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Yep, the next update is going to have configurable opacity as well as update frequency.

I'll be doing it either with a setting in the mod config menu (from options) or a right click menu on the button itself. The latter is nicer but the former is faster to implement so probably end up going with that.

Awesome! Yea, I don't see any issue with that implementation. You won't be changing opacity that often anyway. Not sexy - but functional. Very Rimworld

-Stigma

But i think when there are powered traps, there should be an extra research for safe traps.
This give you "safe" powered traps, with 95% trap hit chance for enemy, and 5% hit chance for colonist.
You could say, everyone got a NFID chip-amulet that show you the traps you arn't an enemy and they can't get triggered. These 5% is still there if you forget or lost your chip-amulet.

Sure, it's not unreasonable. I'm not sure I'd rely on that for anything but a 0% chance to hit my colonists though...
Also there might be some issues when raiders learn trap locations - and all the tiles into your base are covered by traps because you didn't need to leave a path. Then they will avoid all entryways totally instead - and break down your walls instead - because the pathing algorithm really hates stepping on known traps.

-Stigma

@Britnoth How does your replace walls function differ from JT Replacewalls? Aside from yours being a seperate tool that is.

It would be nice if it could override doors too, because you typically change those along with the walls.

-Stigma

1. It is almost 6 months older. 

2. It does not use any detouring. It just adds the build on walls flag to the existing wall def, and adds a tool that places wall blueprints on existing walls. Very simple.

3. Really? The game only has the 'build on existing wall' flag, which is why it is limited to just walls. I rarely replace existing doors so felt this wasn't a critical problem...

Well, thinking critically about it - I guess it is highly situational in practice.
I guess I use non-wooden doors mostly on defense, and past the early game you don't swap around materials on those very often.
It's not critical by any means.

JT Replacewalls is ever so slightly more convenient for not having a seperate tool you need to use - but if this is done in a more compatible way then I prefer that. I don't need this functionally THAT often. It's mostly just nice to now have to micromanage it those few times that I do.

-Stigma

AWESOME mod - so simple, but so useful.
Yet another "this should have been in vanilla" type of mod with no downsides to speak of.

I do however have one thing I'd really like to see - and hopefully it is not too hard to implement:

Problem: I'd like to play with heatmap on all the time to be able to tell that something is going on before it becomes bad (like all my compost getting ruined because I forgot to build more passive coolers as tribals). heatmap is great for seing the problem - but usually it is too late by the time you check it. Unfortunately the effect is very strong - and it makes it hard/uncomfortable to look at the details in your rooms.

Solution: Add a copy of this effect that is the same but with maybe 25% to 50% (hard to guess without seeing it) opacity so that you get some rough indication of the heat level to warn of trouble, but not so much that you can't just comfortably keep it on always.

Suggestions on how to implement (in order of what I think would be the ideal implementation):
- Make the button a 3-toggle, so it just cycles the 3 states, off, normal, "light". Unless a 3-toggle is hard to make in this framework this seems like the obvious solution.
- Make the button pop out a menu you can select the state from like "cleaning area" mod does. You can probably just rip the relevant code from that project (with the authors permission obviously) to use here if it is non-trivial to implement. Not quite AS intuitive as a 3-toggle, but still easy to use, and then you could even include a few different opacity levels so users can adjust to taste - so this is a definite boon worth considering.
- Make a toggle in in-game mod menu. Cumbersome, but workable. At least doesn't need a restart.
- Make it an editable value or switch in some XML file. If all else fails...
- Make a "light" version of the mod. The nuclear option - but probably the simplest of all in terms of changes since I'm guessing it's changing a couple of values in the dll and recompiling (I'd be happy even with just this though )

-Stigma

I've looked forward to a good trap-mod for a while, but being honest I won't use this as-is.

Primarily because the traps seem completely unbalanced. If I remember correctly, last I checked this the spike pit for example is really cheap but does an absurd 250(?) dmg. That ought to one-shot anything basically. The balancing is completely off compared to the baseline set by the deadfall traps.

Secondarily I don't feel like the mod adds enough diversity. When all the traps seem to mechanically just be deadfall traps with different stats that is just boring, and there is only so much you can do with that - basically only variants on dmg and materials  - and if it's going to be balanced there aren't going to be so many combinations there to make it interesting.

