boards for frequent suggestions.*

Let us create one for all the FoW debates. All the threads can be gathered there. We can call it The Fog Chamber and then everyone who wants to can go fight it out in there and leave the main board for new ideas and less emotionally invested debate.

What frequent suggestions do you think should have their own board and what mildly amusing pun that gets less and less amusing every time you read it name would you give it?



*Please Note: This suggestion is not serious but should be contextualised with a British accent and too much time available. Amusement levels may fall as well as rise. Interest Rate of 0% applies for duration of perusal. Conforms to international standards on self-referential meta-humour and contains 100% of the RDA of joke that is mildly amusing at first but that gets less and less amusing every time you read it. Thank you; I'm here all night!

I think it would be fun to add a little bonus to escaping the planet. I think that if you get your three original castaways into a ship and off the planet, that there should be a chance that on the next map you play you may find them in a hidden chamber, as well-equipped and as skilled as they were when they lifted off. Naturally, they would be hostile to your current colony and they would not surrender (because, honestly, that's how we all play them) so you'd have to kill them. It would be a challenge and also a nice little bonus from the equipment point of view.

[Iron Ore]

I've been thinking about future resource additions, and have assumed there will be some, so I decided to start a Poll. There's no closing date, it's just to see what people like. At the moment you can have up to ten votes - but you don't have to use them all - and you should be able to change them about as/if other options appear.

I've made a list of some options already, based both on my thoughts and things others have suggested on the forums. If there is something else you would like to see up there, please post a brief overview of the suggestion and I'll try to update the options periodically.

I am sure that some of these things can already be found in mods, but here we are talking about resources we would like to see added to vanilla. Below are the reasons I have for the choices included in the initial tranche.

Iron Ore - Steel should be a research product and Iron Ore should be the resource. Smelt to ingots for Wrought Iron. Smelt again for Cast Iron. Research and smelt for Steel. Possible further research for Carbon Steels and Stainless Steels.

Copper - Hugely useful resource that also looks great. Needed for power systems such as turbines and transformers, heavily used for conduits, and pretty ubiquitous in power electronics. Used to make alloys such as Bronze and Brass. Copper smelting led to Iron smelting so it could be a nice addition to the Crafting and Research trees. Would be a nice texture for weapons. Also used in glassmaking and ceramics to provide colouration.

Ceramics - Clay is found all over the place in real life. It could be mined or extracted from soil types. Useful for floor tiles or Bricks, it could also be used for Art or Crafting to make statues and clay utensils for export. Clay could be used with Bones to make Bone China for a labour-intensive but high-cost crafting product.

Bricks - Bricks are a simple and sturdy construction material that might be ideal for flat biomes especially. It could have strength somewhere between Wood and Stone but low flammability. Bricks could be manufactured from Clay or from Mud (finally, something to do with all the mucking fud!) and could either be naturally dried or kiln-baked.

Bones - Bones could be used in the manufacture of Knives, Shivs, Clubs, Spears and Bows. Bone could also be used for Art to produce Scrimshaw pieces. It could also be used with Clay to make Bone China.

Glass - Could be used for windows and greenhouses. Could be made from Sand. Might be essential for the construction of Solar Panels or bottling Beer for export markets. Decorative Art Glass for beauty buffs or trade also spring to mind, as do research projects for Glass Fibre, Lenses, and Fibre Optics.

Silk - Harvested from Mulberry Bushes. It could provide an intermediate between Cloth and Devilstrand both in value and growing time. Would be good for those biomes where the season doesn't allow for Devilstrand. Mongols used Silk to great effect to lessen the danger of arrow wounds as it twists around rather than breaking, allowing the projectile to be teased rather than pulled or cut out. Silk is a good insulator. Could also be used for high beauty Carpet.

Hemp - The hippy terra-former's dream plant. Hemp can be grown in most biomes and could provide any or all of the following: Textiles, Oil, Flour, Medicines, Recreational Drugs.

