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I think perhaps it is the device that teleports your colonists backwards a miniscule distance once every nanosecond. Something has to explain why it takes my hunters so long to get to the muffalo grounds.

Why don't I give the recursive answer and say "You should be the one giving us "HARD FACTS" that FoW is hard to implement, balance, change the fundamentals and will not appreciated by most.

Firstly, by vote of the OP, this suggestion is already appreciated by more people than not.
"balance, change the fundamentals"
Secondly, you are currently disrupting this discussion thread so they are moot points.
Thirdly, I paraphrase from someone else that "Tynan would take less than 6 days to program FoW" (Not including balancing).

I think that surely the burden of proof must always lie in the proponent rather than the opponent, no? If your mechanic says that he's going to fit nitro to your car, without the car being broken or unsuitable for your purposes, it's down to him to prove that this will be a good thing, not for you to prove that it has the potential to explode or destabilise the car in a fundamental way. Similarly, RW without FoW is not currently borked, but the implementation of a major change always has the possibility of producing major issues. I think that those people who are urging caution or who are campaigning against FoW have legitimate concerns and fears.

With regard to the pro/anti split, the top two votes are for those who actively want FoW, the bottom two are for those against, and the middle for those who have no strong feelings either way (who I would count as in the 'not appreciating' figure) which takes the vote currently to 40 who actively want FoW, and 40 who don't actively want it. Even if you take out the moderates, it comes to 40 who actively want it and 31 who really don't want it and 40 to 31 is hardly a massive majority. Personally, I'm in the middle.

Sounds like mineral mining or power construction to me.

I don't know if this is a cheap idea or not, but, now that we have quality control for stockpiles, is there any way that we could toggle trade beacons on and off? I like to hold back my best equipment and apparel for colony use, and only sell it if I fall on hard times. I'd like to be able to exclude my finest wares from the sales without having to delete the stockpile and its settings. That way, when I come to selling, especially after a big raid, I don't have to sit there when the exotic trader comes round trying to sort out keepers from chuckers in the trade menu.

I'm going to have to vote no on this. Disregarding the sheer amount of time and coding it would take to implement all the ideas you suggest, and kudos to you for presenting them well, one main problem I can see is that most colonies only last a couple of years or so, maybe five, so they would never really get out of the toddler stages.

However, thinking through the addition of procreation to the RimWorld milieu for the sake of realism can produce some unexpected results when you factor in the fact that it has the option to run with some extremely amoral behaviours. Since that moral fluidity is something that most of the players seem to value, you would have to accept the consequences or Tynan would either need to remove lots of the current game or set completely artificial limits on behaviour for both colonists and raiders.

For instance, you would have to allow raiders to kill babies, cannibals to eat babies, for babies to get the plague and die, for babies to get sold to slavers and so on. No matter how amusing that might be to some people, it's certainly not a good way to get news of the game out there - an effective method, yes, but not good.

But, leaving infanticide aside for a moment, you would also have to allow colonists to be able to force breed with any captives, if they wanted to keep on providing fresh meat or saleable children. I could even foresee mods to allow bionic wombs to be fitted for faster gestation or the picking of traits. Once again, as with dead babies, rape is not a big selling point for a game in today's enlightened times. Oh, and we're just talking about the heterosexual side of adding in sex and relationships for the sake of realism. You would have to include homosexuality and bisexuality, I think, which would get brownie points from some and opprobrium from others. Also, unless you're remaking Oz, homosexual rape is even less of a USP in the US market at the very least (us shifty Europeans, of course, are somewhat more jaded and louche). You might want to go further and include gender reassignment, all well and good if the subject wants to change gender, not so much fun if you're just going to force sex changes on prisoners for the heck of it.

Basically, what you're suggesting is more akin to The Sims than to RimWorld. If kids and relationships are what you really, really, want in your game then you might be better looking in that direction. Mind you, if you actually just want to make your pixelated minions eat babies, The Sims 3 has mods to allow you to barbecue unwanted children. Never underestimate the gallows humour of the modding world.

I have, on a particularly satisfying day, had two large groups of visitors go at it in the courtyard of a largish, L-shaped colony. It was outlanders versus tribals, I recall, and the outlanders were winning, when mechanoids decided to land 'right on top of us', which happened to be roughly in the middle of the on-going fire-fight.

