Messages

you should look in your Rimworld/Mods/Core/Defs/ThingDefs_Races. just check what has changed or just load the old mod up and see what errors you get.

[world map/start:]

so i played the a16 version a bit and have some mixed feeling about it. so far i just build up my base, have not gone into the caravan feature to much. (looked with dev mode shotly into it yesterday tho and saw some on spartys streams.) playing on the extreme cassandra difficulty so far, so some things might be different in other storytellers. (played first half on the first devlopment build and yesterday with the updated version)

(wall of text incoming ^^)

world map/start:

for the world map thge main thing i was and still am a bit confused about is why hexgones? the bulk of the game are squares. you build your stuff in a square grid. so why hexagones? this makes no sense to me, since if i would enter a biome/tile, from which side does my pawns come in, if its a hexagone on the world, but zoomed in its square? i must admit in terms of design it looks good, but i find it a bit confusing with the rest of the game.

the map itself looks good, some highlighting on the square you select is probably needed. there as already pointed out somewhere in this thread.

for the difference between mountains, small and large hills i must say, that they look nice, but if i want a specific biome they currently make i hard to find your thing. you basicly have click + look at the description to get the terrain, since the graphical differences are very settle. for a nice looking map, this might be cool. but i wish there was some overlay options, like in the world maps before. were you could switch/show biomes/height etc.

so for my biome i thought, maybe not a hard one, but with some snow. so i have some freezing temperatures a time of the year. i ended up landing in a temperate forest biome, with like -10 to 20 degress temperature range. this usally was pretty easy to survive, since you could grow and hunt.

for the people i rolled a bit, to not get abrasive/ugly/volatile/etc. people, since i wanted to test the building stuff mostly and worry to much about mood early. it's usally a bit of an issue for a new alpha, since you don't know how to play around the new modifiers, but with decent starting colonists usally okay.

so starting out, building into a moountain. all things seem okayish. got some growing going. finaly build soem small rooms (2x2) for my people. wanderer, first raids etc. things started to get weird after the first real raid, meaning when people got hurt.

medical stuff:

so i fought off some raiders, someone got beaten up/shot at and took some damage. this is in general not a big deal, get healed up fast, get some work done, fit at the next raid. (i thought) my patient stayed in bed, but literaly healed nothing in terms of health. when the next raid hit he still was not full helth. i thought hm maybe my doctors are super bad, i checked and they were at 5. for an early game start this seemed okay and hospital beds seem to be far away in terms of research at this point. so this meant basicly getting hurt in raids can send you in a bad injury/pain spiral. if your good doctor gets hurt/dies your done. in my colony it lead to much more food problems, since no work could get done with bed rest and people healing super slow. (not sure if that got tweaked or my colony is to far along at this point, but had less problems now with it, got hopsital bed too. so might be that)

i understand the idea behind the doctoring and this makes a good doctor have some impact. but for early game this mechanic is pretty bad. when i read/heard about the medic change in the new alpha i expected the infection system and the bedrest problem to get a look at (how illnes workes and the they randomly get up to do stuff, even if i tell them to bed rest. since i feel like there was most of the problems.) so i was a bit of disappointed, since the old doctoring problems still exist and are super bad. meaning pawns are hut, but still do joy, put on clothes. get up for no reason. i hoped so a fix there. i usally use briths mod for patient sanity this so its not as bad. but seeing this in vanilla is a big problem.

on the note of illness/infection in hindsight i haven't had a infection in a body part. not sure if that is removed, but had some people bleeding badly in some fights. had one pawn die to plague, even with all time micromanagemnt bedrest and a doctor treating asap. had no medicine and no hospital bed at this point.

i still had the problem that a pawns arm/leg got cut off and bleeds badly and doctors treat all minor wounds first then the cut of body put. (this was with the latest build) i remember hearing from someone that this should have been fixed, could be a rumor.

