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I enjoy a challenging game and I've been playing roguelikes for 20+ years so I'm no stranger to unfairness in games.  Still, instead of falling into a pit while holding a cockatrice corpse and feeling eager to start a new character with what I've learned from dying, I often find myself either switching Rimworld off in annoyance, savescumming, or even hacking the save file.  And that just shouldn't be happening.  So I spent some time making note of what's annoying me over the last few games and I hope it might be some use to the developer.  To other players, please note that this is my personal opinion, to which I have a perfect right, and sneering fanboy injunctions to "git gud" will be gleefully ignored.

First, Rimworld often feels malicious.  Game mechanics can be challenging without feeling like they're screwing you over.  I think it may be the way the game is designed to throw multiple challenges at you at once; because of the stochastic nature of the game, they often interact with each other in ways which feel punitive and sadistic, such as hitting you with plague which knocks down half of your colony instantly, then throws an infestation in the middle of your doctor's bedroom and kills him instantly, causing his grizzly bear to go insane and murder the only people not lying in the hospital.  That or some variation of that happens often enough that I find myself putting the game away for days to get over the bad taste in my mouth.  A random number generator shouldn't have the power to just throw up a "game over" screen.  The knowledge that any game can end instantly due to nothing under my personal control is actually a really good way to induce what psychologists call "learned helplessness," with the net result of creating a negative emotional aversion to playing the game.  When things go haywire in Dwarf Fortress it feels exhilarating to watch all your careful planning fly apart like springs out of a broken cuckoo clock; when things go haywire in Rimworld, it just feels like schadenfreude on the part of the developer and I'm not quite sure why.

Second, there's the grind of getting yourself back to where you were.  As I mentioned, as a long-time veteran of roguelikes I'm not unfamiliar with instant unavoidable game overs.  But in NetHack, if my cockatrice-wielding tourist dies, I can cleanse my palate so to speak by switching classes with an entirely different skillset in an all-new dungeon.  In Rimworld, instead of feeling excitement to start my next colony, I find myself just bored by the prospect of playing the same early-game elements all over again just to get to the part of the game which requires creative input.  I find myself save-scumming rather than throwing a couple of hours of tedious grind down a hole just to essentially recreate the game I was playing before.

Third, I think there's too much luck in the game.  A certain amount of luck keeps things exciting, but too much luck -- good or bad -- feels like heads-I-win-tails-I-lose.  For example, getting a cat or a yorkie instead of a working dog for an initial pet makes a huge difference, since an early hauling animal is equivalent to an entire extra colonist.  Likewise, I've simply quit games where my first Wanderer Joins is abrasive or a pyromaniac.  And having your only doctor drop dead of a heart attack at the age of 51 with no way to prevent, predict, or fix it also amounts to a helpless game-over.  And don't get me started on diseases.  Bazinga, 3 of your 6 colonists (including the only two colonists with medical skill) have sleeping sickness -- enjoy!

I think more thought has to be put into giving players more sense that they have a hand in their own outcome.  Note that this doesn't necessarily mean giving them more control!  Psych studies in hospitals have shown, for example, that when patients are given a button which they're told will release a tiny amount morphine, they end up using an average of 70% less painkiller simply because they now feel their pain level is under their control.  I don't want Rimworld to be less challenging, I only want it to feel less frustrating.  Malaria drugs and the like are a good first step, but we need more preventative steps we can take, even if they aren't magic bullets.  For instance, I've suggested in the past that it should be possible to have doctors do check-ups which would reduce the chance of having a random heart-attack.  And if you're going to make bonded animals go on a killing rampage when their owner dies, I should have some control over whether or not a given colonist bonds at all; when 82 year old Engie is force-bonded with the colony's warg, I know I'm going to have a bad time and save-scumming is the order of the day.

Looking at the background material for the game and what we can see in-game, many communities in the Rimworld universe have chosen to live in stable towns or villages with a sustained and stable technological level lower than that of glitterworlds.  Currently in the game, however, even tribal starts eventually develop into a technological community.  I think the option should be available to explore viable technology branches which are not reliant on higher technological development.

For example, instead of moving from bows to guns, it should be possible to instead develop better and more sophisticated bows: simple to composite to crossbow, for example.  Likewise, I'd like to be able to move from skins to wooden lamellar armour to bronze plate to chainmail rather than switching to kevlar and power armour.  It should take the same amount of research, but move the player sideways rather than upwards, creating a true technology tree.  I think, for example, using nothing but herbal medicine should be a viable strategy by researching better forms of traditional medicine.

