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Beer is actually dehydrating your body... Altho, others are nice touches.

That's also arguable. Depends how strong beer is and how much do you consume. A bottle of light beer or two, (which is 95-96% water) can hydrate a person very well.

Six or ten or whatever bottles of beer work vice versa, body gets too busy pounding out alcohol (by losing water), which leads to kidneys overworking etc. So problem rises when blood alcohol content gets too high.

Of course, that doesn't apply to stronger liquor.

I like the idea, but there should be some chaos for people who have Randy as a storyteller. Maybe something like "Heyy, we decided to come a bit early this year, hope you don't mind!" or "ya we got ambushed and have only half of the merchandise promised"

Well, I'm sure there's tons of way to make it rough. Caravans, indeed, could get ambushed, not arrive, arrive with not so good intentions (a covert raid!) or just... fiddle with economy. Such as forcing low prices (perhaps at gunpoint?) of whatever.

Perhaps food you bought was poisoned. Perhaps it gave everyone diarrhea. Perhaps clothing makes you itchy. Perhaps guns you bought broke on first use. There's tons of cheap ideas to make it more dynamic.

It's just a matter of balance. Need for food right now is a bit overestimated, even though pawns do hard work.
Starvation should be just longer process, and that's it. In real life, if you don't eat for 2 days, you do get weakness, shaky hands, hunger and whatnot.
You just don't die. Also, Rimworld doesn't run in real time - a season is 15 game days long, not 90. Perhaps adjusting this would make needs more manageable. Although it would take forever then to grow crops.
But who really knows how long days are on mysterious planet or how long do potatoes grow there?

I'm also thinking that water would give more use to beer and milk, and perhaps introduce fruit trees (crop you don't have to resow!) and juice making.

The existing systems in Rimworld, such as bills and schedules make it possible to build... industry. I've tried building a mass scale brewery and clothing workshop. It's totally possible.

What's missing is way to trade those manufactured items efficiently: caravans come only that often (even if you call) and forming your own caravan is way too time-consuming, risky and sluggish.
So how about ability to form some kind of trade contract with nearby settlements, for example "you come this day every season, buy all my t-shirts, bring that much strawberries or components in exchange", etc?

[FENCES FOR KEEPING ANIMALS IN/OUT]

* Pawns calming pawns on some sort of mental break. Success chance should be regulated by personal relations and/or social skill.
* I also second slavery. If you can eat em' and harvest em' for organs, you can make em' work. That moral threshold was crossed long ago...
* FENCES FOR KEEPING ANIMALS IN/OUT (that are not walls, that don't block vision, that won't trigger roof building etc but are crossable for humans)
         *** Electric fences for keeping raids out?
* Grazing and sleeping areas for animals instead of mess animal zones are right now. Sheperds (an extra tameable skill for dogs?)

I *did* say "few days".

[At this point, Rimworld needs concept of water.]

I've been playing Rimworld a lot lately and thinking about water.

I think water (and bodily needs) could be done quite elegantly without going all The Sims™ about it where pawns spend half a day in toilet or under a bush.

First, "hydration" need. It should be quite general bar for liquids and span over 2 or 3 game days. While water is critical to humans, you can go few days without drinking, especially if you get your H2O from food and don't work hard.

Second, hydration should be pretty automatic. There's high amount of water sources in game world, all we need is characters to go to closest one whenever they feel thirsty or their canteen/water skin/whatever goes low-ish. Rainfalls. Snow. Water on temperate maps. Morning dew on plants. Perhaps water vines or something similar in tropic biomes? How about puddles after rain that last for some time?

Water collection would also introduce containers, such as wooden barrel to collect rainwater or whatever. Containers would greatly simplify logistics for water collection as they do in real life.

Third, meals should work more as daily (water) rations, a simple/lavish/fine meal should have water content enough for character to fully re-hydrate.