These are just my personal opinions and they are meant as constructive criticism only.
I said a lot of the same things to the guy making the recent "traps plus" and IMO he's starting to do some pretty impressive stuff although there is a long way to go before I'd consider it polished. Consider looking at those ideas, maybe even collaborating or at least talking to share some tips about how to do the technical stuff. His additions so far of certain traps that don't need manual rearming, different damage types, traps with debuff effects, traps neding electricity ect. all add a lot more factors that you can combine into cool (and balanced) traps.

-Stigma

Is there a way to disable colonists from triggering traps like floor spikes?  I edited the "Buildings_Security_SpikeTraps" file to this:

         <MaxHitPoints>200</MaxHitPoints>
         <WorkToMake>400</WorkToMake>
         <TrapMeleeDamage>100</TrapMeleeDamage>
         <TrapSpringChanceEnemy>1.0</TrapSpringChanceEnemy>
         <TrapSpringChanceColonist>0.0</TrapSpringChanceColonist>

I even changed a multiplier setting "trap spring chance colonist" to 0% in the game settings.

Even after that, 4 of my colonists still triggered the spikes and killed them lol.  Any help would be appreciated.

You should simply make sure that there is always a path (including diagonals) to each trap. As long as there is - pawns will never step on traps willingly (since A17). They will if they are "forced" to - ie. if the only way to get to a trap (usually to reset it) is to step on another trap.

So a checkerboard-pattern for example solves this.
Protip: if you make the "safe" tiles slow to move on and the trapped tiles fast to move on relatively (make floors under traps) then enemies are much more likely to "want" to step on trapped tiles in a checker-board pattern because they think it's faster.

-Stigma

It's an issue with how the multiplicative factors work.

high quality is a large multiplier on insulation.
well-insulating materials is another large multiplier.
combine these together on a high base item and you get absurd values - much more than you could ever need 99% of the time.

The range of values should probably be truncated a bit and moved towards the middle, especially on the high-end.

Then again, as you say, rimworld biomes in the extreme range so high and low than these unrealistic values sort of fit...
-Stigma

If you just want fuses - get "RT fuse"
Reasonably balanced costs, both makeshift fuses that blow up when "used" and later on advanced fuses that merely need to be reset.
You need many of them if you want a large battery bank, so it doesn't totally trivialize the problem IMO. Backup banks, separated circuits ect. are all still good ideas a lot of the time.

In vanilla, an option is to simply disable this event in the scenario editor when you start the game. It's not a competition ... play Rimworld however you think is fun.

Or, the micro-intensive way to do it is to only construct conductors under stone stuff (walls and floors). It doesn't prevent the event, but limits the damage a lot. IMO this gets tedious after a while though. Personally I use the mod.

-Stigma

Seems like a oversight/balance issue in that mod for the most part - to be able to re-camp without moving that is.
Otherwise, moving around and long-distance hunting seems fine - but also not terrible effective use of time unless you are truly desperate (and if you are you are probably in an extreme desert or ice-sheet where neighbouring tiles are unlikely to have many animals if any).

-Stigma

If you start tribal but run into heatwaves almost immediately then that's tough because the only tool you start with is the passive cooler (the passive cooler is actually quite strong though).

If you have to make due though:
- Build passive coolers inside until comfortable 32celcius or less.
- Only go outside to do critical food-jobs like planting and hunting (or to get the small amount of wood you need for coolers)
- Reverse your schedule to sleep in day and work at night, when it is significantly colder.
- restrict zone to not wander too far from safe inside area. Pawns are more likely to seek shelter automatically and sucessfully.

- Rush towards complex clothing. Trying to get coolers fast is hard for tribals, and it only replaces pasive coolers which already work fine indoors. Complex clothing to make  dusters and cowboyhats (or other hot-clime clothes with apparello or fashionrimsta) is much closer on the tech tree and will let you remove or severely reduce the heat impact outside (a set is like +18 heat insulation using a 100% material, bringing comfortable temp up to like 50celcius even with mediocre materials. Just keep in mind that leathers vary a lot in how much they insulate. Cotton is great if you remembered to plant some early - I always do for tribals in hot climes).

