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Food poisoning ? NPD makes you forget about food poisoning. If you have bad cooks, less than 6 with no passion, it makes sense to just use NPD at least until a cook comes by. You may cause more damage than the +0 mood is worth.

Lavish meal: 20 food including meat
Nutrient paste: 6, 5 with research. Clearly the tooltip is wrong, that's nearly 20%.

maybe make them hard to produce, require something rare like gold or uranium to make.

At which point you've invented a convoluted way to sell uranium or gold.

For the record, I just found a guy like that, except he has no Social and the 3 is in Art, not Medicine. And he has a bionic eye . I bet you haven't checked that.

[Now Yegor owns a sniper rifle.]

Yegor the assassin from The Deadly Thiefs

I captured him without inflicting any permanent injuries on him. He has pretty much three skills: Shooting at 12(passion), Melee at 15(burning passion) and Art at 3(passion). He can't haul, craft, grow, research or clean...

But wait. A bionic eye.

I started thinking. Do I harvest this guy for the eye ? 95 recruitment difficulty is not that easy. But not impossible. I decided to give it a try, I have an Empath with 11 skill in social and a burning passion. It could wait. I lacked a really good shooter, and had most other roles filled.

It took less than I anticipated. Several days at 3% chance, believe or not no savescumming. And boy, was it worth it !

Randy Random 100%, rainforest, flat terrain. Steel is a bit of a problem. After some initial pirate raids it was quiet for a very long time. It made me nervous. I was building in the open, not a single room created by mining. I was gradually replacing my wooden structures with stone, and used wood on perimeter just to break the line of sight. No killbox, just clever positioning of turrets, and a loose base shaped like an empty square.

When the raid came, it was a siege. With a sniper rifle - I had none, and I would have to make a long detour for dubious advantage. I had a battery of 4 EMP mortars waiting and exactly 4 shells from an earlier siege. I decided to wait until the mortars are finished, and try to blow them apart.

Before they finished setting up their mortars, The Deadly Thiefs called a SECOND sieging party for a pincer attack. I was looking at 4 mortars. But the second siege had no sniper rifle. I called Yegor and told him to go for it.

He made mincemeat of the second siege base, and got the only survival rifle guy while he was constructing sandbags. It was so fast it wasn't even funny. Guys from the other siege base were walking all over the map to take steel from the second siege base, and I was able to shoot at them as they were passing. Pretty soon they assaulted me.

By the time Yegor was already heading for his well-earned sleep. I had turrets hidden in horseshoe-shaped wooden perimeters. I deployed pistol guys around corners, and waited. The sniper couldn't do anything in offense thanks to my wooden barricades. I flanked him with a pistol and that was it. A single wound was from the improvised turret, and was soon healed.

Now Yegor owns a sniper rifle. I outfitted the rest with pump shotguns and a looted heavy machinegun. I don't think anything short of several scythers can take out Yegor at range. I just need to give him backup.

Which game are you playing ? I play Rimworld alpha9 on Randy Random 100%, and NPD has a mood penalty of -4.

The thing is up to 4x more efficient in terms of food consumed, doesn't require a dedicated cook (+1 colonist), requires 4x less field work, and has no need for meat. I had barely any meat in my previous game which was in tundra. NPD also uses less electricity (200W instead of 350W). Solar Flare lasts one day, I can totally have my colonists eat corn raw in that time.

I think the NPD bashing is, like building colonies exclusively in mountains, a case of groupthink.

Because lord knows nobody is defaulting to NPD in it's current state.

I do, in many situations, especially in cold climate. Nutrient Paste Dispenser is 2 times more efficient than simple meals, and 4 times more efficient than lavish meals. And that's not counting the extra labor of a) the cook and b) harvesting the big-ass field.

I just finished a game in mountain tundra. I ran with NPD for most of the game, and in late game decided to rebuild it. There simply weren't enough animals to make lavish meals, and I didn't feel fine meals were such a huge jump in quality. So I used meat only for lavish meals, and when meat ran out - NPD. I had a stockpile of lavish meals to deal with cold snaps, psychic waves and so on. And that was because of a biome difference.

