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When real electronics don't get sufficient power, they don't instantly click off. Instead, they run at a portion of their efficiency proportional to the total amount of electricity they are receiving over the power they require to run at full capacity. Total blackouts don't happen unless power straight up stops flowing, like a line gets hit and an entire section of city is without power. Insufficient power over a network creates a brownout, or power sag.

During a power sag, things run less efficiently. This would give a player enough time to deal with the situation since their colony can kind of function in this state, and also allow them to more or less maintain productivity as opposed to being unable to do anything until there's enough power to run everything at 100%.

Furthermore, it would also make battery banks more representative of what they are in real life: a buffer. Not a true storage. When your batteries are out, power is still flowing through them, it's just not accumulating. This is not the case in this game, where insufficient power is functionally equivalent to no power.

This would also make hydroponics in particular a more attractive option, since their biggest downfall is that if you ever don't have power to everything in your entire grid at 100%, your crop is dead at the drop of a hat and you can't really do anything about it.

All in all I think my suggestion would solve a lot of problems the game's current power system has and would increase quality of life for the player, as well as having the added bonus of better reflecting reality.

When you're talking about physics it makes sense. The pods launch themselves through the air at nuts speeds and suicide burn to a halt at the last possible second in the general vicinity of the landing zone. Maneuvering thrusters mean that the pods can stay together as a group with minimal variation, but you're launching a ball of metal out of a big gun at potentially extreme distances. Even if you only fire one, it won't land exactly where you tell it, just because of inaccuracies in calculation and minimal variations in air patterns scewing the numbers slightly.

I happen to play a lot of space and physics-based game, so I halfway expected the single lone to not land where I clicked, but a few tiles off - straight through a roof and seriously damaging some equipment, but I was still not warned, and it came as something of a surprise despite knowing the potential for such.

I feel like it would be prudent to at least give a special popup warning a player activating theirs for the first time that there could be some error, and prompt them to double check that the landing zone has enough clearance to make up for any inaccuracy from the launcher.

Given the option of fixing three to eight holes in the roof and having to replace some appliances, I think most players would appreciate a note of caution.

That is all.

I'm considering adding Pokémon to my game. If I do I'll likely release it here as a mod.

They wouldn't be terribly sophisticated, basically just animals, but I'm willing to look into things like weapon effects and evolution. To start they'd just be animals, they may never be more than that. Depends on things. I don't expect to be putting out a Pokeball mod.

Is there any interest for such a thing?

Question: is it more efficient for your pet flesh-eating war monster to eat directly off of the corpse, or for the body to be chopped up?

I know having it be butchered carries a penalty for whoever did it, but as far as food values go I was curious on what would technically be the most efficient way to feed your animals after a raid.

So my colony, just barely getting off the ground, suffering a casualty and the death of our beloved farm animal, JUST now setting up individual bedrooms and actual walls for buildings instead of bare rock, is being sieged by raiders with military-grade weaponry and actual mortars.

....why? We don't have anything. We've got a handful of spare pistols laying around and food for a season, and money barely enough to buy an animal. What in the world makes these pirates think we're worth the time and effort for this kind of action?

I still don't understand the raiding system in this game. If I was a pirate, I'd be looking for a lot bigger fish to fry than this sham of a settlement that doesn't even have defenses...and I'd certainly not waste my time and precious ammo in a siege of such a place!

Either I'd hit it with overwhelming firepower up front and burn it all and pillage it Roman style, or come in with overwhelming force and demand a bribe. Not....this.

Can anyone explain the reasoning here? I'm very much a mind to debug make the guys leave, not because it's frustrating, but because it's so pointless.

I have seen a lot of discussion and I feel like the general concensus is that Rimworld has an early game and a mid-game, which is about when people stop playing to go re-visit the other parts of the game that interested them. I wanted to take this opportunity to start a discussion about some of the ways that present challenges based on where the player should have developed at that point in the game.

Early game's biggest challenge is building from nothing. There is no colony and defenses need to be made, and a functional settlement needs to be erected out of dirt and rock and pieces of your own space ship. While this is happening, hostile people while notice your arrival and try to descend upon you, looking to exploit you in your moment of weakness. This part of the story gets resolved when you can more or less hold off direct assault from either faction type at any time. In this phase, the biggest threat to the player is the natives and the pirates.

