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I like your ideas, they are good, horses especially. But I would replace bike with vechicles. Something like podracers from Star Wars I or vulture from Starcraft or bikes let's leave it for a while.

Thanks for your suggestion!
I opted not to suggest vehicles like that as Rimworld has a Western-style feeling to me. It's less science-fiction and more surviving on that forsaken rock. To me, it feels a lot like the series Firefly. Getting high-tech vehicles should be (if at all) a high tier technology for people who want to make the Kessel Run (you reference Star Wars, so do I! ). Horses feel the most Western-ish, but are admittedly hard to implement the way I envision them (but maybe someone else or Tynan himself has a better idea), so a bike would be a simple gadget to build. There's not as much technology in bikes as there is in podracers, thus constructing them in a simple colony feels more natural. (Admittedly, since Alpha 5 you can research space-ship parts)
But that's just me, maybe podracers are a better choice.

Regarding your control options, I see where you're coming from with (b), but why shouldn't colonists just share their vehicles? I guess you thought about a situation where a hunter shouldn't be forced to go by foot only because the grower takes the transport vehicle all the time to water potatoes in front of the colony's gates.
By requiring vehicles to be parked at designated zones (in order to gas them up, maybe) one could circumvent that colonists always take them, i. e. colonists have to make a detour to get to their vehicles, then. Plus, making it take time to mount/unmount would help with this, as well.

[Bike]

In order to make bigger maps work, i. e. your colonists not getting tired and hungry because they have to get to the siege or hunt and haul far away from their beds and stoves, we need faster or more durable colonists. The option of faster colonists seems easier to implement such that the game balancing is not completely broken (if the colonists get too tough, the game is too easy). To make them faster, I suggest to use bikes or horses.

Bike

• Bikes are made on the machining table. Seems more logical than making them a build-able item, but that would also be possible.
• Bikes can then be mounted (code from manning mortars can be recycled here). Mounting takes a short amount of time such that bikes are not always used for every small step.
• When mounted, bikes provide colonists with 100-200% movement bonus (can maybe be linked with some trait or skill?). This also means that grass and the like will reduce overall movement as well.
• "Half-defenses", i. e. everything you can use for defense but also climb over (sandbags, chunks), are impassable with bikes.
• Riding a bike, you cannot pass through doors (I understand that this might be complicated due to the fact that bikes could be stockpiled both inside and outside the base. So this is definitely a maybe).
• Bikes also allow normal transportation of items (so max. 75 of resources, 1 of rockets/meals and the like). Especially transporting meals will be beneficial for surviving meals.
• Research might allow for more transport capacity/faster bikes.
• Shooting from a bike is possible, but only if the skill level is above 10 or the like. Accuracy is reduced.
• Bikes cannot be used for defense.
• Bikes can be destroyed. They naturally lose integrity with time and can (can't?) be repaired. Not being able to repair them maybe is a possibility of balancing them.

Horse

• The horse is a new animal spawning in packs, not unlike the muffalo. It roams around, it eats plants. Gives around half(?) the meat of a muffalo.
• Unlike the muffalo, horses are fast and also can, when fleeing from hunters, leave the map with the whole pack. They do not attack hunters.
• The horse is tame-able. The mechanic for this would have to be implemented, making this probably a much harder implementation than bikes. I'm not sure if taming is planned? For the sake of a completed suggestion, here an idea for taming:
  
  • New order: Tame.
  • New structures: gate and sleeping spots for animals (hay). Effectively making stables.
  • New animals in the stable are like prisoners and need to be tamed after being held captive. Tamed animals will not run away likely if the gate is open and sleep in the same spot every night.
  • Animals in the stable need to be fed food. Mood is not affected by the type of food eaten.
  • New item: saddle for mountable animals.
  • Tamed mountable animals allow for being saddled. Mechanically one could think about gear for animals.
  • Animals in the stable can also be marked for hunting. One could think about making it a melee-hunt at that point (cut the throat).
    
  • Plan A: Animals marked for taming are hunted in a usual manner, but are likely to be incapacitated. They can then be rescued and be brought to their new stable. They are like prisoners, need to be doctored. Seems relatively easy to implement, but is rather cruel .
  • Plan B (more complicated, probably more fiddly, but less cruel): When an animal is marked for taming, a colonist (either new skill Taming or using Hunting (seems somewhat logical as the first dogs were probably used and tamed by hunters)) takes food and tries to approach the animal.
  • The animal will approach the colonist with a certain probability p (depending on skill) or run away respectively, making the colonist retry. It makes sense for a horse to run away more often than a muffalo.
  • The colonist then tries to lure the animal back to the base. Startling the animal (shots fired at other animals) at this stage will result in a failure.
  • It will be lured to a free haystack to sleep in. It is then in the process of being tamed.
• A saddled horse can be mounted by colonists.
• It is very much like the bike-suggestion otherwise.
• Unlike bikes, it can move over the half-defenses. It can also be used as a meat-shield, so that it gives defense.
• If being shot while mounted, it can get a panic attack and run away, throw down the rider etc.

Looking at both lists, bikes are probably easier to make. If one opts to make them in the machining table, it would result in kind of a new type of item: can be crafted, can be put in a stockpile and is movable. While I feel a lot of code can be copy and pasted for bikes, I have absolutely no idea how much complexity bikes or horses would add to the pathfinding algorithm A*.

So, that's my suggestion for bikes and horses, hopefully it's extensive enough for a good approximation of how complicated it is to implement. IMHO, we need faster travel or at least the possibility of transport or otherwise, sieges are just the death of colonies because they are unreachable.

Any questions or suggestions? Just shoot them, I'd love to discuss with you!

