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I hope Tynan will consider adding the ability to remove flooring eventually. You can already deconstruct walls so it shouldn't be impractical or unrealistic to pull up flooring too.

... they'll come to the conclusion that many do: The colonist may as well have just died, because they aren't being kept around anyways.

Pretty sure this is the sentiment some have when tragic things happen to people in the real world and they're left in a state which lessens their quality of life such as a devastating brain injury. People who have lost limbs or been paralyzed in accidents sometimes wish they'd died instead - but the resilience of human nature pushes us to overcome and adapt and find meaning and enjoyment even beyond limitations. That's why our species is successful in evolving to highly sophisticated functions such as designing virtual realities where tiny arm-less and leg-less people can find meaning in their lives, stranded on a hostile planet! Things just went full circle and got really deep right there my friend. I wish I lived in Colorado, we could discuss the meaning of life over some nice home-grown xerigium.

All jokes aside though - this isn't a traditional RTS. It's a storyteller game, an RPG more than a strategy game with survival and city building thrown in for good mix. It's a hybrid I think and again, read the post I wrote asking if a player had played any tabletop or traditional RPG style games. Games like that have consequences which are sometimes irreversible and at the whim of the roll of the dice. Why does irreversible brain damage bother you so much? Death is permanent and final and ...boring. If all we ever had to worry about was units/pawns being destroyed in battle and countering with constant new "squad tactics" we'd be playing an entirely different game. I like RTS games, don't get me wrong, but it's a different mindset entirely. You're not supposed to be attached to your "units" (in an RTS) - they are disposable "pawns" ...both are terms I see used in this forum but are somewhat unflattering for the intended gameplay of RimWorld.

Yes, there's strategy involved with defending your base and knowing how to fight well with your colonists - I get it. But at the same time, you're supposed to feel something and be attached to your characters. I think that's honestly why it bugs people more when bad things happen to them. I was devastated when my favorite colonist (and the best medic to boot) got a brain injury. But it made for a very memorable experience in that game. I did finally euthanize her after she got sick from plague and never seemed able to get out of bed anymore. Poor thing.

Proceed to hack off the infected body part, it cures them instantly.

-Argon

Except in the case of the torso. You can have an armless, legless colonist but not a body-less one.

Build a waffle killbox, they are much more forgiving during power outages because they slow raiders so much.
Here is a design which I have been building unchanged for four consecutive alphas.  Use it well, young apprentice.

Oh my goodness. Your "Wafflebox" with the geothermal at the other end just gave me some sadistically horrible ideas I dare not repeat for fear of concentration camp references. I'll use an analogy instead. You ever go to KrispyKreme and watch all those balls of dough moving slowly along the conveyor belt and into the cooker vat? Imagine the enemy tribals are globs of donut batter and at the other end is the waiting cooker and delicious donut holes pop out the other side! Ok now I'm hungry darnit!

Only repair SOME of the walls. Allow them to beat down one section that leads to an exploding turret or two.

You could definitely devise a "Plan B" strategy this way where they slowly whittle their way into a trap of some sort. In my case it was a happy coincidence I scrambled around thinking wtf was I going to do and spied the bricks. I don't like watching too many Lets Plays because it tends to spoil my own natural learning curve when I see other guys better at the game doing it first. I want to have to think and react and come up with improvised plans.

One of the best situations I ever had was when everything shut down during a solar flare and just as the enemy was about to reach the core of my base and demolish everyone (because they were already beat up from a mysterious ship drop just before that) the solar flare was over and suddenly everything powered back up and the turrets wrecked them inches from getting to us. Talk about a huge computer-chair-cheering session that time haha!

