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Would it be possible for someone to use the robots xtension and nick the droid sprites from the old mechanical defence mod and bring back the droids?

I got so used to be able to build glass walls and glass doors that I completely forgot it wasn't part of vanilla. When I updated to alpha 13, I was searching the research list back and forth trying to find the glassworks. I put on development mode looking through all the buildings trying to find the glass ones. Forgot it was never part of vanilla.

This mod is essential stuff. Ty should nick your idea and put it in the game.

Permanent events could pair well with megastructures.

Toxic fallout could keep getting worse, as thingy mentioned, up to the point of being so dangerous that you dare never go outside. BUT you could then research and build some sort of atmospheric cleaner. It would take a lot of resources, a very long time to build and require an enormous amount of power AND would have to be built outside, in the fallout. Maybe make it a multi-stage building. Various phases of construction.

Switch it on and three months later, the fallout stops.
I have no idea how Ty would do this, though. Maybe do the same thing one of the modders did with the mechanoid terraformer? If that can change weather then there has to be something in the game to work with.

For a permanent heat wave you could construct a satellite and blast it into space. That satellite could carry some sort of solar mirror so you can cool your area of the planet. Again, that would take a lot of resources on the same level as the colonists spaceship.

The only other modpack I see with a quick look is the Mod Variety Pack. I have no idea how it differs from HSK though.

I tried going from HSK to ModVarietyPack but it's just too different. Going from the over-the-top complexity of HSK to the simple vanilla+ of MVP is just too much of a change. You lose so much.
A solid base that would have taken over a year and a half to set up in HSK took only two months in MVP. Found myself getting bored quite quickly.

You can build complete structures out of nothing but steel bars. Actual steel bars. No scrambling for parts. It was just so fast and easy. Relaxing, in a way.

[Mutant Jungle]

Mutant Jungle
An incredibly aggressive jungle, composed of plants grown out of control by failed genetic modification. Plants grow very fast and will literally overgrow and attack your structures. Vines can grow next to walls and will damage them. I'd like to see graphics for the vines actually growing on the walls but I don't know how possible that is. Those vines will slowly damage the walls and will continue to grow on the other side unless cut off. There would also be poisonous, barbed plants that can randomly grow on the ground and hurt any colonist who walks over them.
Throw in some of those man-eating trees someone else mentioned, too.

Outside threats would be relatively easy to handle. The jungle itself would attack raiding parties and discourage further invasion. That's a pro. It also kills any animals that enter the region. And that can be a con.
Your own farms would grow very quickly due the mutagens in the soil. So if you can seal off an area of ground and keep the jungle out of it, you'll grow a lot of food very quickly. Trees also grow quickly and in great numbers but can be dangerous to cut down due to poisonous barbs and such.
The jungle itself will need to be periodically hacked and burned back.
Also, those vines I mentioned can grow across player-placed floors. Vines can only spread to the other side of walls after they lower durability to 50%.

Wacky enough?

The safety of the mountain is a reward for how much harder it is to set up a base inside one compared to building on the open plains.

But earthquakes would be good. For preparation, you could have warning before it occurs. Maybe build a detector, scan for some seismic activity, scan p-waves or whatever it is. It would give a warning message about half a day before the earthquake. Time to evacuate. Or the earthquake could start with slight screen shaking that steadily gets worse, then the earthquake occurs.

Could make it even harsher by adding a chance for the quake to close steam geysers.

You can edit the hell out of biomes and some stuff that appears on map gen: scattered items and geysers. But can you edit how the map itself would look when generated?

I want more overhead mountain. I want a landing site where more than half the map is inside a mountain. So I can build a huge bunker, naturally.
Is there something that can be edited to ensure all mountainous regions will have more than half the map under an overhead mountain?

[WASTE MANAGEMENT]

(Apologies if this has been suggested lots of times before. Didn't see it in frequent suggestions.)

How about WASTE MANAGEMENT? Might be easy to add to the game. I imagine the longest job would be finding a graphic for it. But it doesn't exactly need to look pretty. I suppose it's just an expansion to the cleaning job that already exists. Just this makes it a bit more involved than simply telling everyone to do cleaning for one day every few months.
Anyway, managing waste is a challenge every human settlement has struggled to deal with throughout history.