Bamboo - Better than wood, it should definitely be available in suitable biomes. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants around and, according to Wikipedia, Bamboo has a higher compressive strength than wood, brick, or concrete, and a tensile strength that rivals steel. Bamboo Mortars could be fun and a research requirement for later steel mortars. Blowpipes might also be introduced if raids looking for captives become common. Blowpipes could be used to incapacitate pawns. Also: Pandas. I sooo want to hunt Pandas.

Grapes - A good resource for Wine and as a Meal ingredient. Winemaking could take a lot longer than beer and vines would take a lot longer to grow than Strawberries or Hops. Very good for Relaxing Socially, could be used for a new Gourmet Meal.

Bears - We know about Wolf-packs, what about Bears? Could be the animal equivalent of a Centipede - very hard to kill and dangerous up close but able to move a bit faster. Would only be found as individuals. Bears provide a lot of good meat, a lot of good skin. Also, there are Bears for almost every biome: Grizzlies, Polar Bears, Black Bears and of course... PANDAS! Did I mention that I want to go Panda hunting?

Ice - Ice and compacted snow for structures in sub-zero biomes. Smooth ice floors for extra speed? Igloo type building or Ice Hotels (go look 'em up).

I have long been confused by the apparent gaps in the medical tree. We have colonists with bionic arms and eyes, and surgeons capable of fitting them, but loads of simple medical procedures are somehow impossible. For instance, we surely should be able to fashion an equivalent to a peg leg for the arms, and fashion a hook for replacing missing hands. These procedures are old (who doesn't love a pirate with a hook?).

Furthermore, we get a lot of facial disfigurements which seem to have no real effect and also get no plastic surgery. In my latest colony, I have a sniper with a fetish for shooting noses off raiders, so about half my colonists have no nose (and yes, they smell terrible). In general, people who suffer sudden disfigurement would probably have some acute emotional problems, and often would have on-going emotional issues. In our colonies, however, people seem entirely unaffected. In historical terms, plastic reconstruction of missing ears and noses through grafting has been about since 2000 BCE. Or, if rhinoplasty is too much, how about prosthetic noses (think of Tycho Brahe and his brass nose).

I think tweaking this side of medicine would definitely be a positive move.

I was hoping someone could tell me the answers to these two questions:

1) Is there any way to remove a thin rock roof without simply mining everything to the point where it is unsupported? I figure that, since we can mine and can construct roofs, we might be able to cut away the overhangs. There have been a number of times when I can't fit in that "last" wind turbine because of a couple of squares of TRR - and my compulsion for symmetry takes it very badly.

2) Is there a set, variable 'height' for overhead mountain or is it simply an absolute? I often like to remove small rock formations near my chosen base and it's quite irksome when I have a couple of squares of mountain left. So, if I keep mining and collapsing 'overhead mountain' squares, will I eventually rid myself of the fallen rock columns that form or is this simply a sisyphean task I'm taking on?

I would like to take a moment to remember Coffey the Mindwipe who has, today, met a grisly end, beaten to death by a horde of screaming madmen from the local tribe.

When Coffey first arrived and announced he was joining the colony there was some trepidation expressed, especially since this colony was seeded with the three youngest colonists I could find and Coffey was 76 when he appeared, naked, trembling, and clutching an almost expired wooden shiv. Coffey was frail, had a bad back, and was woefully under-talented. He liked cooking though, and was a mean shot (a double-flamed twelve on the Tynanometer). It was, however, a leap of faith for the three teenage colonists to give a gun and control of the stove to someone almost twice their combined ages and who also had two cataracts and dementia.

Still, two years on and Coffey had risen through the ranks to become a talented chef, knocking out lavish meals left, right, and centre. True, there was a certain amount of wandering involved, but Coffey earned his way every day. When he wasn't slaving away in front of a red-hot stove, or butchering muffalo in the ten-degrees-below cold room, you could generally hear him off in the distance, relentlessly pursuing a tortoise with his faithful machine gun in hand.

