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As more is assed to the mood/needs system, I get the sense of things becoming a bit.. I don't want to say convoluted, but definitely overly complex. I understand that balancing this sort of matrix can involve alot of spinning wheels, so I'd like to suggest a buffer of sort.

The current structure of the mood system seems to lean toward allowing players some agency in moderating and improving colonist mood. However, just as a consequence of how many factors there now are, it is possible to have a perfect storm of mood crashes that can drop someone's mood with very little to be said or done about it.

Proposal:
Have the Warden task include trying to 'talk down' colonists or prisoners that are close to a mental break (when someone is under that much stress, it's evident). The Warden will approach anyone within a certain range of their break threshold and apply the same 'talked with warden buff' that the prisoners get.

Alternative:
Have prisoners close to breaking prioritize an activity that will stabilize their mood. Like drinking or herbal meds.

Other alternative:
Give Doctors a 'sedate' option for broken colonists. They should be taken to a medical bed to recover instead of a prison.

This isn't about being judgmental or running purity tests (there are other topics for that). Mostly in response to such, really.

Emphasis on vanilla is the metric concerning discussions on balance, but the overwhelming popularity of certain mods can't really be denied. The community isn't that large, so I suspect there is some overlap, and I'd like to see where.

I intentionally didn't introduce example metrics in the poll. I'd like people to post what they use and where they draw the line on what they consider to be 'still vanilla'.

Personally, I draw the line at the UI. Your mileage may vary. You don't need to justify anything (though feel free to if you're inclined), but go ahead and add your .02 and let's see what comes up.

I think that some of the forum/irc discussions could use some guidance that only Tynan can really address regarding decisions in design and the way forward. This isn't to take Tynan to task for anything people may or may not disagree with (There are other threads for that), this is to get an idea of the behaviors he is trying to guide players toward and determine the roles he has in mind for other things in game.

So if you're willing to humor it, here's 2 from me:

1.) What do you see as the role of prisoners in game? Is is mostly just recruitment? What would you like to ideally see done if a player happens to have quite a few survivors from a raid?

2.) What about turrets? You seem to have a sort of love/hate relationship with them at the moment. Where do you see the ideal role for them, and what are the things you really don't like seeing done with them?

When tended count is reached, disease is gone.

Medicines will affect the treatment quality, which will determine how severe the effects are until next treatment (except pain, because for some reason we're just not allowed to mitigate pain).

In this case, it took a while to get through, but the gut worms passed at 8/8.

Wouldn't that be like... the one thing for dogs to be able to do? Would help with the cleanup in some places too.

Has anyone figured out how exactly this works? It doesn't seem to be based around distance or line of sight.

Edit: 5 spaces for disturbed sleep, apparently. I'd say that 5 spaces is quite a bit, but my primary complaint is that this goes through walls.

Isn't there a way that domesticated boomalope can be harvested?

I think that the biggest incentive for managing relations with other colonies would be to have a semi-consistent means of trade. Have friendly colonies send a trader at least every season, with a popup telling us what kind it will be in advance.

- Slaving them is heavily punished.
- We can't organ farm them anymore.
- Recruit thresholds are often ridiculous.
- Can't just kill them, that's punished too.
- Keeping them for too long now results in prison breaks.

So what exactly are we supposed to do? Could we at least sell them back to their faction or something, or are we going to start finding more innovative ways to reduce our load again?

Story time:

This colony is a couple of weeks in. Not many people. The crash started with a scientist, her collector daughter, and a space drifter (with pet warg) to look after them. We were later joined by an 81 year old nudist war veteran (high skills, but bad back/scars/etc that defeat the point) that literally just up and walked in.

Not many defenses up, but I've good people that can handle the raid that comes in. Might be trouble with that bow, but we'll see.




Suddenly, help arrives. Like.. heavy-duty help from another colony. These guys are loaded for bear and ready to tear ass. Figured it was just rng doing it's thing and didn't question it.




Then I took another look at the leader. That last name looked familiar..



Yeah, that's the leader of the neighboring colony, and he's here to save his wife.

Tynan you madman tell me you didn't explicitly script this. Is this the work of your story generator? This is better than alot of stuff on TV.

Running a curious experiment.

I just finished my tundra biome run on randy, which I also used to test the 'realistic combat' mod.

Awkwardly enough, I never had a crash and just ended up buying an AI core from a trader after selling some well-made art. Was fun.

I noticed the 'keep playing' option at the end, though. Was never sure what the point was. So here I am, just leaving it open on max speed to see what happens to the colony over time.