other thing i installed a bionic leg (or tried, save scummed here a bit to test). my doctor had 92% surgery chance. my room had smoothed floor and hospital beds and there were no filth spots insice (have not checked the cleanliness, assume one ish [edit. just checked in game, its clean/zero]). but it took my doctor 4 attemps to install the leg. i'm not 100% sure if there were changes made to this part, but 4 tries seems a bit high (m ight be just bad luck tho)

work priorities:

i was super surprised when i saw repairs removed. i can understand, that with potentially adding more skills in the future there might be some going together to not flood the work tab. but repairing stuff after raids is quite important and this could relieve some work amoutn from your contructors in the past, by letting other people help. so i dont like that. since in most cases you will have stuff to build in your base early/late game. and forbidding/deleting very blueprint/project seems to add more unneccessary micro.

the other thing i dislike is the decontruct. in most cases you want the decontruct first to build new stuff there or need the ressouces. so having it at first was kinda needed in my opinion. i honestly dont understand why this priotiy got moved. and yes you could have the roof problem. but this will happen one time and then you get it, that the roof needs to be done first. plus i think/assume (can't remeber right now) you added the roofing job priotiy at first two. so this problem would be gone either way. which was usally the reason for deconstruting not at first.

prisoners:

so i got a bit lucky my run and got a drop pod spacer quite early. at the time i had the 2x2 rooms. so i thought put a small bed in, smooth the floor. should be a recruit in no time. i never got the prisoner... i feed him, my warden did his job. the prisoner dont had bad traits, like volatile to make him break easily. so what happend was i tried to heal the prisoner up, this took forever. he was grumpy for the pain, the room was to small, he had no table etc. so he broke after some time. with the cathrsis buff later his mood was okay. after it ended he broke again and the cycle started again. after some time i build a bigger room, with light, table, heater and all (my colonists were still living worse then the prisoners at this point). so i put him in there. got a 2nd prisoner. the cycle stoped for a bit. but i had super low chances <1% (he had 60ish difficulty, my warden had 5 or a bit more social at this point, which i think is okay early on). i didn't took prisoners for a while till i had like 7 colonists or so and only took wanderers/refugee events to stock up people. i'm not sure if it's intended, but i feel like taking a good chance prisoner early and putting him in an okay room should make it possible to recruit with decent chance. at this point i build a big prison room and have a 9 and 14 warden and this problem is gone. but you don't have that early on. together with doctoring this version i feel like high social is a must have skill to progress at a decent rate.

bed room debuffs/base design:

so yeah the small/cramped bed room debuff. i think this is one of the resons my prisoners broke so much early on. my colonists doing fine, even with me still building the sleeping caskets. i personaly dont like them as a concept overall for the game. let my explain a bit. if i build the bigger bedrooms, there is not much stuff in the vanilla game to put in there. maybe one statue/plant pot for mood and a chair? but i feel this looks stupid. there is not much more to put in. a table you dont want, since random people come in to eat and the pawn get disturbed sleep. so i end up with a big room with some strange things inside. yes i can use mods and put in more fitting furniture, but i dont think that should be the point. the vanilla game should be balanced/designed around itself in the first place. so i dont get this reason for having bigger rooms.

the other thing is that it forces a specific base design. if you dont want the debuff you have to build at least X by X rooms. so every base looks the same in terms of sleeping areas at some point. yes you can build other shaped rooms, but since most stuff is square the majority will end up having square rooms too. i feel this hurts the game variety. let me explain this a bit on infestations and mountain bases, since it's a bit clearer on that. with the introduction of the infestation event my base looks like the others. before the infestation event i first build a base with corridors when i stated out in the game. later i thought maybe i could skip them and use only work rooms and i loved the base design. it had no benefit/disadvantge over the other one, but i liked it. my base looked different from that of anybody else. i loved the 2x2 bed rooms with single beds and a statue in them. not for the benefit, but the design was cool. if i took on a mining colony in the north i build sleeping caskets for my workers 8rooms that only fit the bed), since it fit the theme of the colony in the late game. less comfor = small rooms. but it ran the same as the other ones, no benefit/disadvantage. so with the infestations suddenly this design was bad. because if a spawn happens. you dont have enough room to move back. you might have to deconstruct walls to make room to move/free bugs. this would leave my base in ruins and people got hurt due to smaller rooms. so if you dont wanted to have all this draw backs you needed some kind of corridors now. i tried my old desing a few times and the amount of micro/stress you had to go through just to have your own base desing was unreal compred to just making a corridor. so to have room to move around/have enough shooting power, you usally want bigger hallways (around 3 large). this neccesety ends up making your base look a specific way. you want to enclose most rooms in a hallway to be able to aproach rooms from different angles if the bugs move to a bad spot. so in the end my mountain base looks about the same a the one from other people. hallways, bit bigger rooms for work/storage etc. not because i like it, but because not building this way makes the game so much unfun, that it's unreal.

