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Hey there; loving the changes to the game since I last played it a fair old time ago.
Thing is, I've got a 3-monitor setup so when the game starts up in the figurative centre of the entire display area, this happens:

Any chance you can set the game to start up on the desktop with the taskbar?
Ta.

I think he might be asking how, if a mortar is behind a mountain, it can still hit stuff on the far side of the mountain.

The answer to that is that mortar rounds travel in high ballistic arcs, ascending almost vertically, and also descending vertically. It might be nice to see the mortar shells rise towards the camera to show that happening, but I suspect that would involve programming in a proper Z-axis, which I recall Tynan not wanting to do.

Take it from a defensive game to an offensive one.

Yeah... Rimworld's combat is highly detailed and all, but the game's not really in a state where attacking mortar bases is ever actually fun (for me).
You can kind of get a pincer movement going (with your three/four unarmoured, pistol-wielding colonists against the raiders' eight or twelve Space Marines), but generally I find that the combat bogs down really quickly. Even throwing a pretty-much-suicidal grenadier charge into the mix doesn't improve matters much. I tend to find that that guy just gets mown down before they throw a single grenade anyway, much like the raiders who try the same tactics (when there's fewer than four grenadiers, at any rate...).

If the mortar base is on the far side of the map, your colonists are already half-starved or half-crazy by the time they get there. In a high-vegetation map, you can kind of finagle them into harvesting and eating some of the local vegetation on the way, but it's something of a micromanagement nightmare, as is providing any kind of local first aid to anyone who gets wounded out in the middle of nowhere.

We'll see how alpha 7 goes, but I don't see the game being much more fun for me in 7 than it was in 6 (i.e. not very).  That's alphas for you, though.

It's true of wild berries, and false for cultivated berries.

I believe that each is an explicitly different type of berry, when clicked on, but again, can't check...

The wiki also says Berry plants leave the bush after berry picking... and that doesn't seem to be the case. If it's not... is there really a point to berries over taters?

I can't fire the game up at the moment to check this, but I believe there are "chop plant" and "harvest food" buttons. If you chop a berry plant, it will harvest the food, but also clear the plant. You want to tell your colonists only to harvest the food.

This only applies to wild berry bushes and those leafy plants (agave? something like that, it's been a while since I played). Farmed berry bushes are completely harvested.

Are they planned? Desired?

It occurs to me that this no leg = permanently disabled thing really does encourage and even require some pretty extreme measures on the part of players.

Eeeh... As it stands, you've got a choice between allowing the incapacitated to die, or sell them off, or keep them alive but forever-incapped (including, I would guess, being unable to get to the ship to escape, but I've never built a ship, so...). Those are extreme measures, but they're not repeatably interesting. You just make that decision and move on.

I'd suggest you make crutches/wooden leg really crap (probably 25% speed, or maybe even less), with a significant barrier to entry before the player can get prosthetics that are any good. Probably a second-level research item, with a specific crafting table. Probably a high-level arts requirement to even build one.

Perhaps a temporary per-item "prosthetics" skill on the injured party member, too, so that they could improve their performance with a particular prosthetic, but then be a liability for a fair amount of time if they switched to anything better.

Temporary/per-item skills might be useful to put into the game for other items, such as particular weapon/armour/turret types, for example... You might be good at shooting pistols, but not brilliant with rifles without some training.

Random thoughts.

[EDIT:]

Darkness is what tips your miners over the edge, though.

All your other colonists can be crunching their way miserably over well-lit rubble without causing trouble, but miners need to be sent off to smell the flowers every so often...

EDIT: Oh, if hats are hooked in, I wonder if wheelbarrows might not be far behind... That would truly be a joyous day...

Now that colonists have wearable items, it would be nice for them to also be able to pick up emergency rations they can eat when they're starving. Perhaps without them, they would refuse to move more than X spaces away from the home zones.

I guess this is only really an issue on larger maps. I think I'm going to have to switch to playing on smaller maps again, because travelling to siege camps just makes my colonists go mad from starvation...

Sorry, slightly unfocused rambling.

Personally, having been hit by this "intended behaviour" myself in the past, I think there should be a check and an alert to the player when this will affect them, in the same way the "These colonists will lose their beds" check is done. If there are any zones in the room you're trying to designate as a prison, they should be deleted, or the player should be warned that those zones are going to effectively be disabled until the prison is undesignated.

