Messages

I run out of worktime for plantworkers long before I run out of plantable space on any halfway decent map.
So if I can turn a lot of grass that needs no pawn time to plant or harvest into food? All with minimal work for slaughtering or milking? That is already a good deal.

The increased meat amount is merely the icing on the cake.

You don't want to use most of the map, only the center of the map.  Stay away from the map edges whenever possible. 

The old idea was to have animals wander into less secure (map edge) areas and then have them immediately be able to go inside in case of danger.  Now we cannot simply rezone our animals but instead have to actually go through a laborious process of moving them between pens, one which puts our pawns in mortal danger.

In any case, I feel to further clarify how my previous herding idea would work.  Say I have a herd of 10 horses, horses are set up so that a horse herd contains 1 dominant male and 4 dominant female.  The key thing here is that a horse herd is also set up to have a 20% herd move threshold, meaning that if you can move 2 of those horses towards a new pen, the other 8 will automatically follow behind but if you move 1 of them it does not.  This is quite separate from the mechanic about dominance, the subordinate horses will follow the closest dominant horse so you can sometimes get extra horses by moving a dominant one, allowing you to complete the move with less labour. 

You can move the herd by simply moving 2 subordinate horses, but if you grab one of the dominant horses you would run the change of getting extra subordinate horses tagging along, allowing you to complete the move with half the work. 

Who cares about the blur? The important question is: what happens if a jaguar enters the toilet while interaction? And: will a pawn cancel action when enemies apporoch? Or can they shot and sh**? Will they drop their pants if canceling?
So many things must be reconsidered?

No, because like everything else in the game it can be mechanically simplified.  The pawn would simply stop pooping mid-action with an incomplete bar and fight the jaguar. 

IIRC ages ago Tynan said something like "I will never add drinking to this game... gfto"
And I basically agree on that opinion, as recreation and hunger already take enough schedule time. adding a third element of.. surprise, could keep a pawn buys 100% a day as scheduling isn't able to say, go poop then hunt and not otherwise.
So, I think, nice idea with much potential of disgust, but not fitting the game mechanics. If you want toilets, play ONI :-)

This is a game about survival and water is far more important for survival than food is.  You can go many more days without food than you can without water. 

[know]

Since nobody but themself know is in them, how do you know they do not harbor illegal or forbidden material?
How do you know those materials have not changed ownership?

Well if you can manage to change possession of the item without getting caught, well you are now a successful criminal.  The point of my proposal is not that smuggling activities should not be possible or profitable but that they should carry some risks.  At the moment we seem to be able to engage in risk-free drug-dealing and dealing whatever else. 

I recently learned that apparently animals that are tamed produce more meat when slaughtered (as opposited to hunting and killing their wild counterparts).
For Pen Animals, that bonus might require them to be inside the pen.

So actually changing the order of operations might be a problem.

I know and don't care, I still won't be keeping animals except to haul stuff or fight.  If I need a special pen with lots of grass to raise meat-animals, I might as well simply eat the animals and then plant crops in what would be their pen.

The whole meat amount thing was a dumb hack which was a desperate attempt to make herding viable without addressing the actual problem, which is that creatures that behave like Rimworld animals are not viable candidates for herding.  We don't herd cats and all Rimworld creatures are atomised individuals rather like those proverbial cats.  They are even more catlike than actual cats (I released a pregnant cat into the wild and she then ate all her kittens!). 

While the theory of the "Alpha Wolf" was pretty much a bust, a concept like that is part of many herd animals - you capture the matron/leader of a herd and the rest will kinda just follow.
Like chicks follow a mother duck.

One of the big reasons not to ride on Zebras? They got no social structure like horses, cows or sheep you can use to get a decent group into your pen. You have to tame then one after the other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo

What is it however with this game and it's apparent aversion to modelling social relationships among animals? 

Really we need three kinds of relationships among animals.

1. Family relationships.  This is an obvious addition that somehow is barely in the game.  Offspring animals need to have a defined relationship to their mother, their siblings and in a few cases their father (dogs and geese) as well.  Juvenile animals need to follow around their parent(s) if they can.  Creatures avoid breeding with their known relatives unless they have no other choice and offspring born of incest can get interesting deformities.  They also avoid eating their relatives unless they have no other choice (including leaving the map). 

2. Herd/Pack relationships.  This is better modeled by having a herd modeled as entity, formed when two or more suitably social animals have socially interacted a number of times.  Once a certain % of the total animals in a herd/pack have been placed in a pen, the others will automatically follow. 