Water would also fight heavy imbalance during heat waves which tend to kill my colonies off before I even could gather enough components to build coolers. Consuming water should decrease effects of heat wave and fight off heatstrokes.

As for watering the plants, I'd rather see it as a bonus, some kind of watering system, to boost crop growth, not essential for plants to grow.
Of course, this could be taken further by restricting crop types to biomes (no rice on arid biome or whatever) and you could "cheat" by building watering systems to enable those crops in any biome.

There's all sorts of fun ideas water could introduce: Moats around your colony against raids, washing and pollution, piping and sewage, etc.

At this point, Rimworld needs concept of water.
Also, we have insanely extended systems for drugs and brewing and cannibalism and whatnot. Could be such basic thing as water "too much"?

[Unless]

Most of it should be cheap.

* Make cats meow less. On full speed, it's full concert all time.

* There is zero need for stuff lying on the ground to be in locked state by default. I'm sure every player in every new colony spends first 10-15 minutes of play time just for zooming in and out, doubleclicking and trying to find and unlock all locked resources. Why?

* Make animal hauling and owner following work for real (I doesn't at the moment. My husky is always wandering around far from owner even though fully trained and I've see him help with carrying farm crops only once during 4 hours of playing - and I don't know what even triggered this helpful, rare sight).

* Muffalos sleeping in bedroom (because there's animal bed) looks funny, but weird

* Animal release should be automatic and animals surely should outpace their owners! Right now, I click release and War Zoo™ arrives from hell-knows-where only when owner is already ripped apart and bleeding out

* Instead of very complex and very static area system, I'd love if I could just click on a room, and have "no pets allowed" button somewhere. Might be as simple as to mark door regions around room with similar flag that works for wild animals. No more muffalos crapping up my hospital while we have a flu breakout! Or wargs having lavish dinner parties in my food storage room while my colonists are breaking sweat at mines.

* I often wish my colonists would have some kind of schedule. Like breakfasts together. A hour in living room in the evening. Only thing that's more or less syncronized is sleep time right now. Once again, area/restraint system is very little of help here, I'd rather not use it.

* Colonists should be more cooperative generally. Right now, every colony feels like a factory where no worker knows others. Instead of priority system, I wish I had a designated cook that gets up half a hour (or whatever that is in game time), prepares breakfast for all and lays the table.
Or entire colony would go harvesting crops together, instead of entire field of dropped potatoes (no one's hauling!) for half of the autumn... or fight fire together, instead of sleeping peacefully while half of house is burning... or go hunting together. And always help a fellow colonist who's being chased by crazy squirrel, instead of watching clouds next to him or whatever.

Priority system is still weird and the moment you turn it to manual, goes broken quickly.

* Speaking of priorities... cleaning should be different.
Unless you have a single, otherwise talentless colonist assigned to only clean from noon till dusk, every colony looks like Queen's nest from Alien movie. This is not natural nor realistic. Cleaning takes way too much time, has way too little effect, lasts way too short and is way too low on priority list. Also, unless born without arms, I cannot image someone that wouldn't be able to clean (or haul, for that matter) at all. I'd make cleaning essential and semi-automatic skill for everyone, and maybe balance this with traits like "messy" and "orderly" or something

* I think (some of the) hauling should be a part of optimized movement. I know it's tricky to code.
But miner coming home, should grab a handful or steel, going towards home anyways. A plant cutter should take some potatoes with him if he's finished cutting and goes to eat lunch. Builder going to storage to grab lumber for construction could also take limestone blocks he just deconstructed from reclamined wall. And so on.

Basically, colonist, each time when going somewhere (unless it's a fire or fight), should check few nearby regions for items that need hauling, and few regions around his intended waypoint if there's suitable storage area nearby.

I imagine technically, each item that can be and should hauled has a passive waypoint before being picked up. So empty-handed colonist could easily check if him going to waypoint would help item to get closer to its passive waypoint and if so, just carry it or take a little detour and finish it's path.