Well maybe I branched off into a different topic that coattails nicely on this one because often times I see the chief complaint being similar to what someone said back on page one: "But I *should* be able to counter everything somehow!" - I read that and realized that maybe a lot of players are coming into their RimWorld gaming experience expecting a traditional RTS? I honestly had no idea what RimWorld was the first time I saw it in a blog on a game fansite somewhere. It wasn't until I was browsing for something else and saw Cohh doing a beginner's guide on it that I actually sat down and watched and realized this game was nothing at all like I had first thought and that's when I bought it, on the spot.

I'm one of those poor souls who loves computer games but isn't quite wired right to comprehend the hardcore storyteller games like Dwarf Fortress even though I absolutely adore RPG and storytelling. I also love survival and city building. RimWorld just satisfies so much of that. I haven't played a top-down game in ages so it took a lot to turn my head. I'm so glad I watched Cohh play it. The story is what keeps me here and if things like brain damage and other unfortunate rolls of the dice are part of the process then I'm all for it and love random. I don't like the current forced ending for that reason. It's contradictory to the best of what RimWorld is about.

Odd, I am playing a jungle biome and haven't noticed the cobra in particular as aggressive at all. Are you using in any mods that might be altering animal behavior?

So the question becomes: Is Rimworld telling Tynan's story, or a story that the player should be building? There isn't a wrong answer to this, mind you, but it does make a difference in the approach and expectations of the game.

Have you ever played a traditional RPG or tabletop RP? There's always a Dungeon Master and their job is to decide the story's path though they aren't "gods" by any means - the outcome of your character's actions are decided by the roll of a dice or random AI in the case of computer games. Tynan is just the wizard who created the AI. The AI storytellers are the DMs in this game and it's their randomness (or predictableness) that decides. If you're a gamer who wants complete control of everything, then a storyteller game might not be your thing. *Edit: I was not directing 'you' in this response at "you" the person I replied/quoted to btw, sorry if that came across as any sort of criticism or pointed. I was referring in general to all the 'you's' reading who might disagree with unfixable outcomes to their game's characters.

The fact that there is no right answer to the question is why the game will appeal to some and not to other types of gamers with differing playstyles. A full blown RTS or turn-based strategy game gives you a way to counter every situation that is thrown your way with the roll or turn, but only if you know the right thing to counter it. In an RPG, you may not be able to counter everything and in fact it may be impossible to counter some static story driven elements. Brain damage for one of your colonists is an unfortunate side effect of a battle injury that may or may not leave your colonist dead, permanently impaired or simply a little slower. I'd like to see the options expanded a bit to have maybe 4-6 possible outcomes so that it's not always fatal but not always Hodor guy left for you to direct around mindlessly too. I love the foundation of this game's unpredictableness and storytelling, but I despise the ending!

Fill in all the doorways/halls with brick walls as fast as you can and let them beat on those (while your guys repair them from the other side) until they get tired of beating on them and give up and leave. This method has saved my bacon on two occasions and once was in a solar flare. I was SO lucky to have a pile of slate bricks stockpiled in the next room where I had been saving them up for some fancy walls or some dumb thing. Learned a valuable lesson. Now I keep a pile of bricks at every exit in case we need to go into emergency mole mode.

Oh and one other thing (sorry for the huge posts). I am wondering if there's a way we can have a distinction between a 'chef' who prepares the high end meals only for the slavers to enjoy and a simple cook who only makes the crappy simple meals or just loads the nutrient paste hoppers for the slaves to eat? My high level chef I started with as one of the slavers because my leader demands good meals from day one gets the debuff for labored. I separated the food prep areas so that the slaves only get access to the nutrient paste hopper. Filling the hoppers is a cook job and raises cooking skill. I don't mind having a slave do that but I don't want the slaves to have access to the freezer where the fine and lavish meals are stored, those are only for the slavers! I've puzzled out how to design the cooking / eating areas to keep slaves from eating those high end meals and the only way is to prevent them access to that stockpile, but then that means I have to have a slaver chef to prepare them because the slaves can't get through the doors where food prep is being done anyways (nor do I want them to).

