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Just from starting a new game, something that seems different is colonists you prioritize for "Plant Cutting" but not Construction will target and cut plants blocking construction without having to explicitly mark those blocking plants for cutting.  In A13 and previous this was a bit annoying, either I'd have to explicitly mark the plant for cutting or give at least some Construction priority to another pawn, right click on the blocking plant and have that pawn 'build X' (whatever X construction you intend there) which will get them cutting away at the plant.

This is a nice fix that reduces micromanagement to get around a quirk.  The devs seem to have done a good job at targetting little peeve-inducing quirks like this!    I honestly have never seen devs so adamant about it with this release.  Stardock's devs (publishersr of the Galactic Civilizations series, among others) by contrast appear to be quite good but many quirks and bugs survive from beta testing through post-release patches and seem to just get ignored despite several threads, by contrast (not to pick on Stardock specifically, bigger-name devs seem even worse and don't have such open convos with players on their forums).  I hope Ludeon continues to embrace this personably responsive model, earning itself a positive rep for this responsivity and doesn't lose a bit of this responsivity as Rimworld iterates toward release and future other projects for the team come to fruition.  I know unfortunately anything on the Internet that's popular attracts trolls and unfortunately this makes it necessary for some to put a bit of a barrier with the public, hopefully Ludeon can find a way to not be too bothered by trolls but maintain personal responsivity to customers like this!

Thought this could be the start of a thread for things experienced players have found the devs have fixed/improved but not included in the list of changes.

From changelog:
"Projectiles fired by hunting colonists no longer intercept random targets."

Does this mean you'll no longer hit friendlies or other targets while hunting?

On this thread:  https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20360.0

Several fellow Rimworlders have loaded the savefile attached to the initial post, but for some reason at the point of loading, I see 0 output from the solar panels (I posted a screenshot in the thread) whereas other players loading the same savefile see some output.

I don't know whether its relevant, but in my own current game's savefile, its 1h (1 a.m.) ... could the solar power generation not be resetting properly when loading another savefile?

Not sure if this is considered an undesirable bug or not, but a cougar became downed due to a leg infection that became severe (possibly from being counterattacked by some prey they had hunted).  I flagged it for hunting for some free shooting training for my colonist with a sniper rifle and commanded the sniper rifle to manually hunt that downed cougar.  In his opening shot, the colonist blew off that infected limb entirely and the cougar immediately revived from their downed state.

Not sure if this is an intended or desirable effect or not.

I've heard some cursing at marsh and other frustrating terrain that some players consider to just get in the way.  However, I think its worth thinking about it another way:  consider marshes and shallow water to be vast moats.  Enemies trying to cross them will have no cover and will be moving very slowly, so they are great to try to drive raiders/tribals/etc. to cross them.  Setup tunnels, if you can, through hills/mountains with doors to give your colonists faster ways to bypass the marshes the enemies will usually ignore, with outlets to take potshots along the marshes, and setup sandbags on the near side (closest to your colony buildings) so your ranged attackers can setup a firing line as enemies slowly try to trudge their way through.

Enemies with guns won't generally try to stop to shoot back when they have no cover, which can make this kind of tactic particularly effective, more or less a turkey shoot.  Be wary of grenades or shielded melee attackers, if the enemy has no cover and their ranged enemies don't stop to try to shoot back, you probably will want to target enemies with grenades and shielded melee enemies first.

Similarly use mountains, hills, walls and pre-built buildings to your advantage when confronting raiders setting up a siege or crashed mech ships.  Sniper and survival rifles can really help out, but if you can sneak closely to enemies with slow-firing but long-range weapons, if you find a way to get close enough in while being covered from enemy fire due to walls/hills/mountains, you can pop a faster-firing but shorter-ranged colonist out whom can target and fire, and pop back into cover before the enemy can finish targetting with a slower-firing weapon, which is a significant advantage (I've taken out powerful enemies with sniper rifles when I didn't have any doing this without taking any damage to my own colonists) but takes some time and micromanagement to pull off.