I can see how it could cause some confusion for player at first, but the optimizing effect would be well worth it. Right now, great chunk of "playing the game" is just waiting and waiting for mundane things to get done.
Cutting up 50-tile rice field is guaranteed to have a field full of harvested, unhauled rice for next two seasons. Unless you go through priorities and make sure that hauling is ONLY thing your 6 colonists will do now... (still) for a whole season.

* If there's starvation, colonists' AI should be intelligent enough to automatically harvest raspberry bush next to base door instead of dying due hunger next to it. There's enough micromanagement as it is

* I think rather cheap would be to remove some cheap stuff and replace it with something else.
Stone floor textures are is cheapest stuff I've seen and could surely use some variety, even if they're still placeholder. Adding few new textures shouldn't take any time at all.

* Ceiling lights. Or invisible ones. Whatever.
I don't know why, but I make 2-tile wide corridors ONLY because a light the size of a full tile in 1-tile wide corridor feels wrong and impassable (even thought it's really not). Alpha or not, if we're staring at same stuff for hours and hours (and Rimworld is very slow game), aesthetics start to matter.

* Time to remove hoppers from nutrient paste dispenser, due temperature system. I wanted to have NPD as a backup, but gave up, because colonists started filling hoppers with food instead of storing it in dedicated, sub-zero temperature area. Which let food go rot.
So remove hoppers. Or, justify crazy amount of power nutrient paste dispenser takes by having hoppers next to it be liquid nitrogen-cooled or something.

* Squirrels, hare, etc offer too much resistance, bruises and infectious bites. It's funny to see colonists die, but it's way out of realistic balance right now. Snapping a neck isn't that hard.

* That's quite cheap to make but awesome to have: extra point allocation system in character creation a la Neo Scavenger, Wizardry 8 or Crusader Kings 2. You get your random rolled stats, and you get some extra points to invest in skills, so you could fine-tune a bit. A bit, not change colonist entirely. You can take a good trait and have less points to distribute or bad trait/injury and have more points, etc.
But I'm sure it's suggested already and not once. Crusader Kings 2 pulled this off perfectly imo, by connecting "points" directly to age (you can be a master schemer, but it took 20 years of your characters lifetime to get that good... or something). Rimworld could add injuries and chronic diseases, peg legs, etc to age to make it even more costly.

* Building sets. I pick wall and floor type and drag a rectangle, just like zones. And a house will be built.

[injury and disease system]

I have tons of ideas, but those feel like cheap ones:

* Remove "cramped space" from negative morale modifiers. Not everyone is claustrophobic (but that'd make neat character trait!)
* Add "In my room" as positive morale modifier. Man's home is man's castle
* Less negative effects from mining. Right now, digging a long cave feels like most dangerous task ever
* Remove "trading ship in orbit" from alerts, or better yet, make two-tier alert system where such low-priority alerts appear in different-colored icon or simply as message on upper right
* Extremely cool would be to actually see shadow of trading ship slowly going over game map. Since it's far away, it would be quite large and impressive. It could even disrupt solar panels (although occurrence of ships should be much rarer, otherwise it'd just be annoying)
* Stackable food or single-tile container to store stacks of prepared food. Also known as fridge
* Some scheduling system for designated cook(s). Like "make colonist+prisoner amount of food twice a day" Right now you either micromanage food all the time or make tons (infinite) and lose a colonist to this never-ending task, not very conservative approach to ingredients neither, since stuff rots over time
* Handheld lights. Nobody really goes to dig endless mine with no flash- or headlight
* Better solar panels. They feel very unbalanced right now. So far in future, solar power efficiency should be much higher
* Prisoner escape attempts
* in a game where you colonize unknown world, there should definitely be injury and disease system. And various diseases, born immunities to them, viral outbreaks, isolating patients, broken feet and hands (and how they affect colonists work), etc etc. This is not cheap to make, but groundwork for something like this is easy enough and could be handled with character trait system