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Added nuzzle: Animal approaches colonist and nuzzles him, giving him a happy memory. Different animals do this with different frequencies, and have different "nuzzle powers" which change their mood impact.

All I can think of when I read this was potential effects of different tamed animals muzzling your colonists.

The Tamed Warg nuzzles a colonist.
The Colonist is very happy.

The Tamed Lizard nuzzles a colonist.
The Colonist is happy.

The Tamed Muffalo nuzzles a colonist.
Colonist needs treatment: Fleas.

The Tamed Mega scarab nuzzles a colonist.
The Colonist is mildly disturbed.

Colonist 1 nuzzles Colonist 2.
Colonist 1 does not reciprocate.
Colonist 2 has broken down and is wondering in a daze.

The Tamed Scyther nuzzles a colonist.
Colonist needs treatment: Missing Nose.

Ok, fine. I know it just means a mood buff/debuff, but physical effects would be kinda fun, too.

Split your colonists into two groups:
1) Rodeo Clowns
2) Grenadiers

The Rodeo Clowns are equipped with shields. They run back and forth in front of the Mechaniods to attact fire. Try to find a balance between aggro range and safety: Too close and the shields will die, too far and the Mechs will engage the grenadiers. Hopefully you'll have multiple shields so if one guy loses his shield he can run to safety while the other pawn(s) distract.

Grenadiers use fragmentation grenades. Frags do high damage to multiple organs/components, but have a short range compared to guns. Since the Rodeo clowns are distracting the mechs, the short range isn't too bad. Three grenadiers will kill a centipede in 3 or 4 volleys if your really unlucky. If your lucky they'll die even faster.

Supplement with ieds: They're grenades you don't have to throw!
Supplement with Turrets: make good distractions, and if you hook the turrets up to a switch, you can wait until the mechs get into close range before they register the threat, then turn all the turrets on at once. Now you have 4 to five shots per turret to further distract/hurt the mechs!

Don't Melee you fool!

Deploy shielded troops only to detract the Centipede's fire, like futuristic rodeo clowns. No direct attacks. Instead, try using frag grenades: They damage multiple components in one hit, instead of damaging a single random component each hit. They "Reload" rather quickly, too. This means you'll be able to at least one vital component with each attack, possibly more. The only weakness is range, but if your rodeo clowns are out in front doing their jobs, the grenadiers will be fine.

Rocket launchers work too, but they are ludicrously expensive.

Well, Rimworld IS marketed as a "Story Maker". So I suppose this would be logical addition to the game.

Or, you know, give it to pirates and watch as your base becomes a poisoned wasteland.

Just one more event for the pile, I suppose.

Once he was a common Gangster on a "civilized" world. He was the lowest of the low: A mook to be beaten and abused by fellow gangsters, enemy or not, and scorned by the rich and educated. He learned no productive skills and became totally asocial. Then, after a raid destroyed his gang, he was captured by a corrupt business with a need for muscle. Mindwiped, and given a meaningless purpose, Coffey became despensible drone to kill those who slighted the company.

Eventually, he broke free, and killed his captures, but without anywhere to go and no skills beyond the art of death, Coffey quickly fell back into the underworld and joined a pirate gang. But even among fellow brutes Coffey still couldn't escape abuse. The pirate gang stripped Coffey of all his possessions -which at this point consisted of raggy, stolen clothes, gave him a shield and a shank, and told the berserk to hold up wanderers for money.

So now our naked pirate friend is chasing a passer-by for her possessions. Maybe, if he's lucky, he can aquire enough wealth to gain repect among his fellow pirates. At the very least he could get some damn clothes! As luck would have it, however, the survivors of a recently destroyed voidship explosion had settled nearby. The passer-by,named Vang, offered to throw in with the colony in exchange for sanctuary. The colony accepted, and Coffey was beaten within an inch of his life.

But the refugees showed mercy on the Mindwiped Maniac. They threw the pirate in a cell with two other raiders from a rival gang, and over time tried to convince Coffey to join the cause and make a better life for himself. If only here, Coffey had chosen to leave behind his grudges and past sins, things might have gone very differently.

Instead, Coffey threw himself at the rival gangsters. He beat both of the captives nearly to death -twice- and each time had to be subdued by the colonists. The colonists tried to reason with him, but by now Coffey new only violence, and threw himself at anyone who shared a cell with him the moment they tried to sleep. Unwilling to put up with him any longer but unhappy with the concept of cold murder, the colonists released Coffey bound and into the wild -without his shield, of course!

What could Coffey do now? He could not return empty-handed to the pirates; They would have lost what meager investments they had been willing to give him, and without the shield he would be killed long before he could get within stabbing range of any loner worth mugging. Lost, alone, and naked, the berserk stood hungry in the center of the camp.

And then, an angry rabbit bit him.

This apparently sent the would-be assassin into a berserker rage, and he began stomping every rodent in the camp. Over time he accumulated a long list of bruises, bites, and cuts from retaliating animals. Fall arrived. He got Hypothermia. Coffey the lost pirate lunged and attacked anything in site, but he was too wounded to effectively pursue and the colonists simply ignored him. He got an infection. He started to starve. The end was fast approaching for poor Coffey.

The death blow came in the form of a psychic wave that stirred a trio of Muffalo into a frenzy. As they approached the only nearby living creatures; the colonists, Coffey the Berserk, Abused, Mindwiped, Naked, Shivering, Hungry, Sickly, abandoned Pirate prepared to protect the only people to ever show kindness to him.