3. Dominance relationships.  Depending upon species there is a fixed number of dominant animals of a given gender within each herd/pack.  This number fills up 'first' as the herd forms.  Once this quota is filled, all subsequent 'recruits' join as subordinates, subordinates unlike other animals are prohibited from reproducing.  Subordinates follow the closest dominant animal in their herd/pack around, using the same mechanics as juvenile animals do their parents.  Some creatures have a maximum herd/pack size mechanic that limits how big their groups can get. 

All animals in the herd/pack have a 'social power' mechanic, which combines their physical prowess, their age (older is better) and the number of known children they have.  Incumbents get a bonus to their 'social power' but if a subordinate animal in the same herd/pack exceeds them in this value they will usurp the slot for the relevant gender.  Creatures do not usurp their own parents however in this way, though they may usurp their siblings. 

Lastly, subordinate animals do not like being subordinates that much.  They will eventually attempt to wander off map if the environment is viable for their creature and they can get to the map-edge.  Dominant animals on the other hand do not wander off, which takes the burden off the penning mechanic since we can have a small herd of herd animals wandering the map without worry. 

Also part of Dubs Hygiene.

I know, but I don't find it very well implemented. 

The game really needs to treat herdable animals as well herds, with those join events giving you a already set-up herd.  We could use the social relationships panel to track 'herd-mates' of an animal, with animals becoming herd-mates if they spend enough time together. 

[not]

I am not making friends with Dryads.
I am not capturing and raising baby dryads.
It take control over the nest/tree where the queen resides, and Dryads have to follow. If they like me or not. If I like them or not.

The means to take control of a insect nest would be different - but the effect the exact same.

In my experience there isn't any need to 'gain control' over the nest, you just need to wall them off to keep folk wandering in for whatever reason and then sneak in to steal their insect jelly as they sleep.  All we need for insect farming as I said, is the ability to steal insect eggs from the hive at the same time and raise them separately from the hive they came from for food.

Water is surely more important than toilets.

I am afraid to say that the most stressful part of the game is when you decide to move your base and then there is always someone who has a mental breakdown and requires the whole caravan to wait, during which time their own bars inevitably decline causing further mental breakdowns (and so on).  Apparently the solution is to boot out everyone who has a mental breakdown, so the others can leave the map and then have them wait off the map for him to recover and create his own caravan.

This solution does however have a potentially fatal flaw.  Items are loaded onto pawns essentially randomly with no regard to whether they are about to mentally breakdown.  While waiting outside is a good mechanic if the pawns that did have a breakdown have food on them, it is entirely possible than the pawn with the breakdown is the pawn that is carrying all your food. 

That is why I am proposing that we be able to 'unload' pawns that are mentally broken, similar to how it is with animals and then we would be able to load any items onto our caravan separately. 

[most cases]

Except the Warhouse might be legally outside the Jurisdiction of said faction, despite being physically in the Factions territory.

Stuff like that happens in the real world.
It happens on the Rim. Especially with religious mandates.
You were going for a realism argument. But my realism is bigger then yours 

I am all for it, if we have more counterplay then just "do not settle anywhere near them". Some "conversion missions" would be all that is needed.

That isn't how freeports work, only embassies work that way.  Freeports do not exist outside of the jurisdiction of anyone, they are simply places exempt from paying import taxes, so if it is illegal to buy, sell or possess something in the wider country, it is also illegal to do this in a freeport. Granted creating freeports is in most cases dumb, particularly those at geographically 'premium' strategic locations (the Suez canal), but we aren't here to discuss politics (freeports is basically like giving people free rooms at your hotel). 

Whether we pay import taxes in Rimworld is an interesting question.  Import taxes could explain why it isn't cheaper to buy from a town than it is to buy from a caravan.  If there were freeports in Rimworld, they would all be in orbit since nobody would bother to actually 'land' the goods if they wanted to ship them to somewhere else via our world, as getting goods back from a planet is pretty expensive once you have landed them.  I think they use some kind of teleporter to manage it, as I recall the last time I actually set up an orbital trading beacon. 

Conversion mechanics are a separate topic.  Possession of illegal goods remains 'legal', so our base does not have to worry about 'settling near somebody' and we are independent (why we piss them off by settling with 5 squares of a faction, because we stole the land we settled on).  My idea is simply that the traders in a town should refuse to buy the goods that are illegal.  We would however have a random chance of having a separate criminal trader (different interface) that only buys illegal goods but dealing with this criminal trader carries a small % chance of getting caught. 

The only punishment is that we get banned from trading in that town's marketplace for a certain period of time.  We can still trade with other towns, even from the same faction.

How did you missread it like that?

