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Really like these ideas. Wish there was a way to upvote, or something.

Woo! Thanks, this bug was keeping me from using this mod, which makes underground building a LOT more convenient.

is this a bug?
an emu has 100% aggressive but a cougar only 10% ?

No, Emu's are aggressive son's of b****es.

And apparently it's possible for an unarmed human to intimidate a wild cougar into backing down. I mean, I wouldn't want to try it, but there are videos of people doing it.

[requires]

Late to the party, but I'll give my feedback to the OP.

1. Should the game have a such a thing as bad luck outcomes that's not induced by some obvious, non-pressured, voluntary player decision? Or should I make a universal design standard that nothing bad ever happens unless the player actively induces it or makes some clearly-traceable mistake to cause it?

Yes, bad luck events should just happen. But understand that players, even those who understand this, are going to be angry when they occur. We want to win. Adversity along the way is interesting and helps to generate a good story, but at the end of the day, we want to see a story of triumph. Losing colonists hurts, emotionally, tactically; I think maybe losing colonists should be one of the very few things that requires player fuck-up. Note, a colonist who's basically incapable, like less than 50% capable in vital things, is essentially the same thing as losing a colonist for many players.

2. Should I just ignore some classes of player feedback as simply not linking up with what RW is? Are some players worth leaving alone to try to make a game that's different from the usual assumptions? Even if it leaves them pissed off because they intepreted a story generator as if it were a skill test?

Yes? I mean, you should read it, and if a particular strain of feedback becomes prevalent enough, take a moment to rethink what you're doing with RW; I'm not saying you should cave to feedback that disagrees with your goals, but if it's strong enough, just take a moment to assess if your goals are the best ones; if you decide they are, move on. Like, I'm always going to keep griping about melee combat; I do not believe melee should have parity with ranged combat. I believe it should be very situationally viable. So you should probably mostly ignore those parts of my feedback, unless there starts to be a strong enough strand of agreement with my points. Then reconsider, decide, and move on; Maybe drop a note saying that you thought about it and what your decisions were based on.

3. Should players be able to consistently avoid losing people/resources even at high difficulty? At any difficulty?

People, mostly, yes. Resources, not so much. If the goal is to keep people playing until they're satisfied or bored with a particular colony, which I would assume it is, then you want to avoid things that will induce rage-quitting. Losing a valued colonist is the easiest way to do that. (see my point about what may also count as 'losing' a colonist in my response to #1) Me personally, I would be okay with considerably longer recovery times so long as it kept me from losing colonists entirely. When you read a story or watch a movie, a named, developed character dying is a Big Deal^TM (unless it's horror; then it's just part of the countdown). I think it's the casual, random fuck-it-all of losing a valued colonist that triggers the rage reflex with people. A tornado just ripping right across a pawn, a meteor hitting them, a one-shot head removal. That shit hurts and it makes people want to just quit a game that might be otherwise going well.

4. Is there a way to set expectations (relative to the whole game, or relative to a given difficulty level) to encourage players to accept some degree of randomness to game outcomes? Or will they always reject this randomness and demand to be rewarded in accurate proportion to their skill/effort?

Just doing what you're doing, dude. People are going to expect what they're going to expect, and there are limited ways for you to change that. Some people are absolutely here for the completely random death-and-destruction, others want to be rewarded for optimal gameplay with perfect outcomes, and others still want a more balanced approach. All three types of people are going to come play Rimworld, and give feedback, and probably a couple more types besides than I'm not thinking about.

We're here for the game you're designing. If we disagree with your choices, we'll either mod them out, accept them and adapt, or we'll move on. I don't consider myself a hardcore player by any definition, but I've got just shy of 400 hours in Rimworld; if I quit now, that'll be about 7.5 cents per hour that I paid for this game, and that's a hell of a return on investment; some games I really, really enjoyed (like AC: Black Flag, for instance; random piracy FTW) are considerably more expensive games in comparison.

There is always an option to arrest them. I pick my warden and arrest anyone who has annoying or dangerous mental brake in wrong time.

This reminds me of a gripe I had with my last colony. Chemical binge, trying to keep my dude from getting addicted to yayo (benefits aside, I think the downsides are bad enough that I don't mess with anything stronger than beer or smokeweed, and even then I try to keep it below addiction) so I go to arrest him; He berserks, no big deal, just have the entire rest of the colony mob him and beat him down with fists. Usually no harm, right?

Not this time.  He ded.

It's happened a few times, not enough that I'd call it common, but even as seldom as it has happened it feels like too much. unarmed fighting against your own pawns should have nearly zero chance of death. Not completely zero, but less than currently, for sure.

-Rename Char ITab to Story.

Not sure this makes sense. Their skills/traits are not a pawns story. I liked "character" or "char" if those are no good then "skills" or "traits" would be better than "story" in my opinion.

