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Well, the Steam forums will be a hive of scum and villainy as they always have. The vast majority of people that purchase will probably never bother to create a Ludeon forum account, so this little patch of the interwebs should be insulated.

The issues you mention are still there, but complaints are being heard and being handled piecemeal. Pretty much every alpha seems to add a bunch of new stuff, fix a portion of old complaints, and issues crop up with the new stuff that make the game hard to get back into after a week or two.

Still, every new release is at least two weeks worth of nonstop play, so next alpha will be worth a re-eval by OP.

The mail envelopes the game spawns with events. Red for raids, yellow for environmental hazards, blue for visitors.

The letters should drop for top right to about where the "clear letters" message is on your screenshot.

They should probably be called "notifications" for clarity...

In theory, a colony relying only on tribal tech should go completely unnoticed by pirates and mechanoids, the mechanoid equivalent danger should probably be slavers at around the midworld level of tech. Better equipped pirates should be bought off with ransoms of the colony ended up gathering too much wealth.

I mean there has to be some kind of explanation as to why tribals exist in the game. Randy would have wiped them all out by year 3 if they were a real colony.

Maybe you should reconsider playing biomes and map sizes this game was not designed for and settle with "only" -50 at winter and standard-sized map. I'm saying this because I already have quite a few ice sheet colonies behind me and I have rarely seen any visitors freeze their ass off unless maybe in hard snow if they have their movement impaired by injury. It's really not commonplace.

Extreme ice sheets have the most fun early game loop. Spending 3 seasons hauling and filling up stockpiles and then dedicating the winter to construction and crafting is unique.

For the record, I play standard map sizes on the coldest point of the map. If this temperature is available unmodded I consider the game being designed for it.

[he chose]

Considering how fully half the available biomes in the game (Arid Shrubland, Temperate Forest, Boreal Forest, and Tropical Rainforest, although that is a stretch) are perfectly survivable, I really wonder exactly why the Ice Sheet is used as the benchmark.

Not a benchmark, an example.

There are enough ways to play the game that it's easy to not understand a person's stance simply because the issue at hand isn't as severe in someone else's playstyle. I felt that this might be the case and threw it out there.

He feels he is "forced" to kill by the necessities of the situation, though he can't escape that it's really his choice.  He wants a straw to grasp for so he doesn't have to make the hard decision.  But the decision is inescapable, and whatever desperation drove him, he chose to take the life of a loved one.

But the bigger issue is the lack of uncertainty in the situation.  Euthanizing a colonist during a famine rightly feels like a necessity. Euthanizing a colonist during a rough patch and then having a trade ship pass by with an item that had a 37% of curing the colonist (given the surgeon's skill) a few days later would feel more like drama. Regret lives off of what-ifs, and the latter situation would most certainly have more of them.

With those considerations in mind, you're playing the game wrong if you don't enuthanize the colonist. Either the AI or the biome is too easy.

Like my previous replies, it is the type of player.  I play the game like a roleplay story.  In the ones I have started posting in forums, I just executed my good smith/melee combatant because was troublemaker.  It was not for good gameplay or game too easy, it was roleplaying a story.  So depending on how I am playing the colony, I might keep somebody alive just for "story"  It depends on the colony.  Psychopaths, or if they are the honorable ones.

Same thing with graves, animals etc.  Logically a person should never build graves but instead put all bodies in a freezer specifically to feed their dogs.  People will still build crypts though.  My one colony has two raiders in crypts specifically cause they had a relation to colonists. 

Roleplay.

But does your roleplay get hurt if there's a pie in the sky cure hidden somewhere in the research tree or the cargo hold of a trade ship that may or may not spawn in 30 day's time? It's fine that some players see drama in the choices currently presented, but does it detract anything for features to be added that cater to the people that don't see much of a choice in what there is?

I keep relations and former colonists in graves as well (except for that one bastard that went crazy and hospitalized two colonists before being put down,) I'd just rather have one more grave and an empty bed than to dedicate a room to being a resource intensive sarcophagus.

[you have decided]

A foregone conclusion isn't really drama, it's just a different death.

It's not a foregone conclusion.  It's just what you have decided you'll always do because it's "game-optimal".  I suppose you also always murder lone travelers to steal the fillings in their teeth, just because you can get away with it i.e. "game-optimal".

If you're not interested in the meaning of the lives and deaths of your "pawns", if you think of them as nothing more than pieces on a game board, tools to help you "win", you just mayyyybe have missed the point of the game.

