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As of the next release you will be able to set a target number of meals to be produced - your cook will make more whenever your stock drops below that point.

Not quite the same thing, but it definitely cuts kitchen micro.

i would suggest lowering the power output,

This. Frankly, if I were you, what I would do is lower the power output to less than half the solar panel - trading raw power output for consistency. The solar panel works only for half the day and not at all during an eclipse. The geothermal works 24/7 and during eclipse, but needs to be placed on a geothermal vent. Making a power source with neither of those drawbacks but giving it a drawback of it's own (low power rate) makes it something that fills a niche rather than being the obvious best choice.

Of course, geothermal is really, really good and so there perhaps isn't as much depth to the system as I suggest, but frankly I think I'm going to nerf it in my own game because wow, it's really good. (Though I generated a map today that doesn't have a vent on the surface, so that's a consideration)

Given how harsh the penalties are for eating poor food, getting the best available would probably be better.

Alternatively, though I don't know how technically close this gets to what you want to avoid, colonists could get the best food when they are only 'hungry' and the closest when they are 'urgently hungry' or starving.

I've been playing a little bit with this, and I've not found anything that looks like a real bug, but a couple things I notice with the balance:

- The appearance modifier seems really high. I had a 2 tile wide hallway floored with wood, and despite the whole thing being covered with rock bits from mining, colonists in it were getting the 'beautiful environment' modifier - for it being so easy to gather, that seems a bit much.

- Relating to that last bit, you get a whole lot of wood really quickly. There are plenty of trees around, each of them drops a bunch of logs, those logs get turned into even more planks, and the sawmill works extremely fast. Even if you wanted to build your entire colony out of wood, you'd need remarkably little in the way of time and trees to do so.

After seeing the update and the new things, I just thought of something.  Mobile Turrets.

So... Guns?

Not instead of bills I wouldn't say. Production lines could easily become more complex later down the line such that you don't always want resources to be replaced when they are used, in which case it again becomes extra micromanagement to cancel the craft to order. In addition to ordering a specific amount though, this would be a grand idea.

The game scales the raiders that show up with the perceived strength of your colony (And if you were playing any of the 'classic' storytellers, I believe with time as well). Getting a bunch of snipers when you don't have any weapons that can match their range is unlucky, certainly, but they were bound to show up eventually.

Running power cables out from your walls to keep them outside a turrets blast radius would be a good idea (and generally limiting your usage of turrets, because they aren't really all that great).

I like this, but I think there should be a limit to the number of times the penalty stacks - colonists shouldn't be going insane just from sleeping in a community room.

Well, Randy's whole deal is that he's random (obviously) - I've had games with no raiders for weeks, and then games where multiple good sized waves drop at almost the same time. An easier storyteller isn't something I would be into (though it would be good to have regardless), but one balanced to make things more challenging as you go forward without the explicit intention of eventually overrunning you like Callie/Cassandra/Cleopatra would be nice.

Choosing the corpses to eat could be done via forbidding and un-forbidding. From what I can tell, bodies in graves don't get uncovered without the grave itself being deconstructed, so you would have to deliberately dig up a buried colonist if you got curious needed to eat one really badly. Human meat meals will probably be off by default, so you'll almost certainly never eat a dead colonist by mistake.

That wasn't the point, though - they want to eat human meat, but they want to be able to configure it so that only raiders get butchered, while colonists get buried instead. If how the system works is that you just put in an order for 'butcher humans' or whatever, you won't be able to control burials vs butchers without an enormous amount more micromanagement than should be needed.

Very cool.

Have you considered/is it possible to build a wall that doesn't create a roof when closed?

I am almost 300% certain that it is not possible. But that is a feature which Tynan is already including in the next patch.

The description for the charges talks about blasting rock - rebalancing them to be better for mining (destroys more rock, longer fuse, needs a colonist to activate them?) and adding a less ridiculously good alternative for blowing up raiders would be my suggestion.