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Maybe make the tiles containing the river a different biome entirely? The greenery surrounding the Nile appears to extend pretty far:

I just wish melee hunting was allowed. Right now I have to manually have a melee colonist go around owning squirrels/rabbits/rats/etc, and then have to manually unforbid every dead animal.

Right now each eye contributes 50% of your sight effectiveness. This means that a person with extremely bad eyesight in both eyes of 50% sees just as well as someone missing one eye but with otherwise perfect eyesight. This isn't really realistic, and it causes disproportionately harmful effects when someone losses an eye. For instance, a sniper in real life only uses one eye to look through their scope and shoot, but in Rimworld losing one eye is extremely harmful for shooting. I'm suggesting that sight be calculated instead with this formula:

Sight = (Efficiency of good eye) - 0.10*(1-Efficiency of bad eye)

The game will look at both your eyes, see which eye is better (or default to the right eye if both are the same), and sue that eye as the base for determining sight. Damage to the other eye can still harm your sight due to loss of peripheral vision and depth perception, but this caps out at 10%. This will also nerf getting two bionic eyes which also makes sense since it's hard to imagine how getting a second bionic eye would really yield you much additional benefit over one. Some numbers:

1 Eye, Sight = 90%
1 Bionic eye + 1 normal eye, Sight = 120%
2 Bionic eyes, Sight = 122%

The ancient city of Çatalhöyük was flourishing with 5-7,000 people roughly 6,000 years before the discovery of iron. The Bronze Age started roughly 2,000 years before iron smelting. The Great Pyramids of Giza were constructed over 1,000 years before iron. By the time the technology to smelt iron is produced you already have massive and advanced cultures and civilizations.

It's hard to describe what the steel is that they are dealing with. If you are considering small things like leaf springs that are somehow not rusted away into nothing then yes I agree they can bend them and do other simple metal working. But steel is incredibly strong, you cannot meaningfully work steel that isn't super thin without significantly heating it up. The furnaces you need to heat up steel enough to work it, those with blow pipes equipped with bellows, are the same furnaces you need to smelt iron.

It is a common misconception that you add carbon to iron to make steel. In fact iron doesn't generally exist in a pure form on earth, and the purification process leaves it with a ton of carbon in it. You get steel be removing the carbon from iron that's been processed from ore until the carbon only makes up around 1%. Because bloomeries are not hot enough to melt iron, the iron is instead purified by reacting the iron oxide with carbon monoxide, leaving just elemental iron and a lot of carbon contamination. If you are good at controlling the temperatures and adding the right amount of charcoal at the right times you can get pig iron, which is only contaminated with about 3-4% carbon, any more than that and you are left with a chunk of unusable, brittle iron. Further refining in a hearth can get you wrought iron. But you aren't going to produce meaningful amounts of steel until you create a new process entirely.

The tools they make are made using tools. My question is where did the original tools originate from? If the people on Rimworld found the tools then so be it. I can acknowledge that given the abundant steel in Rimworld that perhaps they saw that they could heat copper and tin and other metals if they got them hot enough, and perhaps that led to the idea that if they heat up the steel hot enough they can work it, so it is reasonable that perhaps the jump from working those metals to work steel was much shorter. However, in the meantime they still need edges, which rocks and knapping provide an immediate access to. In the meantime though it still took thousands of years for people to develop furnaces hot enough to work steel, and that was largely just a by product of people trying to make hotter furnaces for pottery.

As far as saying something to persuade you... how could I say anything to persuade you if you don't even read my posts? I used the term bloomery multiple times in my last post, I know what it is.

Metalworking with primitive technology isn't something that you remember because it is far removed from modern metalworking techniques (and it will give you really crappy results). If you watch the video of iron smelting in Africa that you linked you will find that it is much more involved than you are giving credit.

The iron smelting they are doing in that vid: uses clay not mud (and it's pure clay from termite mounds), has a built in bellows, and they smelt the iron ore by mixing it with a special flux of local minerals (which I presume contains lime) which helps it smelt at lower than usual temperatures. The bloomery they make needs to be actively worked with a bellows for 10 hours.

Actually constructing a furnace like what they created which 1) doesn't break, and 2) achieves hot enough temperature to use, takes a lot of trial and error, especially when you must take into consideration the local materials. They bloomeries they produce are also one-time use only. Additionally if you don't control the temperatures properly and add in the correct amount of charcoal you will end up either not purifying the iron, or adding too much carbon to the iron making it extremely brittle and unworkable. Meanwhile, this is all ignoring the fact that the tribals don't have have tools (tongs to grab the hot metal, hammers hard enough to work the metal, an anvil) to actually work the metal.

If you stuck a bunch of random modern-day people on a desert island, they would learn how competently knapp before they ever learned to work metal.

In general predators can't kill tortoises. Here's a video of lion trying to eat tortoise and failing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTn2MZTu_3k

Although I agree that the tortoises shouldn't be able to take out your larger animals.

That's where my saves used to be. At some point they disappeared and showed up in my caches folder.

Why wouldn't tribals know about metal working? I see tribals with metal weapons all the time.

Because metalworking with steel requires heat that can only be acquired with forges or other similar constructs, which presumably the tribals don't have access to.