Mid-game's goals are to become self-sufficient as a settlement. The defenses have held, bodies are increasing in number, and more hands means more can get done. Direct assault by the enemies will ideally stop due to how defensive the colony has proven to be. Sieges will happen, sappers, ect. as people get more creative, but the general 'walk in and kill' strategy will stop. Food is going to be a big deal here in particular, as the rate of food coming in must constantly be adjusted to match the additional mouths, and shifting seasons will further complicate and magnify issues. The biggest threat here is the environment. Mechs will appear and attacks will remain a concern, but will not be as threatening to the colony as a whole as they were initially. (This part of the game is not organized completely, nor totally filled out, but this is something that will probably happen eventually)

And then we have the late game. The colony is more or less "finished" and fully established, and is either capable of growing or is so large that it can sustain new recruits and migrants for years to come. Luxuries have been established and it's quite comfortable; it might even resemble something like the society the people once came from. The environment has more or less been conquered, and the enemies have always been there in the background, but is more an attrition that the colony must occasionally adapt to than a standalone threat. A ship to get off the planet is either possible, or something to consider in the future.

There's currently no real obstacle in the late game. This is why people will grow tired and start over when their colony is "finished," because there is nothing to do. The game needs a threat.

Bigger enemies is not necessarily the answer. Larger attack waves, evidently, is not the answer. Problems that we have do not need to be magnified, because it does not take away from the redundancy that bores people once they pass the middle point. The game needs an obstacle, and it needs it in a way that is not a similar yet different version of an existing obstacle, or just twice as much as something we have already.

We have attackers, and then we worry about the environment. What else does Rimworld need to threaten the player with?

The latest raid just passed. There's people who are pretty messed up. The colony population isn't especially high so these things matter a lot more. Fortunately your existing colonists understand the dire situation and...just...what? What are you doing? No get- get up! Wake up! Go treat (colonist) like, now dude! She's missing a leg and bleeding out! What is wrong with you? Y- hey, why are you sleeping?! We've got infections setting in! Are you daft!?

You can micro-manage it through but you really shouldn't have to. One of your colonist brethren's health should come before your own need to sleep. If they die, there's a very good chance that someone else might in the very near future.

Given that there are people who are literally incapable of even attempting medical procedures of any complexity, and that failing to treat a wounded or sick colonist is a very real death sentence...I feel like at the very least it would make sense for them to, at the very least, staunch their own bleeding injuries. Or self-medicate illnesses at a portion of the success rate.

Obviously they can't operate on themselves, but at the very least it would make your only doctor getting the flu or pricking their finger less needlessly damning.

It's not a big mod. Basically I thought about Mars compared to Earth: there is a certain time of year on Mars where you can theoretically take off all your space gear and just walk around somewhat comfortably, with the exception of the air, which we cannot breathe.

Rimworld air is close enough to earth air that we can breathe it, but I have reservations about believing it's IDENTICAL to earth air. Maybe's a lack of something, maybe it's an addition of something else, maybe both; either way, I wanted a mod to add a 'disease' that would cause a debuff that affect's someone's consciousness and things like alertness and work speed and such. It's not air we're fully designed to breathe and as such breathing it purely causes some issues. Sluggishness, maybe some risk of poisoning somehow later, but mostly it's just a pain and a potential long-term health hazard.

Air must be treated and filtered before it's fully safe and provides an environment that allows the debuff to wear off, a lot like how the poison from toxic fallout currently works, except a lot less lethal. Specially crafted rebreathers prevent the buildup in non-controlled environments, but it's a cumbersome piece of machinery due to a lack of advanced tools to refine the design, and it takes up the head slot, which could put your colonists at risk.

Further down the line you could pressurize your colony with oxygen-enriched air or maybe chemically altered air to cause the inverse of the debuff, but that's high-end power-hungry stuff a regular colony would struggle to maintain unless it's really well developed. End-game things. Nothing broken or huge, like a big adrenaline surge colony-wide or something - it's just better air and gives you more energy. Everything is passive and affects the game over time based on what kind of air the colonists are exposed to. People breathing air they're designed to will naturally function better than someone who is getting half of what they need, a quarter of something else they need, and then something else that gets jammed in the pipes somewhere or does something else weird and not intended.

So yeah, it'd require an introduction of a new mechanic, but contained atmosphere would function almost identically to how the heat system currently works. Not sure who would be up to that challenge, but it'd be a pretty awesome mod and add a bit of flavor to the Rimworld experience, and help to emphasize that this IS an alien planet, and not some earth duplicate. We aren't designed to live here and in the context of the game we don't want to anyway. Just one more reason to leave, right?

I dunno, I think it fits the game's theme pretty well. I'd play it, anyway.

