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That's what I wound up doing, just removing the roof and rearranging the room a bit.  I don't like doing that because it picks at my obsessive design tendencies, but it just works better.  I just wanted to mention this because it seemed baffling to me that I could overheat a room by venting it better and wasn't sure if this was unintentional or just game stuff at work.  Looks like, from Razuhl's response, it's just one of those 'game things.'

This may be a vanilla game issue since I don't have any mods that affect temperature calculations (that I know of) but the item that triggered the problem is in a mod so I put it here.

Full mod list is here if it's needed:  https://git.io/fxHo1

So, here's what happened:
I have an RF Solar Shield in a 9x9 indoor room, because the shield shorts out if it gets wet.  This item protects me from solar flares when they activate, but consumes an insane amount of power and generates an insane amount of heat when active.  As such, I have one wall that is nothing but vents (except for one door) leading to a 2x9 enclosed outdoor space; I set it up in this janky way because raiders love to destroy vents and coolers and such to get inside and I wanted to deny them that.  A solar flare happened and the room with the shield immediately began fluctuating between 60-100 degrees as the vents dispersed the hot air to the outdoor enclosure, which in turn sent it outside, just like I'd designed it to do. 

For the sake of visuals, here's the setup.  X is a wall, V is a vent, D is a door, S is the Solar Shield:
XXXXXXXXXXX
X  No Roof    X
X                 X
XVVVVDVVVVX
XSS             X
XSS             X
X                 X
X                 X
X     Roof      X
X                 X
X                 X
X                 X
X                 X
XXXXXDXXXXX

This was still too hot for my tastes, so I decided to remove the door in the vent wall to give it some extra space to vent.  Removing the door between the two rooms sent the temperature flying over 300!  I think this happened because removing the door turned the setup from two rooms, one entirely indoors and one entirely outdoors, to one single room that was mostly indoors.  This affected the heat distribution calculation, causing much more heat to stay inside despite the fact that the setup as a whole had the exact amount of exposure to the outside (18 tiles) as it always had.

This shouldn't happen.  What I would have expected would be for the initial setup to either have the same temperature (due to the enclosure not being large enough to vent that much heat) or for the interior room to immediately heat up to 300 (due to the heat buildup in the room exceeding the vents' ability to get rid of it).  In either case, removing the door between the two areas should not have made the situation worse.

I can see this being a fringe case not really worthy of dev time or attention, but I thought I'd mention it anyway!

I once had the inverse happen, where a prisoner broke free, grabbed a weapon from my armory, and attacked a muffalo, only for the muffalo to one-shot him with a headbutt.  I imagine the odds are similar!

In a SP game, automating what would otherwise be micromanagement busywork to save time but give same results is strict QoL improvement without changing actual design of the game's mechanical interaction...

This is my main logic for suggesting 'Vanilla Plus' mods whenever a thread like this comes up.  They're all things you could theoretically accomplish with base-game behavior but they reduce intense amounts of micromanagement, RL time-wasting, or in-game clutter associated with those tasks.

I play with a lot of mods.  A LOT of mods.  But these are the mods that I consider so essential I'd consider them 'Vanilla Plus' mods - Things that don't change the vanilla gameplay experience but instead provide important functionality and ease of use.

EdB Prepare Carefully - This should really just be in the base game.  It's the most powerful tool available for setting the scene for your story.  It naturally complements the ingame Scenario Editor perfectly and once you use it a few times you'll wonder how you ever did without it.

HugsLib - Do you like using mods?  You need HugsLib.  A lot of mods need it and even if you don't like mods then it won't do anything that interferes with the vanilla experience.  Get it just so you don't forget it next time you see a must-have mod.

Allow Tool - Another thing that should be in the base game, this tool (actually a set of tools) allows you a vastly-improved mechanism to select things on the map and set permissions based on item type, like selecting every ship debris for deconstruction or every squirrel for taming (you mad bastard).  It also makes cleaning up after raids a snap by letting you set everything on the map to Allowed at once instead of needing to designate everything item by item.  This mod has saved me so much time I'm not sure how I got by without it.

Stack Merger - Regardless of how you feel about storage (there is always a debate between 'Don't hoard' and 'More space') you want this mod.  This adds a low-priority hauling job that has pawns tidy up stockpiles.  No more having 9 piles of 5 steel or 4 individual smokeleaf joints wasting tiles of stockpile space, since pawns with nothing better to do will automatically clean it up and put everything together, the way it should be.  As much as I hate to keep saying it, this should also be base-game behavior.