Apologies for delving so off-topic. I support lengthening the starting game, but feel that should mostly be done by fleshing out the starting game with more content (adding ways of preserving food without refrigeration, for example), rather than slowing down the rate at which the current content is encountered. Although I do support removing the starting guns because I feel they are overpowered and make early encounters a breeze, after which you gain better access to weapons which leads to a snowballing effect that ultimately ends in combat never being challenging or satisfying.

My save data is in User/Library/Caches/Rimworld/Saves

Bourbon is made from corn. It'd be nice to see the alcoholic beverages expanded some day, but I think that is largely dependent on coming up with specifics (recipes, and drink stats) that are ready to fit into the game. It currently doesn't make sense making beer out of just hops. Perhaps the hay could be made specifically into barely hay and it could be used along with hops for making beer. The harder liquors that don't require hops (vodka from potatoes, bourbon from corn) could be balanced by giving less enjoyment and making the colonists more drunk. Sake could be balanced by simply requiring more rice I suppose and being cheaper.

I stepped on a fish hook once but I was wearing shoes. Just going to clear up some misconceptions now about tetanus.

1. Tetanus is caused by the bacteria Clostridium tetani which is sensitive to oxygen, and can't grow where oxygen is present.

2. C. tetani can form very strong endospores, which are found in the ground and water all over the planet and can survive seemingly indefinitely. While in this form they can interact with oxygen, and bleach, and boiling water, and all sorts of things, but they cannot grow and be active.

3. In order for C. tetani to infect you it must reach a part of your body that doesn't contain too much oxygen. This is why tetanus is usually associated with deep puncture wounds, because there is less oxygen available than at the surface.

4. There is no association between C. tetani and rust. Endospores of C. tetani are commonly present outdoors, and a rusty nail is simply likely to have been present outdoors in addition to having more surface area due to the rust for dirt to accumulate upon.

5. There is no harm in the presence of iron in our cereal. As a matter of fact roughly 50% of iron that American's receive in their diet is from fortification of grains with iron. It is generally put in your food in it's uncharged, elemental form, which your body is unable to absorb. However, when exposed to the acid in your stomach it rapidly oxidizes to it's ferric form, Fe2+, which is absorbed.

6. Iron isn't needed to "make your bones strong", it is primarily used for oxygen transport and as a cofactor for redox reactions.

7. The tetanus vaccine doesn't contain a dead or inactive form of C. tetani, but rather it contains an inactivated version of the neurotoxin that C. tetani produces. Once an actual tetanus infection occurs the immune system will produce antibodies that bind to and neutralize the toxin. Because the inactivated tetanoid toxoid is so potent at stimulating an immune response, it is actually combined with other antigens in other vaccines. For instance, the conjugate Hib vaccine contains a type b capsular polysaccharide from Haemophilus influenzae that is covalently linked to the tetanoid toxoid because by itself it doesn't normally stimulate a response that leads to antibody production.

I don't know how many people are into them. But I've been watching the GDQs since the beginning. This year Summer Games Done Quick will be streamed 3–10 July, and I'll probably be watching their stream more than playing games myself.

Honestly, the first thing I would do is not include a survival rifle (or pistol) in the start spawn.

It doesn't make any sense, are the sleeping with a survival rifle for no reason? And if they keep it with them specifically for security increase they crash land then why only a survival rifle? If they have the technology to space travel then they could include better weapons.

It's also really OP in the early game. That first raider equipped with a shiv always gets taken down by the rifle and pistol user. The rifle is better than anything the tribals wield. It's basically a pre-sniper rifle and can even be used in the early game to effectively snipe people who are seiging or preparing for a raid without them retaliating.

If a stone-headed club and a wooden ball club weigh the same and have the same sized and shaped striking surface, they will do the same damage. #physics

The distribution of that mass is an important facet that is commonly ignored. For instance, if I had two balls of equal mass and volume, but one was hollow and the other solid, then the solid ball would roll down a hill much faster than the hollow ball. This is due to the hollow ball having a much greater moment of inertia. Additionally, let's say there's a wall at the bottom of the hill that stops the balls. The balls would transfer the exact same amount of energy to the wall (purely due to conservation of energy) even though the solid ball was rolling faster. It follows then that if you equalize the speed of the two balls, then the hollow ball will transfer more energy upon impact than the solid ball.

We can apply this to the clubs. With a greater moment of inertia, the more top-heavy stone clubs will hit a lot harder if they are traveling at the same speed as the wooden clubs. So if I was to simply let gravity supply all the force of the swing, ensuring the clubs moving at a roughly equal speed, then the stone club would hit a lot harder. This is why tools like sledgehammers that really primarily on gravity to power the swings rather than muscle are so top heavy. But if I am primarily relying on my own strength to swing the club then if the difference in the speed in which I swing the two clubs is great enough then I can impart more force with the wooden club. This is why baseball bats aren't top heavy (amongst other factors like needing to be able to swing fast enough to hit the ball). So there's a balance that you must strike for optimizing the maximum force outputted by the club. However, since the clubs are not designed to take all of your strength to swing it would make sense that these clubs are not being swung at the maximum speeds that their wielders can muster, meaning that they should fall on the side of the balance where increases in the moment of inertia will increase their striking force. Therefore since the stone clubs have a greater moment of inertia they should hit harder.

There are other factors at play as well, such as how much of the impact is absorbed by the sponginess of the wood compared to the much more rigid stone. But those are not as significant.