Topics

campfires should not disappear when they have run out of fuel.

generate map in the background during character choosing to save time.

Can not feed starving sleeping animal that is not yet downed without
resorting to trickery.

Colonists seeking safe temperature should wait until not shivering
before choosing another job.

I would really like a history where I can see recently "cleared" event notifications.

No notification when a colonist or pet is being hunted often leads to
needless and annoying deaths.

It would be nice to be able to assign allowed foods.

Caravans should be able to stop to hunt without having to settle.

Caravans can't always choose direction of formation.

Interrupted colonists drop food.

Remember last set of options when generating new game...

"Honeymoon phase" and "got married to ..." seem to be redundant

Healers do not heal most deadly wounds first.

psychic pulse drives nearby animals mad...but they are all asleep...so nothing happens.

Instead of world percentage...maybe use different size worlds...

Colonists will change from doing what you told them...

It would be nice to be able to socialize a wandering/dazed character to try and "talk them down" without having to arrest them...

Should be a way to choose to prevent a guest from joining the colony.

Similarly, you should be able to expel an arrested colonist.

It would be nice if hoppers had use for more than just nutrient paste dispensers, for example, generators.

It would be nice to be able to cycle through tamed animals.

Poison Ship is not really a threat unless it lands in your fields.

You don't need to actually complete building a wall to make it impassable.

Food binges last too long...how many meals can someone eat before they
are stuffed?

Ranged wielding colonists should automatically drop their personal shields.

Most Blights should destroy only one type of crop.

Being able to list all items on map would be nice.  (For example, I
had a very nice weapon dropped for no apparent reason by one of my
colonists near the edge of the map.  I wandered what had happened to
it, but did not find it until much later when it had seriously
deteriorated...)

Tusks and thrumbo horns should be gotten as a result of butchering, not falling on the ground when the animal dies.

It would be nice to see the ages of animals in the animals window.  Also, it would be nice to be able to sort them.

Warnings should be given the moment any animal begins hunting a
colonist.  Waiting until the animal has actually attacked and wounded
the colonist is often too late.

I had a strange case of a colony animals (grizzly) hunting a berserk ally trader.  Since there was no real notification of this, I was unable to intervene in time, which lead to war. 

Cleaning growing zones.  It would be nice if cleaning and firefighting did not both depend upon the home zone.  I would like my colonists to fight fires in the fields, but not go out and clean them.

Animals tend to stay near the edges/corners

Pyromaniacs should get a mood boost from having an equipped molotov
cocktails or incendiary launcher.  If equipped when going on a
firestarting spree, they should use it.

Here is a brief summary of items that I find myself having to micromanage that I would prefer not to:

Colonists working while standing in an open door in the middle of winter.

Colonists seeking warm temperatures do not wait until they are no longer shivering to go back to work.  Thus, as soon as their hypothermia is no longer serious, they run outside and two seconds later have a hypothermia warning again, which they pay no attention to until they finish their next task.

In harsh environments one generally needs to hunt immediately at the beginning of the game, as larger prey will often leave very soon and it is rare for them to come back.

Opportunistic Hauling.

After combat in freezing environments where corpses won't decay having colonists hauling high valued weapons before corpses.

Post Victory Insanity Spiral.  It would be nice if there was a boost to moral for repulsing invaders, but instead one ends up with half your colonists being depressed about witnessing the death of the people that just attacked them.  All while dealing with seeing corpses lying around.  Victory should feel good.  Even if just for a short while.

Deconstructing items before constructing new items.  It would be nice if this was reversed.  Or if they were separate prioritizable tasks.

Preventing several haulers from all running to pick up three different piles near each other of something that can be carried by one.  Especially at the start of the game.

Beginning of game unforbidding of resources.  Hunting through the whole map to make sure that I have unforbidden all of the survival packages and steel is quite cumbersome.

