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Just put some time into a game called Cliff Empire.  One mechanic in the game requires the player to periodically deliver random resources to an orbital platform in space.  If you fail the task, you lose money (another resource).  If you satisfy the task, you level up.  More mechanics are introduced to the player as they level up.

Now apply this to Rimworld.  The lore is that the Empire will protect your colony from raids but you have to satisfy certain requests of theirs every so often (such as at the beginning of every year or half year).  They'll send a ship to your colony and you have a couple quadrums to satisfy their request by putting goods into the ship.  At the end of the period the ship will fly off (and can also be sent early if you meet all the goals).

If you completely satisfy the request, you unlock something that you didn't have access to before.  Maybe you get access to a new plant or unlock the ability to research a new technology.  Maybe you can also get some minor rewards like a bunch of devilstrand or a new colonist.

If you don't complete the request, you get punished.  This would be the only time you face a raid but it would generally be smaller and not something that would require a kill box to defeat (remember, players in this mode really don't want to deal with raids).  The difficulty of the raid can be decreased by how much of the Empire's request you satisfied (so if you only delivered 50 berries instead of 100, the penalty will only be 50% as bad).  Other penalties can include blight, psychic waves, toxic fallout, eclipses, etc.  These might last for a quadrum or 2 but you could caravan the remaining goods to an Empire city to stop it early.

It might not be perfect but it's a step in the right direction to have their body replaced with prosthetic parts.  If they have wooden parts, those parts can eventually be upgraded to something better.

Might be something tied to your ideology.

He made the game moddable.  He could have not and let the game stagnate which would improve DLC sales.

Be nice if children could learn from TV.

[New object: Voting booth]

Came up with this in the shower so it's only like 30 minutes old in my mind.

New object: Voting booth

Only one colonist can use at a time but can build multiple and they are ugly to look at (the means of Democracy is an ugly business).  Made of some base material and some cloth/wool/leather.

On the 2nd day of every quadrum (or every other quadrum, or every year) it's Voting day!  Unshown to the player, every adult colonist gets a new work job with a random number to go vote.  Some colonists will roll a low number like a 1 and prioritize voting over all their other jobs.  Other colonists will roll higher numbers and not get to their "voting" job and as a result will suffer a negative moodlet because they couldn't participate in Democracy.  Colonists that vote will get a positive mood bonus and it will be even higher if their vote(s) win.  Voting starts at 8:00(AM) and ends at 20:00 (8:00PM) on Voting day.

On Voting day, the game will pick 0, 1, or 2 social roles and/or specialist jobs in the colony, prioritizing roles that don't yet exist in the colony, with the Leader role always getting picked if there isn't one in the colony.  If a role is picked and someone is already filling that role, that person will be up for reelection.  The game will pick another colonist at random that fulfills certain criteria for that role to go up against that person.  If the role is unfulfilled, the game will pick 2 colonists at random to run against each other.

Colonists will generally vote based on their social preferences so they'll prioritize colonists that they like a lot.  For specialist roles there will be some adjustments based on the skills and passions of the elected pawn but elections will mostly be popularity contests.  If the elected colonist loses the election, their role switches to the other colonist.  There will be no ceremony; the voting process was the ceremony.  The player will be informed of the exact counts of the election after the voting period ends.


New specialist: Psycaster

Democracy does not tolerate Kings and Queens.  Upon picking up the Democracy meme, any Royalty will be stripped of their titles without fanfare, though they'll suffer a negative moodlet for awhile based on their accumulated honor.  Formerly Royal colonists with psycasts can still use their psycasts if they take on the Psycaster role.  As one of the specialist roles, the Psycaster role can be chosen to be voted on.

Hypersensitive colonists are most likely to decide to run for the Psycaster role while dull colonists will rarely run.  A colonist that takes up the Psycaster role will be able to use all psycasts they know plus a smattering of psycasts that the rest of the colony knows so your colony won't be completely defenseless if the role ping pongs back and forth between two colonists.  There could be other psycaster-related benefits to the role as well but the colony will only ever have one Psycaster at a time.

Unlike other memes, there can never be more than one of the same specialist role.  There will only ever be one shooting specialist, one mining specialist, one production specialist, etc.  However, Democracy will allow all roles in the game.  Democracy will also not allow more than 1/3rd of your colonists (rounding down) to have a social role or specialist job (and the first two roles will always be Leader and Moral Guide at 3 and 6 colonists respectively).  Since those roles will be forced on colonists without your control, they will still be able to do jobs that they have at least a 10 skill in.


New precept: Slaves can vote

Under the Democracy meme slaves can vote but their vote is only worth 1/2 (half).  It can be 3/5ths if the coding works but that number might not work out in small colonies.