It may have been Mexican, but it certainly wasn't a stand-off. It was a glorious free-for-all and my colonists had steel doors and a lot of beer.

When the shooting stopped, they popped round the back and finished off the last moving centipede before picking up lots of free loot and a couple of prisoners.

Incidentally, that's when I discovered how quickly a friendly faction can turn on you - over nothing more than a couple of kidnappings and some corpse defilement/robbery.

Moral Dilemma

Perhaps certain conditions might affect colonists in different ways. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be any friction between colonists and the colony - even when someone incapable of violence has to live in a colony of psychopaths and cannibals, or a tribesman watches his former friends, or even relatives, harvested for organs or sold into slavery.

I think there should be a chance that, say, a new recruit from an escape pod who breaks during their first few months in the colony has a chance to steal some small percentage of your resources to buy passage off-world from a trader when they pass by. Or, for home-grown recruits, perhaps, if you have a prison full of raiders from their former community and they aren't happy enough, they might lead an escape - not a fight, unless you choose to try and recapture them.

It might make it more important to choose who you do and don't recruit, and how you treat them, rather than taking the route of recruiting everyone you can for the purposes of Operation Human Shield. After all, the Warden might have told them the colony was a family-oriented place and you'd be working people close to you, but when you discover that you're taking Granny to kidney removal 101, you might begin to entertain doubts.

Yes and no. Thing is, hydroponics, strictly speaking, doesn't use soil at all. Instead, plants are fixed in something like perlite, which doesn't hold any water for long, and drip fed or even suspended in a system where their roots are covered by a constant film of liquid and feed (the so-called nutrient flow technique). I imagine, with the fact that we have basins, that the system in RW utilises a basic NFT model. So, when your power goes out, the plants not only suffer from a lack of heat and light but also water and nutrients (in soil, the medium is water-retaining and so plants can survive for some time, albeit in a dormant state, without the temperature and light they use to grow).

However, when the water flow shuts down, you are also exposing the roots and, more importantly, the rootlets to the open air, where they will dry out very quickly. When the rootlets dry out they die, and most plants will not readily recover (unless you go in and individually bag the roots of each plant with a fluid supply as soon as the power outage begins). A relatively short power outage can wreak havoc, killing or stunting whole crops, delaying, or even stopping indefinitely, flowering or fruiting.

Modern day sappers are general-purpose combat engineers who carry out a wide variety of tasks from construction of defenses, airfields, etc. over minelaying to demolitions work (which generally means sticking plastic explosives on bridges and other structures, digging tunnels below enemy defenses died out after WWI). The thing you are forgetting is that in your examples the defenses were easily visible and their location known. You don't see the inside of a bunker and just because you know the location of the entrance doesn't mean you know how it is laid out internally, you need advanced equipment for that.

True, but you must not disregard the fact that we are on a Rimworld, where people are still fighting with clubs and bows and arrows, clubs and spears. The pirates and outlanders may have charge rifles,if they're lucky, but those weapons appear to have been bought in - I don't think anyone's manufacturing them on-planet. Therefore, the 'sappers' are unlikely to be trained engineers in the modern sense, but are far more likely to equate to the sappers of WWI (a conflict which saw both cavalry charges and tank assaults) who were, on the British end, drawn from the mining communities. I would assume that sonar/radar equipment for ground penetration and mapping would be unlikely on a world where armed assaults take place for the purpose of stealing steel ingots and dead boomrat.

Whilst there is no doubt that advanced equipment exists throughout the galaxy, the basic premise of RW as I understand it, is that our situation is closer to that of the old Wild West frontier lands than it is to Starship Troopers. So, given the dearth of high-tech help, sappers are going to have to return to their roots. The may not know the internal layout of a bunker, but if they know where the entrance is they can have a reasonable guess at where they might need to start digging - they simply have to hope they get lucky.

I don't want any digging unless the enemy is high tech spacers with mining eq. And ground sonar to detect the hollow space that is your base.

