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[WINDOWS]

Great discussion here, thanks for all the constructive feedback whether you are for or against smooth stone floors.

I agree that because smoothed stone floors are so desirable, it gives another reason besides superior defense to build your bases inside of mountains. Also, because there's no penalty or difference between a rough chiseled mountain wall and a crafted stone or wood wall, it's far easier to just build rooms into the mountain as the colonists don't prefer one over the other. Why would I bother all the effort of stone masonry out in the open when it doesn't make my colonists happier and is so much more difficult to defend?

Suggested Floor Fixes:

1. Make carpet the highest beauty value but with the added risk of flammable (maybe it already is flammable - I don't bother making it to find out) and slower to clean.

2. Stone tiles with the second highest beauty value because of the crafting skill and time investment necessary to create them.

3. Polished wood plank flooring third highest beauty value. It's faster to make than stone tiles so it's less time intensive but has a higher (probably not as high as carpet) flammable value too.

3. Smoothed stone flooring and concrete should be last and have the same beauty value, very low. These are 'industrial flooring options for when you haven't gotten the research / craftsman skills yet to make tiles or don't have the wood resources for polished plank flooring.

I'm not sure where to put metal and plasteel floors in the ranking, I'm sure others can suggest that. They are more modern/tech heavy materials requiring special crafting IMO and should probably have a much higher beauty value than stone probably.

As for wanting players to stop burrowing into mountains so much (if Tynan has said that's something he would like players to do less) - that's a whole separate topic I'm sure has been debated a lot so I won't go off-topic too much on that other than to say the current defensive tactics pretty much make mountain living the best option so of course it's a no-brainer to use that because you're already tunneling through them to find stone and steel in the first place so the ease of converting tunnels into living space makes sense along with the superior protection. And again, there's no bonus to building beautiful stone walls so why bother? Also, a granite mountain wall has higher hitpoints than the same wall created from colonist made granite bricks. Why would I lessen my defenses by doing that when the bare mountain walls offer higher defense protection and no penalty to my colonists happiness?

Suggested Wall Fixes:

1. WINDOWS. This one tiny addition could change the way players build. If my colonists demand windows as part of their happiness ... I cannot force them to live like moles underground forever. To start out with, cave-living may be a necessity while we plan and build an outside 'fortress' with windows so they can increase their happiness (along with beauty factors for walls and flooring)

2. Wall Beauty - Give a much higher beauty bonus to well crafted stone walls. This will encourage players to create better living spaces outside of mountains. Maybe walling off a valley for defense (done in real life medieval times) would still be a tactic overall but I'll want my colonists happier living outdoors as much as possible in good weather (unless of course my colony is on the ice sheet).

Summary: Because RimWorld is a top-down view game, it's difficult to 'imagine' 3D style fortresses and buildings out in the open. They are just squares of various sizes with walls around them. I have an easier time visualizing my bases inside the mountains. It's easy to burrow in, easy to design rooms, and gives no penalty. These are just a few simple things to think about when trying to coax players to "think outside the mountain" so to speak. Find ways to encourage the effort to live out there (turrets mountable on walls and other helpful defense methods) rather than to penalize. Right now you are encouraging players to build in mountains because the reward is higher than the penalty.

Why does a smoothed floor give +4 beauty while a stone tile floor only gives +2?

This doesn't make much sense to me as crafting and laying down individual stone tiles (especially the higher end stones like granite and marble) would produce very luxurious/ornate flooring would it not? It also takes some crafting skill to produce those bricks/tiles whereas anyone can smooth rough stone flooring... so it shouldn't be considered more beautiful.

I also don't understand why crafted walls don't give anymore beauty points than the rough chiseled cave walls do. Again, takes skill, time and materials to produce marble brick walls - it should up the beauty because it's hand-crafted.

I mentioned this in a thread on the discussion forum but it fits here so I'll tack it onto your suggestion to repair items.

Suggestion: Recycling Machine

Feed tattered clothing into it or broken weapons and it will spit back out a very small percentage of raw materials which when collected in enough amounts can produce recycled cloth or steel. Similar to how you can 'machine' out bits from a mechanoid, this machining process (you could even use the same bench) will pull out usable resources from worn out and broken items. It won't be a lot, maybe only a small percentage of the original item since obviously it's tattered or worn out in the first place, but at least you'd have the option instead of throwing old clothing into the incinerator.

