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I had one of my animals get shot in the brain and become a savant, but unfortunately that doesn't do anything for animals.

I think it would be fun and hilarious if savant animals became treated like regular colonists, excepting of course that they continue to have their dietary restrictions and sleep in animal beds.

The coding to enable this would also enable us to add traits like "vegetarian" or "meat lover" to the game, providing mood penalties if the pawn in question can't access their dietary preference.

The non-minor mental breaks currently in-game only happen to someone who already has a severe psychiatric disorder, and basically almost nobody in history has ever gone "berserk" as currently represented in-game. I'd like to suggest some different mental breaks for each tier that are more realistic.

Minor Break-
These are all fine.

Major Break-
"Dazed and wandering" should be moved up to extreme break. Additionally the following could be added:
1. Breaking Stuff. The pawn starts attacking a random object in his immediate vicinity. The object being attacked changes randomly for the duration. Never targets living creatures.
2. Physically Abusive. The pawn wanders angrily and strikes any living thing that comes near it, but only once or twice per creature. This may aggro dangerous creatures attacked.
3. Hysterics. The pawn remains where it is and generally cries, yells, and makes a scene. Damages the mood of other colonists who witness it slightly.

Extreme Break:
Remove Berserk. It just doesn't happen. Replacements:
1. Murderous. Only occurs if a pawn really dislikes another pawn (-100 or more). The murderous pawn attacks a specific hated pawn using lethal force. If it has no weapon, it seeks to acquire one before the attempt.
2. Incoherent. The pawn is treated exactly like a severely injured pawn for an extended time; it cannot move on its own, and must be fed by another colonist or it will starve. This state would last for days.
3. Suicidal. The pawn acquires a weapon and begins attacking itself. It will not stop until disabled by its own attacks or arrested.

Not only is it absurdly unrealistic to have a herd of deer suddenly decide to kill all humans, but it's also a pointless RNG game-ender if you have it happen early on in your colony's development.

If you insist on keeping it it should only last until the pawn who made the taming/hunting attempt is disabled and then immediately end. Having a herd of deer trashing your base is ridiculous.

Because skill at making a tribal garment should not translate to making a sword or an assault rifle or the reverse.

Alternatively characters could receive a skill penalty for creating an item that isn't from their colony's tech level.

Ancient people used a lot of methods to keep cool that aren't in-game. Modern people too! Here's a few suggestions of things to add:

1. Stone buildings should have MUCH lower conductivity than metal ones or wooden ones. I lived in New Mexico for a while where there are lots of adobe buildings, and if you opened the windows in the evening and then closed them in the morning, the temperature inside would stay heavenly almost all day; I often wouldn't need to turn on the AC even when it was 90 degrees outside. An easy way to implement this would be to just make stone buildings +/-5 C toward 21 C.

2. Fans! Electric fans should take WAY less power and resources than air conditioners, but be significantly less effective. In fact if real temperature vs perceived temperature could ever be added, it could just change perceived temperature in the room slightly. Manual fans could be added too; characters experiencing heat stroke could fan themselves or be fanned by others to reduce the effective temperature for that character.

3. Caves should always be relatively cool regardless of outside temperature (in fact slightly too cool for the comfort of those inside).

Adding humidity to the climate system could make the game a lot more dynamic. Off the top of my head, it could affect all of the following:

1. "Real" temperature versus "perceived" temperature: 40 C in the dry desert is a lot more tolerable than 40 C in the jungle. This would add an advantage to arid starting locations and a disadvantage to lush ones.

2. "Fog" (disabling solar generators) and rain could be tied to humidity.

3. Fire spread would be tied to humidity. No longer would every fire in a forest result in a wildfire; some would just die out because the vegetation and wood are too wet at the moment.

4. Plant growth rate could be stunted at extremely low humidity, adding another variable to farming. Plants that require lush environs could even just die in low humidity.

I like to play Tribals a lot, and I've come up with a number of ideas for buildings and changes at the tribal tech level. I think they're really good and would add a lot to the game. I'll try to list them from simplest to most complex.

1. "Work spots" should be able to construct stone and wood spears, but not metal ones.
2. "Geothermal vents" should have a second building added to them at Paleolithic tech: Hot springs. Hot springs would be joy-producing buildings that up to 8 people could use at once, and would add a great deal of joy. They would also relieve hypothermia symptoms and keep characters warm while in use. Additionally, geothermal vents that aren't in use as generators should probably increase the temperature of surrounding tiles.
3. "Firepit" should be added as a Paleolithic building. It would function identically to a Crematorium, but would require a great deal of fuel to function. Additionally, building a Firepit would enable a right-click menu item: "destroy object." That is to say, you could right-click any object in the world that's carry-able by people (other than chunks) and a new option "destroy" would appear. Thus, you could throw unwanted tools or junk into the firepit to remove them from the map.

I was trying to think about how to make the threats in the game more deep and interesting, and I feel like the current frequency of raids and size of raids tends to make the situation such that you're either extremely well-prepared for all of them and therefore none of them are any threat, or you get a bad start and the first major raid just kills you. Plus, once you get a few good guns, almost all raiders die in every assault anyway so it's not a reliable recruitment method.

One of the added benefits of reducing the frequency but increasing the size/threat of raids is that you could push up the likelihood of characters being incapacitated (since skirmishes would be bigger over-all), possibly further reduce weapon accuracy when people are in cover, and make individual raiders dramatically harder to recruit, some to the point of impossibility (increasing the usefulness of slave trading ships as a revenue stream).

Some downsides: Skirmishes would likely be much longer, increasing likelihood of mental breaks (perhaps an "in combat" modifier would need to be added to characters to give them temporary sanity boosts). The first big raid would also likely be a much bigger stumbling block for most players, whereas currently it's close to where it should be in terms of beginner-friendliness. Throwing weapons might become OP with their current damage numbers and may need tweaking.

Any thoughts?

When I saw that a patch was being rolled out to adjust difficulty levels, I must admit it made me a little worried; not because the change or goal of the change wasn't good, but because this kind of change strikes me as a beta or even post-beta level change. I'm not sure how much time it takes to tweak these things; hopefully not very much, but I still think it's important for a game developer in an alpha stage to be focused on two things:

1. Stability and code refactoring.
2. Fielding and testing new core game elements, or implementing planned changes to current game elements.

I admire Tynan's attentiveness to his fans here very much, but if he allows himself to be distracted and side-tracked by balance tweaks the community calls for this early in development, I'm worried that it will massively delay the final product; after all, the community will always always always have suggestions no matter how "finished" a game is.

So yeah, that's my attempt at constructive criticism. I really like the game and am looking forward to seeing it grow and succeed!