I've noticed this issue a few times near the edge of mountains/hills where one pawn can target and shoot another, but the other can't shoot back because they seem to have unequal targetability around obstacles between them.

http://i.imgur.com/R1vJcnQ.jpg

Yes, Coriveau only has a survival rifle vs the raider's sniper rifle, but Coriveau's inability to target Pan despite Pan's ability to target Coriveau isn't due to range -- Coriveau can (and is) targetting Savanna whom is farther away but at a different angle.

Not sure what to do with two insects guarding both doors.  I may deconstruct one of my own walls to pop in, I gotta stop that insect from mining the wall into the Ancient Structure or its all over.  This was a bad plan :/

Also does anyone else notice bug infestations ignore your prisoners?

I think this has been mentioned a few times, but I think the way plants spread could use some tweaking.  Anyone who plays on a larger map and goes through a Toxic Fallout will wind up with a map that's completely devoid of any wild plants except at the fringes, large fires out in the wilderness can prove unrecoverable for wild plants as well.  As the plants try to repopulate, they'll hit various barriers they won't spread past like hills, rough rock floors, desert sand, marshes/water, etc.  This will tend to make the majority of the map's outdoors interior completely barren for the remainder of the game.  Could the code for wild plants reseeding to be maybe tweaked a bit to make it easier for wild plants to cast their seeds over unplantable barriers (hills/rock/marsh/etc.)?  Really kinda sucks that an event will have everlasting effects like this.

CBS teaser of new Star Trek series (set to debut in 2017):  https://youtu.be/xXpPweAooeE

CBS has previously said it won't be related to the upcoming Star Trek film, and I thought I read it was generally not supposed to be related to the JJ films at all, but judging from the art style, they're pretty much going with the style of the JJ films.  Two elements of the teaser indicate this for me despite not actually seeing a starship:  the crazy roller-coaster-planet run similar to the ending credits of JJ's Star Trek films thus far, and the stylized Star Trek title similar to Abrams' with a practically identical individual letter-spin-reveal also similar to JJ's Star Trek films.

Oddly enough, some folk have never heard of Murphy's Law.  In case you hadn't:  Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.  Its commonly used to describe situations of unexpected combinations of events leading one to suspect fate is playing tricks on you.

Case in point:  I've played game after game after game hoping for a Psychopath with cooking trait to carve up some nice raiders, natives, and ... ermm ... yeah, expired colonists too.  I mean, why let all that meat go to waste?  But it gets hugely expensive in terms of social debuffs to the cook unless they have Psychopath as a trait ... IIRC, its -16 per corpse a cook has carved, and after some raids there are a lot of corpses to carve up.  But human meat goes so well to my hungry animals whom deserve to reap what they sew when they slay raiders ...

Anyway I finalyl gave up waiting for Psychopath as a trait with cooking, even clicking the re-roll randomizer waaaay too many times when creating a game, so I got EdB prepare carefully working again to ... well, yeah, cheat and give myself a Psychopath cook from the getgo.  And my very first 'Wanderer joins' that game?  Psychopath with cooking skill and passion .... GO FIGURE!

Murphy's law.  I tell you, its a thing!

Yet another misconception I've seen (and I admit I started out with this misconception myself my first several games) is that 'animal box' you can construct (NOT the 'animal bed' you can make out of cloth or other fabrics, but the 'sleeping box' you can make out of hard materials like wood, steel or stone blocks) WILL NOT WORK for any animal large enough to haul.  The box only works for smaller animals like chickens, chinchillas, cats and the too-small-to-haul dogs like Yorkshires; other animals cannot use it (including the can-haul dogs like labradors and huskies).

I'm not 100% sure what the effects of animal beds (boxes or beds) are exactly as I'm not very good at digging into the datafiles as many crafty players are, but based on experience animals tend to breed much faster if they have a proper sleeping construct and not merely a designated sleeping spot.  I imagine that, like colonist beds, animals have shorter resting periods in higher-quality constructed sleeping boxes/beds and may recover more quickly from injuries (but I'm not quite sure on this).

But again, to re-iterate the main point of this tip:  animals big enough to haul cannot use animal boxes; they can only use animal beds to sleep in.