The benefit is that long-term games in less than ideal environments will no longer require rapid technological advancement, just gradual improvement in the efficiency of low-level technologies sustainable with what's available without trade.  In fact, this is the reason this idea has been occuring to me lately, since I'd like to try playing a game in a harsh environment with no trade and no outside contact at all, more of a survival sim, but as it stands right now is not really feasible.

From a developer perspective, a change like this gives the game a broader appeal and much more replay possibility.

Instead of selling prisoners you don't want or harvesting them for organs, I think it would be fun to be able to turn them into drone techno-zombies.  Implant brain-invading neurocircuitry which essentially turns them into obedient slaves with very basic skills.  They would perform every skill at a level of 1, and would never improve -- but they also require no sleep, never have morale problems, never cause fights, and will consume anything from nutient slop to corpses without complaint.  They would require a drone control station with an AI core installed, move at half-speed, and are completely incapable of self-defence of any kind.  Mostly they would act as an alternative to animal haulers late-game for people who don't have any moral objection to zombifying people.  (To make things interesting, perhaps you could have them turn hostile and berserk if the drone control panel ever shuts down due to loss of power or being destroyed or disassembled.)

Crater could occur in any biome, like hill or mountain.  Crater terrain would be roughly circular: an outer edge area which is mostly flat, then a ring of hill/mountain all the way around forming a perfect circle, though with gaps in the ring wall.  Inside would be flat, but roughly half in middle would have deep water or ice, with swamp/shallow water around the edges.  But there would also be a chance of a single hill or mountain in the exact middle, like a bullseye, possibly accessible if it's not entirely ringed by deep water (and is sometimes seen in real craters).

This is really starting to get on my tits.  Whenever you complete researching a technology, the information pop-up steals focus from whatever you happen to be doing.  It's not a big problem; you can just repeat whatever it was you were doing.  But after hundreds and hundreds of times, it really gets annoying.  Sometimes it'll interrupt in the middle of doing something like dragging a selection area or putting down an area of wall and result in making a hash of whatever you were working on.  Again, it's simple enough to fix most things, but when it happens two dozen times a game, every single time, it starts to grate like sandpaper. 

(There are a few occasions where it actually interferes in gameplay.  For instance, if two colonists have just had a fistfight and you get the technology completed pop-up before you can click on the fight message to find where it happened, by the time you deal with the pop-up the clickable fight message has vanished and you have to hunt across the whole map looking for dropped weapons -- and I've left sniper rifles or light machineguns lying out in the rain more than once as a result.)

So I have a colonist who asks his girlfriend to marry him twice, then they break up.  That's a -50 mood for two seasons.  He's also a night owl.  By forcing him to do joy activities constantly I can partially offset part of the unhappiness, but even the slightest negative influence like seeing a corpse or a blood splatter or feeling hungry gives him a terrible mood if he's awake during the day.  I've been forced to save scum once already, since walking into the unlighted warehouse to get some food was enough to make him berserk, at which point he beat two dogs to death, then attacked a bear and was killed, and then his pet elephant went crazy and proceeded to give me what amounts to a chain reaction game-over.

Short of walling him into a cell for two seasons with a big pile of jerky or surgically removing his legs, is there anything else I can do about this?  Two entire seasons of -50 unhappiness seems a little excessive.

I have three colonists with a probability of taming a group of three elephants of between 7% and 8% each, and the chance of them turning mankiller 2.5%.  Supposedly.  Over the course of 14 days, I had zero successful tames, and four mankiller failures.  This seemed wonky, so I plugged the numbers into an online chi square calculator, and unless I made a mistake the chances of this occurring purely through randomness are virtually zero.  Is there something going on under the hood I don't understand?  Or have I made a mistake in working the chi square?  I save-scummed after each critical failure (since a mankiller pack of elephants would essentially be a game-over for me); does this mean the game secretly tracks successes and failures and ensures you'll always have a statistical balance of results to deter save-scumming?

There should be different types of party, each of which would cause different levels of happiness to colonists based on their personality traits.  Poker tournaments, toga bacchanals, orgies, cuddle puddles, wine and cheese mixers, book reading circles, and jam sessions (for example) should all appeal differently to different people.  Psychopaths would not be happy in cuddle puddles, while ascetics would be rather displeased with bacchanals, but both would probably enjoy poker tournaments.  The type of party being held would be based on the personality of the colonist throwing it.

I'd like hospital beds to have the ability to set bills for check-ups.  The bill would allow you to automagically have colonists go every X number of days/weeks/seasons/years and get a medical check-up done by someone with medical skill, essentially an operation which has a preventative effect.  A character should have resistance to disease after a check-up which slowly fades.  It should also show up any pre-existing medical conditions, such as diseases which haven't manifested yet.

