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If you don't use medicine and you have a decent skill, you should have a colonist recover during the 'extreme' state just before they die.  In my experience at least.

Even medicine, shooting, and melee have safe and risk-free means by which to practice to professional level. That's what realism does for you, it does what people realistically do.

This is why 'muh realizm' is about the worst argument to present for an idea. It pretty much just a way to present a (usually bad) idea with no real justification or basis.

Making a Jacket involves farming up some very easy to obtain cotton. Alternatively, can just make shitty weapons with stone to improve. You know, like many early artists actually did.

Get better at shooting? Target practice.
Better at melee? Practice on a dummy.
Better at medicine/anatomy? Cut up some corpses or experiment on prisoners.

Skill grinding isn't about 'risk', it's about time, and time is a very important resource in early/mid game.

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?

Wash rinse repeat is very boring, and the biomes should be more than just new skins.

This is really the heart of it.

If a desert base looks just like a jungle base (but with slightly different heating facilities), something is wrong. In my book, anything that encourages more dramatic differences between biomes is good. Being able to build the same optimized, self-contained, killbox'd fortress in every biome and play out the exact same production lines is, to me, a total failure of game design. When each biome feels really different, that's where we win. I made this change because I think it moves further in that direction.

Ironically, I think this is a mark of success. Essentially, you've provided the players with the means to innovate a way to survive across a variety of different environments. I think it's something to understand that bases built to survive 3+ years are all going to be the same, just pallete-swaps of each other. This is something you see in real-live cities, all structured around maximum efficiency.

For me, at least, Rimworld isn't just Sim City with a wonky theme though. Every colony I build isn't made of 'maximum 3 year efficiency', it's made for 'keeping things going long enough to get off this fucking planet'.

That's where the experience is, I think.

It makes sense when you look at it statistically. With a limited que of events, even Randy's long-term behavior isn't really that random and becomes a script of it's own in the long term. Because each AI draws from the same pool in just different order/frequency, the long-term game is going to play essentially the same, no matter the environment, no matter the storyteller. It is going to be difficult to do more than just really delay that.

What many of these changes really do is affect the short-term. When decisions aren't weighted under the assumption of 'being here for 3 years', you start to see the special sort of nuances that appear from 'temporary thing that accidentally became permanent because of a hiccup in the plan'. Loss of colonists is more significant because you aren't stacking up 20 of them, as more than 5-6 really piles on the cost of getting everyone out.

I think that the essential experience of Rim World lies in trying to get off the planet, not in sticking around forever. Things are desperate, dynamic, losses hurt, the research tree is only half-explored (in different orders, depending on environment), and everything is a god damned mess by the time you leave because the choice between 'optimize everything' and 'get the fuck out' isn't a choice.

The realism argument doesn't move me.

Thank the gods.

The immunity rate will increase with time after treatment. I think that skill/medicine/bed all increase the time before next treatment, which increases overall immunity gain before they need to be treated again.

This thread is the best thread.

Being able to build things without wood was really my biggest concern in this. Bearing that in mind, I'm much less concerned, if not optimistic now.

Though ?

I don't think we need a whole gameplay around Leadership, however I suggest two things :
- Being able to write a colonist "role" (just like NPC are chief, archer or brawler)
- The Tales system could then keep track of that.

I think I would fit our wish to roleplay anything without obligation.

I like this.

Doing things a frontier colony would do takes away from the idea of it being a frontier?

I guess.

Removing stonecutting xp just replaces stone grinding with cloth-tailor grinding, and the latter actually has a payoff associated with it.

Again, that's the kind of realism you're aiming for. People practicing in order to get better at something.

It's also another very important lesson to consider: many realistic things are boring. That's why we're playing on a space colony.

This argument of 'realism' is really wonky sometimes, if for no other reason that it's not.. realistic. At all.

If you want to introduce soil quality issues? Sure. Also introduce the very-easy-to-implement means we have of getting around these issues (i.e. fertilizer, and the ultimate end isn't any kind of depth or complexity, it's just a resource drain attached to primary resource generation).

Want lack of wood to be a problem because 'wood is hard to come by in the arctic'? Sure. The solution would be to just use things other than wood in constructions. Butcher table made out of stone would work fine (if not better) and would even be preferred if I have stone aplenty and no wood to spare.

That's really the issue at the heart of all of this. For all that 'muh realizm' is being used to justify this problem, actual realistic solutions are being shied away from.

It's one thing to just arbitrarily raise the cost of research. I wouldn't call any of this more 'realistic', though. Alot of 'real' research is literally just sitting and writing.

Thats pretty terrible Actually...

You're right. It is.

For some reason, people think this is 'realistic' and that monotony and mindless micromanagement count for depth.

But why do you want less drama in your game? Drama is the whole point.

There is drama in the difficulty of overcoming an obstacle.

Random non-crippling inconvenience isn't really an obstacle nor does it really affect difficulty. I think you'll see this sentiment in mods like 'less incident trolling', as things like frequent solar flares, blights, and battery blowouts don't really add to drama.

There's no buildup, there's nothing to prepare for, no anticipation, it's just an arbitrary setback that doesn't seem to serve any purpose or add much to the game.

The question of brain damage is more a question of "why aren't they just dead?". On one hand, I like the reaction this provokes in players who are attached to their pawns. On the other hand, players recognize this as kinda arbitrary and it can foster hints of resentment.

Oh no, I cut that off at the bit early on. Plants don't grow at-all outside of proper temperature, so I have a pair of heaters inside to keep everything at 35C

Though, perhaps I'm missing something. This wonky business happens during the non-growing season (even when it isn't cold enough to kill them).

You could always lower the amount of XP from butchering.

It would be more humane than capture a crappy raider, haul him to a cell, set the prisoner-settings to receive treatment but not medicine (because those are expensive), draft a colonist and finally shoot the raider a couple of times, then let the doctor fix him up, and shoot him some more...

Yeah, RimWorld have a REALLY SPECIAL kind of dark "humor".

As was stated, logic and balance are 'enemies' of a sort.

There is this odd way of thinking that making things convoluted or needlessly complex adds to depth. Even worse, a sense that these things somehow mirror 'realism'. This makes realism something counter-intuitive and makes realistic solutions seem 'cheap'.

Is it dark to experiment on unwilling captives in order to learn nuances of medicine and anatomy? It is, and that's pretty much exactly what happened. It's in hindsight that these things can be learned by proxy of more humane means, but that first knowledge? It's not a coincidence that surgery and butchery share those parallels.

All that aside, it does make a sort of sense that butchery doesn't progress medicine because you aren't really making the same cuts toward the same ends. Many of the basics are the same, so it's good for early learning, but to really progress your skill you'd need to use bodies.

So really, just let us butcher corpses for medical xp instead of cooking xp. Can even require it to be done on the medical bed and make it a time sink.