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Added a dropbox link (here), for those so inclined. Really tho guys, why not join us in gaben's enveloping embrace? It's warm in here. And we get stickers and stuff.

A little mod I made after starting a tribal game in a rainforest and finding out why you shouldn't do that. Also in general to give tribals a reason to grow psychoid, since they're already cut off from so many other features. Loosely based on the traditional Andean mate de coca, which I tried once and was nice. Not 'cure fatal illness' nice, but yknow, videogame.

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Bumpf:

A simple mod that adds a new drug for tribals. Can be used socially, and also helps fight illness.

- At a campfire, turn 4 psychoid leaves into one psychoid tea.

Drinking it gives a small amount of joy and a +5 moodlet, plus a bonus to blood filtration, blood pumping and metabolism.

Addiction and tolerance properties are balanced in line with other social drugs, so pretty safe, but the effects if they do occur are the same as other psychite drugs, so quite emphatic.

The item itself is perishable, but on a long timer (60 days) because tribals have enough problems as it is. It is also sellable, although not worth much more than the raw materials.

Compatibility: can be added to saves, but it won't show up in old drug policies, you'll have to create new ones to prescribe it.

notes
- I intended to make the recipe available only to tribals, ancient shamanic wisdom and all, but it turns out there's no simple way to do that, so for now it's available to everyone. I'm trusting you to do the right thing.
- Also the art isn't great, bear with me while I figure out how all that works.

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Workshop Link - here.
Dropbox Link - here

Comment, suggestion, obscenity, all welcome.

What does the about.xml of the mod look like? That's the only place I know where version number comes into play.

You can use Ilspy to look at the code (use it to open RimWorld\RimWorldWin_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll), although all I usually get out of it are feelings of confusion and stupidity. For the xmls the auto-documentation from this thread is a godsend, lets you search through all of the xmls and see what links to what, and which files different tags show up in.

Do you have an About folder for your mod? Under ModFolder/About/About.xml, you can put the version number in:

Code Select Expand

<ModMetaData>
<name>Mod Name</name>
<author>Mod Author</author>
<targetVersion>0.16.1393</targetVersion>
<description>Mod description</description>
</ModMetaData>

> Well, filth rate is apparently proportional to body size (at least, it's listed as an update from a12 here) so if I can control meat amount and leather amount separately from body size, then I can just get body size really high and get the same effect, right?

Yeah, should be, although there may be some unexpected side effects from having huge body size other than leather and meat amounts, you'll have to test it.

Here's the bit of the spooky code that seems to correspond:

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public static float AnimalFilthChancePerCell(ThingDef def, float bodySize)
{
float num = bodySize * 0.00125f;
return num * (1f - def.race.petness);
}

So increasing bodysize or decreasing petness (which is presumably the inverse of wildness) seem to be the only ways to alter the filth rate without getting into overrides and detours and all of that complex stuff.

Beyond me, but I did notice the author of the Cave Biome mod has the source up on github, that should give you an idea of what's involved - https://github.com/Rikiki123456789/Rimworld/tree/master/CaveBiome/CaveBiome

Looks a bit bloody complicated, though, good luck with that

You can set <LeatherAmount> and <MeatAmount> in the <statBases> part of the animal thingdef, if that helps. Control of the filth rate itself seems to be secreted away in the arcane world of bool and curly brackets, so other than changing the body size or wildness I don't think there's much way to control it. You could give your snail its own type of filth tho, and make it uglier or dirtier or harder to clean.

The rest of the stuff seems a bit impossible, tbh, at least from what I know (which isn't much). Temperature control seems strictly linked to buildings, and once things are dead there's not much you can make them do. Asexual reproduction, maybe? You could give the creature its own thinktree to stop it trying to mate, and make it pregnant anyway with a hediff. Tho I'm not sure how you could apply it at appropriate times. Birthday hediffgiver, maybe? Maybe.

In general, I've found it's best to look at what the xmls do first, then think about what's possible. You'll run into a lot of brick walls coming at it from the other direction. I know I have

I'm sure there's room for innovation, but I always thought the way DF handled parties was very elegant: you just designate a 'meeting space', then characters will either go there solo when they need relaxation or occasionally organize a party and draw others in. While in the room, everyone just interacts with whatever is there - chat to other people, admire art, play with animals, eat/drink etc. Simple, powerful, does the job.

So at any one time you might have a pair of miners shooting hoops outside while your introvert doctor reads alone in the library and your alcoholic lead researcher gets into an argument with the off-duty squaddies in the makeshift bar, etc and so on, with activity choice weighted by personality traits.

Perhaps something like this could happen in an event, a bit like the '<animal> goes psycho' event that exists today. Except instead of one animal going mental and mindlessly attacking, it's all (or a high %) of a given animal on a map going food-crazy and coming for your goodies. Explained by a random disease or just motivated by starvation.

If it's just squirrels you just splat them all and move on, but something like a herd of muffalo might have eaten half the harvest by the time you clear them off. Boomrats might eat a bit too much and become unstable as in the OP.

Great post. I'll add some thoughts, if I may.

Hauling/Storage

I think Tynan posted somewhere about equipment racks being placeholders for the moment, to be filled in soonish. I imagine container stuff will start to come along with that. Wheelbarrows would be great, as would those hover-dolly things you see in sci-fi from time to time. Also I've heard mention of hauling droids, to free up colonists to do more interesting things without adding to the 'who are you again?' factor; they would presumably have the advantage of being able to carry more. Also perhaps cargo containers - super efficient in terms of items-per-tile, but with the catch that you can only take things out in the reverse order you put them in? So they're useful for zipping up all your metal/potatoes/raider-skull ashtrays for trade, but it can't be abused to store everyday items.

