Messages

"Rabbit Food"

... I swear they always go for the Siri-Gum and the Devilstrand first. Damn critters.

There are several free joy sources such as walking and praying which your colonists will do if they have nothing else (or get bored of them). As far as I know, they are as follows:

Free joy sources: Walking, meditating, praying, relaxing socially, cloudwatching, stargazing, watching the sun set/rise.

You can also buy chocolate from bulk goods trade ships. Chocolate is the only "gluttonous" joy source I have seen so far, though I suspect an alchohol binge might count for that as well.

I bought a TV and set it up next to a nice armchair, but nobody is using it. Maybe nothing good is on?

[challenge]

For the record, I usually play on the "challenge" difficulty setting. I prefer the Arboreal Forest biome because I enjoy the season changes as well as the extra challenge cold weather adds.

I think the pacing in the early game is very good - it has been that way for several updates now. I find myself scrambling for resources, constantly making tough calls about what job to finish first and how best to utilize each colonist's skills while the base gets covered in blood and dirt because no-one can spare the time to clean. Defenses are improvized and fights are nerve-wracking because I don't have enough (or indeed any) turrets and barricades.

Somewhere around the 6th or 7th colonist joining I find there is a bit of a speed bump. People start wandering because there is nothing for them to do. I've built and researched the essentials, everyone has a room to sleep in, the base is nice and clean and the freezer is stocked. This results in long-ish periods of boredom interrupted by frantic scrambling to set up defenses when an attack comes. At this point in the game, siegers and crashed ships are a welcome distraction, because these situations require you to take direct controls over your pawns to best deal with the situations.

Suggestions:

Resource scarcity is almost exclusively an early-game challenge.
Adjust the amount of resources spawned on the map according to difficulty setting - steel in particular. I have never purchased steel from a trader because I always have an excess of it - if not in storage, then close to home and easily accessed.

Smaller but more frequent attacks. Being attacked tends to put most of your colony on hold, and the time lost in work-hours can sometimes be a bigger issue than any injuries suffered. More frequent, smaller raiding bands would stress the player more overall than the large groups that spawn currently.
To avoid these smaller groups simply becoming cannon fodder for your turrets, I would like to see smaller raider groups use guerilla tactics against the colony - sniping your turrets from range, blowing up random bits of wall, setting fire to your crops, etc. - anything that forces you to stop what you're doing and deal with them personally. I don't know if it's possible, but perhaps the AI could evaluate when a group spawns whether or not it would be a match for the player's current number of turrets and armed colonists in play and plan their assault based on that.

Nerf geothermal power. I'm probably going to catch some flak for this one, but I think GP is way too strong compared to the other power sources. A solar panel can barely power a freezer and a single auto-door and doesn't work half the time (more than half if you count solar eclipses). Wind turbines need lots of space you could use for something else. GP is risk-free, maintenace-free, hassle-free and has a massive power output. Yes, it requires research, but you can start that as soon as the game begins and have it ready in a few days.
Alternatively, add some sort of unique catastrophic event to GP generators or gate the research somehow.

I like the concept of the event, because dealing with it is optional at the cost of losing resources. It would probably be more interesting if they spawned on top of other events, forcing you to choose between beavers and a more immediate threat like raiders. At the moment, they are very easy to deal with on their own.

Troll or madman? You decide.

I'll just leave this here:

It's dumb that they can trade with spaceships at all. It's just a stopgap because ground traders are so difficult to do. I still hope to switch all the trade to ground caravans - some day.

It may be a bigger issue that mood in this game doesn't matter so much so far. Unless two bad events overlap (psychic drone + heat wave), or one event and a severe mood penalty from a trait, colonists work as usual. I would like colony mood to be more fluid and in line with present events, somehow. Or colonists having more individuality and mood swings.

I agree with that. That's what I want too (well, it's part of what I want anyway).

I'm not going to respond to this, because it's a strawman. Something superficially similar to the point I made, only easier to refute.

Well it wasn't intended as such. The problem is that for me the human element of the game is very, very important and that means I want colonists to act as human as the game allows. I don't think that people who want slavery (in the game) to be natural and profitable and have no consequence for your colony want the same things from the game as I do.

Do you plan to add more jobs?

If so, I think construction and repair could be merged without any real gameplay issues, as long as the game explains that construction also means repairing damaged structures.

If not, I don't see any particular need to shorten the work overview list.