Place A it is legal to buy/sell
Place B it is illegal to buy/sell, but not to transport through.
Place C it is legal to buy/sell

You buy at A
Transprot it through B.
To sell in C.

And before you wonder, a traders warehouse might be considered a seperate jurisdiction from the country it is in.
You meet 5 minutes outside of town borders. Transfer the goods and silver there.
Trader Resident in B moves the goods to a Freeport in B without ever selling in B. Legal.

Not relevant I am afraid, because we aren't transporting through anything, that is essentially legal in my suggestion.  We are actually buying/selling the goods in question in the jurisdiction of said faction.  There aren't any free-ports in Rimworld and there aren't going to be (not enough commerce), so the legal shenanigans you speak of are not relevant. 

Catastrophe hit my colony as the beer ran out and the refugees decided to rebel against my faction, the former situation allowed a certain member of my colony who was wandering around in a mental state to be taken prisoner by the refugees (the others died, partly because of killer ostriches, ostriches are nasty). 

The game however considers the kidnapped refugee to be dead, including wanting me to perform a funeral for them.  It appears there is a problem either with the general kidnapping mechanic or with what the game does in the event of refugees capturing someone.  The refugee factions don't continue to exist one the quest is over do they?

Save file is here.

The idea is to make it generally better to trade with factions that agree with our values.  The 'counter-play' is to move to where a faction exists that agrees with the products we are selling.  Or go to several settlements in a row, hoping that one of them has a suitable source.  Smuggling is meant to be harder and riskier than selling legitimate goods.

I am not sure what legal systems you are use too but no.  You cannot legally buy items that are illegal in one jurisdiction in order to sell them on to another jurisdiction where they are legal.  So the third-party stuff you are referring to is criminal smuggling, I already took that into account in my OP did I not?

Crime value in the faction (the odds of having a criminal merchant is increased by).

1. The presence of each pirate base within a certain distance.
2. The presence of any non-hostile base in a certain distance that legally sells goods illegal to the base's faction.  This potentially includes the player. 

When you are ranching cows you:
- Milk the female cows for milk
- kill most male cows and old females for meat
And that is how you would farm Insects for their meat too.

That isn't what we are talking about; we were talking about making friends with insects, like we do with the dryads.  To do *that* you would need to acquire baby insects somehow and then you would raise them like regular livestock.  There really isn't any special mechanics, let alone memes that we would need for that, just baby insects in our care. 

And we could steal baby insects from insect hives and destroy the hive in the process. 

I have found out that I can sell controversial things like human leather and slaves even to factions that do not believe in things provided I travel to their town.  In a manner of speaking it makes sense, obviously I am selling to criminals within that faction rather than the faction itself but really it shouldn't be that easy. 

Instead of always being able to sell illegal stuff, how-about we randomly determine whether illegal goods will allowed to be sold every time a town's inventory restocks, using a separate trade screen called the 'criminal contact screen'.  The odds of this screen becoming available depends upon the settlement (not the factions) crime value in a simple fashion, the crime value is your odds of a criminal contact spawning when the town's inventory restocks. 

A town's has a base crime value which is determined pretty much solely by how many things it's faction is against that involve a 'material component' that can be sold.  Some banned things (like drugs) are considered less niche than other things (like human leather) and so prohibition of those things entails a higher base crime value, but all banned things entail some extra base crime. 

The crime value goes up due to other contextual factors.  The most basic faction is goods sold to the illegal trader of that town; so if you sell a lot of goods to the criminal trader then he is more likely to show up next time.  Other factors are.

1. The presence of each pirate base within a certain distance. 
2. The presence of any non-hostile base in a certain distance that legally sells goods illegal to the base's faction.  This potentially includes the player. 

There is also a suspicion value.  The base suspicion value is 10% for a neutral faction and 1% for an allied faction.  Suspicion is your chance of the 'criminal trader' being an informant and selling you out.  If you get caught, it harms relations with that faction and results in a 'trading ban' in that town for a given period that prevents all commerce, legal or otherwise.  Suspicion also goes up for the following reasons.

1. Every other base of the same faction within a certain distance.
2. Every completed interaction with the criminal merchant raises suspicion. 
3. Suspicion is earned for each ethics divergence between your faction and theirs.
4. Suspicion is earned for every other base within a certain distance whose ethics diverges from the base's controlling faction's ethics in the same manner.  Ie. If you are a cannibal and they are not a cannibal, then any other cannibal bases within a given area raises suspicion. 
5. Suspicion gain from dealing with the criminal merchant is multiplied for every separate infraction you make.  If you sell human leather AND drugs, this incurs more suspicion than if you trade only in one of these categories.