Hunting with the survival rifle when animal is moving to edge of map and the hunter keeps running forward, stopping to shoot, and having the animal run out of range.

Controlling what food gets fed to prisoners.

In low food situations colonists choosing to eat raw corpses as opposed to butchering and cooking them.  Especially irritating when the perpetrator is the colony chef who after eating the corpse starts butchering and cooking meals for others, but then goes insane in part because he ate a raw corpse.

Dazed discarding of gear that then must be unforbidden.  Dazed discards should be unforbidden by default.

Other random suggestions:

It would be "nice" if there was a psycho hard break mode where the colonist destroys stuff instead of attacking people. 

Similar, it would be interesting if there was a berserk mode where the perpetrator would actually fire ranged weapons.

It would also be nice if mood boni and bogi gradually ended instead of suddenly ending.  If someone is sad because of the death of their pet, it usually doesn't just end, it gradually diminishes.  The mechanism could be similar to the health mechanism but for mental health.  Thus, annoyances would slowly go away (unless the irritant is still present).  It might be possible to even have a social interaction that would sooth peoples mental mood debuffs.  Thus a skilled social worker could help mend mental health the way a surgeon bandages wounds thus speeding up the recovery process.  Some  mood problems might even require counseling the way frostbite requires treatment.

I just noticed that released prisoners are still in restraints.  I am not sure this counts as a bug, but I think that they probably ought to not be in restraints once released.

Colony Management Inc. would humbly like to request an upgrade to the colony management software currently being used in all our outer planet colonies.  Specifically, we request that restricted area designations for colonists be non exclusive so that a colonist can be allowed access to multiple areas simultaneously.  This will allow our colony managers to more efficiently allocate colonists and livestock to areas and tasks that suit their needs.  For example, those colonists choosing to consume the flesh of their enemies could be relegated to do the bloody business of chopping up raider scum in areas separate from the normal butchering facilities, thus ensuring that no squeamish colonists are assigned the task.  Livestock areas could also be easily switched around.  Common areas could still be assigned to everyone.
While technically the same thing can be accomplished using the current colony interface by assigning each colonist/animal their own area and editing them individually, this is a cumbersome task.  We believe great efficiency improvements will be seen by our colony managers with this one change. 

Thanks,
Colonoy Management Inc.
"Your one stop shop for colony management!"

It would be nice to be able to disarm traps without having to deconstruct them.  If you have several traps placed next to each other, when a raider dies, he will often drop his gear on live traps, and retrieving the gear can be quite hazardous if you don't deconstruct the trap first. 

I'm a little behind the times, what with Alpha 11b coming out, but here are my accumulated suggestions/comments from playing Alpha 11 in no particular order:

Allow group selection to attack target. 
Add priority to blueprints.  It would be nice to be able to specify that certain items be built first.
Add priority to healing different wounds/infections.
It would be nice if there was a way to set one's own default Prisoner Settings.
Currently flooring takes as many resources as building a wall.  This seems too much.
It would be nice if there was a way to jump to combat whenever time slows.  Especially, if combat is not involving your colonists.
Manhunter Packs should kill off local wildlife and eat it.
Doctors will sometimes forget what they are doing if they have to move stuff out of the way before performing operations.
prisoner restraints don't decrease melee chances significantly if at all.  Someone in handcuffs should really have a harder time hitting someone.
It would make it easier to manage colonists if you could select multiple areas, not just one.
I have seen a case in the middle of a manhunter pack where a Warg went mad.  Unfortunately, no save, and didn't really effect play, just a little odd.
Visitors come in a group but often leave as individuals, sometimes heading in opposite directions.
It would be nice to be able to command a colonist to pick up a meal for their inventory
When "Seeking Safe Temperature" should stay as long as they are still suffering any temperature based health bogi.
It would be nice to be able to put clothes on unconcious people.
The ice sheet biome is nice and hard, I like it!

Overall, these are nitpicking details and I have to say the game is really coming along quite nicely.  Well done!