Would like to throw my vote behind 'traits' or 'pawn'. Story and char don't feel right.

All of Fluffy's mods have already been updated for 1.0 (though I read a comment saying that the most recent push has broken Work Tab)

But yes, I think most of Fluffy's mods need to be integrated into Vanilla.

dritter: For now, possibly try adding colonists to the pods later on. 1.0 allows you to add or remove things, so that'd probably be a good workaround to the problem; you'll just need to ensure that you leave enough room for them to fit.

Not everyone enjoys relieving a dramatic\tragic and interesting story, constantly hanging over an abyss. Some enjoy building and managing a damn colony (it is posed as colony manager) and trying to make it a successful, rich city, with kinds of goods, many people interacting with each and etc.

So save extreme, naked gruesome death for those who want it. Some actually like to have a "decent start", instead of a wreck you have to pull on a hair to drag from a pit of misery and failure.

Dude, that's what the lower difficulties are for. I deliberately chose a scenario beyond Naked Brutality, but played it on Phoebe Medium, and am thriving. I'm not even that good of a player; at best, I'm middlin'. The basic Crashlanded scenario with medium or lower difficulty should still offer basic challenge for those who want to build a big base.

There's no point trying to argue about research from a real life perspective - obviously a random person from our society (an industrial civilisation) would know barely any of the techs, not even complex clothing or furniture. Who could turn raw materials like stone and steel into a refrigerator? I think putting these things behind a research barrier is better for gameplay.

The only concern I have is being able to survive a heatwave - this really does necessitate researching a cooling tech which may be impossible without a decent researcher in many biomes.

Wanna address the first part real quick: While we shouldn't expect this game to mirror 'realism' exactly, it's still always a thing that should be kept in mind, because games like this are always a little bit about suspension of disbelief. You're going to have to accept some things are true in order to tell a compelling story. But there's also a point where suspension of disbelief gets to be too hard, and it's often the tiniest things; You'll be fine with dragons or FTL travel, but a leather shirt shrugging off shotgun blasts is the thing that's going to get you. So don't dismiss 'realism' arguments entirely. It's short hand for 'feels right/wrong' in context, and what feels right or wrong is very important when you're asking people to suspend disbelief.

Regarding heat waves: Crashlanded now has access to the passive cooler, doesn't it? An arid or desert environment makes them considerably more expensive, but they're still available. In anything but the hottest environments, I've managed to generally just tough heat waves out without one, though; Everyone's miserable, and always on the edge of heat stroke, but they're survivable. Where trees are available though, they're actually really effective, and I've recently become a convert, instead of just trying to barely survive.

I do think that overhead roofs should have a greater effect, but I think Tynan would have to rewrite whole swathes of the code to make that work, and I doubt it's worthwhile.

You should give melee another whirl though - It's in a really good spot especially post shield belts.

I didn't say my reasoning was smart, it's just where I'm at right now.

The naked brutality scenario exists and it's doable. You can even be stuck with a pawn incapable of violence and it's still doable

Read back a few pages, and you'll see I tried something even harder than Naked Brutality, and aside from one early, rather funny, backfire, it's going well enough for me; original pawn (after my first got kidnapped and left me waiting for randoms) was incapable of research, firefighting and cooking; Now it's three pawns, doing relatively well.

It is a bad move because it makes good researcher mandatory at the start as a crashlanded. Yo already need a good shooter (because shooting is a way to go), a half-decent brawler (because now you HAVE to cover your shooter), a good cook (or you'll spend half of the time vomiting and botching any work), a good constructor (or you can't build a lot of thing you really need and botch a ton of materials). If you want a mountain start (and 1.0 is heavily weighted in favor of mountain bases), you also need a capable miner.

Absolutely none of that is mandatory. I like a good shooter, a good medic and a good social; Everything else is optional, based on how I want to play this particular colony; I try to get a good mix of stuff, but research, even now, is still one of my lowest priorities, and melee has always been, and continues to be, even in the newer paradigm of considerably stronger melee.

Even industrial-age+ colonists crashlanding on an unknown world aren't going to know how to build all of this stuff from the get-go; It's honestly a kindness that we have electrical engineering. I'm a pretty technical dude, with mechanical and electronic experience, and I couldn't build a generator, cooler or heater without a lot of time spent figuring out how. The fact that I have a basic understanding of principles and a solid idea of what's possible puts me head and shoulders above a primitive tribesman, but I'm not going to have the knowledge from the beginning; And chances are good that a random sampling of 2 other people aren't going to, either.

