Topics

A complete and utter reworking of animal handling as we know it. As they stand now animals are bordering on useless except as pack animals for caravans or for their wool.

Make animal handling a full time profession. Taking care of animals should be a full time job for one of your pawns, but the benefits should be worth it.

Milk and egg laying animals should produce more frequently. Cows and hens especially. You should be getting several buckets of milk per cow and at least one egg per hen a day.

Automatic slaughter and controlled breeding. Your animal handler should slaughter most male animals and some female animals as soon as they reach peak size, leaving some leftover to breed. The breeding animals get slaughtered when they next batch of breeding animals comes of age. The breeder also controls the breeding process, making sure females of age are always gestating unless a population limit has been reached.

Fertilizer. Animals crap a lot. It's the animal handler's job to clean it all up. This creates buckets of fertilizer that growers can apply to crops to give them a small boost to growth speed.

Hauling revamp. No more making advanced intelligence animals haul automatically for you. Dogs and other advanced intelligence animals should accompany hunters and bring back game for them so they can stay in the field longer, though. Pack animals like cows, muffalo and llama should also be used for packing on map as well. Animal handler will teach them basic pack ability and haulers will grab their reins and walk them around, using them to carry large amounts of goods around the base.

Muffalo are used to carry goods in caravans, right? So why can't we use them to efficiently haul around base?

My suggestion is that a colonist with hauling task feeds a tame muffalo, then has the muffalo follow them around as they collect stuff to haul back to the stockpile. The muffalo holds everything to be carried until full, then colonist takes the muffalo back to stockpile to deposit the goods.

Something to remove the dead person debuff and maybe give colonists a mood boost when wearing clothing that's been recently cleaned. Does such a thing exist?

EDIT
Seems like it doesn't. Can someone make a mod like this? It'd be much appreciated!

We should be able to repair clothing using a tailoring bench and the same type of cloth that was used to make the item in the first place. Pawns with the Tattered Clothing bad thought should be able to head to the nearest tailoring workbench to repair the clothing themselves or drop their clothing off their to have it repaired and go get new clothing while someone else repairs it.

Alternatively, we could be allowed to deconstruct damaged clothing for cloth scraps of that type. I have so much synththread clothing that no one ever wears because it's too damaged. The only thing to do with it at that point is sell it, and that's barely worth the effort since you're only liable to get a few silvers for it anyway because of the damage. Be better to just have a job at a tailoring bench set to take apart clothing below a certain level of wear and tear in order to claim the cloth for reuse.

Just a small tweak to the job system. I find the job priority system as it stands rather cumbersome for dealing with specific tasks that need doing and would like the ability to assign colonists official jobs that they take priority in doing over all others without having to go in and engage manual settings for the whole base. Would rather just make one colonist the official cleaner and have them doing that job all the time as opposed to having to always go in and switch to manual priority override every single time I want the floors cleaned. It interrupts work flow when I do that.

The comments section in the news section got me to thinking. Gonna go ahead and copy/paste what I said in the news section over here.

"Straight up cloning I'm unsure but think it'd be too easy, but what about birthing vats? Colonists that like each other can mix in their genetics and childhood memory scans. Child spends a few months growing in the vat. Out pops a teenager (whatever the minimum age for colonists in the game is. I think I've seen them as young as fourteen or fifteen?) who has some small amounts of skills based on the uploaded memories and is ready to work. Could limit it by requiring some manner of Slug Plug that can only be purchased from passing traders? Basically a ready made recipient for genetic material that takes the genes and then grows into a fully formed human after some time. Could be a good way to get more pawns without having to convert captives or buy slaves."

Thoughts?

Basically, food production generates waste materials. Butchered corpses leave behind bones, cartilage, organs and sinew. Shucked corn leaves behind empty cobs and husks. Peeled potatoes leave behind skin. All harvested plants leave behind plant matter of some kind that needs to be cleared before more crops can be grown. Meals that are eaten don't always get eaten fully and may leave behind leftovers of some kind if there was more food on the plate than could be eaten or if not all of it was edible.

Most, if not all, of these items that get left behind are not fit for human consumption and are an eyesore. It can either be hauled off and left to rot in a dumping stockpile or you can setup secondary industries for disposing of this waste in a more efficient manner.

First industry would be composting. Build a bin and dump it all in to create fertilizer than can be spread around fields to improve the soil for a short time. Second industry would be converting it all into animal feed. If you have dogs, hogs or wargs you can just deliver leftover bits of corpses to the animal feeding bin for a quick snack that the meat lovers can gnaw around on for hunger satisfaction. If you want to get fancy, you can instead make Kibble. Building an animal feed workshop will let you grind up all leftover food waste into a nutritious Kibble that can be given to your animals. Meaty Kibble for carnivores. Vegetarian Kibble for herbivores. Regular Kibble for omnivores.

Inspired by the Regarding Hypothermia thread. Build a fireplace out of stone or a brazier out of steel with a special bill that causes pawns to keep it constantly filled with wood within a certain temperature range. Or to cook simple and fine meals in the event electricity isn't an option.

I like some of the character's hair styles and sometimes finding myself lamenting the fact that they have to wear anything for added head protection. So I'd suggest adding some kind of mode that makes worn head gear invisible to the player for aesthetic purposes.

The game lists chickens as herbivores, but they're not. They're omnivores and can eat just about anything. It feels pretty weird that the chickens I have won't even touch the meat stocks after all the vegetables have run out when I feed my chickens irl leftover meat all the time. They freaking LOVE leftover burgers.

Also, adding the ability to scratch around in the dirt and grass for worms and other insects would be awesome. Make chickens less dependent on the same food sources the colonists and other animals use. If I pen chickens up in a large open field, I shouldn't even really have to feed them anything unless I want to fatten them up. They'll go to town on whatever grasses, seeds and bugs they find.

Mood effects like Sold Prisoner and time based events like Cold Snap are moving at a much slower pace in relation to the actual passage of time. My colonists are still bummed over a prisoner I sold a month ago, even though the mood said it would expire in expire in 10 days (currently says it'll expire in 8.7 days) and we've been experiencing a cold snap for almost a month now but the tooltip says it's only lasted for four days (looking over at my game running in background I see it just ended now, on December second. It started on November seventh).

Any thoughts? Is this a known issue?