This feels like another argument that assumes easy access to resources. On ice sheets, gravel zones are a precious resource, and every potato that doesn't go to your colonists goes to the muffalo that provides the parkas and turqs. Maybe I suck at the game but I've never been able to secure a reliable enough food source on an ice sheet map to even consider being sentimental. My main consideration with the gravely disabled is whether to euthanize right away or if I can hold out for a trader to stock up on chocolate and beer before the deed gets done.

The point of the game is to be a colony/survival simulator with a horribly imbalanced AI that a segment of the forums insists is a feature. It doesn't take place in a resource stuffed Judeo-Christian Midworld nation state where the gravely injured can be kept on life support for the duration of their natural lifespans.

With those considerations in mind, you're playing the game wrong if you don't enuthanize the colonist. Either the AI or the biome is too easy.

A fix for every injury makes them temporary only if one assumes full access to recources.

It's not a disaster if the player knows that an injury is fixable but would require several seasons worth of research and a decent amount of resources. Food or medicine shortages  in the interim should be the deciding factor in what to do with the pawn in question.

The main focus with this game has always been to create drama, whether that means tragedy or comedy. Having irreplaceable body parts and unfixable injuries creates moral dilemmas the player is forced to deal with, rather than just sit back and watch their colony of super-cyborgs go about their business.

Drama is best created when there are choices involved. Deciding whether a pawn is worth putting in a 25% movement speed wheelchair or euthanizing is drama. Deciding whether to euthanize now or later because the injury isnt fixable isnt. This is just burdening the player with meaningless choices.

I'm for risky, expensive fixes for all injuries. An example would be fixing brain injuries/age related conditions with with with AI Cores with the chance of re-randomizing traits and backstories and a high chance of death on failure.

If anything it would be a sorely needed cash sink.

Keeping them happy affects it, but not by much if the base chance is really low. I had a prisoner for about 2 years with a 0.5% chance, building a bed, a table, and getting a dedicated cleaner to remove the blood off the floor brought that chance up to about 0.8%. It's not much, but every little bit helps with the really stubborn ones.

More than anything I think the chances of recruitment were just brought down really low recdently.

The game has certain "unique" characters that keep names, backstories, and attributes. Colonists named Emmie and Sparkles consistently show up in my playthroughs. The only differences between games are their traits, as far as I can tell.

The scavenger idea is actually pretty good... except... if the map is so cold that everyone is dropping dead within squares of showing up, how is the scavenger going to survive?

Scavenging mechanoids hunting for gold, maybe?

I swear that NPC pawns have some kind of hidden buff that keeps them alive longer than player colonists normally would. They're not really required to stay on the map with any length of time, just move around long enough to pick up a few choice items and break for the border. Maybe meander just long enough for the player to muster the forces to fight them off if they take something that the player wants. Mechanoid scavengers that stick around the map trolling metal/component drops have the potential to be more of a danger than Manhunter packs, imo.

Okay, it needs to be incinerated then, or bartered away for consumables. That's actually kinda annoying.

Incinerating is a great feature but on extreme biomes there are way too many other early priorities to dive right into smelting or incineration, not to mention my example where I didn't even have colonists equipped to survive the cold long enough to haul stuff in for disposal. The player being responsible for removing crap the game dumps of their doorsteps is also a symptom of a wider problem in Rimworld - early design was so hell bent on preventing cheeze tactics that literally the entire game is now about cheezing the AI to give the player a fighting chance. There isn't even much in the way of player agency anymore, it's all about doing the minimum necessary so that the AI stays off your back.

Rimworld needs a Storyteller overhaul ASAP. I'm talking scavenger spawns to remove stuff from the map so that it's not 100% the player's problem, raiders and pirates that can be bought off with goods/captives before they assault, OP slaver/mechanoid runs ONLY when the player population reaches too high a threshold. Generally just more events so that the AI director doesn't feel the need to spam visitors/traders that can't handle the weather every other day.

All those weapons dropped by the tribals? Don't collect them. Stone blocks worth to much money? Don't cut them, the chunks are worth squat. You can have resources on hand without having them "liquid".

The thing is, if they die anywhere inside your home zone, the value of their dropped equipment immediately counts towards your wealth. Apparently now even if you put all of their crap in a dumping stockpile out in the wilderness, then remove the stockpile, forbid the items and remove the home zone, the item's value still counts towards your overall wealth.

Yep, aparently players were gaming the system by keeping junk out of their base,  earlier. As of a few updates ago, any item on the visible map now belongs yo your colony. GL,FH!