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So, what are these "anti-fire materials" -apart from cutting grass- we can use to prevent fire from spreading out?

A two thick layer of stone or metallic walls, or flooring of any type. Fire "sparks" hop two tiles at most when the fire is at a full blaze on a tile so a two wide gap stops any fire from spreading.

This has caused me to wonder: do strong winds cause sparks to hop for longer distances in the game?  Your statement suggests that they don't, but it would be extremely realistic if they did (as the Fire Weather Warning in my real-world area today because of high winds and low humidity aptly demonstrates).  Similarly, I'd think that plant seeds would travel longer distances during periods of strong winds.  I think it would be pretty cool if these mechanics were reflected in the game.

Heck, maybe there could even be a "windstorm" type of weather event where high winds could actually knock down and destroy lightly-built walls and exposed structures (with varying percentages of likelihood based upon their construction materials).

Hmm, If it is a Design choice it may be to mimic real life somewhat. whereas you can have some people who are absolutely terrible at something but still want to do it, or someone who is brilliant at something, but hates the hell out of it. (ie. Finances, Art, Coding)

If it was a design choice, then it is one I can't get behind, because the end result is that I still end up with the proper colonists assigned to the jobs they are suited for (since these selections can be modified) ... it just means more work on my part to clean up the mess of mis-assigned priorities at the start of the game.

If there really was a desire to have colonists who insist on doing certain jobs even though they are not well suited to them, I'd say that those should be colonist characteristics that cause those particular checkboxes to not merely be selected by default, but to be selected and locked from editing so that the player cannot deselect them from those jobs. I doubt that I would enjoy that, either, but at least this might make it a gameplay mechanic, rather than just an annoying requirement for a bunch of extra clicks on my part.

Also, having a colonist who is great at a certain job and refuses to do it would make that high skill rating completely pointless, and we already have a gameplay mechanic where certain colonists can't be assigned to certain jobs at all anyway, so to me this would feel redundant.

Prior to Alpha 10, the colonists usually started out with pretty sensible work priorities in the "Overview / Work" view, with people being assigned to work they had some talent for.  However, in both releases of Alpha 10 thus far, the game seems to be making (on the face of it) irrational decisions about those initial assignments.  See the following example of the defaults selected by the game for my most recent colony start:



Examples of what I am talking about from the screenshot: both Cooking and Construction/Repair are assigned only to the least suitable colonist, by far.  There is also one colonist who has much greater Growing ability than the others, and once again, they are not assigned to the Growing job.  And although all three of the colonists have some Mining capability, the one with the highest (by a little) rating in that area (Rush) was not assigned to Mining for some reason.

So far, a few strange things have cropped up, and I am still trying to get my head around whether they are bugs or just features I don't understand yet.

However, one minor but annoying visual "bug" in A10 I am already certain of is the fact that, when editing a stockpile's valid items in A10, many of the line items in that popup don't line up very accurately with the corresponding checkmarks/X's on the right.  Primarily this is true of the "leaf nodes" in that popup (i.e., the items with no children).  I have to look kind of close to be able to match up a checkbox with its text now, because of this misalignment.  (This is on the Mac version ... I can't speak for the Windows version.)

I tried to apply an "Add No Roof Region" to a pair of squares that were labeled as having a "thin rock roof".  In A9 this would have given me an "Unroofed" region (which I'd then use as ventilation for A/C systems), but in A10 the region is still marked as "Indoors" afterwards.  Has something changed in how an area is designated as "unroofed"?

What switches? What do they do? Seems I missed something.

You can toggle the power on most electrical devices (light bulbs, stoves, tables, heaters, crematorium, etc) with one of the buttons that appears on the bottom of the screen when such a device is selected.  It used to be that, when you did this, the device turned on or off immediately, but with the latest alpha this action doesn't take effect until one of your "controller pawns" actually runs over to the device to make the change (i.e., "throw the switch").

Has anyone ever come up with a reason for restricting Controller duties to a subset of the colonists?  The only reason I can come up with for doing so is if you have a colonist who is extremely slow (e.g., frail, peg leg, and/or brain damaged).  But the game by default seems to restrict Controller duties much more than that, and I haven't been able to discern any reasoning for this.  So I've just been clicking to enable it for everyone as a rule.

I don't really want to see colonies growing so big that the individual colonists cease to have meaningful identities and stories.  I view that as one of the strengths of the game ... I always find myself mentally "filling in the blanks" for the back stories and attitudes of individual colonists, and giving them a real identity where I care about keeping them alive (in most cases ... once in a while, not so much).