When rotting food loses all it's durability, it turns into food waste. So after it hits 0/whatever, it'll turn into a messy looking item called 'food waste', or something. Massive beauty hit. Never degrades. Has to be disposed off.
Same for anything else that hits it last point of durability. All turn into a waste item.

Colonists could leave behind a waste item every day or so. After they eat meals, it could leave behind minor waste items that have to be disposed of. Hardcore workbenches could leave behind industrial waste, that might even be slightly toxic in addition to being ugly.

It would require the player to construct some sort of landfill away from living areas. Maybe, further down the research line, recycling could become possible. Most waste could be recycled to get something useful out of it and destroy the waste. 'Food waste' could be recycled into fertiliser, although that would probably require extensive changes to agriculture, so bugger that for now.
Could perhaps have a power plant that burns waste as fuel? Give it an area around it to mark pollution that kills plants and gives a debuff to any colonist going to close to it.

Anyone happen to have a map seed with a landing site that's 90% overhead mountain?

I'd love to play a landing where I had to do everything underground. Mine out every room, use only indoor power like geothermal vents. Have to deal with all my colonists going cabin feverish. Farm exclusively on hydroponics. Dig out open caverns to make ranch space for animals.
Have one single tunnel entrance through which all outside hazards must approach.

Would probably need new events for something like that, though. Earthquakes with random cave-ins or something, I guess.

For story purposes, think all the escape pods smashed through a thin portion of the mountain and wound up deep in some cavern with no way out.

6) Radiation from uranium: Implant could be a good "upgrade" way to wean off of chemical suits in the later game. That way you can have protection and still wear your power armor and such. The micro-managing of uranium does get tedious.

Robots would be a good way to handle uranium and its radiation.

Although, the conveyor belts can be used to ship it from the drill, to the processor and on to the powerplant without a single colonist having to touch anything.

What are the odds of getting some nice automated factory buildings to do those basic crafting tasks?

I'm thinking something like the oil refinery. Put steel bars into the hopper next to it and it'll crank out either spare parts or full steel parts, depending on what you choose with that 'change resource' button. It would be good if it would produce parts depending on the metal in the hopper, but I have no idea if that's possible or not. But a separate factory building for each metal would still be good.
Give it a massive power drain, something like a solid 8kw, and make it eat the appropriate number of metal bars to produce metal parts.
Oh, and an automated plant to smelt ore into bars.

All that, combined with the drills and the conveyor belt system, would allow us to make some fantastic sealed factory buildings for mass-producing those parts we desperately need.

Could always make the whole thing take constant damage so a colonist is needed to maintain the whole place. Keep a bit of hardcore balance. If it's all indoors, have it generate a fair amount of heat so that some more power-hungry cooling systems are needed. And make the factory building huge. I'm talking 6x6, at least.

How do I change the wall texture for glass windows? Really not keen on the one in the pack. Also, any chance of putting in concrete walls?

Liking it so far.

Is there a happy medium between this mod and nines old modpack? I like the depth and complexity, it's just... it takes so long to get anything done. So, so long. I just don't have enough time to sit here and wait for the colonists to do stuff. Maybe if there were an option to speed up game time beyond what we've already got (speedhack function in cheatengine doesn't work anymore, which is odd. speeds up clock but not movement and action).

Can we get some great big industrial workbenches that can crank stuff out faster? Should I start a map with at least 6 colonists each having 20 in crafting?

I'm very mixed on this mod. On the one hand, I like the complexity. On the other, it's made some things almost tedious. The number of steps you have to go through now to build a simple bed can mean half of my people will have suffered multiple mental breakdowns before the first house is built.
And the requirements to build basic power and move to hydroponics are that high that a desert or tundra biome is pretty much impossible without 'preparing carefully' by adding lots of extra resources to your start. Going for temperate woodland feels like wussing out, though, so I'll keep struggling in the desert. Don't know what I'll do when some idiot finally decides to add water as a necessity.

I like the modpack, sky. It's a lot of good work. And it'll make it much more satisfying when I've finally got my colony built.