The whole point of sappers, as they developed, was to undermine defences. The term even comes from the old French word for digging, I believe. They dug trenches for your artillery and then mined underground to destabilise your walls by creating wood-supported chambers underneath them. They would then set fire to the supports to cause a cave-in or, with the advent of gunpowder, blow them to smithereens with underground charges. Just running up and lobbing grenades is not the action of a sapper, it is what a grenadier would do. Sappers are slow and careful and clever and digging quietly into the side of your base, or underneath your walls, is their MO. You do not need sonar or any other specialised equipment, just picks and shovels, muscles and patience. In the 16th century, at the siege of Godesberg, sappers dug into the side of the mountain on which the fortress sat and then blew it up to cause a wall collapse. Try and look at some of the remarkable info on the tunnels dug in WW1, for a relatively recent example. If anything, Tynan is underplaying their effectiveness.

It's not too difficult to have a 'preferred' stockpile for animal corpses, that does not allow rotten, close to your butchers bench. Then you put a 'normal' dumping stockpile that allows rotten corpses by your crematorium. Set the ingredients radius on your crem and your butcher's bench so that they only cover their respective stockpiles. Do that once and, voila, all your fresh corpses will go for butchering and all the rotten flesh and bones gets burned. Haulers and hunters sort things out automatically.

If, however, your kitchen and crematorium are so close to each other that you can't do this, then your colony is way overdue from the health and safety team.

I would like to take a moment to remember Coffey the Mindwipe who has, today, met a grisly end, beaten to death by a horde of screaming madmen from the local tribe.

When Coffey first arrived and announced he was joining the colony there was some trepidation expressed, especially since this colony was seeded with the three youngest colonists I could find and Coffey was 76 when he appeared, naked, trembling, and clutching an almost expired wooden shiv. Coffey was frail, had a bad back, and was woefully under-talented. He liked cooking though, and was a mean shot (a double-flamed twelve on the Tynanometer). It was, however, a leap of faith for the three teenage colonists to give a gun and control of the stove to someone almost twice their combined ages and who also had two cataracts and dementia.

Still, two years on and Coffey had risen through the ranks to become a talented chef, knocking out lavish meals left, right, and centre. True, there was a certain amount of wandering involved, but Coffey earned his way every day. When he wasn't slaving away in front of a red-hot stove, or butchering muffalo in the ten-degrees-below cold room, you could generally hear him off in the distance, relentlessly pursuing a tortoise with his faithful machine gun in hand.

Coffey never took a day off sick, or partook of too much of his famed homebrew, and he always took time to deliver food and a friendly word to captured raiders. But he was no pacifist. When the colony was under threat, Coffey was always in the vanguard for the home team (not least because he had to be really, really close to be able to see the enemy). He was shot, stabbed, and clubbed repeatedly but his optimism pulled him through and, even after everyone saved up to buy him a bionic eye, he still kept to his famous tactic of drooling a bit and then charging forwards spraying machine-gun rounds with equal contempt at everything in sight.

Poor Coffey, he finally got too close. Some say he did not spot the thirty or so savages who crashed through the gates, some say he saw them but did not care to flee, others yet posit that he was a daft old man who couldn't tell a squirrel from a boomrat.

All we'll ever really know is that Coffey lived a long and eventful life and died defending the things he cherished: a freezer full of dead animals and the sound of gunfire.

Goodbye, Coffey, we will miss you.

I didn't and I'm not going to.

I think the problem is rooted in the fact that growing, apart from the initial seeding process, seems to be based entirely on individual plants and the zones are there purely as geographical limiters.

In an ideal world, each grow zone would be a meta-object formed of all the plants within it. You would then be able to designate a zone to be tended and the task would be to harvest/cut all the plants in that zone, then to haul all the crops from that zone, then to reseed the zone before moving on to the next one. That would most accurately represent the most common agricultural routine.

However, I'm also assuming that this would be a nightmare to code because Tynan would have to come up with a method for more than one colonist to be assigned to one of these meta tasks at the same time, and I don't think that's terribly likely given what he has said elsewhere about getting colonists together to haul large objects.

I would like equipment racks a lot more if I could also store the following: Kevlar Helmets, Power Armour Helmets, Military Helmets, Armour Vests, Power Armour, Personal Shields. To my mind, all those items are more equipment than apparel. I would also like to see them, or something like them, for storing Artillery Shells, it always seems a bit odd to me to have them just lying around.