Just like the social roles and specialists, precepts are up for election as well.  On voting day, the game will randomly pick between 0/1/2/3 precepts to come up for election.  The vote will determine if the precept remains the same or is modified one direction (for precepts that have more than 2 choices).  If the highest result is less than 50%, the precept stays the same, otherwise it changes one level (so nothing too drastic unless you're playing with Randy, then maybe it can adjust by two levels).  I haven't figured out how colonists will choose whether to want the precept changed or not.


New moodlet: Humble defeat

A colonist that loses an election will obtain the negative Humble Defeat moodlet.  Should they suffer a breakdown while they have this, it will become a worse negative moodlet, Sore Loser.  Sore losers will cause problems for a colony following the Democracy meme (I haven't worked out what exactly, maybe something potentially destabilizing to the meme itself).  Colonists that win an election will get a small positive moodlet so they don't go on a drug binge after winning.

As soon as a colonist hits 50% on a disease, you can add an Operations bill for "Administer Hospice care."  You can no longer give medicine to fight the disease but the disease progression dramatically drops and its effects are halved (or more).  The colonist gets some kind of mood buff and the effects of euthanization of the patient on the rest of the colony are decreased.

There is a mod for this but I think if added to the game, balance would be an issue.  The mod itself highlights the balance issue as the author allows players to change the cost of the repair kits because he can't figure out a balanced value himself.  The mod allows you to repair 1 durability for 1 cloth and 1 steel.  That means a tattered duster is going to cost over 100 cloth and 100 steel to repair despite a new duster costing only 80 cloth by itself.

Then there's the high end armors.  Cataphract armor costs 400 steel and 400 cloth to repair from 0 to 100%.  Making a new one, besides the work involved, ultimately costs:

• 210 Plasteel
• 20 Uranium
• 192 Steel
• 18 gold

It might just be easier to balance the game around building new suits of armor and smelting/selling the old ones.

Rather than reduced ingredients, I'd think that on occasion he makes an extra meal or he has a chance for the meal(s) to be one quality higher (Fine-->Lavish).  Maybe he can do something with Nutrient Paste (game lore he would add spices or something) and turn it into a simple meal.

He should always be cooking or running his kitchen and would therefore always be holding a knife or butcher knife so there's really no reason for him to be able to do much else.  His Skills would probably look like the following:

• Shooting
• Melee
• Construction
• Mining
• Cooking
• Plants
• Animals
• Crafting
• Artistic
• Medical
• Social
• Intellectual

He should generally only be able to melee fight, fight fire, clean, haul, and cook.

The ability to pick only the best traits and to force children to be passionate about a skill you're missing in your colony makes children in longer games just way too overpowered.  Though I feel the player should have some control over the growth of children, sometimes children just don't grow up the way you want them to.  I'd like to propose some changes that will nerf children and add a little randomness to the growth process.

Children would still have 8 growth tiers with each tier affecting their traits or a passion.  When a child has a growth moment at ages 7, 10, and 13, the game will pick 6 skills for the passions to randomly pick from.  For each growth tier affecting passions the game will randomly pick an additional skill to add to the pool and then the player would be permitted to eliminate one skill from the pool.  The game will then randomly assign however many passions you have among the remaining skills with no skill being picked more than once for that growth moment.  You can still funnel the child's passions into shooting or medical but maybe, just randomly, he decides he's really into animals or plants and you'll just have to deal with that.

You can do the same with traits.  At each growth moment, the game would pick 3 traits randomly.  For each growth tier that affects the traits, the game will add an additional trait to the pool and you'll be permitted to eliminate one.  Then out of the 3 remaining traits, the game will pick one randomly.

They do hold compost!

Just realized they hold 12 while pallets only hold 8 so that's nice to know.

Can Pod Launchers have the tool to build a transport pod when you select them?  Sort of like how when you select a bed you can build an end table.

You don't need a mod for the nutrient paste/packaged survival meal (PSM) issue you just have to stay on top of new packaged survival meals.  Allow your colonists to eat both the PSM and nutrient paste but forbid the PSM.  Even if forbidden, you'll still be able to pick it up for caravans and it will get unforbidden while in the caravan.  When new PSMs are made, just be sure to forbid them after they are dropped off in their storage location.

Actually my bad, I really figured it out this time.  It wasn't Deep Storage (though Deep Storage did allow the issue to pile up in one tile).  It was Rimworld Farming which creates compost which is literally dirt.  I have two small piles in the upper left of the room and an entire pallet filled with dirt and I'm wondering why this room is dirty.

Luckily, I found out I can store the compost outside safely without degradation (it's kind of hard to make) so I did that and it solved the problem.

They are made for rough living outdoors and to last a long time.