I support this idea and to take it a step further (probably already suggested elsewhere) please allow us the option to recruit "guests" instead of just heal them up and let them go. Make it more challenging if you want, or make a pre-requisite list as suggested (bed required, stockpiled food, or other necessities) but please allow me a way to potentially recruit those I heal up as guests.

Crypto-casket survivors too. They come out of the pods either A) pissed off and wanting to kill you, or B) severely injured/sick and near death. Either way you have to work hard to save them either via incapacitate/capture or rescue. Only the first of the two methods will give you the option to recruit them, as a prisoner. This isn't right. You should have the option to also recruit a guest.

Don't like that suggestion at all. Would easely jump over the need to produce new quality clothing, and by that seriously reduce the strategical part of the game and nerf the whole mechanic of quality crafting drastically.

How would material recycling nerf quality crafting? You still have to *make* the recycled cloth bits back into usable clothing, it's not recycling the fully tattered clothing item back into new - that's not my suggestion. My suggestion is a recycling machine that instead of incinerating tattered garments, spits out a few small pieces of usable cloth per piece you feed it, maybe less... a very tiny percentage compared to the number it takes to assemble a new piece of the same clothing. There's no way that would 'jump' over the need to produce new clothing because you couldn't sustain clothing production without new stuff - it just wouldn't be enough pieces of cloth to reproduce the amount you'd need per piece.

New clothing will still be a mandatory mechanic and still require good crafting skill to produce quality pieces. I'm just suggesting an alternative to burning everything in the incinerator for scraps.

I think it depends on what they're really good in vs. their age-related limitations to be honest. An old colonist with super high research skill or crafting can just stand there doing that at the bench all day long and not have to hobble around so it won't matter if they've got a bad back or are frail and slow moving.

Unfortunately sometimes even that's not enough to make their skill level bonus worth it. I captured a very high level chef and was all excited because we'd been having the notorious food poisoning chain of death where they just keep eating more after they puke haha. But she had a bad back and was frail, AND she lost a leg to an infection from the injuries she sustained when we took her captive. I thought it would be ok to just station her at the cook stove all day long with a pile of veggies and meat at her feet...but she still hobbled back and forth to the freezer so slowly when the supply pile ran low that it caused too much lag in the production speed. The younger, faster cook (who poisoned everyone) could crank out twice as many meals in that time so I had to really weigh the benefits over the limitations of this particular senior citizen chef. I ended up giving her her own cooking station and at least some of the meals weren't poisoning everyone, haha!

This is suddenly getting requested a lot so I'm going to add it in for A10.

This is great! You're awesome. I think with clothing deterioration it's going to become important to have a higher leveled crafter be your dedicated tailor.

I suppose for testing purposes you could turn off the bills for other crafting in the colony and only have stonecutting and then watching their skill points during that time, yes.

Like others, I'd love to have a way to assign certain colonists to certain crafting stations or even the individual bills because I don't like it when my high leveled crafter makes bricks while the lowbie crafter makes crappy clothing I want the higher skilled one to make.

Is there any indication that someone's crafting skill is increasing by stonecutting? Would be nice to gauge it somehow more than just their skill points going up randomly because that could have come from tailoring or some other crafting they did. How can you tell stonecutting is not gaining skill?

the issue is that you are clicking a non-drafted colonist and clicking rescue. You need to draft the colonist and choose arrest. This will allow you to do it the way you used to in Alpha 8.

But why do have to 'arrest' a non-violent non-aggressive person just to recruit them? Is there never a friendly way to recruit someone to join your colony?

This goes back to the very reason we asked for a viable alternative to 'arresting' neighbors and neutrals in the first place. We don't want faction hits and angry neighbors but we *do* want happy / friendly guests who we have the option to recruit. It's two separate issues that rely on the same mechanic I guess. I hope this makes sense.

I'd like the option to recruit neutral characters who I rescued from an escaped space pod or those who pop out of cryptocaskets and are not hostile. Additionally, I think it would be cool if neighboring outlander town's citizens I rescue from raider attacks (or who are injured while helping me defend mine) would be somewhat persuasively attuned to joining my colony somehow if I want them or if they randomly offer to stay.

The OP is just looking for a 'thank you' but I'm taking it a step further and saying "hey if you're happy with how we treated you while you were our 'guest' why not stay and join us?"

The random pod people should definitely want to stay around and join you ... where else are they going to go? They take a risk walking off by themselves into the wilds to be captured by pirates or hostile tribals so to me it makes sense you should be able to recruit them without having to 'capture' them first to do it.