It would be nice if artists/craftsmen could make jewellery and other wearable art.  It could provide a small portable beauty bonus.  Or maybe a slight mood buff.  Or both...

Berserk colonists leave doors open behind them, even autodoors.  There currently is no way for sane colonists to do this without dumping something in the door to keep it open.  It would be nice to have the opportunity to do by choice what berserk colonists do in their rage.  Some suggestions follow based upon that train of thought.

1) auto-doors should close behind berserk colonists.
2) It should be possible to toggle doors to remain open.
3) It would be nice if doors could have components like locks (similar to organs in pawns) that could be damaged separately.  A door with a broken lock would remain open.  Thus, raiders might be able to get past a door without destroying the whole door.  Like attacks on pawns, they wouldn't be targeted attacks, but there at least would be a random chance that the lock gets busted.  To fix the door you could then just repair the door, not build a whole new one.

Every once in a while, there comes a time when I want a colonist to haul something, heal someone, or do something, only to discover that the activity is currently reserved by someone else, or perhaps the item is forbidden.  This takes a few extra steps to free up the activity for use by the person I want to do it.  I would like to suggest a new UI feature, namely, using the shift key as a means to override the reservations of other colonists or the forbidden status of an item.  There would not need to be any additional menu options cluttering up the context menu, but you still could avoid chasing around after the colonist who is reserving the task, and also avoid accidentally overriding something that you don't want to override.

It seems to me that prisoners in restraints are far too good at beating up people.  I just had a prisoner with melee:2 deal a whole ton of bruise damage to a colonist with melee:12.  The colonist did inflicted 10 bruises to the prisoners 9.  If it weren't for the fact that the prisoner was still recovering he could have seriously knocked out the colonist.  It seems that all restraints do is slow the prisoner's walking speed.

To this end, here are my suggestions for restraints:
1)Reduce melee combat to hit chance for restrained individuals.
2)In the prisoner menu have an "enhanced restraints" option.  Basically, instead of just cuffing the feet you cuff their hands as well.  Doing so should have a significant bogi to mood but make melee combat almost impossible. 
3)Add further options via the research tree... ball and chain, explosive neck collars.
4)Have a mechanism for prisoners to escape their restraints.  Maybe based on their intelligence and dexterity (research and crafting skills?).  Once free, they ought to try and pick up weapons(no more using your prison as your armory) and attempt to escape.

It would be nice if meals with different ingredients were kept separate.  This is especially important for human meat, but it would be nice for all meals.

I would kind of like to see enemies that are fleeing dropping some of their gear.  Obviously, they should attempt to flee with their gear first, but if they continue to get hit, it would be nice if they started dropping things in order to run faster.  Of course, for this to work, there would need to be a reasonably significant penalty to speed for wearing/carrying too much stuff.  Ok, dropping pants to run faster would be silly, but weapons, meals, personal shields, helmets, even armor might be dropped by someone who just wants to get away...

Roofs are a perennial topic of conversation and there are several threads that have suggested various ways to modify them.  I have decided to add my $0.02 here.  Without going full 3d, which is a non-starter, there still are several things with roofs that I think could be improved, especially if roofs are turned into things made of stuff.  So here are my combined suggestions, some combed from previous posters:

Include a "Roof View".  No more hunting for that one square that will not roof and is letting out all the cold/warm air.

Have roofs be constructed, like floors, not autocreated.  The construction ought to be fairly quick, but dependent on the type of roof.  Allow roofs (and floors!) to be deconstructed.  No more having to place "no roof zones" over the existing sealed buildings to prevent collapse when deconstructing it.  Obviously, roof deconstruction should be prioritized over wall deconstruction.

Add a button(like the auto home zone on/off button) for auto-roof blueprint generation  with the ability to select a default roof material (including none).  The roofs would still need to be built.

A warning when the last support for an existing roof is marked for deconstruction/mining.

