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why don't you tune down the difficulty level a bit?

Translation: git gud.

I went to some pains to explain (several times) that this has nothing to do with difficulty.  I've played and enjoyed many games much more difficult than Rimworld.  I've beat NetHack, for example, and more than once.  My critique of Rimworld is based around the feeling of lack of agency in many parts of the game.  Again, I'm not saying the game needs to be less difficult or that it even needs to actually give more agency to the player, just that it needs to give the feeling of greater agency.

Tynan is on record as saying he intends Rimworld to be a story simulator.  In order for a narrative to be gripping, there has to be engagement.  That is, the player has to be invested.  Where there is no agency in a game, there is no investment in the outcome.  And contrariwise, the history of gaming has shown that if there is player engagement, even games with minimal inputs from the player can be spectacularly popular.  The Telltale Walking Dead games are an excellent example of this: despite a complete absence of micromanagement, the feeling of agency the player has creates intense investment by the player in the outcome -- even when we know that in many cases our choices don't actually matter a single bit under the hood.

I agree that some of the events will make you lose you colony, but you can fix it in the next one.

I just played a game where I had 10 colonists.  Three got sleeping sickness, including two of my doctors, but I had one trained doctor left healthy so it was tolerable.  Then five colonists got malaria, including two who already had sleeping sickness -- and my last remaining doctor.  Then I got a raid.  Stuff like that doesn't feel epic to me.  It feels contrived and malicious.  There's SFA I can do about it.  If I chose to keep going, I would need a new doctor.  That means spending an hour or two -- real, actual time I could be doing something else -- manually grinding medical skill by shooting a llama and then bandaging it.  That's neither immersive nor fun.  It's not even !!fun!!.  It's tedious and unenjoyable.  And my desire to start a new game was nil because I realized exactly the same thing could (and probably would) happen all over again.

It's not just that these things can happen, but that they happen every single game.  And it's not even necessarily that they happen which bothers me, but that they're made to happen in such a way that they take agency away from the player.  Another way to look at it is, if three out of four games contain random, unavoidable game-overs which simply cause me to waste my time and grind out an identical game to get back where I was, then I want the ability to eliminate all that time in-between which I'm not enjoying so that I can play a game the whole time instead of gritting my teeth through the parts I hate in the hope of eventually getting some parts I do enjoy.

I'm not trying to analyze this game for me.  There's thousands of games I could be playing, which I actually enjoy.  I know this is alpha, so I'm trying to give feedback on how to improve the feel of the game.  Again, I'm not saying the game should be easier, just that it needs to give more feeling of agency to the player so it doesn't feel like I'm being trolled by the developer.

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.

[...]the post name "zombies" does not fit[...]

Zombies originated in Haiti, where people were poisoned with tetrodotoxin to induce brain damage and make them compliant, then used as slave labour.

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.)

I doubt anybody is reading this thread.

I posted a comment back around page 250 asking any dev who reads it to reply so we know this thread is actually being read.  No one did, and I got my answer.

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).

You also have to have a careful look at the traits of the pawn you'll try to recruit. Great brawler but whining too smart depressive? Pass.

That's great, except you're often not given a choice.  I mean... look at your name.  I've had an abrasive pyromaniac show up my door and invite himself into my colony with no useful skills whatsoever, and the only thing I could do about it was salvage his organs and suffer severe mood debuffs for months as a result.

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.)

I'm not sure why this is, but it seems like rejection is a problem in smaller colonies.  Once I have six or more people everyone strangely loses interest in love.  Maybe they're too busy sowing smokeweed?  Or maybe the colony is just large enough that they spend most of their time out of each other's way?

I've noticed that I get sudden flurries of fistfights breaking out when there's a big crowd of colonists all working on the same projects.  I tend to have one or two specialists for each task, then set everyone at a 4 priority for stuff they're not particularly good at, so that when their primary work is done they can lend a hand sowing a field or digging out some ore.  When there's nothing else on the burner, that means I'll get a crowd of pawns all working on one thing, and with all the round-robin gab-fests happening, a fistfight almost inevitably breaks out.  I suspect that these crowd-sourced capital works projects also result in a lot of the sexual passes going on.

Okay, I gave him 2 hours a day of joy activities and confined him to luxurious quarters with beer during daylight hours while I acquired a joywire.  Once the joywire was installed I set him loose and he immediately started hitting on a man-hating woman repeatedly until he was miserable again.  I think I might have no choice but to remove his legs or give him a silent jaw.  I know the game will sometimes give you a big flurry of negative events all at once for the purpose of !!fun!!, but does it also pick a random pawn and turn him into a complete fedora-wearing social retard?

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?