Path Avoid A17 - This adds a tool that lets you designate pathing options for colonists.  With some thought and planning this mod can easily overcome the game's occasionally-dodgy pathfinding and make life a lot easier.  No more will colonists attempt to run through every patch of mud or copse of trees on their way to and from the farm, nor will they decide that climbing over a research table is faster than walking around it, because you can tell them not to do that.

Set-Up Camp - This is a bit more unusual since it's not a new tool or interface tweak but rather a natural expansion and streamlining of something you can already sort of do.  All it does is set up a Tiny map for your caravan to camp at if they need to recover joy, find some emergency supplies, or just rest for a while.  You can already achieve this by Settling a tile, but this mod means you can do it without littering the area with abandoned settlements.

Melee Hunting A17 - Colonists no longer need ranged weapons to go hunting.  Especially great if you play tribals, since their melee options are often much better than their ranged ones.  Also gives your Brawlers something to do.  Just make sure colonists aren't told to hunt until they actually have a weapon or they will gladly go out and try to punch bears to death.

Conduit Deconstruct - This lets you remove power conduits without ripping down what's build over top of them first or having to select each one individually.  Vital for those times you need to rewire your base, you'll never know how great a tool it is until you realize you need to rip up 90 power cables you've laid under several load-bearing walls.

I'm not sure how this works for jobs with work units (crafting, artistic, etc) but I imagine it's actually the same, with XP being given per work unit completed rather than per second.

I think it depends on the type of job mostly. Any artistic, armor or weapon bill gives continuous xp, as does growing, research and construction. I can't figure out the logic behind when plant cutting gives xp and when it doesn't, but it seems to be related to the maturity rate of what you're harvesting. Most other jobs only give xp when the job is finished.

Surgery used to give continuous xp, but I think it was changed to a large chunk instead (presumably to prevent powerleveling by starting surgery and cancelling before it's done).

Seems a bit unusual that it would work that way, but I admitted I didn't know how it works for work unit tasks.  I'd have programmed it differently myself to remove that very thing.  I'll keep that in mind.

I tend to be a more casual easy-mode relaxation type of player, but I still have a few 'rules' I like to play by.

1)  No killboxes.  They take the fun and danger out of raids.

2)  Moral High Ground.  This can be surprisingly tough and encompasses a bunch of little sub-rules.  No drugs for colonists.  All addictions must be cured.  All refugees must be accepted and cared for, all crashed pods must be rescued, all downed raiders must be captured, treated, and released or recruited (within reason).  Corpses are to be properly disposed of (buried or cremated) as soon as is practical. 

3)  Every colonist needs their own bedroom!  No bunking.  Exception made for married couples, who can stay together, and prisoners, because sometimes large raids happen.

4)  No mountain bases.  I just don't like them.

Cultist has it right - This is an illusion and is, for most tasks, counterproductive because XP is only given when the job is finished.  I'm not sure how this works for jobs with work units (crafting, artistic, etc) but I imagine it's actually the same, with XP being given per work unit completed rather than per second.  This would also be counterproductive since the number of work units doesn't change, just the speed at which they're completed.  This would limit the gains to limiting over-cap XP (because the job takes longer to finish so the pawn is less likely to hit their daily cap, and exceeds it by less if they do) and maintaining skill levels (since skill decay doesn't happen when a skill is gaining).

Let's not get into religious debates in a thread about video game playstyle diversity, guys.

I suspect mods are the way to achieve a lot of this for one simple reason:  The more complex and inaccessible you make the base game the fewer people play it.  Some people want a difficult survival setting where every step is a struggle, and that's perfectly fine.  I want that too sometimes.  But sometimes I just want to kick back and build a little colony without worrying too much about development tracks and optimized power distribution.  By making vanilla incorporate more 'hardcore' elements then you turn away the more casual players because the game's not as accessible.  Take Dwarf Fortress, for example.  It's a truly amazing game and I love playing it because so many different things can happen and there's so much to do and see and manage.  But I don't know any of my friends that play it because getting past the welcome screen requires a wiki.  That mod mentioned by Razzoriel above sounds amazing, for instance, and if it's available I'll probably snag it and try it.  But I always have the option to turn it off and go back to the easier vanilla experience if I want to, and I like that.

It's always worth remembering that those of us who frequent the forums are typically the more dedicated players, and thus often the more skilled, more analytical players.  Surviving an ice sheet on Extreme might be easy...  for us.  But the people who post on the forums are generally a small subset of the whole community that plays the game.  Go on any game forum and you'll nearly always find there's always a good portion of people who think the game is 'too easy' and wish it was harder.  Is the game actually easy?  Maybe it is, or maybe it's just those dedicated players have worked out the optimal strategies already and have been employing them judiciously.