Different roof types that might do different things like solar panels for power generation or glass panels for green houses.  I imagine that modders would have a field day if the capability was built in to the engine.

I would also consider allowing collapsing roofs to effect adjacent cells with some probability, so, for example, a collapsing roof could actually seal a tunnel off some of the time (but not always!).  This would allow for more sophisticated traps, natural cave-ins, and other fun events.

And finally, the eponymous suggestion:
Allow Roofs to be made of stuff.  Roofs from different materials could have different properties such as:
1)Strength/Hp and protection from mortar fire,
2)Insulation
3)Flamability
4)Construction time
5)Distance from nearest support before collapse

The last one could make mining/cave building more interesting.  Overhead mountain/natural rock roof types might only allow a very short maximum distance(say 1) from the nearest wall and require bracing with some other roof type if you want to have a large underground facility.  It could even depend on the type of rock, so granite might allow larger caves by default while sandstone might have a tendency to collapse.  Want a really large open area, use plasteel bracers...

Thoughts? 

Currently, if you want to see the health of your potential characters you need to dig deep into the info screen (two clicks).  I find it the most useful information that is not currently displayed.  In particular if I am randomizing for a particular trait, say fast walker/jogger, and then get a character that is significantly slowed by a pre-existing injury, it is quite annoying.  I would have the create character screen list all pre-existing health conditions.  From a realism stand point, a basic health check up would likely be part of any recruiting scheme.

Thoughts?

I have compiled a short list of things in vanilla alpha 9 that I find that I need to micro-manage, most of which are not adding to the experience.  I realize that some of these can be addressed with mods, but I think that these AI/UI issues should be fixed in the vanilla.

The good: 
I find that while I generally have to micro-manage combat, overall this is a good thing.

The Bad: 
Harvesting wild plants.  It should be possible to set up regions where your plant cutters will gladly harvest whatever plants are fully grown, regardless of whether you planted them or not.

Multiple haulers going after same collection of goods when one is sufficient and the other should go after a different set.  This is mostly a problem near the beginning when I am trying to get all the survival meals out of the mouths of Muffalos, but it also effects the random pod drops later. 

Opportunistic Hauling.  On a similar note, when someone has finished a job far from the main base, or decides to take a break to rest or eat, for maximum efficiency I need to tell them to haul items that are on their way.  It would be nice if they naturally would do this.

Completing Construction tasks:  I want the geothermal generator built, please build it.  Great, you hauled metal to it and have now decided to go back to doing something else, please go back and prioritize constructing the generator again.  and again. and again.   It would be nice if once a task had been set to prioritize, the colonist would automatically prioritize the related follow on tasks unless they are dying,starving,being attacked or about to drop from exhaustion.

Deconstructing v. Construction.  For some reason my colonists think that deconstructing a wall half way across the map is more important than building anything.  It would be nice if they would change how they prioritize building/deconstruction, so that they worked on what was closest first regardless of whether it was a construction or deconstruction task.

Prioritizing working on nearby furniture with same raw materials.  When you instruct a colonist to prioritize working on an item with other items or walls nearby that have similar raw materials, the colonist will happily haul the raw materials to all of them, which is great in that it saves hauling time.  Then the colonist will pick something random to construct, not the item that you asked them to prioritize.  This is bad.

Hunting creatures that are running away.  When hunting creatures that are leaving the map or crossing the map, my hunters tend to run just until the creature is in range, then start aiming.  With the survival rifle, by the time they are ready to fire, the creature will be out of range, so guess what, they repeat the process, never firing a shot, but running all the way across the map.  It would be nice if they actually got close enough to shoot it.  It is quite possible to do this manually through drafting them, telling them where to go and what to fire at, but the hunters should do this on their own.

Clothing/weapon Management.  A lot has been said about this by others to which I heartily agree.  With fraying clothing/weapons and other gear, colonists should automatically pick up demonstrably better items on their own.