now back to the small room debuff. later on you would want to have the room benefit buff (the low expectations buff goes away, mood managment gets a bit harder etc.). so meaning you would want roomsize x by y at least. put in items z for the mood/beauty. this means not only does my corridors look like other people, now my bed rooms do too? and thats not because i as a player choose to do so, but because the game mechanic forces me to. i understand that some mechanic lead to certain optimal base designs adaptions. but should these not have clear benefits and drawbacks? currently you can have different killboxes/defenses. some work better/worse against other enemies. but you have a choice. i always liked that about the game. but i feel like adding the bedrrom debuff is a bad thing.

why do you have a debuff for smaller rooms? is every colonists claustrophobic? do they spent their whole day in the bedroom? if they spent ther day "outside" mainly, why does the room size even matter? why do you force the player to have bigger rooms? i dont get this decision, sorry. i understand you don't want players to build sleeping caskets, but why? does it make the game super easy/hard? i dont think so? do larger bedrooms make the game harder/easier? as far as i know it does not, so i dont have a clue why this change was/is made.

dead mans cloth:

uhm yeah. if you add the debuff, can we get an option to let our people not wear this stuff? that debuff is a bit less then naked, but there are some clothes, that the colonists do not need to counter the nakes debuff. and currently you would have to turn off all the clothes of the type. button would be nice.

in general i like the attempt to make producing clothes a bit more of an must. but i dont like this route. since you fight for your life,  have a lot of other more severe problems. you care that you wear a dead persons clothes, but just killed 10 people in cold blood? how does that not matter (i know there was a debuff for killed someone, not sure if is still their, but this was temprary)? i'm not sure if the dead mans cloth goes away, but i assume not. so killing a bunch of people you forget, but the fact that you wear the cloth bothers you forever? so yeah. the other thing is i expected with this update to add the recycle cloth function/recipe/workbench. since the dead man's cloth change forces you to make clothes, but on harder biomes you will not have much animals to hunt and growing cotton will not be a priority. so you have the debuff for forever in this biomes.

forgot to mention, maybe another route would have been to just give player made clothes some more boni/benefits. like infusion mod or just lower the raids cloth if drops in general (so you would only get tattered apparel). just a thought.

deterioration/roofs:

the deterioration makes sense, but i feel its a bit overkill at first. from what i saw the rates seemed fine. they ai core does no deteriorate, but mechanoid corpses do?

workbench penalities:

not sure about this change. since power is usally a struggle in vanilla. you don't end up heating all rooms. you get the penality even if its roofed and 20 degress outside? (i dont think there is a way to check these values so not sure on this could be wrong). i'm pretty sure a stonecutters table would be okay outside in a roofed area. and if the pawn has good clothing this should not be an issue. since the most hinderence would be his clothes, but he does not change them in general if he works outside or inside. the other thing is we already have temperature penalities for inside/outside, they are hypthermia and heatstrokes. so why would there be a need for others?

the other thing, why not just make the penalites on workbenches for electic ones. i dont think a mechanic process would have penalities.

caravans/new colonies:

as i said have not yet played with them much. the main fear i have, since usally 15+ people colony would couse lagg, depending on the size of the colony/jobs this would vary. but 20 peeps would slow you down a lot. with the world map running on the side and multiple colonies at the same time, i'm not sure if the lag will not stop my colonization attemps in very early tracks. not yet at this point, so just a guess. hope there are a lot of performance improvements made to avoid this. but i love the idea and stoked to see what happen, when my people are at this point.