Even if you do add more things and new styles and diversification there's still going to be an optimal strategy, a way to make the game too easy, a path that allows maximum gain for minimum effort.  It's the nature of any sandbox survival game.

Just something to keep in mind.

An important note for mass production is that this works the other way around too - A pawn retrieving something from a stack locks that stack until he gets it.  This can make crafting certain items with rapid craft times (Joints, most commonly) from one or two source stacks remarkably inefficient if you have more craft stations than stacks, a problem that actually gets worse if you use a mod that increases maximum stack size.

[You could easily have the foraging % be the amount you are slowed by doing so]

I think allowing foraging by both pawns and animals might help this problem a great deal.

Specifically, I'd recommend allowing the player to set a (freely changeable in transit) "forage" or "live off the land" rate for a given caravan, set to specific percentages.  For example, you could perhaps set 33%, 50%, and 75% of the daily nutrition requirement as the amount of foraging for both pawns and animals (as separate groups), slowing down travel progressively at higher percentages.  You could easily have the foraging % be the amount you are slowed by doing so, or some multiplied amount thereof, as an example, which also handily disallows foraging for 100% of your supplies.

That would defeat the purpose entirely.  Assume you forage 50% of your food, reducing your food consumption by half, but you travel at 50% speed, which means the trip takes twice as long.  You now need half the food over twice the time...  which is the same amount of food as before.

A few generic ideas for positive events that aren't simply handouts.  I may have borrowed some ideas from earlier in the thread.

1)  Moonglow - An especially reflective full moon passes across the sky at night, allowing for partial light even at night.  The night occurs as normal, but has a 60% base light level instead of 0%.  Outdoor plants will continue to grow during a Moonglow event, even though it's night.  Can occur during (and thus overrides) a Solar Eclipse, as the light is not directly coming from the sun.

2)  Hunter-Killers - A pack of Scythers appears on the map during a raid with intent to kill a specific target in the enemy faction.  They are friendly to your colony but enemies will treat them as hostile and try to defend the target.  Once the target flees or is killed the scythers will leave the map (but will still defend themselves).  More likely to occur if an enemy faction leader is present, targeting them.

3)  Intercepted Broadcast - A group of possible events.  All of these require a Comms Console.

3a)  Your colony's comms console intercepts a communique from an enemy faction announcing the time, target, and type of their next raid, allowing your colonists more time to prepare for it.  It will also announce the direction they will arrive from, or if they are using drop pods.

3b)  Your colony's comms console intercepts a burst of mechanoid traffic.  You can choose to Leave It Alone (no effect) or Try to Alter.  A failed alteration has a chance to cause a small mechanoid raid.  A successful one guarantees a Hunter-Killer event during the next non-Mechanoid raid.  Success chance is based on the highest Intellectual skill in your colony.

3c)  An orbital trader mistakenly contacts you thinking you're another faction, asking you the coordinates to deliver their shipment to.  You can either inform them of their mistake (gain relations with that faction) or give them your coordinates (take a relations hit but trigger a Drop Pods event).  There is a small chance that the signal is a spoof by pirates and giving them your coordinates instead triggers a small drop pod raid.

4)  Animal Migration - A large group of a single type of animal enters one side of the map and slowly moves to the other side, leaving the map when they reach the edge.

I argue that the temperature system is fine enough for the context.  This isn't a simulator, after all, I wouldn't expect extremely detailed temperature mechanics in a game like this (except from Dwarf Fortress because the creator of that game is insane.  In a good way).  There are a few quirks of the temperature system (AC units make incredible heaters - I've heated bases with the waste heat of my freezer) but I don't think making it more complex is needed so much as just ironing out the kinks.

Interestingly, the inefficiency you expect to see does happen, but it requires a larger area or a greater ambient temperature difference to really manifest.

Ordering traders doesnt really pay off unless you re looking for something specific like bionics or neutroamine in high amounts, traders have low money since A17, cost 700 silver when ordered and only buy specific stuff, faction bases though buy everything, you get a trade bonus because its a faction base, and they have way more money and stock than your average trader and you can save the 700 bucks and spend it on something else.

Thing is, this is generally the only reason you trade.  You need something, and probably in volume.  It's easier and safer to have the trader bring it to you than it is to go out and get it yourself, and when you factor in packing and travel time, cost of food, cost to maintain pack animals, and lost productivity from traveling pawns, it's also generally cheaper.