I recently found a floating "constructed roof" near a small rock formation in my game. I never built in its vicinity. As far as I know, no raiders attacked from there. There was no siege or the like. I did find it in May of year 1, so I'm not sure whether it was generated at map generation or afterwards. I can upload the save file, if necessary. Attached you find a cropped screenshot of the region. Obviously, I can't give any steps to reproduce, but here's what I guess is the map hash from the save file, maybe it helps.

Code Select Expand

<mapInfo>
<name>Ellis</name>
<size>(250, 1, 250)</size>
<maxThingIDIndex>353474</maxThingIDIndex>
<generatorDef>XericShrubland</generatorDef>
<gameplayID>bTgd3UMqF3Q23RuOHVDv</gameplayID>
</mapInfo>

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I know about two Google Docs ([1], [2]) with Rimworld lore by Tynan (found the links somewhere in the forums). Is there any more lore written (aside from characters' backstories)? Are there plans to extending the lore; are we users allowed to make up our own history of Rimworld, thus extending what the game's universe is about (again, not looking at the backstories)?

Specifically, I'm trying to concentrate on history of the planet itself. Something has to have happened in order to get mechanoids on there and hundreds of thousands (looking at the number of raiders/traders/pirates) of humans. We are trying to survive on this world, we should get to know more about it.

[1]: Longsleep Revival Briefing
[2]: RimWorld Universe Quick Primer

The main problem with all these suggestions (which I like very much) is the passing of time. I hope you don't mind me extending on your suggestions.

The game (and reading comments in these forums, the community as well) likes the "authentic" passing of time, e. g. people eating daily, day/night cycles, sleeping at night and thus making long travel exhausting etc. (let's call this the "human frame"). Concurrently, on the other hand, raspberry bushes and agave fruits can be harvested again and again in a matter of days, as can potato plants. Oak trees need less than a month of growth in order to harvest (called the "nature frame").

The way I see it, the two frames, human and nature frame, are disjoint. How can these be merged?
A simple (planetary) way would be to say: We're at a different planet, no reason to assume that those raspberries are our terrestrial raspberries, they metabolize faster. As does the whole flora and fauna.
Since this planet already is all kinds of weird (psychotic wave, mechanoid centipedes), this could very well be an acceptable explanation. It also allows the explanation why there are so freaking many tribesmen and outlanders, they became more and more indigenous to the planet and have a faster life cycle. One could still argue why you land in an unpopulated place on said planet, but as soon as more aggressive animals and mechanoids are added, this also makes sense (I'd love to see wolves and the like, killing your poor muffalos and thirsting for human blood when there's nothing left to hunt!).

This explanation would allow for procreating. After some time your people are influenced by the planet so that they reproduce faster. The most natural way to introduce such a mechanic would be exponential trend of gestation so that a newly arrived pregnant women is still 266 days away from birth whereas a person who becomes pregnant after 100 days has a shorter pregnancy, e. g. g(t) = a*exp(-t/t_0) + b where t is the length of gestation. In order to fit with the seasons on the planet, b~3 days and thus a~263. t_0 would tell how fast the colonists are getting indigenous to this new planet.

Born children then can be taught (after a couple of days) certain skills when looking other colonists do them. Junior wants to learn cooking? Let him watch! Learn hunting? Let him shoot! Make his hands dirty? Down into the mines, I say! But children should also have a higher mortality than colonists (a sad, sad truth). As can birth lead to a dead mother. A proficient doctor could be of use here to reduce mortality for both mother and child.

When thinking about mating, one should think about relationships between colonists. Only in a fear-controlled colony the player should be able to designate which two colonists procreate. In general, colonists should have thoughts about their feelings to each other (X does not like Y, thus happiness decreases whenever X meets Y. X loves Z and has happiness spikes whenever they had a chat, but is also depressed when Z is wounded/away for too long etc.). If two people like each other very much, they might end up in the same bed with a certain probability of the woman getting pregnant. The player may help out with orders but only if happiness or fear is high enough, this command should succeed.

Are squads a confirmed feature? I guess if squads get their own commands it'd easy to add them to such toolbar

[F key solution]

I'd like to suggest a way to access custom commands from everywhere. Whether I want to raise a wall at a certain point on the map or whether I want to have quick access to mining orders, I miss such a feature at this point. Right now I have to click Architect -> Section -> Command (maybe hotkey instead). It can get a bit tedious when building a room for example: putting down the plans for walls, doors, lamp, bed and floor results in a couple of clicks.

I thought about a couple of ways to implement global hotkeys. The change between global hotkeys and a quickbar (or whatever name you may have for such a toolbar) would be merely whether or not the bar is shown at all times or not, I guess.

• F key solution As the keys 1-3 are already used for the passing of time, the usual number keys are not ideal for hotkeys. However, the functional keys F1-F8 are yet to be used and one could give the user the ability to bind commands to them specifically. In this case (as there is a fixed number of rebindable keys) one could think about displaying the bar at all times and prompting the user to add commands (as depicted in the screenshot).
  
• Modifier solution Give the user (near) complete freedom for binding commands to keys. In order to avoid conflicts, a modifier has to be used (Ctrl or Shift probably being the most feasible options).
  Though I'm not sure at how to make the user-defined keys in this case. I pondered about hovering over the command and hitting the hotkey (as in Diablo 2), but that seems a bit awkward nowadays and what happens if the hotkey was already defined? Not being able to invoke a hotkey just because the cursor is at the wrong position seems aggravating. A checkbox "Edit hotkeys" is clunky. Maybe something like Modifier+Space to edit hotkeys? I'm not sure and like to hear your input.
  

So, that are my thoughts on using the commands more efficiently. What do you think about it?

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