raids:

i just tried this with dev command. and got my 5 people in to try and see what loot there was. but for a later colony this seemed hardly worthwhile. from what i saw the raiders had the same weapons like my people and the storage only had some meals and maybe medicine. which the last one would be worth it, but for the effort/time investment i'm not even sure here. i'm burning to see what mods can do to that feature. it seems quite interesting. maybe i just had a small ooutpost in my test. so still unsure about that.

weapons variety:

i like the less charge rifles change. since i find myself using the other weapons like lmg/assult rifles a bit more. good change and seems to work nice so far. got only one charge rifle so far after quite a while into the game. really love this change.

desertification:

i assume there are some changes hidden here. since my map is not as barren as they used to. maybe just luck, not sure. from the event list in dev mode there seem's to be no grow event. so probably just the plant spread/ growtime. but i like it very much.

animals:

with the colonies/caravans these seem to gone up in value, whiuch i like overall. the problem is that the alpha version does not fix the problem which came with animal figting in the past. yes you can have the foloow check markes, which i good. but the main problem was/is the slow reation time of animals, the runing in front. which leads them getting shot by friendly fire lots of time. the other problem is that the zones are still bugged, a problem the mod itself had at first. but i assume this gets fixed along the way.

research tree:

love the tree. as someone said, not sure how well it works with mods. but i felt the old one was a mess and some sort of overview and/or search function was needed there. maybe some zoom out/in for mods and if more research gets in the game is needed, but it looks good.

overall:

overall i have a bit of mixed feeling about the alpha, there is a bunch of stuff i love (mostly a ai feature, research tab, animal tab). i'm a bit disappointed that some big issues are not getting a fixed (patients getting up, no eating asign tab, animals response etc.). for the main feature of settling/raiding it seems okay, was not something i particular wished for in the first place. but since most people seemd to wanted that, it made it and i must admit it seems like a big change up in terms a late game. so looking forward to testing this out in depth a bit more.

so yeah, love the game great work as always. sorry if some stuff sounds a bit to negative. really love your game, looking forward to updating my mods in the later days. thanks for making this early release testing avaiable to us. hope this helps a bit, got a bit rambly sometime,sry XD

thx for the great work

attachment has the mod config i used for my medieval run some time ago. maybe it helps, had a lot of fun. includes some ui/quality of life and stuff mods you dont neccessarly need. the numbers mods are my mods. at this time i would add some additional mods, since some have updated + newer mods have come out. it has been some time, since i did such run. so some mods on the list might have received updates and it could not be compatible all together. i edited some mods in minor ways to fit my personal needs, you can use the normal versions for these. maybe it helps you in what to use/choose.

the scenario just has some bunch of tech enabled if i remeber correctly. i think i disabled some wanderer event,sicne someone joined wih a pistol some time, not sure,why the name. as i said has been some time ago i did the run

what you definitly want in terms of content mods is (my personal opinion here ):
- medieval times mod: includes a lot of stuff in terms of smithing, weapons, production. it has been updated and it should have not as much lag on spawning raids as it used to have, from what i read in the forum thread.
- medieval edition mod, removes the guns, adds some more medieval style event descriptions, you can prob use another mod with the same functionality here
- some sort of mining mod, i would use the quarry mod at this time. since you need some steel/metals at some point and without the option to call traders you will run out of ressouces if you play longer.
- i like the forest density mod as a must have, since low tech means you need a lot of wood and on the vanilla maps there is not as much. but if you dont like to fight vegetation you might want to disable this one. but you would probably need to make a tree farm later on then. (if you play jungle biome, maybe try the ck animal+plants mod)

if you want to build castle like bases you might want to add my bridges mod (for terraforming stuff) and prepare for fishing if using fishindustry. i did these mods after my medieval run, thats why they are not on the list.

i would strongly recommend using ui/quality of life mods with every run you do, but personal preference here, currently using these on another run and is what i use every run as fixed mods:
   

