Messages

As with anything else, the smelter is very useful, the player just needs to prioritize. Brick making has the same problem. Particularly if you like to tunnel, you wind up with a ton of rubble to either pack into bigger and bigger stockpiles, or turn into brick and sell in bulk, however if you focus too much on it in the early game, you're going to find yourself short in more important areas. You have to know what and when to prioritize.

As for the furnace, I don't know where I'd put all of the bodies without it! You can only put graves in arable soil, which is a waste, and I rarely have enough incendiaries lying around to cremate them that way. The only real problem I have with it is that it uses power (I'd rather it burned wood, honestly), but I just turn it off when it's not in use, like turrets and A/C in the winter.

It just feels so wrong when someone 5m before he reaches his luxus meal that he could eat next to this 10k silver statue on his silver char and silver table, stops dead in the tracks and says fuck it and begins to wander around starving..

I feel like the soft breaks could use some work. If it's primarily due to trauma - such as injury, seeing friends die, being surrounded by gore, vomit and burnt ruins on a dark night, etc - I can understand the pawn wandering around somewhat aimlessly in a daze. That's not outside the realm of possibility. However, if the big reasons for the break are hunger or exhaustion, it would make more sense to me if they simply dropped what they were doing - regardless of what was going on around them - to find a meal and a bed, outside of the player's control until they rise above the break threshold.

I arrest/capture the pod drops and just pretend that I didn't. I keep a number of "prison" rooms that are just as nice and comfortable as my colonist rooms, my prison medical facility is identical to my colonist one, I even give prisoners prosthetics, even if I'm not necessarily going to keep them. So, while I've technically imprisoned them, I simply role play it as if I've rescued them and their extended period in the "guest" rooms waiting to be recruited is a recovery period. I would like it, however, if the rescue option for those did not often end in them dead in the wilderness somewhere. I'd prefer it if they perhaps had an option to join you, or ask for shelter until they get passage on a passing trader (hopefully not a slaver!), or even choose to join one of the nearby factions, perhaps based on a weighted die roll of some kind.

I like them in tandem. With the addition of personal shielding, it's fairly viable to have a couple of well armed, high melee characters engage the enemy at close range while your ranged combatants pick the enemy off from a distance. This denies melee enemies the ability to close with your shooters, and ranged enemies the ability to use their weapons, usually resorting to mostly harmless punching instead.

I've started keeping a couple of "outbases" with small food stocks, maybe some medical supplies if I can spare them,  and a couple of beds around the map near places where sieges are commonly set up. I then use them as bases of operations for my siege busters - who are usually outnumbered - in cases when they need to rest or eat or receive emergency medical care without needing to return to the main complex. It's still a little micro heavy and requires some planning, but I like it as a long term solution.

I remember, in my very first RimWorld game, alpha 6, one of my initial colonists had her leg blown off in my colony's very first encounter with mechanoids. The other soldier she was with hauled her back to the medical bay and a reserve force went out to intercept the remaining mechanoid. At this point I had no idea that she was missing a limb. When she was fully healed a few days later and still in bed, I checked her health tab and found that she was legless. I was stunned. I went in search of answers online and found that there was nothing I could do for her. She was the last colonist to die in that colony. The doctor, her long-time friend and the last remaining healthy member of the original team, bled out in the doorway of her room, killed by raiders defending her. The storytelling that having a bed-ridden, useless member of the team added to the game made the effort of feeding and caring for her worth it. Likewise, I recently read a thread - here - in which a couple of people relate stories about their brain damaged survivors that range from merciful euthanasia and almost ceremonial interment to modifying their base to allow the wounded survivor to continue to serve in their way. It's really quite excellent.