Topics

I have about 1100hrs in Rimworld, there are some rough edges in the game that cause me to alt-f4 in a commitment game because I feel that it's basically just not my fault. Here are the most common ones:

1. Color coded mood bar, seriously just make that mod official. Someone with a mood so low that they are about to set fire to your antigrain warhead should not be represented by a slightly different shade of grey. Mood management is what everything else in the game revolves around, it should be crystal clear to the player at all times where they stand on this.

2. Luciferium need does not alert you until the pawn is going to go berserk, and at that point it's generally too late. Additionally I've seen pawns not take the drug when on a 5 day schedule. When the drug policy is instead set to take for addictions, I've seen pawns take it when their need bar is full.

3. Raids should (imo) alert you briefly *before* the raiders show up on the map. If you have a pawn or especially animals that happen to be far away they could just be screwed and there was effectively nothing you could do about it. This has a greater impact the smaller the map is. You can mitigate this by keeping everything close, but I'm not sure that's an interesting choice gameplay wise. It makes sense that raiders would be seen coming from a greater distance than what the map represents. It doesn't need to be long, just a few hours would do, and the alert could be more vauge than the final card. "Hostile Drop pods sighted!"  "Hostile ground force spotted!" etc.

4. When a pawn is being followed by a hostile animal or pawn, time should slow to the slowest rate when that entity has gotten within a certain distance that will still allow handling the situation. Currently it only triggers on aggro, and so a melee entity can time accel right into your pawn and then it's too late. This is really awkward and can happen by mistake very easily.

5. Moving lots of stuff: Set home area or stockpile, create caravan packing spot, create caravan, watch pawns pick up everything, cancel caravan, if using animals create an animal spot, manually click twice on every single animal to have them drop their stuff. <---- This should not be in the game as is, it's awful and you are incentivized to do it. There are mods that soften this up, allowing pawns to haul their weight capacity and such, but that's not the only problem with caravan packing. If packing is canceled it cannot be resumed before unloading everything first, and so on, if the whole process doesn't happen fast enough mental breaks are incoming, pawns don't use their beds even when available, pawns who do have a mental break cannot be taken off the map. Caravan packing needs some serious adjustments.

That's it, that's the whole idea, it's not the best solution, but I assume it's extremely easy to implement and would close off a really lame mechanic. When the optimal way to play is to just rush the ship with one guy and immediately beat the shit out of it so that raids during the event are comprised of one enemy with a mace, you know something is wrong. There's a video on youtube of a 37 min nakid brutality speed run, where he doesn't grab a weapon or even put on any clothes, he just builds traps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KMfbvfUGWc

Obviously a better solution would be very welcome, I actually have no problem with wealth being the primary factor in raid strength, but the way the value is balanced now is very off. Value gets inflated so hard by material and quality that you are highly incentivised to sell or trash any masterwork or legendary anything. That just feels terrible and is a bit of a noob trap.

However don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if you're done with rimworld development, just go in tweak the existing formula to use 100% hp value instead of current value and that will close off a lot of bullshit while not changing anything for people who don't know about it.

1. If a colonist leaves the map with a temperature condition, for example "shivering" it will continue to progress to severe hypothermia resulting in death.

2. While traveling colonists will not do *any* recreation resulting in deprivation, and thus recreation starved daze states.

3. While forming a caravan they will ignore sleeping spots (dangerous when it's freezing outside, also see above) but also will not sleep regardless of their bar and regardless of their restriction schedule. Only sleeping at some specific arbitrary time. They will not do recreation, but will still gain all the mood penalties associated with everything they are doing. So it creates a race situation, "get everyone off the map as fast as possible before everyone starts having a mental break".

4. The map exit point appears to be random instead of based on the direction you are traveling. This leads strange situations where colonists will decide to leave the map in the opposite direction of travel. It can also result in them deciding to leave the map through the path of, for example, a siege, triggered ancient danger, or crashed ship, resulting in multiple tries to leave the map in a desired direction.

5. If animals are already packed, but a caravan is not formed, the animals must be unpacked before forming a caravan. And because a caravan will be aborted when the last colonist is removed from it (instead of for example keeping the animals in the caravan but just simply being unable to leave the packing area) the whole process needs to be restarted from scratch every time there's anything wrong.

6. Issues like running out of food cannot be dealt with while traveling without forming a colony. But since colony's cannot be temporarily abandoned, you have the choice of having multiple empty maps running all the time, or an ever growing mess of abandoned "colonys" on the map. To resolve this I propose a "camp" feature, that simply uses the same feature you have already for random map encounters, it generates a small map that you can stay in for a few days.