Just failed catastrophically in a surgery. Someone somehow lost their sternum, which is effectively a permanent injury I can never fix, because guess what isn't a part in the game as it stands? Among other things, a sternum is in there.

It's not a tall ask. If I can take it out, let me put it back in. That's all.

I mean, it only makes sense, right? I don't know if spacers are so much a faction as an environmental factor in the game right now, but heck, SOMEONE is up there. Traders float around and they're clearly alligned to something. And if you befriend them, they'd probably take the time to put you on their contact list and you could keep tabs on one another. It'd also probably do to hand out (or make it possible to craft) something to make constant communication possible.

As it stands the biggest grief I have with the game is that you are sometimes just stuck waiting around. I can't tell you how many times I've hit this 'hurry up and wait' phase waiting for traders and thought to myself how I'd rather be doing something else. It's just a chore and adds a needless hassle to grinding to the end game.

Not sure what you'd have to do to get on the good side of someone in orbit, but anything seems like a good alternative to sitting with my thumb up my butt, waiting for a notification that a trader will allow my progress to continue.

Also, space marine strike teams. That'd be nice. But mostly I just want their cash.

This seems like a kind of obvious oversight. Cannibalism is a moral crime, and if anyone in the entire world should care, it should not be a literal psychopath. That's their thing: they know it's wrong, but they DON'T care. That's why they're called psychopaths.

Psychopaths can sell people into slavery, calmly chop up prisoners for spare parts, murder anyone they want, treat anyone however they want, don't care if everyone around them suffers, but hand them a piece of jerk jerky and suddenly the line is drawn. Empathy sprouts out of nothingness and guilt appears: oh no, that's a human. I feel horrible. I am sad. I can feel and it is terrible.

Nah. That don't happen. Fix, please.

I can't tell you the amount of times I've had to lock an entire stack of meals because one of them contained human meat for any reason. Maybe a really tight winter just ended and we're ready to start eating food that isn't made with some of our visitors; maybe it's a simple misclick in the menu for what to make into meals. Either way, the way I understand meals to work is that if you have one ingredient in a stack, and you add a single meal containing another ingredient, all meals are considered to have both ingredients. They merge. That means that if you put one human roast on top of a stack of baked potatoes, suddenly every meal is thug roast with a side of hashbrowns.

This is inconsequential every other time EXCEPT for in this particular instance, in which case it wastes a ton of food or applies a hefty debuff for absolutely no reason. Meals with human meat should SPECIFICALLY not stack with meals for this very reason.

This seems like a mechanic that will get fixed up later as the game develops, but in the meantime one single piece of human meat can effectively spoil an entire stack of meal platters, and that's just silly.

I got to thinking about this when I thought about the implications behind the AI core component of the ship you inevitably have to build. An artificial intelligence powerful enough to emulate a human intelligence, perhaps even exceed it, would be an inconceivably complicated piece of software/hardware. It's complicated enough that I daresay that no one on the Rimworld can possibly hope to alter, let alone manipulate, such a sophisticated piece of fantastical machinery.

But then there's the other mechs. Those things are automated, lethal, but not exactly outrageously advanced. They're ancient pieces of an old war effort, if I understand correctly, and their directive is currently obsolete. That they don't seem to understand this and that they are indiscriminate in their targeting says to me that their intelligence, while complicated enough, is not completely otherworldly.

Mechs do not go 'down' all that often, but when there's literally nothing else to do to them than kill them slightly less violently. I don't know about anyone else, but if I was a colonist and I had to bootstrap an entire colony on a hostile planet infested with pirates and xenophobic natives, I would think twice about wasting this perfectly good war machine. ESPECIALLY if I can manipulate it. It is, after all, just a robot.

It'd be balanced enough, of course. Mech brains aren't that fancy, but their hardware is still outside the range of our colonists to produce on their own. They can bootstrap destroyed limbs, give them regular guns to use, but anything too detrimental can't ever be fully repaired to its maximum capacity.

A centipede never needs to eat, sleep, need entertainment, or worry about hot or cold, but it also barely moves and can't do basic tasks like haul or clean. On the plus side, it is a big, fat hunk of metal to stick between me and the guys with guns who want to shoot me and rip out my organs to sell to cannibalistic primitives. Scythers are faster and maneuverable, and probably have really good aim compared to any human, but same restrictions apply. Destroyed parts can only be replaced with basic components duct taped on and inevitably the machines will just break down or be destroyed.

BUT, I'd rather lose a mech than a colonist. That, and having a pet centipede acting like a big scarecrow in my pasture because it's too damaged to be of any combat use sounds fun.