EDIT:  Some players have been confused between "Animal sleeping spot" vs "<Hard Material> animal sleeping box" vs "<Fabric Material> Sleeping Bed" so I have attached a screenshot.  These are 3 different kinds of animal sleeping furniture -- the first is just a spot on the floor (similar to the 'Sleeping spot' for colonists, just specifying a spot on a floor); the second is made of a hard material (steel, wood, stone block, etc.) but (as mentioned) only small animals too small to haul fit in (Yorkshire Terriers are too small to haul and fit in; Labrador and Huskies pups too young to haul fit in; adult Labrador and Husky dogs are big enough to train to haul and cannot fit in this box); the third is Animal sleeping beds, made of soft fabrics (cloth, leathers, wools, etc.) which fit all animals.

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I have seen popular and talented "Let's Play" gamecasters on Youtube doing a Rimworld series make some gaffes that indicate to me a lot of folk may not realize what will or will not obstruct wind turbines.  A popular one recently expressed surprise to find out that (non-tree) crops and solar panels don't obstruct wind turbines ... so I presume some other players don't realize this, etiher.

Aside from trees, crops do not obstruct wind turbines.  In fact I find they're a great way to help keep wind turbines clear of trees (trees do obstruct wind turbines, lowering their power output) because your farmers will keep cutting down any plants other than the crops that are supposed to be growing there.  If its generally poor soil, you might consider cotton or haygrass or somesuch, or healroot more for the sake of something low-maintenance to prevent wild trees from taking seed there for a long term than actually expecting output from planting that particular field.

An even cheaper option in terms of never having to maintain once built is to simply install flooring within the 'white range' of the wind turbine (the range that must be kept clear for the turbine to function effectively -- though note I have noticed that trees adjacent to but not inside the white box will still obstruct the win turbine).

When your constructors build beds, the beds have 'quality' depending on their skill.  Generally early on, before your constructors have earned experience, those bed qualities can be poor.  The quality of the bed impacts sleep quality for colonists (/prisoners/patients) in those beds as well as how pretty or ugly the room they are in feels, and your overall colony wealth.

That sleep quality can have a real difference -- a high-quality bed means your colonists can get fully rested in a much faster time, so they are able to get more work done during the day (to really take advantage of this, you may want to eliminate or strongly reduce their restrictions that force them to sleep for a fixed period).

I'm not entirely certain (someone else whom has experimented confirm/deny?) but I believe bed quality also impacts recovery from disease or injury for your medical beds.

If you happen to be flush in a material you can make beds out of (wood highly recommended if you're in a wood-rich map since its fast to build and if you aren't on an ice sheet, you can grow more), I suggest building a lot of beds somewhere, even outside.  You can then cherrypick the best based on quality (I don't have the quality-names memorized, I just tend to click on a bed and figure out quality level based on the 'Beauty') and replace your colonist beds if they are lower quality, deconstruct the rest of the beds you built to salvage some of their materials (important to note, if you don't know, you won't be able to recover 100% of the materials used to build something when you deconstruct it).  This also helps train up construction skill, so the more you do this, the higher the constructor skills and gradually they will build better beds (and other constructs) more consistently at higher quality.

I copied Rimworld into a few different folders -- a primary one to maintain as vanilla (no mods), and a couple others selectively for different mods, and I installed the mods to the mod folders of those installations separately with the hope that if I felt like playing mod X one day, I could just click my taskbar shortcut for that installation of Rimworld, if I felt like mod Y tomorrow or just play vanilla, I could just click my separate taskbar shortcuts for those installations.

Unfortunately what I've found is that Rimworld seems to use one datafile in a fixed location that keeps the settings of what mods are enabled, created world and savegames.  If I create a world on one installation of Rimworld with Mod X (after having already copied Rimworld into several different folders, each for different mod setups) and enable Mod X on that installation, if I tried a different installation (such as my vanilla install or Mod Y install) it will have the created world and savegames of Mod X install, and the Mod Y installation will have the mods I had installed disabled, I presume because a fixed datafile elsewhere in my hard drive all installations draw off (or possibly the registry?) stores the active mods settings.

Maybe I'm the only one who likes to keep several installations going in separate installations (as I do with Civilization IV:  Colonization), but maybe others would like it easier to pick a particular mod setup at launch instead of having to change the active mods and carefully remember which created worlds were created with which mods, etc. if folk besides myself like to try different mods or play vanilla on occasion.