Vehicles feels like a stretch, honestly, given the scope of the game... apart from anything else, the maps might start to feel a bit small once you can cruise around at high speeds. One idea - it might seem a bit forced, but maybe a system where you build a start point and an end point and the car/trolley/hoverboard or whatever can shuttle between them. To make hauling from your remote mining op to the launchpad a bit less bothersome without all the attendant complication that would come from piloted vehicles.

Energy Storage

Would love to see some form of this, tho in my head the batteries are trade goods - some ultra-high tech method of condensing energy, such that one power cell could run the whole colony for weeks or more. So your options for power include solar - cheap and safe but depends on sunshine; geothermal - efficient and constant, but perhaps dangerous/temperamental machinery; then mega-battery - safe and reliable, but mounting cost. (A high-tech colony with an abundance of geothermal vents might even take to making its own energy bricks for trade. Or run an intense power operation in one corner of the map and run the main colony off cells.)

Fridges

I don't know if decaying food is planned for some point, but if it is I suppose these are a given. I like that it bridges energy concerns with food concerns - a colony might rely on its vast stores of frozen food and casually sell the latest crop, only to find their power supply interrupted and their rations steadily rotting... all good drama. Tho if there's no rotting food, putting fridges in seems to lampshade the fact slightly.

Liquids

It's just me talking, but I always liked Simcity more before you had to do all the piping as well as the wiring.. it exercises the same mechanics, without really adding much interesting - either you have enough and you ignore it, or you don't and everyone dies in a few days. Though of course from a simulationist perspective it's a critical resource, seems odd to leave it out. Hmm.

Defenses

I think there's two lines of thought here - traps and AI defenses. Would love to see more traps, DF style - always the most entertaining way to defend yourself. Also gives you more control over capturing instead of killing - from stun mines to snares, lots of ways to incapacitate with a bit of forward planning, and options at every level of technology.

Automated defenses seem like they're always tricky to balance in games - too strong and it becomes easy to turtle up, too weak and they just become pointless and a waste of resources. I think part of the problem is quantity - if they're good in small numbers, they're amazing en masse, and if they're only mediocre en masse they're useless in small numbers, making it an all-or-nothing thing.

My suggestion is to give them the potential for great power, but make them scarce - requiring special parts to build and significant expertise to optimize and maintain. So if you take the plunge and go for a turret network, you have a hefty upfront cost in terms of buying the parts and building it, but also a continuous time investment; if the engineer was too busy putting out fires or banging his head against a wall, or god forbid got killed without training a replacement - your investment slowly degrades, starts to malfunction, and eventually just becomes a giant paperweight, worth its weight in scrap. Conversely a decent engineer might make a good thing even better. It could be a full-time job; as the researcher goes to his desk every day and fills a bar, the engineer goes to the turret (or turret control console?) and does the same, improving the rate of fire, damage, tracking speed, acquisition time etc. in discrete levels.

Anyway. Just thinking with my fingers.

I'd love to see something like this implemented. Something like power should be a primary concern for colonists and just being able to plop down more generators as needed blunts that somewhat. If important structures were one-shot kits that you can't always assume you'll be able to get your hands on, you'd have to make some really tough choices about what you need; harvest doesn't look too good, you were going to buy food, but ack he's got a geothermal kit, that's the first one you've seen all game. I guess the people can go hungry until you finally have enough power to run that hydro operation...

Or perhaps to make it less of a crapshoot, you can research/build basic versions of structures, but need kits for advanced models? Upgrade kits? I dunno.

Can't say fairer than that.

Thanks for reading, loving your game.

Certain crops could even be more susceptible to blight than others - with countering benefits, like yield or grow speed or resistant to pests. So colonies have to weigh the tradeoffs between one crop and another, with the environment playing a big factor.

Though I don't know how much variety you can add to agriculture before it stops being much fun - scrolling through 20 different crops and their GM variants to find the one that works perfectly for your setup is just gaming a system in the end. Nicer to have to make the choice; on your rainy, boomrat infested world, do you go with the wetweather crop that is like ratnip to the exploding rodents or the drier crop that might get waterlogged but is too tough for their little teeth? Then there's always the ultra-hardy high-yield GM stuff, but that always comes with the warning - Moonsanto accepts no liability for injury or distress caused by spontaneous total crop failure....

In terms of upgrading your own crops, it could be interesting to run 'seed lines' - ie improvements are made over successive generations; you've got your plant genetics lab up and running, you set it to '+yield' to feed your hungry mouths, and see a cumulative +x% bonus each generation (or it could be on a separate research timer, but improvements are only applied in the next generation). But then your geneticist has a bad day and introduces a -y% pest resistence, which proliferates through your fields. You switch him over from improving yield to improving pest resist to counteract the malus, which works for a while, but continued tampering lowers the overall hardiness a significant amount. Then there's a blight, and the whole line is lost; oh well, back to the drawing board.

If that all seems a bit complicated, it does come with the added effect of minimizing clutter in a putative genetic engineering scenario - instead of having fifty different varieties flying around, you just have the basic version and the one you're working on, like the crop is a character in an rpg (with permadeath).

Thinking about it, you could even have non-technical people improving their crops by artificial selection - far less drastic effects than the gene fiddling, but less unpredictable.

Haven't seen this discussed anywhere; what do people think about tasks that take multiple colonists to complete? I don't mean like harvesting or fighting, where several people can contribute independently, but complex interactions with things like deep shaft mining equipment or advanced manufacturing equipment where at least two people are required to make it work at all.

It adds a bit of complexity to the management, having to juggle schedules etc, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your view. It could work well with a more developed social system, where you'd see 'teams' emerge, and friendships and rivalries form between co-workers.