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There's something I've noticed twice now which I don't know whether it's a bug or working as intended

(Randy Rough, travelling through hilly arid shrublands, played maybe 10 hours in last 3 days.)

When a caravan is attacked by bandits, there's a chance for the fight map to have an insect hive on it. Both times that I've seen this the bandits have spawned next to (literally within 5 cells of) the insect hive. This sets the insects hostile who then kill the bandits and attack me, being a much greater threat than the bandits ever were. One of the times I just barely fought them off, the other didn't go so well :/

I'm wondering if this is supposed to happen, and if it's specific to 1.0 (I'd never seen it previously, though I wasn't doing so much caravaning previously.) It sticks out in my head because these accidental insect attacks tend to be far worse than any actual "attack" events I've encountered so far.

Raid power scales infinitely.

At year 4 on normal I have 1:20 ratio with pirate raids. Twenty pirates against each one of my colonists, including non-violent and inept in combat

On base builder I'll get 15, and 20 would be year later.

medium and lower difficulties keep relentlessly adding more and more raiders just like other difficulties

Thanks for the pass-along. This is something I'm thinking about while making adjustments.

The thing is, unless there's a bug or something, or he's modding, none of these statements is actually true.

Yeah, I gotta go with Tynan on this, I've played further than year 4 on higher difficulties than "normal" (I presume he means medium), and I've never been outnumbered more than 1.5 to 1 in recent builds, maybe 2 to 1 in earlier ones. That's either a case of a broken mod, a bug, somebody making every damn thing in their base out of solid gold or something (not even sure if that would be enough), or somebody's been telling porkies

Nooo, don't take my RNG away!

In all seriousness, one of the things that keep me coming back to this game time and again is the chance, always there, for everything to turn around in an instant and the new challenges associated with recovery.

For context, I've a good 300 hours sunk into this game. I don't claim to be the most experienced player here by any means, but I know the situations people are talking about. I've seen the freak 0.1% shots hit. I've gotten colonies where more than half the members are incapable of something basic like hauling or fighting. I've lost multiple colonists in an instant to lucky hits from rocket launchers and the like, suffered plague before getting a single doctor or any meds and had my best fighters have serious breakdowns just before a raid.

You know what? If it weren't for that stuff I'd find this game boring as hell.

I mean, think about this game for a second. Most of the time, at a given moment, absolutely nothing is happening. Most game ticks go by on full fast forward, the pawns following the priorities you set like some sort of idle game. It should be boring. But it isn't. There's a certain joy to seeing everything work properly, and that only comes because you know that things could stop working properly at any moment. Then, when it does fall apart, you've got to hop out of the rut you were in, gather up the survivors and rebuild (or lose, but if losing wasn't a possibility than winning would be meaningless).  The unpredictability makes it worth sticking with and keeps it from just being more of the same.

A few days ago my current colony got into a fight with some mechanoids. This was before the charge lance nerf and RNG was in a wrathful mood, so even though the hit chances never left the single-digit percentages and my pawns were fairly well armoured we ended up losing two limbs, a foot and a kidney. Since then, the kidney - deficient pawn has died of a disease he'd otherwise have made it through, while caravaning (ironically, to recover an excellent charge lance from a quest). Now, when he died I wanted to give him a proper burial, so I hit "settle", made him a sarcophagus, dumped a few caravan items on the ground there to get the weight down so we could move, and headed home with the rest.
No sooner do we leave then we get a chased refugee event. I accept - but wait, where is she? Then I realise she's on the map I buried dead guy on, that no-one else is on but I forgot to delete. I have her grab the LMG I'd ditched and take cover behind the sarcophagus, she shoots her attacker down, and long story short she makes it to our proper base a few days later.

Now here's the thing. In 300 hours of play, a good half of which was after caravaning came in, it had never once occurred to me to scatter some weapons on an empty map for the refugees. It never would have occurred to me had that pawn not lost that kidney to a charge lance shot that had a tiny chance of hitting. Experiencing some failures leads to playing the game in whole new ways that keep it interesting - I've a dozen more stories at least along those lines.

Now if we ditch RNG, we'd presumably end up in a state where perfect play = no deaths. I've seen some people directly advocate for this. But honestly if we got that, I'd probably be incentivised to play deliberately worse, or on crazy settings like sea ice extreme, so things aren't so damn methodical. Because as much as frustrating as it can be to lose a pawn you've been through 20 game hours with, it's not half as annoying going through those same 20 hours without any real gameplay - just letting it play itself almost (had that experience a while back when I selected too low a difficulty by typo).

Now obviously, some people here will disagree with me, and I've no issue if Tynan wants to add some sort of optional anti-RNG mode, similar to the permadeath/commitment option we have now. Some people will use and some won't. But if there's some attempt to remove big, game changing RNG like brain hits and the like entirely, you can bet the first mod I'll make when 1.0 comes out will be to bring it back!

So here's a funny story for you. I started playing 1.0 pretty much when the dev first dropped. Lots of things looked cool, excited to see where these changes went and how they influenced gameplay, but after a couple quadrums I noticed something - the game was definitely easier than I remembered. Raids were smaller, I didn't suffer a single permanent injury for 3 years (though a lot of this is due to the new armour system which I LOVE), and generally I was starting to lose interest due to lack of challenge.

Then I noticed I misunderstood the new difficulty names and was playing on a lower level than I was used to. Guess I play Rough so often I just assumed it was the medium one!

Anyway, W.R.T. more specific things with this build;

-New river stuff is cool, they now feel like more than just obstacles.

-More developed lategame is a big plus, no longer are all useful techs done in three years, have yet to launch ship so can't comment on the endgame rush

-I already mentioned the new armour system, the whole "fewer but more significant wounds"  is interesting, but what I really like is the new dimension it adds to weapon choices. Once, when those psychotic non-fleeing tribal sappers were charging, I put my only power armour on my Tough colonist and put her in the front as a decoy - then, when they were all over her, had a bunch others open fire with shotguns and machine pistols. None of those weapons had any chance of penetrating her armour and she got out with a few bruises while the raiders were shot to pieces.

- I'm a little iffy with the new art TBH. It's not that it's bad, so much as that a lot of it doesn't fit well with existing graphics. Even just adding a few graphics that are sort of inbetween the old and the new in style would do a lot to bridge the gap. Right now the difference is kind of glaring tbh.

- Shooting in melee changes threw me a bit. When I started 1.0  it was still a thing, and now the raiders could do it too. Had some serious trouble meleeing a early raider with my brawler (though that *may* have also been due to said raider's surprisingly good armour, Tough trait AND Painstopper  ). Then point blank shooting went away, and predator attacks got much harder. I would actually quite like this IF undrafted pawns reacted instantly (shooting or running) rather than the second or two delay we seem to have at the moment. That's probably the one change I'd like the most at the moment; with ranged pawns now doing worse in melee there needs to be better reactions to the threat of melee.

- (Slightly theorising, but based on past experiences)  Just saw that you nerfed the greatbow a fair bit, kudos for that. That damn thing was too out of league with the other neolithic ranged weapons. I'd like to see a bit more rebalancing with pre-gun ranged weapons, currently there isn't the same level of "what's the best for this situation" decision making  you get with all the other weapon classes (guns, melee, grenades, spacer).   Making the greatbow no longer be a bolt-action rifle in disguise is a step in the right direction IMO

That's about all that springs to mind at the moment. There's obviously a bunch of other changes/new stuff / rebalancing I didn't mention for brevity's sake, but in general I am a big fan of 95% of this update, this'll be a hell of a game when it's finally done