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Gee, if only dating sites could be this concise!

2. Created a new world and a new colony. Without doing anything I was able to build wooden furniture again.

Were you bychance loading an old saved game before you made this new world and colony that works properly? The new update did say not to use old Alpha 8 save games so maybe that was it and it was all glitched out?

Vat-Grown is something that happens in rimworld.  So how about a maturation vat.  Two people want a baby. (lets not restrict gender here)  They build a vat and start the cycle.  Neural trainers can be used on it, but you can select pawns to 'teach' whoever is in the vat to transfer skills/traits.  Maybe make the baby bill so you can select what ones that you want.  The more passion the teacher has the more the offspring has a chance at having.  Traits are taken from the parents or the teachers.  In the end the whole process takes maybe a year.  There can also be a direct clone option if you really feel like it.

The "Baby Bill" idea is awesome. Cracks me up! It could be a crafting component and the higher your crafting the better product you produce from the vat!

I don't know why people keep getting hung up on the 'time' issue with having kids. You can hyper-grow potatoes in a few days but you're upset realism is lost if a kid matures to an adult in a year or two?

I truly didn't know beer wasn't made entirely from hops. Good lesson, thanks! Why do beer companies focus so much on the hops then? I think I've seen too many Budweiser commercials or something to have that skewed perception on it. I did wonder why Tynan chose beer over the much simpler wine or liquor options from potatoes or berries already in the game. My Dad always made alcoholic apple cider in the basement. I remember us kids sneaking into it and getting sicker than dogs. He said that's what we got for messing with something that wasn't even drinkable.

I never used it for indoor farming, just mud removal.  I think the best solution would be manual mud removal, like smoothing stone.

Yes! This! I wonder if anyone's put that in the 'cheapest ideas' thread because I don't have time to read the whole thing but this is a fanstastic idea that should not be too difficult to program, right? But what do I know, I'm not Tynan!

I would love it if my colonists could 'dig' out the mud from some of the caves I've occupied in the beginning instead of having to wait until I had bricklaying researched and supplies enough to lay down a proper floor.

It's early access alpha, not even beta. Regular updates are essential, modding in alpha is at your own risk.

In my opinion: Regular vanilla updates > modding.

You just have to "rely" on mods, because vanilla game has not that many features, so it could become boring after a while. With more regular updates, you wouldn't need so many mods.
And little mods for more weaopons and stuff can be updated very quickly, so i stick with my opinion: Moar updates please! I don't need mods

+1

First time I've ever heard someone think a game has "too many" updates, haha. Usually people are complaining about a lack of them which means good things for RimWorld in perspective.

This game is so polished even in 'vanilla' form, I think it's easy to forget it's still in an active Alpha development phase and so the modding community is a lot larger than I would have expected for a game not in full release yet.

I'm very supportive of mods and enjoy a few of them but I don't want the game defined by them and I disagree with the statement that this game 'relies' on them. I think the player might rely on them, but the game is very playable and solid right out of the box as is and so if you have gotten so used to certain mods you can't play without them, then you have to play the older version until your favorite mods are updated.

If the crypto room has a lot of pods (5 or more) I tend to just block off the openings so there's no accidentals until I have enough man-power to handle it or send in a decoy to open and run back to the base where turrets and better defenses can handle it.

One amusing side effect of blocking off entrances to these rooms far from your base is that sometimes invading pirates will attack the blocked off walls instead of your base and if they break through and somehow trigger the pods, THEY get to deal with them. I only had that happen once but it was beautiful.

As others have said, if this is inside your mountain, just build some turrets and defensive walls and try to thin them out (long tunnels help) or even build a tunnel away from the main base and herd them that way with a decoy.

I also always use a cannon-fodder character to do the opening just in case it's a total massacre. Never send in your best guys haha.

I've never had one with mechanoids or other nasties inside, just angry humans bent on killing us.

I think this is the biggest factor. It would be a really interesting idea, because prisoners are such a large mechanic of the game. However, it takes a lot of resources just to keep them alive and happy. Ideally it would be best to just recruit them and have them do normal duties. The only way I can think of implementing it is to have them less affected by bad moods/rely less on sleep and food and limit them to laborious work. You'd have to "break" them to get these benefits, instead of trying to recruit them.

Yes that's exactly why I started the idea in my head as I played through a couple of different games in different locations and with random / different types of characters. In one random I had a noble, who pretty much does nothing. Rather than 're-rolling' away from non-useful traits as many do, I thought "how can I make this work as a story?" - and that's when I started toying with the idea of keeping captives or 'servants' as it would be for a noble from some medieval world. I wondered if there was a way to keep enemies I've taken captive as workers instead of just dead space eating up my food while I either try to recruit them or execute them. Seems like such a black or white kind of decision, why not have a third option?

A lot of characters in the game are ideal for running a slave operation. I have had fun just going through the random button reading the backstories which also gave me the idea for running a pirate/slave trade operation. I found a great "Criminal Kingpin" with high Social but not much else. I mean what's this guy going to do all day other than put pressure on prisoners to conform to his sweatshop operation to make money?

I think many players are really limiting themselves by just rolling 'ideal' traits and skills so that their first three out of the box are doing all the work and spending all their time dividing up that work with not much time for anything else. A clever character (with the right traits of course) would hire or force others to do the work for them, right? If you're going to get attacked by pirates, tribals and hostile neighbors you accidentally (or not) antagonized ... why not make the most of it?

I will be watching your mod's progress after Alpha 9 with much interest, thanks for letting me know about it!