Coffey never took a day off sick, or partook of too much of his famed homebrew, and he always took time to deliver food and a friendly word to captured raiders. But he was no pacifist. When the colony was under threat, Coffey was always in the vanguard for the home team (not least because he had to be really, really close to be able to see the enemy). He was shot, stabbed, and clubbed repeatedly but his optimism pulled him through and, even after everyone saved up to buy him a bionic eye, he still kept to his famous tactic of drooling a bit and then charging forwards spraying machine-gun rounds with equal contempt at everything in sight.

Poor Coffey, he finally got too close. Some say he did not spot the thirty or so savages who crashed through the gates, some say he saw them but did not care to flee, others yet posit that he was a daft old man who couldn't tell a squirrel from a boomrat.

All we'll ever really know is that Coffey lived a long and eventful life and died defending the things he cherished: a freezer full of dead animals and the sound of gunfire.

Goodbye, Coffey, we will miss you.

Eventually, I would like to see breakdowns have more interesting, and possibly more challenging, symptoms. Unfortunately, my colonists are generally not too unstable, so I only ever seem to get them wandering, bingeing, or, in the case of prisoner fails, going berserk. However, I think there is room for some occasional 'special' psychoses. For instance:

A colonist who goes through a cathartic experience might, in a small number of cases, get a permanent low-level increase to their artistic skill - or a massive temporary skill-boost or a temporary halving of their ability if they are normally very artistic.

A colonist might develop an obsession with only eating raw food, say, for a couple of weeks or, even worse, only one type of raw food (usually whatever you could grow but aren't).

A colonist might develop a  week-long, burning hatred for one species of animal and insist on melee attacking any they see during that time or, for real high stakes, might do the same with members of your friendliest neighbouring faction.

A colonist might temporarily 'defect' to the Mechanoid cause the next time they feel the psychic drone of a crashed ship-part.

A colonist might insist on wearing no clothes for a week and sleeping outside - which could be a real problem in the tundra.

I just think that, with a limited number of colonists, mental health could have a much more interesting role in providing minor, but not normally colony-threatening, challenges between raids.

I've been thinking about the possibilities offered by the power conduit system and thought there might be potential for an extension to it. This would involve introducing new research possibilities as well as new functionality. The way I am imagining it, research projects would unlock new types of conduit that it would be possible to overlay on sections of the power network. Each upgrade would require an extra resource as well as a previous research completion and, of course, the cost of the basic conduit.

1) Underfloor Heating
Requirements: Geothermal Power
Cost: 1 plasteel per length.

The heating conduit would have to run directly from a geothermal power plant to be effective, you can't just put in isolated pockets. The heat provided would be set from a core thermostat at the power-plant end.

2) EM Field
Requirements: Ship Power Plant
Cost: 1 Uranium per length.

EM Field Conduits would have to be directly linked to your ship power plant by normal conduits and would have to be placed outside. Their effect, when engaged, would be to strip shields from anyone passing over them. They would not do any damage at all. The idea here is simply to give one a fighting chance against overwhelming melee raids.

3) Remote Turret Control
Requirements: Communications Console & AI Core, Plasteel Turrets
Cost: 1 Gold and 5 Silver per length.

The plasteel turrets would need to be directly linked to your communications console to become aim-able and a colonist will have to man the comms. All connected turrets will now be independently aim-able.

I imagine that the conduit view would be the same as normal (grey/blue) but with a toggled overlay for the 3 upgraded types so you can see their respective paths and networks (in my head it's red for 1, green for 2, and gold for 3).

I don't think any of these ideas would be game-breakers, and I've tried to ensure that they would only be possible at later stages in the game, and would like to know what people think.

I should stress that I have no idea how difficult or simple this would be to implement (everything Tynan does seems like magic to me), so please be gentle when you point out any problems with my blithely ignorant approach!