I think I missed when this was added. I'm certain it wasn't like this before.

I made a topic in the suggestions forum based off modeling Solar Flares and Eclipses off of something that doesn't kill suspension of disbelief and added a bit of flavor to each world.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=11277.0

In hindsight, I'm wondering more about how viable this is and how it would be done.

- I'm imagining that we'd have a pool of X cycles ranging from [1](Frequent) to [X](Infrequent)
- Then each world created would have an RNG assign something from 1 to Y for the number of moons it would have.
- Each moon would have a cycle number associated with it.
- This will be meant to simulate the patterns in which these moons would block out the sun. Eclipses happening in a pattern, as they actually do.

The Astronomy table would just be an unpowered time sink that would give the player access to this information. Could even give it a quality/accuracy.

Thoughts?

I don't think that eclipses and solar flares need to be removed. I think that they need to be interval, and I think the intervals should be randomly generated with each world.

I also think they need to be predictable, with a measure of effort.

Proposal for Eclipses:
Every generated world should have a generated number of 'moons'. Each of these moons should have independent 'partial' (1/2 light) and 'full' (total darkness) eclipses.

This means that every world will have a unique pattern of eclipses, along with some fluff regarding the kind of planet you're on.

Proposal for Solar Flares and Battery Blowouts:
Combine these events. Instead of just randomly knocking out everything for a day, a Solar Flare event should sweep through and cause the battery dumping/fire event (which I think better represents what a powerful flare would really do). Flares remain hazardous with not-always-predictable results, and the drama is preserved without the arbitrary catastrophic hydroponic losses (assuming you get your energy grid fixed in time). If you want, you can also disable the 'jump to location' for events happening during the flare.

Proposal for Astronomy:
I would like to introduce the concept of an 'observatory' station (called whatever is appropriate, it's essentially a telescope and a bunch of charts/math). It doesn't require special research (because this shit was known in medieval times), it just requires a bit of metal, some space, and time.

All it involves is someone sitting at the instrument for some duration (based on research skill), and when completed it will give predictions for when the flares and eclipses are expected to occur.
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Having these events following a script does more than just add flavor for making every planet unique. They can also serve as 'oh shit' timers for events that may/may not happen during them. Pirates/Mechanoids know when flares and eclipses are happening, too. Animal behaviors can change, and in general the flare/eclipse periods can serve as a platform for a sub-series of events that can happen during them.

This also turns these events from 'incident trolling' to impactful events that are weighted by player agency instead of RNG, without removing the RNG/chaos from it all.

Thoughts?

We have a way to refrigerate food to keep it from spoiling. It's nice, though in my experience this doesn't really add the 'depth' as advertised to the nuances of food management.

I'm curious about whether we can use the traditional non-freezing means of preserving food. Grain silos, salting meats, etc.

Is it just me, or is there something off with Hydroponics in a9?

For some reason I have some fraction of my plants just randomly die. They're fully powered and far as I can tell, nothing is disrupting that. Some of the plants just randomly.. disappear and need to be replanted.

Worst effect is on the devilstrand, which I can't seem to produce any of at this rate.

Something to set pirates apart aside from 'quirky name' and 'guns: yes/no'.

Part of what currently eggs me about the current pirates is that they seem kinda.. arbitrary.  It doesn't make sense to roll 30 people deep in order to take down a group of 5 people in some corner of the planet who don't have anything worth the effort and risk of an attack.

I think a good addition would be to distinguish pirates by what they are after, then model the AI accordingly.

For example:
- Pirates:  They want your stuff.  They'll shoot your colonists if they are in the way, but they're mostly going to beeline toward your resource stockpile and just run off with the most expensive things they can carry.  They will extort you for money, or attack if you don't pay up.

- Slavers:  They want your colonists.  Especially if one of your colonists is a pirate defector.  They will threaten to attack if you don't hand over the colonist they are after.

- Raiders: They just want to hurt you.  Either you built on their territory, or the Luddites find your emergence from cryosleep to be a blasphemy, or some other contrived grievance.  Regardless, their only goal is to do damage and they won't be appeased until colonists are dead or they've broken enough stuff.  If your colonists are bunkered in, the raiders are content to just break stuff and leave until next time.

There is a particular snag between the higher rate of captive raiders and the inability for them to feed themselves.  Pile this ontop of long dryspells inbetween slavers or exotic traders, and it becomes a bit of a drag.

Can it be switched back to letting prisoners interact with objects in their area so they can feed themselves?