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to keep a chef who has high cooking to produce high end meals but don't want them to get the labored debuff if they are a colonist. A "chef" creates food for pleasure, not as menial labor. A "cook" on the other hand just cranks out meals all day long for the slaves. I'm probably making this way too complicated haha.

Hi Wastelander. I went ahead and downloaded your mod last night and put it through it's paces with a few months of a test colony. Here are some things I found as feedback:

1. Enslaving a colonist and then trying to 'release' them seems broken. It adds the slaver designator AND the slave designator both which confuses everyone. The colonists get the debuff for having an enslaved colonist friend and it doesn't go away after you 'release' them. Worse though is that in my test case the medic colonist kept attempting to 'free x' over and over even though she had already carried him out the door and set him down. She kept doing this in an infinite loop until she finally went to bed and he went right back to slave status. Might need some looking at the code to see how it removes that slave designation and whether or not the freed slave becomes a regular colonist again or just a released non faction NPC.

2. I think someone else mentioned this but there needs to be a distinction between slave jobs and colonist (slaver) approved jobs. If you intend to have a handful of colonist slavers who don't do much at all because they're lazy bum pirates, they still need at least something to occupy their time. There's currently no entertainment activities sadly, or else I'd assign them all to just enjoy that nonstop. I'd say there are a few jobs that pirates would still enjoy doing but should not give them the 'labored' debuff:

- Hunting: This one's pretty mandatory anyways since who's going to let the slaves run around the countryside unattended with guns? Pirates like to shoot things, so they should get a buff for hunting animals.

- Research: Bringing on the mad scientist to help your evil slave colony advance makes sense and wouldn't be a slave doing this job. Buff to the scientist / researcher for this job.

- (some) Crafting: There are a few jobs I could see pirates actually wanting to do such as weaponsmithing, maybe tailoring to make special armor because that's their focus and of course the whips and slave collars. Unfortunately there's no way to designate specific jobs in crafting yet (I think Tynan said next build he was adding that option).

- Artwork: This could be a slave job but also I could see psychotic pirates wanting to create bloody works of art as their hobby.

- Medic/Doctor: This should be a Pirate job primarily with minor medics in the slave ranks to heal their own. Again, there's no way to really designate who heals who, but a slave healer can only heal slaves if they can't get to the pirate's quarters anyways so separating medical rooms would help this separation. A high end surgeon only for your pirates should not get a debuff for healing and doing their job.

So I think that handful of jobs combined with guard/warden duties should at least give your pirates something to do instead of just constant idle and they shouldn't get the 'labored' debuff. Yes I get it slavers don't want to work but I think that should really apply to "hard labor" jobs such as farming, mining, hauling, chopping wood, cleaning, etc.... basically all the 'dumb labor' type things you often see the medieval nobles, midworld chefs, and criminal types lacking the ability to do anyways. Model your slavers after the 'classes' Tynan's created who hate that kind of work. Those are often very underplayed characters because players always want the perfect choices who do all work. Those are slaves!

I love the cranky ones who refuse to do specific jobs. They are why I thought the slaver idea was so great in the first place and started thinking up a slave colony long before I realized you were making this awesome mod. Kudos to you for putting it into action!

PS: I disabled the payment system for my slavers until we figure out a level that's acceptable for long-term A9 play because of item degradation and constantly needing to repair / sell stuff as a way to pay your slavers.

I'd like it if hunters hunted on their own. Just like growers. Shouldn't need to go find animals and select them for hunting. Granted, there should probably be a way to limit them since you can't limit the animals that come in. Like "search 50 tiles out of home area" or "hunt until x corpes" or "hunt until 150 meat" (counting corpses in stockpiles as the meat they contain).