He didn't even get a single punch off. The Muffalo surrounded and Gored him to death.

The Muffalo were subsequently picked off by a hunter with a survival rifle.

Coffey's corpse was unceremoniously thrown into a dumping pile with some other rotting corpses. He wasn't even cremated; the colony had sold its Molotov's for silver.

Yea, this was one of those random events I got during one of my playthoughs of Alpha 11. When I released him, he wouldn't leave to the pirates for some reason. That was his ACTUAL backstory, by the way.

I agree. From a gameplay perspective, it makes no sense for tattered and naked mood penalties to be the same. It almost seems to encourage you to sell all your clothes in the summer/hot biomes instead of trying to ensure your colonists can at least wear something at all times. A slight buff to battered clothing, even a -2 to the current mood effect (as apposed to -3), would fix this problem.

Yes. This should be a relatively easy quality-of-life fix for Tynan to make. So long as he notices this thread.

Earlier this year I pointed out that a filled grave is exactly as ugly as a completely exposed desiccated corpse, thanks to the way graves currently work. This means a grave is just a less effective version of a dumping stockpile set to corpses only. Now, I want to expand on the idea, and do more with the idea of giving your colonists a decent final resting place.

1: Fix graves
Because if I'm going to go through the trouble of digging a grave the corpse should at the very least have the courtesy to not freak out my colonists from six feet underground.
2: New Joy Activity: Visit Colonist Grave
It's a thing many people do, and having it in Rimworld would mean giving players both another source of joy, and a legitimate reason to treat your dead colonists differently from the raiders' corpses. Plus, its just generally thematic. Would probably be considered a "Meditative" activity.
3: Urns
Your colonists would build urns at the sculpting bench, and work like sculptures with varying beauty and quality levels (But Urns would, of course, be far less pretty than a full-blow sculpture). The cremate corpse job would come with an advanced option to "Put ashes in Urn". Possibly could function like a grave by that point, except you can put it anywhere.
4: Install Statues on Graves
The better commemorated your dead colonists, the bigger the joy boost given to colonists visiting/passing the gravestone. Same mechanic applies to how fancy your Urns are.

[damage multiple organs at once]

So the big problem when facing mechaniods are that they often have many "organs" that all have high health. So your shots seem to do nothing while they spray bullets and fire everywhere. But don't give up! You need only two pieces of equipment to stop the robots in their tracks!

Ingredients for Win:
First, buy, steal, and capture as many shield units as possible. Give them to your pacifists, your melee infantry, and crappy shots in general. And I do mean ALL the shields. Even the crappy ones.
Next, buy, steal, and/or capture every fragmentation grenade you can find. Give these to your best marksmen.

The Strategy

Your shielded colonists will henceforth be known as "Rodeo Clowns". Thier job is to run around between your grenadiers and the mechs, drawing their fire. Mechaniods ALWAYS go for shooting over melee, so as long as your colonists remember to fall back when the shields get low, they'll be fine!

Now, remember when I said that mechaniods have many very strong organs? The key with the grenades is that they damage multiple organs at once. This means every two shots are likely to damage at least one of the same organs. If you have two or more grenadiers hitting the mechs this damage builds up, fast! With bullets, you'll probably hit, say, the 2nd body ring for 20% damage, then the foot, then the 5th ring, then the 2nd, then the eye, then maybe the 2nd again for another fifth of its health, and so on. With frags, you'll hit 3 body rings and an eye, then 2 body rings and the brain, then 5 body rings, then 2 body rings and-up, wait, its dead!

Target down each mech one at a time. Micro the clowns so that they never lose shields but always have the mechaniod's attention. Stay near cover if possible to let guys recharge and further reduce mechaniod damage output. Aim for inferno-cannon enemies first whenever possible.

Try it! It works! Then if nobody finds any flaws someone stick it on the wiki!

Outdoor cleaning makes sense for metal/concrete pathways but I must ask HOW DO COLONISTS 'SWEEP' DIRT?

This game I swear  .

Although this does bring up the option for alternate starting scenarios. I'd really like an option for experianced players where your in a colony ship and your waylaid by pirates, so your ship settles down intact with lots of pawns, BUT your colonists are immediately attacked by a large pirate raid with no artificial or pre-constructed cover. So by the end of the raid, your not necessarily better off than three guys in drop pods.

As for long-term, we actually do need some more unique late-game events to keep player interest. So adding greater long-term danger is actually a plus in my opinion. But all this cool stuff can wait. Remember, we are still in early alpha!

Right now, Empaths cannot use weapons or resort to violence. But that doesn't stop me from giving them heavy armor and assigning them to weld a turret continuously. That's kind of odd. "Sure, I wont kill people, but I'll fix and load bullets into this thing that kills people FOR me! That's just fine!"

My suggested alternative is for the feelings and thoughts of people and animals around the empath to provide a bonus or penalty to the empath's moral. If everyone around the empath is happy, so is the empath. If someone harms an animal near the empath, he or she suffers a slight penalty. Killing an animal creates a larger penalty, harming a human a large penalty, and the death of a person sends the empath into a daze instantly. And lord help empath if a major battle happens within his or her view.

This way, the empath can at least carry a gun, hunt, and defend the colony during the early game. I figure the same system as the beauty system would work for this, just using moods and death/injury events.

I second this

Rockslide!
A sudden rockslide comes rushing down a nearby mountain's surface, burying or crushing anything nearby.

Replaces everything within 3 tiles of an overhead mountain tile with compact rubble.