Recently I had a 51 year old character with no medical conditions have a sudden heart attack, then collapse and die before she could get to a bed or before anyone could reach her.  Given that sudden deaths with no warning can cause chain-reaction animal berserking which can destroy an entire colony, there really needs to be some way of avoiding it.  Heart attacks like that should not occur without a period of warning which can be detected from a medical check-up.

I usually keep my chicken coop in the same barn with all my other animals and never had any problems with eggs being eaten, but in my most recent game I  had to wait years for a trader to sell me some chickens.  I ended up buying 20 fertilized eggs, which went into my warehouse.  All my animals (boars, huskies, bears) have access to the warehouse because they're haulers.  Now my eggs are gone.  I have kibble and hay storage in my barn, so all my animals have ready access to food on waking.  Despite this, I had to forbid my boars from my colonist bedrooms because they'd spend all their time trotting from bedroom to bedroom eating daylilies from planters.  I also ended up having to block them from my devilstrand farms and haul it all manually because, again, despite having ready access to kibble and hay (and my warehouse full of food), they'd spend all day munching devilstrand.  I have this nasty suspicion that the boars ate my fertilized chicken eggs.

Do animals -- particularly boars -- eat fertilized eggs?  Seriously, animals are really starting to piss me off.  They need constant micromanaging to the point I'm starting to think of them as more trouble than they're worth.

In the spirit of helping to make RimWorld a better game, I'm creating a thread for listing players' biggest frustrations with the game as it currently stands.  These are not necessarily the biggest problems, omissions, or bugs, but those things -- even if WAD -- which make the game not-fun and inspire rage-quits.  It's important to explain why these things cause you such frustration.  And since the purpose is to help vanilla game development, things should still be listed even if they can be fixed with a mod.

I'll start:

- Traders' muffalo eating your crops, especially devilstrand.  It's horribly frustrating to hide your devilstrand deep inside your base, protect it behind doors and defences, sacrifice food and large amounts of time, and then be completely helpless to prevent traders' muffalos from devastating your entire crop -- not just once, but again and again.

- Pets.  Just... pets.  You know what I mean.  The way they're always in exactly the wrong places, the way you can't prevent them from bonding (making a meat farm practically impossible), and especially the necessity for going through every single animal and manually adding and removing them from colonists every single time there's a raid, both before and after.

- Disease.  Much too dangerous, much too frequent, and boring.  I ran an AD&D (1st edition) campaign which lasted for eight years.  In the beginning I used the "random diseases" chart included in the Dungeon Master's Guide.  Eventually the players simply rebelled; sitting around in an inn waiting for the cleric to get over the flu might be realistic, but it's simply not fun.  There's a reason why you don't have scenes of Gimli getting diarrhea from undercooked pork while Gandalf struggles with smoker's cough; it's not fun.

- The whole world burning down every time there's a storm.  Playing in an empty wasteland whether you want to or not defeats the entire purpose of biomes.

Does anyone know what the most efficient pattern is for completely covering square rooms with circular trade beacons?  It's something I dread every game.  By the time I'm ready to trade, I have a warehouse full of goods.  Trying to figure out where to place all the beacons is annoying, especially since you can't see the blueprinted beacons through the item spam.  As near as I can tell, you have to have a beacon every 6 spaces (fig. 1) vertically and horizontally to make sure a square room has complete coverage, but I suspect aligning them diagonally (fig. 2) might be more efficient.

1.

x     x     x     x     x     x

x     x     x     x     x     x

x     x     x     x     x     x

2.

x            x            x

       x            x            x

x            x            x

Fortunately, I had a second keyboard lying around.  I understand this is alpha and there will be a few frustrations, but they're really starting to add up, and these are not bugs we're talking about; they're the result of the way the game is designed, which is much more troublesome.  To wit:

A raider attacks.  One.  Early game.  He's armed with grenades.

I send my two hunters out to deal with him.  One of the hunters is the one with a high animal score.  As a result, she has a half-dozen bonded animals following her around.  I don't want them bonded to her, but they're force-bonded whether I want them bonded or not.  I have my farming area walled off with wooden walls to keep animals from eating my devilstrand.  The raider heads straight for the wall and blows a hole with a grenade.  Fair enough.