It sounds like an interesting concept and puts an entirely new spin on the story that will appeal to some players most definitely. I'm curious to see how you will handle the slave work progress and queue to differentiate them from the pirates.

Y'all are some evil overlords! 

I thought bringing up the topic of keeping colonists locked away as 'slaves' was morally questionable but I definitely feel better about that plan after reading all these confessions haha.

Personally I don't think we should want to take the 'evil' route. There's one thing to be said for giving people options but it's a whole other consideration when it would halve the production potential but splitting resources into two different methods of colony maintenance.

Taking captives and keeping them as workers (slaves) must benefit the colony by increasing production / resources if it's to work at all is my idea.

I think in an ideal scenario (game mechanics) the production value would not be halved ... otherwise what's the point of keeping slaves in the first place? Colony maintenance with 'slaves' or 'captives' or whatever you want to call them (to keep this from devolving too far into human moral issues hehe) would be the same as it is with colonists - the only difference would be their ID tag (AI) which indicates their 'rank' as below the threshold to leave the colony's designated slave areas (same as you set up prisoner rooms / areas).

You would still manage their priorities list for jobs... which of course are going to be those jobs suited to their skills. A highly skilled 'slave' could be 'promoted' into colonist status with the right performance. A captive with a very high crafting skill is going to become valuable to the colony as will a highly skilled researcher, shooter, etc. The "peons" (those with negative traits or no good skills) will remain slaves/grunts or even cannon fodder during battles. The Romans used a similar system in which many high-skilled and educated people were slaves who eventually bought their freedom because they could earn money or favor through performance. I guess this is more of an 'indentured servant' type scenario that I could see working to the benefit of the colony in RimWorld.

Now I don't consider it particularly 'evil' to decide to take slaves (as laborers and crafters) in RimWorld. The culture is rife with it ... and you're given the option to buy and sell people and body parts so it's already an accepted (if somewhat shady) custom. "Evil" would be some of the things players are describing doing to their colonists over in that other thread, haha. 

No, I have not explored extensive capturing and bartering / human trafficking in RimWorld yet and was wondering if any players do this routinely and if it made the game more difficult or more interesting for them.

As for suspension of disbelief ... well that's pretty much what the game is all about anyways if you think about it. You're playing with tiny 'pawns' with no real distinguishing features other than hair and body shape... weebles if you will. They have very rich character sheets and personalities which requires you to roleplay it out similar to pen and paper in order to get your 'group' to survive and thrive. It's a story you make-believe from the start unless you just want to ignore all that and play for the RTS factor in which point my entire post has no relevance in the first place unless owning and operating a slave trade operation offered some monetary and tactical advantage.

Trying to wrap my brain around how intensely complicated your colony setup is right now. I can't even.

This padawan has much to learn in the ways of the RimWorld Force.

Wow. Here I thought I was cruel for euthanizing my colony's favorite doctor (and harvesting her organs) after she became brain damaged and wandered around aimlessly with little ability to do anything. Your examples make me look like a merciful saint by comparison.

Edit: Probably the only thing I can think of that was purposely mean was to aggravate an ancient ship AI right when a large party of neighboring allies was 'passing by' and then having that colonist run away and hide so that the neighbor's group had to do the fighting of the mechanoid. I considered that valid tactics!

Well. There's no way to keep them prisoners and have them do work atm.

But if you recruit them you could theoretically lock the door behind them and not let them out. Food can be grown indoors or surrounded by walls, production and mining can be done behind closed doors. However this raises the issue that your original 3 colonists won't really be able to defend from all the attacks after a few months... Unless you're all for giving your slaves weapons... Which really doesn't end well for the slavers.

Right! This is sort of the direction I'm leaning ... how to set up the colony so that the prisoners work and produce food but aren't a part of the outer colony's social life and interactions. But the more 'prisoners' I have, the more enemy attention I'm going to get because obviously I'm going to be stealing neighbors colonists as part of the deal and so the prisoners will have to be armed to defend the colony from attacks which then seems to contradict the whole point of prisoners in the first place.

I realize at this point the only way to really make it work is to fully recruit (there's no way to make prisoners work) the prisoners into the colony but then just RP designate them 'slaves' of the colony to do the hard labor, food production, construction etc...which is basically the regular game-play anyways hehe.

You know you can sell prisoners to passing slave trader ships right?

Or are you looking for something more along the lines of a concentration camp?
Running a large-ish prison is not especially hard if you have enough wardens that can keep the prisoners happy, but it's a pretty big drain on resources and your colonists' time.

Slightly off-topic, the wiki mentions a thought prisoners can get from being beaten by a warden. Is this possible in the current version of the game and how?

Yes I understand how slave trading works, and would be using that mechanic to gain new colonists both in acquiring them and getting rid of unwanted ones I get by taking pirates and neighboring colonists prisoner.

But what I'm wondering about is how feasible is it to actually keep a number of colonists as slaves/captives within the colony? Is there a way to block off portions of the colony for use by the prisoners and to make them work? I know there's currently no mechanic in place to force prisoners to work or do anything but pace back and forth in their cells and be fed daily. That's not what I'm interested in doing. So far the only thing I've thought of doing was recruiting them (which takes a lot of social skill to get pirates to join) and then just RP designating them 'slaves' with different quarters (Smaller, shared, and right next to work spaces) and locking doors to prevent them leaving. Has anyone tried this? The idea of mental breaks happening (and one going crazy) has some appeal for RP reasons (a rebellion happens against the evil Noble keeping them prisoner) ... but the micromanagement necessary for locking doors and moving food around seems a bit daunting.