Besides, turrets need to go anyway. Mechs seem more interesting to me. That and prosthetics are VERY expensive.

A lot of us playing rimworld intentionally set up places in the most inhospitable locations for the sake of the challenge. For the most part it's pretty much the same as any other area, but with more extreme environmental factors. Cold in particular is a popular choice because it can get so cold that people can freeze to death before reaching the other side of the map, even when wearing full parka and tuque uniforms.

However, there are bits of the game that don't entirely understand it is so very cold that it will kill them. Visitors, for instance, don't have a problem wandering idly outdoors in -100 degree weather. Raiders will set up sieges whether or not Hell is freezing over around them or if some distant nuclear detonation has been irradiating them for the last 20 minutes. Even if they realize they're outdone in combat and decide to flee, they do so when the conditions outside are bad enough to kill them. Raiders drop in from drop pods, but when they leave they have to walk. Regardless of where they're going, they're going to die before they get there.

Less suicidal pawns would be ideal. Raiders wouldn't want to go out and die in the snow as they pelt a mountainside with mortars. If it's so cold they can't stand it even with the best gear in the game, they should either decide to leave or just not show up. When they start to take environmental damage in particular (hypothermia, heat stroke) is a good time for this to happen. It can either happen en masse or particularly poorly suited raiders will gradually start to desert as their moods plummet and their health starts to suffer. They're just pirates, man; they're in it for the loot and the pay. The tribals would have a different mindset, but hey, who wants to stand in a blizzard for hours? Half your digits will be gone before the battle even starts.

If this realization hits them and they are already in combat, the desperation effect should kick in; this colony they're attacking is their last hope of getting out of the situation alive, which means they MUST kill everyone in it or they're just going to die anyway. A last ditch effort to save themselves, because running simply is not an option.

Picking free corpses up off the edge of the map is fun and all, and there's nothing funnier than watching raiders die slowly and horribly in nuclear fallout, but at some point it really just isn't very sensible for them to throw themselves away like that.

So apparently part of becoming self-tamed involves spontaneously sprouting a set of keys for the locked doors to my colony. It just sorta...opened the door and walked in. And then bit my colonist's ear off. Was, uh, kinda stupid. Not gonna lie.

Someone should probably include 'manhunter mode' as an exception to the whole 'self taming' thing. Just saying.

I've beaten 2 games now since this new update, and both times I've had a loyal canine friend (at least one) that followed me through thick and thin the whole time, and it was a horrible feeling to have to leave them as we blasted off into the sky at the end. I always sell them off, thinking in my head that my colonists would make sure to explain that these creatures were well loved and need to be handled with care and at the very least as working animals and pets, but as far as the game is concerned there's no difference between selling them to a community with families and selling to a faction that's going to butcher them. It hurts to think about, honestly.

I want to be able to put my pets into the cryo-pods to go with us. It'd take extra resources and time, but goddamn it they served the colony so faithfully and we can't just leave them behind. Leave no colonist behind.

Basically I just want to remove the 'this critter is too small to do this' for the Hauling training.  I want an army of monkeys to run around slowly filling things into their proper locations while my colonists just do things and leave crap laying around. (I'm also not sure why monkeys aren't given Advanced intelligence, because they're monkeys, but that's something else.)

Anyone know what to specifically change to have this effect?

I'm not big into code but from what I can tell this would be a simple addition. Basically I just want to be able to craft some armor. I don't like having to rely on kills and looting corpses to get armor; you'd realistically think the colonists could make something themselves, right? I mean we get a blacksmith table for heaven's sake.

It doesn't have to be fancy. Color-swapped versions for different recipes if you really want to, that'd be awesome, but just regular old body armor getting its own recipe would be pretty swell.

I don't suppose any coders have a couple minutes to work on this?

I don't like how fragile my colonists are. Externally, anyways. I have a hard time imagining fights going down when the first blow blasts off someone's arm and they just keep going like it's not that big a deal, and while the whole idea of stitching my guys back together after big fights is awesome, I'm seeing an inverse of what would really happen: i'm seeing organs relatively untouched and limbs that shatter like glass. Anything but an anti-material rifle and maybe some insane minigun or charge rifle hits shouldn't be able to sever a limb with such ease. Meanwhile, organs are squishy and delicate and not meant to be hurt.

I like the mods out there that add to the surgery thing, but that runs into compatability issues I'd rather not screw around with. I don't want to pick and choose beyond the mods I have, so does anyone know what numbers I need to change in what files to make limbs tougher and the torso less likely to eat a bullet instead of the organs? It's such an immersion killer.