However, I do think the tech tree is too shallow.  If I start off with a really good researcher who isn't given much to do other than research, I can have every tech in the current tree researched by the time the first winter comes, and research capabilities become useless thereafter.  To me, that's far too fast - I think there should always be a reason to at least consider continuing research, even if only to make additional, incremental improvements.  E.g., slightly more accurate targeting for mortars, some smelting technology that adds a bit more metal yielded each time slag or something is recycled, some sort of fertilizer to slightly improve crop yields, an improvement to solar panels to capture a bit more energy in dim conditions, etc.  You know, things that make it possible for a small colony to do a bit more, without necessarily having to add more people.

So I didn't vote in the poll, because all of the choices seem to be predicated on the idea that wanting a deeper tech tree (which I do) implies also wanting higher colony populations (which I don't).

Researching a vaccine seems to me to be a little beyond the capability of one guy working on a table at a remote outpost.  Better than allowing it to be a researched item, I think, would be if you would be able to buy individual vaccinations from a trader.  Maybe your local doctor would be the first guy you'd want to inoculate against the various local diseases, to at least try to keep him on his feet if there's an outbreak.

As I was watching my colonists repeatedly try to head out to pick up goods in an area where raiders were preparing the other day, I wished for just a simple button to toggle a mode that would say "while mode is active, all colonists are restricted to the Home region(s)".  Would that accomplish what you are thinking of?

I play RimWorld at the native resolutions on both my MacBook Pro (1680x1050), where it is very nice, and my iMac (2560x1440), where it is spectacular.

The counterpoint I would offer is that, although you do get "free" walls underground, those walls don't carry electricity.  So when you want to run anything inside your base that is powered (e.g., heat, a/c, light, construction tables), you end up having to strip down and replace those "free" walls with constructed walls that have conduits.  Unless you are willing to run conduits all over the floor, that is, but I am not, because I think that is pretty ugly.  When I build an underground base (which is most of the time now), I usually take down at least half of the "free" walls and replace them with bricks made of the same material, but with conduit added.

And then there is the extra complexity of trying to run air conditioning in particular deep inside of a mountain, and somehow vent it to the outside.  I have quite a time with trying to design bases that allow for this sort of vent network while not impeding the colonist's ability to move quickly around in the base.

Those item, along with the extra time it takes just to chisel out underground areas (as opposed to the comparative rapidity of just building walls around empty spaces in the open), means that I don't think digging is quite as comfortable as has been proposed.  So many of us still do it just because it's very worthwhile in the long run for extra protection once the sieges commence.

If something should be changed, I would say that conduits that run across ground or flooring (as opposed to those inside walls) should be made more vulnerable to shorting out because of their exposure.  That would force people to give more consideration to not taking advantage of those "free" underground walls quite so much.

Hmm.  And here I've been sleeping on a thin foam pad on the floor (due to back problems) for the past, oh, 31 years.  I guess that means I have tested the "sleeping spot" option pretty thoroughly.  And I haven't even broken yet due to all of the de-buffs that brings (well, I've not broken as far as I know ... but you might have to ask my family and coworkers to be sure).

I don't know about those changes, but a change I noticed with A9 is that the first world I generated seemed to span both the northern and southern hemispheres, with polar caps at both the top and the bottom of the map and the tropics in the center (including seasonal differences in the southern hemisphere that at first glance seemed to make sense).  Prior to A9 every generated world seemed to be northern hemisphere only, with the equator at the bottom of the map.

However, I just tried generating another world in A9, and this time it was once again only the northern hemisphere.  So I'm no longer sure how that happened.  Maybe I just dreamed it?

Is it just me that is a little uncomfortable butchering the carcass of what was a psychotic animal for consumption?  I always think to myself, "gosh, maybe it isn't such a good idea to feed the meat of this thing that might have been infected with mad cow/squirrel/elk/muffalo disease to my colonists".

I am unaware of there actually being anything implemented in the game to give colonists a greater chance of food poisoning from eating such meat, but now that food poisoning is actually in the game, perhaps it could be added as a chance?  (The main problem might be that such meat ends up mixed in with the meat of non-infected animals ... maybe the chance of food poisoning related to "bad" meat could be scaled down in the same way that the spoilage time changes when foods of different ages are combined into the same pile.)