I have unfortunately discovered a mod conflict between EdBPrepareCarefully 0.13.0.4 and "Miscellaneous w MAI+Robots" (V 0.13.1, probably the newer version too).  EdB does warn it won't work with other mods that modify map generation script which Miscellaneous does, and unfortunately the result is EdB effectively does not work -- you get a 'Prepare Carefully' button but tweaking your colonists and starting resources doesn't do anything -- when the map generates and the game starts, you don't get the colonists or resources you set up and instead seem to get the initial random colonist, random pet and Miscellaneous mod-vanilla starting resource.

I realize this is probably "no duh obvious" they wouldn't work for those technically familiar with what 'map generation' is, but thought I'd mention this unfortunate incompatibility for the rest of us whom aren't.

This is a quirk I've noticed since I first tried EdB several versions ago -- when tweaking colonist skill levels and passion, if a colonist has some level of passion for a task but you decide you don't plan to have them do that task, and to salvage some points by removing their passion for that task, if you go from 1 passion to none for that task (whether they started with 1 or 2 passion for it), it will actually cost points to eliminate that passion which seems nonsensical.  Having passion for something causes you to gain experience with it faster and has no negative downside, so why would eliminating passion for a task cost points?

It only seems to work in the case of a colonist having a passion for something that you delete.  Adding one level of passion to a colonist with none for a particular task does cost points, as it should.

I downloaded the A13 beta for EdB Prepare Carefully (version 0.13.0.4) linked in the mod's released post but it doesn't seem to work.   I enabled the mod in 'Mods,' but I do not get a 'Prepare Carefully!' when creating a new colony and get to the point of reviewing starting colonists.

I am running with the Miscellaneous/MAI mods (but I have 'Misc. Incidents' from this modpack disabled).  I did create a new world, I've rebooted my computer since installing EdB, but still cannot get the mod to work.

P.S.:  I hadn't noticed until recently that a subforum was setup under bugs for mods, which I think is great because released mod threads with 70 pages of posts are just too long to browse through to see whether someone else has been having this issue too.  I hope more folk use 'Ludeon Forums > RimWorld > Bugs > Mod Bugs' to discuss and hopefully have resolved bugs running mods.

If you play in biomes that can freeze during winter, consider dual-purposing your coolers that keep your food frozen to also serve as heaters for your base by building the coolers into the wall between your freezer and other rooms in your base (generally best for a very large room to reduce the chances of overheating it too much).  This saves power over throwing that heat away by just directing it outside and then building and powering room heaters separately.

If you swing between frozen winters and warm summers that can sometimes go through a heat wave, you can spend a bit more by building extra coolers so you can fully keep your freezer frozen while turning off the coolers that dual-purpose as base heaters (so they won't contribute to heat stroke woes in your base).  That will eat a bit of extra metal and components, but the tradeoff is not having to build and power heaters to keep your base warm in winter and coolers at the same time.

A somewhat simpler alternative to conserve power would be to simply turn off your freezer coolers during winter when the temperature is below freezing ... coolers will still consume power even when not in use if not turned off.  You would still need to power heaters, but at least don't need to run both at the same time ... but you have to remember to turn the coolers back on when the weather rises above freezing.

The non-electric cook stove can hold 50 fuel, but haulers will pick up as much wood as they can haul (up to 75 in most cases) when fueling a non-electric fuel stove.  They'll carry up to 75 wood to the stove, but the stove will just be filled to 50 and any fuel over that the hauler was carrying just disappears.

Seems a bit annoying that 'dumb' labor jobs (Plant cutting, Hauling, Cleaning) never improve with experience.  IRL, people who do labor jobs get better at them from a combination of figuring out tricks over time to save pain/time to just building up a physique for greater strength/endurance.

I hope its worth considering ... if it is, I suggest the following as effects of greater experience:

• Hauling:  Less of a speed penalty to haul stuff like chunks or big stacks of things
• Cleaning:  This one is kinda tough since actually cleaning a mess happens so quickly, but maybe a longer reach with higher experience to effectively clean a whole room faster?
• Plant cutting:  Faster cutting/harvesting, would really help out cutting Oak trees or harvesting Agave which take several seconds; maybe with higher experience, a slight chance that when chopping wood that a new tree takes its place and/or higher yields from chopping/harvesting?