Now neighboring friendly outlander towns should be a bit trickier. Someone in your colony with a very high social skill could probably coax them into leaving their old colony and joining yours but there should definitely be some compelling reason such as your colony's wealth and comfort are higher. They came and helped defend your colony from a raider attack and got injured, you nursed them back to health (I've had it happen several times now) and then they should be fairly anxious to get back to their own colonies so I'm ok with that with maybe the rare chance of them offering to stay and join yours.

Yeah the wording on those float menus needs to be clearer. Maybe people you save should hang around a bit after and decide if they like your colony enough. Almost like a temporary uncontrollable colonist, they are allowed to eat and drink your stuff amd after a period decide to leave or stay. Wardens can help that decision along as they do with prisoners. Would mean you can remove the capture option and just have rescue. You should also have the option to kick em out.

I like this a lot. I want the colonists we take in as "guests" to have the freedom to leave but if the colony is nicely run, safe and secure, and has food to eat, they should *want* to stay on or be easily recruited by those with high social skills. Why does imprisonment/warden coercion have to be the only way you can 'convince' someone to join your colony other than the randoms who are sent your way to join out of the blue?

I'm glad Tynan has added the ability to heal up neighboring colonists without angering them and messing up faction - that's a step in the right direction. But the next step needs to be a chance for them to stay around and decide if your colony is a better deal. If not your neighboring allies, at the very least the random strangers who drop from space in pods and those you rescue from cryptosleep caskets should have some sort of AI built in where they decide whether they want to stay or not without you having to 'capture' them to do it. That doesn't feel right RP wise to me.

I really think for neutral / randoms you should get the option to recruit them or at least have them stay around and randomly help out for awhile before leaving. Neighboring colonies I can understand them wanting to get back to their own colony as soon as they're well enough to get up and around. I thought you got a faction bonus for doing that - is it not working? I haven't had any injured neighbor colonists yet in my current game.

I did have 5 neutrals pop out of crypto-sleep caskets, all very sick or injured but for the first time ever NOT aggro/violent. My colony nursed 4 out of 5 back to health (one died of infection) but they were all 'guests' and so they wandered off. Not one of them stayed. That was sad

In the Alpha9 test builds, I thought the temperature swings of rooms was quite reasonable. I did take notice that the released Alpha9 is moving back towards a more erratic swing with room temperatures fluctuating by as much as 8 degrees every second when a door opens etc. Kind of reminds me what the earlier Alpha8 builds were like until the normalization was smoothed out a bit.

I do think the erratic temperature fluctuation is due to the doors more than 'bleed' through walls, even on hottest days in jungle or desert biomes.

I've eliminated one of the two doors on both of my freezer rooms and it helps but not to the stability it was before A9. The problem with large scale food production when you have more than 5 colonists and prisoners is that your cook or cooks are going in and out every 30 sec for more veg/meat and your hunters/farmers are going in and out to bring in fresh supplies so the door is non-stop opening and closing. I'm wondering if an airlock system of two doors would help prevent too much cold air loss. Anyone tried this?

Edit: I'd also like to say I really don't like how quickly food goes from a frozen (won't spoil) state to refrigerated (spoils in x days) state when that temp. fluctuation happens. This needs adjusted. That constant re-calculating can't be helping system load and isn't even realistic since food that's fully frozen won't un-thaw that quickly if the power goes out or the temp. drops to 1 degree above freezing like that. Because I have a door / temp. issue, I have to keep temps much lower than hovering right around freezing otherwise I have that constant fluctuation every few seconds happening with the freezer rooms. This needs some tweaking I think. When a solar flare or power outage happens, I think food should stay frozen for at least half a day or so before it 'thaws' to a refrigerated or fresh state.

Some good suggestions here to ease the micromanagement issue with clothing. Personally I like the addition of clothing wear and tear but like others, I need a better way to manage it and know when colonists are going to need new stuff. It's not a big deal if you're playing a very small colony of just 3-6 members to keep track of them individually, but when you start building larger colonies of 15 or more, it does become a real chore on top of all the other things you're trying to juggle.

Edit: Not to take it off-topic but would be cool to have a 'recycler' of some sort that can recyle tattered clothing rather than just burning it in an incinerator. The recycle machine could handle other items (nearly broken weapons etc) and spit back out bits of metal, plastic or cloth that could be reassembled into larger quantities as it accumulates.