My two hunters arrive and start shooting.  The raider throws a grenade.  We move.  ALL THE BONDED ANIMALS head to the spot where my hunter WAS standing.  Where there is now a grenade.  They all die.  All of them.  Simultaneously.  I finish off the raider and suddenly a STAMPEDE of animals head for the hole in my wall.  Entire HERDS of animals charge for the hole in my wall like there's free candy on the other side.  I'm guessing the random location where they WANT to be is somewhere on the other side of my farming area wall, so they all telepathically and instantaneously notice the path to the Promised Land and stampede through and start gobbling up my devilstrand.  I blueprint repairs to the wall and instantly four of my five colonists get malaria, including both doctors.  The only colonist without malaria is mourning an entire petting zoo full of bonded animals I didn't want or need bonded, and will probably go berzerk or hide in her room until the end of time.

It's about then my keyboard went flying at the wall.

The main problem with this stuff is that it's all WAD.  I'm used to playing roguelikes and I enjoy challenge.  I also recognize that roguelikes should be slightly unfair.  But an increasing amount of challenge in Rimworld is coming from micromanagement trying to overcome metagame challenges which have nothing to do with the game scenario and everything to do with game mechanics.

Since the entire planet burns down every time there's a storm and it makes the game unplayable for me (3-5 fps while the fire rages), I'm forced to turn cheat mode on, change the weather to rain, then turn cheat mode off after every storm.  Until something is done about the whole world being made of flashpaper, can someone tell me how to nerf either lightning or fire?  There doesn't seem to be anything obvious to change the overall flammability of trees, grass, bushes, etc.

Not sure if this is a bug or WAD.  At some point my animals stopped hauling anything; stone blocks sat unmoved, crops rotted in the field, chopped trees lay on the ground uncollected.  I have something like 20 hauling animals (bears, foxes, boars), so I couldn't figure out what was wrong.  I started watching individual animals to see what they did with their time and realized that they spend all their time collecting eggs.

I have a henhouse with about 15 chickens, and my animals do nothing except collect eggs one by one as they're laid.  They don't even leave the base any more.  The ONLY thing they seem to want to do is collect eggs -- one by one, the second they're laid.  Not sure how this could be fixed, but as it stands my only choice is to kill all my chickens.

Not infrequently, I'll send my miner out to work on a plasteel deposit on the other side of the map and get torn to shreds by a hungry bear.  I'd like to be able to select Colonist A, right-click on Colonist B, and be able to assign Colonist B to follow Colonist A and act like a bodyguard.  You can sort of do it now by drafting and micromanaging but it's so annoying that I generally don't, and end up feeding my colonists to the local wildlife.  It's also helpful in making sure someone is standing right nearby with the Wood Log of Psychiatric Treatment when you know someone is desperately unhappy and likely to suffer a psychotic break at any second.

* Bestiality trait.  Allows colonists to get the "slept with x" mood buff with bonded animals, complete with hearts.

* Shyamalan world: Colonies over a certain number of colonists cause plants to become toxic and cause any colonist nearby to become suicidal.  On the plus side, mechanoids and insects die instantly when they touch water.  Also, the colony is actually behind a wall on a Glitterworld.

* Buildable dakimakura.  Gives mood buff, but only to male colonists with the "ugly" or "very ugly" and "hates women" traits.

* Colonists accumulate pee bottles beside their beds while they sleep, or beside production facilities while they work, and have to be carried away and buried or incinerated.

* Fedora.  Gives the "hates women" trait when worn, but gives bonus damage when using swords.

I still play A14 so I don't know if this has been corrected in the latest builds.  If you've got a corner blueprinted to build a wall and there's a stone chunk in it (x in the figure below), right-clicking to try to prioritize building the wall results in selecting the stone chunk instead, but with the caption "no zone capable of holding it" even when there's plenty of space for it.  This means it can't be built and the stone chunk can't be removed until you disassemble some wall around it.

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An "operation" which allows removal of a trait like pyromaniac or neurotic.  The difference would be it would require a series of successful operations in a row (any failures in between resets the series), and a bad failure would add an additional negative trait.  If you want to make it somewhat harder, require the use of a science fiction McGuffin like a "neural programmer" which has to researched, built, and powered.

I really like the system Alpha Centauri uses for victory, where you can use your strengths to your advantage: the banker can corner the market and get a financial victory, the ecologist can research fungus and get an ascension victory, and so on.  Like, for example, I've sometimes been blessed with two or three good artists, and once you get them up to 20 skill, you can have them doing nothing but churn out legendary statues and buy... well, everything.  Instead of building a spaceship to escape, I should be able to simply buy tickets on a passing spaceship for an outrageous amount of money.  (100k silver per colonist doesn't seem out of line.)

Military victory: Build X many weapons and armour of Y quality, have Z many colonists with a N skill in combat.

Science victory: Research *every* technology, which opens up a victory condition technology which costs something like 500,000 points.

Slavemaster victory: Have X number of simultaneous prisoners while having sold Y number of prisoners.

And so on.