7. When a new colony is created all animals will dump their stuff right in the middle of the map. This is almost always undesirable. Please just keep them packed so the animals can be moved to where they are desired first. Dumping all the stuff right away causes unnecessary hauling, and a durability hit to everything.

Pawn value now factors into raid score. The formula here: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider#Raid_strength  is out of date. On merciless I verified this by using prepare carefully to create a single full bionic pawn and called a raid, it was 4 raiders. I created a new game and then used the same method to generate a much more normal pawn and the raid was the expected 1 naked guy with a knife.

1. I really dislike the fact that random events just automatically add to map wealth. If you aren't going around putting these resources to use (like spaceship chunks, gold, silver, blocks, etc) it just keeps contributing to map wealth and really can build up over time. This is relevant when you are in merciless, and intentionally trying to stay small while researching. So I really think that all items that add to wealth should need to be claimed first.

2. This actually opens up a new possibility for an event as well, scavengers and thieves. You could have neutral characters come and try to take unclaimed items from the map, or mine ore, they would become hostile or run away when attacked. Do do you want that item or not? Another variant of the "a few travelers visit" would be some that would come in your base and try to run away with something, but be neutral until attacked.

3. Hauling in rimworld is a pain in the ass, somewhat broken, and it's not fun. Pawns should be able to haul multiple types of things at once, they should be able to haul as much as they can in a caravan, and they should use assigned animals to help haul just as they do when packing a caravan. Why is hauling broken? The player is strongly incentivized to: put down a packing zone, draw an itemless stockpile zone around items you want in an area, create a caravan including those items, let them pack it, cancel the caravan, assign the animals to an inside stockpile location or wherever you want the items, then either let them be unpacked, or drop the items out manually. For cases where you need to haul multiple types of items (spaceship chunk, psychic/poison ship, etc) or especially harvesting a crop you can get everything hauled nearly instantly at the cost of craploads of fiddling around. Pawns should just do this automatically with animals assigned to accompany on field work. Want to move a bunch of chunks from one part of the map to your stoneworking table? Yup caravan. All the core tools for this are in the game already, it just needs to be polished up.

4. I would like caravan's to have a "camp" option where you are able to generate and enter a small temporary map identical to what you get in an ambush event. This would be useful for hunting & foraging / cooking meals / healing pawns / gathering chucks / mining etc. Without creating a settlement (which then cannot be reclaimed).

Gun Safety

IMO the largest outstanding issue with current gameplay is lack of any firing logic, for three principal reasons.

1. Hunters will just shoot bloody everywhere, if an animal is reachable outside the front door? Yup he will happily gun down everyone that exits the building. Caravan in the way? Congrats you have a new enemy faction. Send out a few hunters at once and they will come back with more bullets in each other than in animals.

2. Caravan's just put themselves anywhere, for example in front of turrets, which will happily gun them down if they are in the way.

3. During battles target choices do not take into account friendlies in the way, for example your melee guys, even if there are plenty of other open targets.

Of course there are occasionally time's when you would want them to not take this into account, for example if a friendly is getting chased by a mob of wargs and is doomed anyway, for that edge case a safety off button could be employed.

I write this just after my hunter decided it was a great idea to put a bullet through my lvl 20 artist's head. But hey he got the rabbit right after....

Thanks for the great update, looking forward to starting a new game soon!

1. I'd really like to see some intelligence regarding weapons. If you send a handful of people out to hunt, chances are they come back with more holes in each other, than holes in what they were hunting.

2. Diagonal wall graphics. Pretty simple to implement, everything stays the same as it is now, but diagonal walls have diagonal graphics. See dwarf fortress tilesets for examples.

3. I'd really like to see some sort of plan carefully implemented into base game (yes I know of the mod). Having a randomize button for each character is really irritating design imo. The game is incentivising you to spam the random button on each character until you get some assemblance of a decent team, while at the same time disinsentivising those who like an all random challenge.

I would suggest having an "All Random" mode, where you have the option of naming your settlers, but then the game immediately starts with no chance of further customization, add in a steam achievement for launching a ship with this start as well. Then also a "Plan Carefully" mode which allows a point based distribution of settlers, skills, and resources, see Edb Plan Carefully mod for a pretty good example. I would further recommend to liberate colonist occupations & descriptions from fixed names and body shapes.

It really comes down to this: The infini-random button isn't fun for anyone.