Has it ever been mentioned what that trading system might be? Direct trade with the neighboring colonies? I hope so, that would make diplomacy and faction favor much more meaningful than just keeping them off your back or "visiting your freezer" as someone humorously put it one way or the other.

It's dumb that they can trade with spaceships at all. It's just a stopgap because ground traders are so difficult to do. I still hope to switch all the trade to ground caravans - some day.

Three wide. Asymmetric doors trigger my gaming OCD.

An expansion on the "Got Justice" or "Got Revenge" buff mentioned above, and some of the other suggestions:

What about having an option to put a prisoner on trial? The colonists all vote on what happens to the prisoner, based on their own traits, and the actions of the prisoner. Once a verdict is handed down: "Prison","Execution", or "Slavery", then the player can carry out the verdict. Once carried out, in accordance with the wishes of the colonists, they should all get a "Justice Served" type of buff, though some might get a debuff if, for example, they idealistically disagree with execution or slavery. Note that there should also be a debuff if the sentence is not carried out in a timely manner, though in the case of a slavery sentence, this debuff should not occur until after the player has had an opportunity to sell the prisoner, i.e. a slave trader has visited.

It sounds pretty cool, but I'm not sure that taking agency away from the player on such an important decision is a good idea.
In the end, the colony's fate and behaviour should be up to the player, but pawns should react to the behaviour the player enforces, urging the player to take the colony's needs and wants into consideration when making decisions.

That's my opinion anywyay.

Selling space pirates or savages into slavery is an act of mercy. The alternative is leaving them bleeding on the ground. What else would you do - keep them in prison forever ? My cook is overworked as it is.

You could make the mood penalty inversely proportional to "recruitment difficulty". The higher the recruitment difficulty, the lower the penalty for selling people into slavery. You could have people with "Idealist" trait who would still be bothered.

Like it or not, western civilization grew up on slavery:
- ancient Egypt, believed to be the inspiraction for ancient Greece
- ancient Greece, Greeks had the time for philosophers because they had slaves to do the chores. Spartans could be full-time warriors because they had slaves.
- Etruscans invented many things we credit Romans for, including aqueducts, arches (architecture), the latin alphabet. Etruscan had slaves.
- Romans had slaves.
- Europeans had slaves, the slave trade was so rampant because of colonization of America and industrial revolution. At its peak, you would get 300% return from investing into slave trade and American colonies.
- United States of America has used black slaves for most of its history. Old habits die hard.

I'm sure ancient people who were sold in slavery often considered themselves lucky. The rest of the village could be raped, slaughtered and burnt to the ground. Slavery outside North America wasn't as harsh. For example it was customary to use slaves in Africa and among Slavic tribes - prisoners of war mostly - but because they were white among white, or black among black, they often assimilated, married etc. It was the black vs white slavery that was the most cruel, because you could point a finger at someone and say he's a slave. He couldn't hide.

Slavery isn't just one thing. Slavery in ancient times, or among tribal societies, was more of a ritual behaviour than an intent to hurt and exploit other people. Slaves could often earn their freedom, and were generally treated as fellow human beings, not as animals. Some could marry and have children and expect their families to be reasonably safe. Their status were more like that of an indentured servant than a slave.

Contrast this with slavery in the last couple of hundred years, where slaves were treated as cattle or sub-human.

Slavery in Rimworld is definitely of the last type. You hand over a human and you get cash. It's pure business, there is no sort of ritual or rule involved. It's exploitation of fellow human beings without any rationale except "you're worthless to me, so I might as well turn you into money". There is really no moral excuse for this behaviour however "evil" the person you are selling may be. Your actions are not morally variable depending on who you take these actions against.

I see this come up again and again and I really don't get it. I really don't.

It's a matter of priorities. Setting the right priorities for colonists is a huge part of optimizing your game. If you set firefighting to minimum priority for everyone, your colony will burn to the ground. If you set cooking as minimum priority for everyone your colony will starve. If you set doctoring as minimum priority for everyone, people will bleed to death while waiting for medical attention. If you set hauling to minimum priority for everyone, shit gets left on the ground all the time.

This problem can be completely eliminated by a single colonist or two, doing nothing but hauling for a single day. It's really not that hard.

The essence of these complaints is "I don't want hauling to be a job at all".

On that note, is there any lore explanation as to why there are veins of compacted plasteel in the middle of a mountain?

Neither steel nor plasteel is described in the game as ore, it's the remains of old structures that collapsed. It actually says so in the in-game description.