Doctoring choosing which one is most likely to die and treating first.  Doctors will decide to treat the nearest patient, but they should really choose among the most likely to die soonest, at least amongst the nearby patients.  Triage would be nice.

So, you can manually deal with triage on the battlefield by dropping emergency medical sleeping spots for colonists and guests out near where they have fallen and "rescuing" them and setting a doctor/medic to bandage their wounds (while forbidding any medicine so that the doctor doesn't run all the way across the map).  It would be nice to be able to stabilize wounds, preventing death by blood loss, and then work on them later to improve the bandages from poor to good.  Also, for enemies, there is no choice but to haul them back to base as a prisoner, which can be fatal.

Eating priorities are just really whack.  I am hoping the changelog indicates that A10 will fix some of this. 

But... not yet listed on the changelog...
Starving colonists will not eat food in prisoner room unless ordered to.  When starving, colonists should eat whatever they can get their grubby hands on that has not been marked forbidden.  And if starving enough, they should eat even forbidden foods.  And they should pass out and "need rescue" from starvation long before they die from it.

And feeding prisoners can be weird.  Occasionally I have had prisoners die because the warden takes them food while they are asleep, then immediately picks it up and takes it to a different prisoner.  If this happens a few times, the first prisoner dies of starvation.  I can avoid this by drafting my warden and removing the sleeping spot (or changing it to colonist), but this just seems wrong.

The Ugly, things that I can't fix even by micro managing:
Which wounds to heal first.  Instead of healing the most deadly wounds, doctors seem to heal them in some random order.  Colonist bleeding out from a major gun shot wound to the torso and several slight squirrel scratches can die because the doctor thinks that the scratches need to be patched first.

Similarly, there is no way to stop a colonist from bleeding out if they are the only caring capable colonist.  Colonists that are not unconscious should be able to attempt to patch themselves, even if it is really awful.

Ok, hopefully the powers that be will find these observations useful.  Please feel free to add your own list of micro-management hell in alpha 9 vanilla.

 Has anyone else noticed that the AI will often send pawns straight through the middle of deep water, thus slowing them down a ridiculous amount?  This not only results in slow colonists, but Animals getting bogged down in water, and perhaps more importantly, raiders and mechanoids.  With raids this can easily lead to an otherwise challenging raid becoming simple since half the raiders fall far behind their compatriots.  I have not been able to repro this reliably, as the AI seems to recalculate things on save/load.

I would like to see items reorganized in the stockpile interface and slightly change the categorization of a few items.  The hierarchy should be changed to start with three top levels: Perishable, Degradable, and Rugged.  Beneath Perishable would be everything that can suffer from decay unless refrigerated/frozen.  Beneath Degradable would be anything that can be eroded by being left outside.  Finally, Rugged items would be anything that can be safely left outside(in all current biomes) and will not degrade with time.  This would allow making specialized stockpiles a bit easier to designate since the most commonly associated items would be under one heading (Food and Medicine in the freezer.  Apparel and weapons inside storage rooms, metal and stone blocks outside.)  An example of the top level hierarchy follows.

Perishable
    Food
    Medicine
    Body Parts
    Corpses
Degradable
    Items
    Weapons
    Apparel
    Textiles
Rugged
    Raw Materials
    Chunks   
Note that with this, wood would move from degradable to rugged, which to me makes sense. 
Comments?

I have written a brief perl script to make copying and zipping files for bug reporting a little easier.  The script will look for the most recent save file and most recent world file as well as the rimworld log and copy them into a new directory which it then tars and gzips.  Written on ubuntu but should work on most linux systems.  You may need to change the $config_dir and $log_file on other systems.  Obviously, if you are using multiple worlds and happen to not be using the latest one, it will grab the wrong world.

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<start historical rant> Alpha beavers threaten to decimate every tree in the region.  Shouldn't that be every tenth tree? <end rant>