Code Select Expand

<li>AllowTool</li>
    <li>DefensivePositions</li>
    <li>Dont Mourn The Dead</li>
    <li>EdBPrepareCarefully</li>
    <li>FeedTheColonists</li>
    <li>FluffierThanThou-RW_Blueprints-9cbe574</li>
    <li>Refactored Work Priorities</li>
    <li>JTBetterHauling</li>
    <li>FluffierThanThou-RW_EnhancedTabs-f5e58d9</li>
    <li>FluffierThanThou-RW_MedicalInfo-62a1705 sd edit version number</li>
    <li>Hunting Alert</li>
    <li>kNumbers-0.5.2-A15</li>
    <li>Less-Rebuff</li>
    <li>MadSkills-A15-1.1.7-T</li>
    <li>New Zone Tools</li>
    <li>OmniLocator</li>
    <li>Patient Sanity</li>
    <li>PetFollow</li>
    <li>CraftingHysteresis</li>
    <li>JTCopyBills</li>
    <li>JTMoreAreas</li>
    <li>QualityBuilder</li>
    <li>StorageSearch-0.15.0</li>
    <li>TradingSpot</li>
    <li>VeinMiner</li>
    <li>MapReroll sd edit cost zero</li>
    <li>ShutdownAll</li>
    <li>RecolorStockpile</li>
    <li>RW_ColonistBarKF-0.15.3</li>
    <li>FluffierThanThou-RW_Manager-ae03913</li>
    <li>steam mod techadvancing</li>
    <li>WanderDontDrop</li>
    <li>steam mod fluffys worktab</li>
(the techadvancing you might not need for low tech runs. shutdown all is for mechs,so you might want to take that out too. the fluffys worktab is called ac-work tab on steam, it is originaly from fluffy,just an update,hence the name i chose. the other mods you should find with steam/google/forum search from the name i think.)

i am currently working on a mod for a low tech comms console option for medieval runs. since i found not having the options to call traders is a bit of a pain. not done with the textures yet. so might be 1 to 2 weeks out from releasing it.

so yeah, as i said at the start it's a lot of personal preference what mods you use, like in every run. so choose what you like for your games


[attachment deleted by admin due to age]

finaly got around to play with this biome. i like it very much so far (only into my first year, so at the start).

personaly chose a medium climate biome, since i was not sure to what temperatures you intended the cave to be.

i was a bit confused with the light spots. since i started to grow on one and then it disapeared and tried at the rich soil and did the same. it was not until later, that i noticed some correspond to the day time and that are the spots you can use to grow^^ but like this mechanic, since it makes you choose your base spot a bit more.

my colony has a bit of a food situation so far, but usally happens on others map with less growing too. i used the green leaves and harvested these and with hunting it seemed to work fine.

the wood seems fine, had a short time were i needed some, but if you know not to waste it, it seems totaly fine and could even be a bit less i think. i usally dont build much out of wood, so maybe just my playstyle/impression.

for the poison plant i must say it confused me,why some of my colonists had the toxic build up. so maybe an extra hediff name would be nice, to let the player realize some plants are harmful to your colony. i like the idea and mechanic tho. overall i love the glowing plants (fan of glowy things^^). already loved the cave flora from your other mod. the texture of the new plants are very fitting to the gamestyle too.

for the harvest of the plants, maybe add some hops if you want the player to get something out of them other then luci?

for the map gen, i must admit i expected one "cave pocket" were i can turtle in, like erdelf said. but non the less i like the maze style, since it's a bit of a change up for my usual playstyle. the other thing is this way you still have a threat from various sides to your base, so makes the game a bit more interesting i think.

for the animals, maybe add some hives if thats possible? so you would have some regions were your colonists would be attacked at the start and that you have to avoid early game. plus i feel it would fit well with the biome. (but not sure how easy/hard it is to add those outside the event)

another thing same like the dead animals, maybe some dead trees? they could just be buildings with a dead tree stump or a tree on the side texture. you would deconstruct them and then get wood? or could be plants with this textures, haven't done stuff myself in this direction, so not sure what the best way to implement this would be.