You are not guaranteed to get colonists with either high cooking or a passion for it. It's a surprisingly hard skill to raise in the game.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

― Henry Ford

Snow should make construction a little harder. This includes digging graves, constructing floors and power conduits. Currently you can build wooden floors outside, under snow, without removing the snow. Basically I want constructing on snow to require the extra step of removing snow. "Dusting" level would be allowed.

How effective you can be at growing stuff in the desert is largely irrelevant to this discussion. The important thing is: do fertilizer pumps make the game more interesting ? They don't, because with them every colony looks the same. No matter the biome.

Crossbows didn't become widespread in Europe until late medieval, shortly before the advent of firearms. They lost mainly to firearms, not bows. Still, the trigger and the stock used in a firearm bears striking resemblance to a crossbow. Even some photographers love it, because it allow to hold the camera very stable. The only flaw is that such a camera is dangerous to use in war zones, you look like aiming a weapon.

And yet, crossbows were supposedly banned by pope against Christians, because they threatened social order. A peasant with 2 weeks of training could shoot down a noble mounted knight with a lifetime of training.

It would be interesting if there were more things tied to trees, for example more animals to hunt if there are trees. Birds especially. Also alphabeavers would be more threatening if they ate raspberry bushes. They also ignore wooden walls for some reason. The flavor text implies they EAT wood rather than use it for dams, so why do they ignore wooden walls ?

For some reason in my last game I've seen around 4 people with the RIGHT leg chopped off by a sword. Not a single person with the left leg missing.

One of my guys had his right leg chopped off, then I installed him a bionic leg. There were pirates with two sniper rifles just outside my base, with some rock walls nearby. So I had the idea to send my Careful Shooter with the bionic leg and a charge rifle and flank the sniper up close. I did that, and HE SHOT MY HAND OFF while I was in hard cover. I was so pissed. Now I have the ship built for 14 colonists, and I think I'll wait some more before launch until I can buy him a bionic hand.

I only have manpower issues while my colony is size 3-4, with 5 I feel comfortable and anything beyond it feels like I can send a swarm of people anywhere and have the designated area mined or construction completed. There's so much to do in early game, so I tend to buy around 2 slaves until the ship is finished.

I feel I can recover from nearly any situation. I mean, I had a colony with a pest guard(melee), space researcher and an artist. Artist can't haul, Space Researcher can practically only research and haul, so many skills disabled. Pest guard was kidnapped while trying to sneak up on pirates who were outranging my turret. I was left with two characters who had "-" as their social skill! I scrambled to make a makeshift prison in the very cramped battery room, but I had to release the prisoner, I wasn't even able to feed him other than dropping corn on the floor. I had to buy a slave who was able to recruit next colonists.

Just thought I'd drop this in here.

Cassandra blessed all my shooters with an outbreak of malaria and then not a minute later, dropped a siege into an area with basically nowhere that I can get any decent cover from. I outfitted my two remaining healthy colonists with the best gear I could find laying around, then when I got to the siege had them hide behind a tree and a rock, and both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.

Tynan, if you're still keeping up with this thread, it'd be interesting to know what sorts of plans with regards to building out the storyteller's decision making process for what to do and when. I know you talked about making the way raiders behave more intelligent, and improving the types of challenges that we can be presented with, but I really can see a need to need to look at the logic and heuristics of how challenges are selected and paced.
My experience above of having the storyteller first incapacitate those who are capable of defending my base, immediately follow it up with a siege, and then one-shot kill both of my last-ditch attempts to fight off the siege, makes the randomness of the current system quite visible.

1. Does malaria really incapacitate pawns ? If it works like any other Rimworld disease or plague, surely they could delay their treatment a little to handle the more pressing danger, then go to bed. Googling says it merely impairs consciousness in early stages.

2. Sieges are rarely immediately lethal. They cause damage, but if you have people running around and putting out fires, they rarely do anything permanent.

3. You offer very little detail. At least a screenshot of the sieging camp would let us speculate if there was a way around it. Making balance changes based on your evidence is controversial at best.

[Revenge of the Circulating Fan]

In 5500 they're still using silly air conditioning, despite ceiling fans being more efficient.
Revenge of the Circulating Fan
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/09/circulating-fans-air-conditioning.html