- Don't let people go idle if they are forced to stay indoors a lot during the heatwave... research tables are cheap, and every extra hand researching will make you reach complex clothing faster to be able to get a long-term solution for heatwaves.

You should be able to get complex clothing before you experience more than maybe 2 heatwaves at worst. After that you should be able to function mostly normally (maybe initial and minor heatstroke) outdoors. In the longer term, upgrading your clothes with materials with premium insulation properties should bring your tolerance up so high that anything short of the most extreme deserts should be a piece of cake.

A handful of leathers insulate well, cloth is a decent 100%, and the best stuff is in various wools (and synthread if you can find it).
-Stigma

@Fluffy (or anyone else who can answer)

Is there any way of re-ordering the colonists? (I'm not just talking in-game, if I have to change a file or soemthing that's fine as long as it's not super risky over too complicated).

I notice that whenever you for example have to arrest&release them due to a mental break the order gets screwed up and the guys you used to have at the top go to the bottom (not on the colonist bar though, but on the worktab).

Mah OCD man ... can't .... take it ! ^_^
-Stigma

If you were going to expand on the meal system then I think a good thing to add would be some sort of "taste fatigue".
If you minmax this game then the only logical thing is to do a total monoculture and only make 1 food.

But how long do you think it would take you to go crazy only eating 1 thing?

I'm not saying you should be too harsly punished for have no meal variety - but a small negative for "no variety" and a small bonus for "good variety" would be cool. I think the game tracks what ingredients are in each meal, so you don't necessarily have to add a lot more meals for this. A lavish meal with rice and boar meat is different from a lavish meal made from corn and rat =P

Just give us a small game-mechanics reason to not minimize the food system and actually use some more crops and such.

-Stigma

Hmm ye you are right - there may be some exceptions to "floor only" dirt that acumulates over time like this.
Unfortuantely I can't find any "remove all dirt" devtool to use for that.

It is well known that playing on the largest maps has bad performance issues though. I generally would not recommend more than 300x300 personally. Beyond that the map gets so huge that it becomes impractical for your pawns to really travel those distances anyway. More is not always better

I think the first mod i mentioned does clean up some sort of dirt and debris (in the homezone I think - you should read the description). You should try how it works out if you temprarily set homezone to the entire map and run that mod cleanup. Maybe that will save you from having to manually clean the whole map - because that seems very impractical to do in anything but the super super late-game when you have more time and manpower than you need.

-Stigma

As far as I know - dirt can only be created on floored areas.
natural soil and ground can't be "dirty" because ... they are just inherrently dirty. You can't clean dirtiness of patch of dirt =P
So I don't see why this should help - unless you have a very very large base (floored). Dirt probably adds some load, but it should only affect floored areas as I said. I keep hearing that it is the social system that is the big slowdown to the system, particularly in the late game.

If you want to run the game fast and smooth - especially in the late game, I would recommend you check out one of the well known performance optimzer mods:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=31990.0
That one is fairly "gentle" and just tries to clean up useless data for the most part. It still makes stuff go much faster, especially the longer you have been playing the game (because data acumulates and start slowing the game down the more years you play).

There is also one called "make war not love" and it goes and rips out the entire social system from the game in order to get a massive performance boost in late-game. If you just don't CARE about social stuff and you would rather want to play a megacolony with 50 colonists then that one is for you...

-Stigma

This matches with what I've observed - but it is very useful to get some raw numbers on it to back it up.
Very cool man!

One of the things I was trying to figure out was if optimal walkways around your base would be diagonal - but it seems Tynan correctly factored in (aproximately) how much longer the diagonal is. Also, I guess it's a viable strategy to lay out junk to slow down enemies. Build some stone floors and deconstruct them and forbid the bricks to leave 1-2 bricks pr square and halve enemy speed. I guess you could build some cheap stools or something too, but that's potential cover. In any case, halving speed is very useful to knmow about from just simple items.

It means you definitely should be careful about keeping walkways clean, make sure rooms are not covered by one big stockpile ect. so people can walk around in there.

-Stigma