so yeah,really enjoying the biome so far, great work and thanks for making it

edit: small issue, just got my first poison ship and this seem to be bugged. tried with clean game+only your mod and still there. i spawned some in with dev mode and it has the [no] behind it. so i assume you disabeled them somehow. not sure, but they can still spawn as an event (could not spawn psychic ones with dev mode, so i guess the disable works there, i haven't disabeled any event in the scenario). for the poison, you can not target them and shooting them indirect spawns no mechs. you can deconstruct, but it gives no loot, the destroying gives loot. feels cheaty with no enemy tho^^. for disabling the event i think its a bit of an issue (in terms of game mechanic/progression), since mechs are a big part to get plasteel(+steel) early game and even later on. so removing this mechanic lets you progress much slower and will create some shortage for ressouces. so maybe some thing to counter that would be nice or a simlar event type for the underground. or increase plasteel veins in map generation or add some old mechanoid structurs you could decontruct for ressouces (this might speed up your early game to much tho, could be guarded with buggs maybe?).
(forgot to mention could spawn other events with no tag like alpha beavers/coldsnap with dev mode, but not sure if that means they would be generated normaly. they did not happen in my game so far.)

as far as i know the size is mainly the wealth/worth the raid has together. so if your fraction has equipment that is rather cheap it will maybe spawn better equiped or/and more pawns then the vanilla ones. i have not done a fraction mod myself, so could be totally wrong here, just a thought. since your pawns seem to use the custom equipment this could be the reason.

*zap* Rimkea has some seasonal addons *link appears out of  a hat*

search and you will find

if you play with modded storyteller/higher difficulty there is usally someone having a bad day. the other thing is there are currently a lot of things that are pure rng and can bring a colonists mood down very bad (raider faimly member attacking+dieing, having a bad day, prisoners ... ,rebuffed etc.). since there is no option for the player to up the mood against these in a signifacant way, you would just add a hardcore rng event, that suddenly ends your game (because some of your colonists had a bad day for example ?).

if you dont base these on mood, what system would you use? do you spend time of your workers to "win votes"? if yes are there not better things to do?

the other thing as already noted, you/the player dont have a physical representation in the game. so why would they vote on you?

you drop in an hostile world, raiders attacking, your live in under threat and your first problem is to do an election?^^ call me crazy, but that would not be my concern as a colonist

if you want to play as the leader you can just make your own colonist and use the colony manager mod from fluffy. just set your "leader" to mostly managing and your set.

as for the event itself, personly dont see a sense in adding an option to end your game in other ways (potentialy very early). the voting seems super rng, no matter how you put it or implement it. another problem is for the gravity the election holds over the fate of a colony, their would have to be some big benefit if you survive, which would probably make it super unbalanced. because how do you reward a player, who just survived the potential loss of his game?

yeah, just my thoughts. personly not my cup of tea, since the game is more of a survival/basebuilder/fighting simulation for me. an election would just end my regime of terror XD

have you tried to go in dev mode and start a new game and test it? since i assume you are using an "old" save from the other topic you posted this.

for work:

personly used the refractored workpriorities mod and i felt my colony had a lot less unfinished stuff lying around. as far as i know the mod does just change the priority system of some jobs a bit. so maybe it was just my colony being a bit more effcient and i felt things were going a bit smoother. but you might want to look into these type of mods.

there is some hauling one were the haul near stuff first, can't remember the name and haven't used it myself. plus there was some haulfirst type mod in the past, not sure if it exists for a15. there you could flag items for haul and if these type of work was done by any colonists he would grab the item firsst. i imagine this system could be used with other worktypes too. (haven't seen a mod for other worktypes tho^^)

for eating:

the mod fast day (i think what it is called), turns the eating function on/off. the streamer cannondeath uses this in his colonys. haven't used this one myself, but it seems to work fine. it basicly turns the eating mechanic of the game on and off. meaning you must manualy feed your colonists or they go crazy (the hunger and mood loss from that still exists). so i'm not sure if thats what you are looking for, but i imagine it would result in a bit more efficient work, since they will not take a break to get food. you still have to micromanage.

i assume some similar thing could be done for sleep, were you turn the games sleep function on/off. haven't seen a mod for that.

so yeah, thats the mods i know of, not sure if that is the kind you search, since you still would have to do some part of micromanagment. you should keep in mind that managing your colonists is a big part of the game. so if all would work flawless it would take away a lot of the fun of the game and you would not see some of the funny moment some "problems" create

if you edit the xml and add the defnames for the linkable facilites you want to add - yes. otherwise no.

hey, like your work, love the textures. fit the vanilla game super well.