+1 ... it's one of my few annoyances in the micromanagement category. Some things I want to micromanage and others I don't care - hunting is one of them. I get it that maybe sometimes you only want to hunt muffalo so you can corner the market on muffalo parkas so you need lots of leather. In those cases you should still be able to hand select targets but there should also be a way to just say "Go hunt until you have X" too. Also while I'm at it, anyone else go crazy trying to select tiny targets (squirrels, monkeys, etc) for hunting? I don't know what's up with the target box but sometimes I absolutely want to smash my mouse trying to target them.

This. If we had entertainment, say TV sets or exercise equipment, then instead of bland 'Wandering around in a daze' soft breaks, colonists could have 'Taking the day off' breaks where they still feed themselves and rest, but do no work and only fiddle with entertainment media.

Love the feast idea, but I'd also like to see different food options made more necessary in the game period. Eating nothing but potato meals should get old, but a varied diet with lots of different meats and veggies should give a mood boost to balance out the 'High expectations' debuff.

The "Lavish Meals" do give a pretty high buff at twice the food cost and can be made with multiple meats, veg. and fruit so that's what you're describing. The feast idea is a special occasion meal prepared ahead and distributed only when a feast is triggered or a bill for a feast is completed. I'd like the option to keep a feast or two in stock so that when things go south we can throw a "drink before the war" party and the high buff from that will help boost their morale through the fighting.

Your "Day off" idea is good and fits in with the morale booster and entertainment ideas. If you could order them to take a day off to alleviate stress, or even schedule them, it could add an interesting aspect to colonist management.

I'm considering trying this mod, but in my perfect vision of a slave colony, not ALL the members are slaves with only a tiny number (the starter three?) as the slavers. I envision a social hierarchy... a class based system if you will, where *some* of the more favorable slaves can be promoted from slaves to slavers/pirates or whatever you want to call them (I prefer human trafficking engineers ).

Would you consider the payment system to be optional or at least add some other ways to pay the slavers (weapons, armor etc)?

It's already quite difficult in A9 to make money compared to previous builds so I really dislike the idea of all my silver and gold going into the paychecks for my slavers especially as I'd like to build a 'colony' of higher end citizens with the slaves as the manual labor so probably an 80/20 kind of scenario. I'm concerned with how to pay more slavers.

*Edit1: Noticed you added a repair bench so that's interesting and might help with income .... I will probably give this a try!

*EDIT2: I am also reading about your prisoner improvement mods. Do I also need to install that or is it standalone apart from this one? If I install this one, I don't need the improvement mod, correct?

*EDIT3: (sorry for so many questions!) - Does this mod work ok with EdB's Plan Carefully mod? It's really the only other one I was considering and is an interface mod.

*EDIT4 (LOL): Went back and read aaaall 5 pages of replies and noticed you backed off the income amounts and then recommended disabling the payment system since Alpha 9 is so rough for making money. I really like the idea of income for the slavers but I think you should make it an option that can be toggled off and on if that's possible and maybe a slider to decide what you pay them. Larger pay could increase morale for the slavers so it would be a goal you want to achieve but not penalize so much if you can't make the money every month. I do like the idea of it, just not sure how stable it is with Tynan's constant tweaks to his core system which often causes poverty like we're seeing in A9 haha!

Just a quick update on the Scenarios mod and Alpha 9: I haven't decided what I'm going to do with this mod yet.  The re-introduction of the ability to mod map generation means significant changes and may force me to rethink the overall approach to how scenarios work.

I'll probably take my time with it--I wouldn't expect to see an Alpha 9 release for at least a week, maybe longer.

Hi EdB, I'm posting to give you encouragement for this Mod. It's the first Mod I've ever used with RimWorld (though I'm no stranger to modding in other games) and I really loved it. The three choices you gave were perfect and added a lot of flavor to the start of the game which can get boring after repeated wipes/restarts during the rapidly changing Alpha phase.

I've been playing A9 vanilla (it's tough!) but now I'm ready to mod again and adding your Prepare carefully and UI mods. I understand why you're taking longer to revamp this one but I hope you won't give up on it because random start is a much needed addition to RimWorld!

Cheers!