Thinking about it, it'd actually be pretty cool to be able to force prisoners to work the zones or workbenches in their prison as slave labourers, but colonist moods are currently so brittle that I can't see that working in the current build anyway...

I had this issue, where I created an emergency prison cell in my kitchen, and relocating the prisoner didn't help. I think it's because I just deleted the bed, which left the room in a "prison" state, and they still couldn't use the items in it.

I'll check when I get home. I had to abandon that colony almost immediately after that point, because everyone went mad, because Alpha 5 is the insanity update...

In A5, yes.

Awesome. I had an issue in one game where raiders had set fire to my base and run off, and the sole conscious colonist I had couldn't fight fires. I ripped off the whole roof and hoped for rain. Rebuilding the roof after that happened was something of a challenge...

Of course, bandit drops in roofed areas makes it much more of a moot point, but whatever.

I can't play Rimworld just at the moment, but I tend to build outside, around patches of fertile soil.
I'll build 5x5 rooms for smaller rooms, and 11x11 rooms for larger rooms.
Rimworld doesn't support 11x11 rooms, so I'll put a "peg" wall in on one side of the room in order to hold the roof up.

Large and small rooms:

    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    X     X     X     X
    X           X     X
    X           X     X
    X           X     X
    X           X     X
    X           XXXXXXX
    X           X
    X           X
    X           X
    X           X
    XXXXXXXXXXXXX

My first large room will be a "greenhouse" around a patch of fertile soil. I'll put a solar lamp in the middle of the room, and put a growth zone around it. I'll set that to trees, then delete the growth zone around all the trees so that I can grow potatoes around the trees. A quirk in the engine means that this leaves me with two growth zones to manage, instead of one per tree

Tree zone:

    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    XTTTTTXTTTTTX     X
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX     X
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX     X
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX     X
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX     X
    XTTTTTOTTTTTXXXXXXX
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX
    XTTTTTTTTTTTX
    XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Delete most of it:

    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    X     X     X     X
    X T T T T T X     X
    X           X     X
    X T T T T T X     X
    X           X     X
    X T T O T T XXXXXXX
    X           X
    X T T T T T X
    X           X
    X T T T T T X
    X           X
    XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Add a new growing zone for potato.

    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    XPPPPPXPPPPPX     X
    XPTPTPTPTPTPX     X
    XPPPPPPPPPPPX     X
    XPTPTPTPTPTPX     X
    XPPPPPPPPPPPX     X
    XPTPTPOPTPTPXXXXXXX
    XPPPPPPPPPPPX
    XPTPTPTPTPTPX
    XPPPPPPPPPPPX
    XPTPTPTPTPTPX
    XPPPPPPPPPPPX
    XXXXXXXXXXXXX

I'll build smaller rooms around the larger one, for colonists to sleep in, and add work desks to any empty rooms. The sun lamp in the centre of the growing zone will give me 24 hour growing, in fertile soil, without hydroponics, so it's a really power-efficient farm in the early stages of the game.

If I can, I'll aim to "capture" a food-producing bush like an agave or a berry bush in my greenhouse, instead of planting potatoes, so that I can allow that to grow. This way, I'll just have to regularly harvest the berries/agave, and won't need a dedicated plant grower.

I'll build the whole thing out of wood, so that it goes up quickly.

This scheme provides a quick, secure-ish, expandable base for the early game, which I can either expand, then surround with metal or stone walls later in the game.

I suppose that this won't be as viable once Tynan brings his change to allow raiders to drop into the buildings into the main build, but it's a fairly decent, defensible build for when that happens.

Either that or give the trade beacon a square area of influence. Having to shape my main outdoor storage area into the trade beacon's awkward shape every game is a bit of a pain in the backside. At its most "convenient", I can draw the shape in two sweeps and just give up on 32 squares of storage.


Most of the time, though, I find myself needing to draw this shape, fill it in, then cancel the extra beacons I've used to create the area. I'm really not great with visually judging distances in the game.
I'm probably missing something obvious, though.

Orbital drop raiders are less numerous but can now punch through thin roofs.

Is that as in "everyone has to build everything in mountains all the time now, because otherwise anywhere in your base can be invaded, at any time?" or as in "people are exploiting the game by creating no-roof zones to trade, and then putting the roof back on, and now they can't"?