one small suggestion, you should add some sort of "round arrow" or other universal symbol to the menu icon of the vulcan cannon to indicate you can rotate to switch the textures of its base. was stumbling across this feature more by accident, but like it very much

the graphic classes determine what textures the game searches for in terms of name and how they are drawn/used in game. as you already suspected. so if they way the game handels these does not fit you, you would have do define another graphic class per code/assemblies.

since i have never done a mod with appareal my knowledge is a bit limited in this regard, but you can use the xml auto documentation or/and dingos xml database to check for possible xml solutions or maybe if you know another mod that does what you want, look how it does what it does.

for the layers the xml auto documentation lists:
Accessory
Middle
OnSkin
Overhead
Shell
so i'm not sure maybe you can try these to get the result you want with the tools already in game? as said haven't done anything with apparel and not sure what you want your endresult to look like.

if the xml thing does not work. you might want to look at the orassans mod. its the only one that i know, which adds a texture that "runs" around with your pawns (adds tails to the race of orassans). the texture there should be added per code, since its compatible with all other mods. so you might be able to use this for your mod by changing it a bit.

hope i could help you somehow

your missing the abstract for the "BaseBullet". if you haven't already fixed that.

a bit of clarification for the directories:
you don't need the sound folder if you are not adding your own soundfiles for your gun.

The language is just for translation. so you can skip that at the start and add it later when you add another language then you original used in the labels. but most people skip this one at first and use english.

The textures folder can have your own named subfolders or could have none. you don't have to use the vanilla subfolder structure, just need to name you texture path correctly in the xml.

for the defname (this one is just my personal opionion and how i name my stuff. as always do what you like and feel comfortable with.):
i usally would choose at least modname_defname as the actuall defname for all things to avoid mod conflicts. i usally choose name letters before that too, so i take sd_power_ ... for my power mod. reasoning behind it is: the game identifies all stuff by there defname. so if there would be another mod adding in your case a thing called "NSA_Rifle", the mod loaded as the last one in the users mod order would be the one the thingdef section is used for the nas rifle. so it would not show two, but one item. this can cause problems if one mod uses some specific characteristic one NSA_Rifle has and the other not, but is needed for it to work properly. it could have no erroer, but the other thing is you probably want both things ingame if you used the two mods. so to keep your mods compatibility with other mods this naming. the bit of another small benefit is, that if an error shows up with a thingdef your mod adds. you get the modname and the user knows its your mod which causes the problem. if he has a bunch of mods installed, this can clear up the process for him finding the problem and for you to get an error report with a potential conflict. so that is why i prefer to name stuff like that personly. it can still happen, but chances are much lower with that method

an option in the modlist menu to move the selected mod to the top/bottom (or like 10 places up/down if thats easier to do).

if your using a lot of mods and need some specific load order for some, its a pain to move them around. and with steam mods its not really an option to do this via xml editing, since it just shows the numbers in the mod config.

have all my stuff postet here now: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=26276.0
(this topic is an old one.)

i'm glad you like the mod

as for the power it was at first a mod for myself to do some kind of endgame power options. so thats why it only has the advanced ones. so yeah steam would not fit that bill necessarily^^ fun thing is that i just thought yesterday when working a bit on adding solar panels, if it wouldn't be an option to add some low tier tech options to have the similar divison between medieval (more industrialisation for this mod), industrial, spacer like techlevels. since this is kinda the techadvancements i choose for most of my mods.

the thing is that from a gameplay perspective this is hardly worth it. you can research electricity so fast, that building such low tier tech is not worth it. the other point is there is already the generator ingame, the one you power with wood. so it would require to overhaul quite a lot of the base game to be a viable option other then just cosmetic. the large base game changes i usally not like because it limits your mods compatibility. so yeah it would probably not happen in the near future for that reasons. (and i'm working on my other mods too)

if you want to see your conept ingame you can:
1. do it yourself or
2. you can try the call of chutullu/lovecraft storyteller mods. they add a bunch of industrialisation age style stuff from what i have seen in the pictures. i haven't played with these myself, but from the thematic perspective adding such powersources there would probably fit better and make more sense. maybe ask the author if he plans to add such things.