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Development mode can do all of this. IIRC.

Gun users can only use their appendages (fists, prosthetic arms, bionic arms, powerclaws) to fight in close combat, and multiple hits can interrupt a melee attack if enough attackers are attacking at once.

Assuming you outnumber the shooter it's pretty easy to overwhelm a gun-user with a few melee once the gap is closed. Your colonists would get a few bruises, but nothing worse than that really.

This is why squirrels can be extremely lethal if they attack your colonists en-mass.

Chickens have no intelligence. You cannot train them.

You know... you can keep playing after your colonists blast off.

It can be a pretty interesting challenge, trying to rebuild your colony after it dies off/blasts off from a single colonist. Doubly so if you stuff a few "Undesirable" captives into non-ship-based cryocasket for the first wanderer to recruit.

Dev mode even has a way to re-add fog of war. Which means you can make a colony, then share it with a friend to explore.

A means to manually name/label/force-rename pets.

Right now, chickens that hatch in your colony will always be named "Chick #" until the day they die. This makes it really difficult to not accidentally butcher your chickens when THIS happens. http://imgur.com/OPwoav8

http://imgur.com/OPwoav8

I think I need a better way to manage my chickens.

all bionic

Be careful with bionics, they are a double-edged sword. Bionic limbs remove all the preexisting limb parts (fingers and toes) and cannot take damage themselves. This reduces the non-critical locations that body part can be hit in. This can drastically increase the chance that a bionic guy will get hit in a vital area (brain, heart, liver) and die instantly from a strong hit.

I really do not advise replacing limbs unless they are shot off or significantly impaired (Missing multiple fingers/toes/hands/feet)for that reason. Bionic-enhanced colonists are glass cannons in combat, and are far more likely to end up dead if anyone can close on them.

Keeping your morale high and focusing on getting skill high is more important than bionics. Morale has a far greater impact on global work speed than anything else!

Bionic eyes rock and every colony should stockpile them. btw. Painstoppers are pretty damn good too! Joywires are only so-so due to the consciousness loss, but can be useful if you get a Voilatile+Depressive asshole.

I wouldn't mind if we could have colonists manually lock doors, like flipping a switch. A means to keep pets and berserk colonists contained would be nice.

The solution to visitors is simple in this instance: Implement the hospitality mod into the core game (So it's possible to passively raise your standing with another faction) and make a massive penalty for ANY deaths in your land. (I'm talking on the order of a 15-50 relationship loss, depending on the worth of the visitor killed).

Then all we need are trade ships being replaced by faction-related traders, and we're all set!

Protect and entertain your visitors, or lose your trade partners and deal with near-constant raids from your neighbors!

Doing a bit of experimenting with babies/children. It seems that baby/child pawns have some (lower) base stats that are different than standard colonists. They are, aside from that, normal colonists in every sense. At current they do not have a unique pawn icon, but that probably could be modded.

Regarding only seeing food poisoning in simple meals: By the time you can cook fine meals (cooking skill 6) the food poisoning chance is only around 1%. Low skill cooks (the people who give you food poisoning) generally can't make meals of higher quality!

That pun was bull.

A strong defense does not need turrets at all. Efficient placement and clever use of cover/lighting is far more important. Plus turrets are stupidly energy-intensive to have on.

Geothermal is actually pretty poor on a steel-to-energy ratio. Two solar panels will match geothermal output, excepting eclipses, and two solar panels and a single wind turbine will far exceed it.

Really the biggest cost for energy should be your indoor farms. Sunlamps take roughly half of the output of a single geothermal generator (or a single solar panel spread throughout the day with a battery. Mind, plants only need to be lit during their active hours!) Hydroponics are also energy-intensive. If security is your biggest powernet draw you are shooting yourself in the foot by vastly increasing raid size with what are ultimately expendable units. Normal lights, autodoors (on your freezer) and temperature control in your dorms and freezer are the lightest draw, but arguably the most important.

If a foot is shot off, there is no downside (except cost) for replacing it with a bionic limb. Same with a hand.

So yeah, just replace the leg.

My standards are generally as follows:

1. Good health
-Colonists with bad backs and cataracts are generally pretty worthless at almost anything they do, even with good skills. I avoid them if at all possible. The only exception is if I know I have enough cash to buy them two bionic eyes and at least one bionic leg... AND they have valuable skills AND they have valuable traits.

2. Not Abrasive
-Abrasive colonists have this distressing tendency to make the rest of the colony get spammed with mood debuffs. If I get a wanderer who is abrasive, I generally ensure they have the most dangerous jobs, far away from the colony, and go on the frontlines of comba/are harvested for parts.

3. Mental Break Neutral, or positive.
-Early on mood is generally an issue. Neurotic, Very Neurotic, Too Smart, and Depressive colonists generally need to be counterbalanced by Iron willed, Steadfast, Optimist, or Sanguine. At least they do early on before I can get individual rooms set up.
-Night Owls and Chemical fascinations/fixations are actually very good. The former only need to have their sleep schedules shifted by eight hours, and the latter will almost never berserk once you get any form of glutenous food/beer.

4. Avoid Psychic sensitivity
-While not a high priority, psych sensitive colonists tend to be a major liability with evil ships or psy pulses. I avoid them if I can.

I've stopped using IEDs pretty much for that very reason. IEDs and Traps have this distressing tendency to trigger on visitors, eventually making everyone hate you because they cannot watch their own feet.

Nowadays I seed the mountainous walls of my colony with IEDs inside. That way when a sapper tries to dig in they often get a nice present for their efforts.