So while I do some research, I go primitive. I hunt only as much meat as I can reasonably eat in a couple days. If I have even a half-ass farmer, I farm. If I've got nothing but shitty farmers, I still farm. Research is more important than it was, but it's still quite doable without it for quite some time. This feels real, this feels right; It's always bugged me how quickly a random bunch of strangers can build a high-tech colony, so moving away from that is a good change.

yeah anything that makes melee not a joke option sounds pretty exploitative to me!
...
but that is the beauty of this forum, you can write whatever you want on balance without the knowledge to back it up

See, your first line is truth to me. Your last line is not, but it's also kind of irrelevant to my purposes. It's not how balanced or not it is that bugs me. It's the fact that it's intended to be balanced. (melee vs ranged, that is, and only firearms, really; you're not going to be using bows in melee range.) Tynan's going to make choices I disagree with, this just happens to be one of them; So with that in mind I have to accept that and try to give feedback that helps with his goals, while continuing to make my stance (I mean, sure, as one of what, thousands of players?) clear. He'll either keep it in mind as a representative opinion, or he won't; either way, I'll try to give him useful data, same as you.

[But I also feel like these kinds of incidents are too amusing to give up.]

The last time I had a caravan ambushed it was by one, 6 year old rooster.. with a bad back.. and two scars.
https://imgur.com/a/SzlW3Ni
He was as delicious as he was foolish.

On some level it feels a bit like a bug. We could set the minimum threat higher. But I also feel like these kinds of incidents are too amusing to give up.

Second this. If circumstances can randomly combine into a situation much more difficult than the sum of their parts (and they can) then sometimes it's nice to have these comically weak 'threats', and stuff like lightning strikes hitting individual rats, and other random-ass silliness. Rimworld can be a pretty grim game at times, so having stuff to laugh at is nice.

Just a minor observation from my last game play session on Tainted clothing. I've gotten away from the whole side of things where it should be saleable; I just leave it on the corpse most of the time. But I was playing a modified naked-brutality start, and had a nude colonist strip the clothes off a corpse, thinking that it was better than going nude, right?

Nope. Nudity is a flat -6. Pants and shirt of tainted clothing is -5 each. It just seems odd that a pawn would rather be nude than wear tainted clothing; a flat -5 would be better, IMO.

Also, so a bit story: I decided, just being masochistic (I'm not normally, but I figured I'd see what happened) and tried a beyond-Naked Brutality start that I'm calling "Exiled to Die". It's naked brutality with a tribal start (so lowered research speed and less original tech) no visitors or trade caravans, no wanderer join event, increased recruit difficulty (50%); Oh, and a raid half a day after you arrive. I wasn't completely masochistic though, and played on my normal difficulty, Phoebe Medium.

I was doing okay, got a basic shelter (found a building with one gap, so all I had to do was build a door) and built a butcher table and was working on a stove with a deconstructed steel wall; No bed yet because  textiles were hard to come by, but I was working on it. Then the raid shows up. Dude's got 15s in both Ranged and Melee, where my girl's got like... 5 melee. He beats her unconscious easily, snatches her up and leaves. I'm like, 10 minutes into this game. So I say fuck it, and open a browser window on the other monitor and leave it running. I get another raid (the usual early one you get) who smashes the butcher table and stove, breaks a couple walls, and leaves. Crashed pod; bleeds out. Finally, Krueger shows up, being chased by enemies. He grabs the club my original colonist left behind, and manages to beat his pursuer to death.

Now, Krueger's a fucking mess. Mostly he can't cook, research or firefight; luckily the structure was stone, as there was a lightning storm that burned everything north of the building before the rain showed up. He's chemically fascinated, and isn't especially good at anything, but he's able to farm (badly) and forage, so he's eating raw berries, rice, and corn from a drop pod. An escape pod crashes, friendly! Fucker walks off after eating my food for most of a week. I let him, because I don't want to risk angering his faction. Finally a hostile drop pod comes, and I'm able to recruit her after an agonizing amount of time. She's able to research, so I get started on furniture, with advanced clothing up next; Electricity just seems painfully far away, so I'm not even bothering yet. I finally got a third when I captured another drop pod (and angered her faction right after taking up a nearby peace talks with them, oops).

Textiles are really hard to get early on, without refrigeration, because I hate to waste meat and meals to spoilage. My strategy is to get veggies as they rot very slowly, and only make a few meals at a time, unless there's meat, because meals spoil more slowly than meat. I only hunt small animals, and grab prey from the pair of panthers trotting around (well, until I managed to leg one of them when it started hunting my colonist; Still managed to fuck up all three of my colonists after I got sloppy with my pathing and it caught up to her; but then I had panther meat for a while) I tamed a single llama so I could get wool. I forgot they don't give milk anymore, but the wool allowed me to finally make bedrolls and clothing, once I finished research for it. Refrigeration is still not on the horizon soon, but I've learned to appreciate the passive cooler during two heat waves. Winter was mild since I'm in a year-round-growing region (completely randomed; the only thing I chose was my original colonist, fat lot of good that did me)

At this point, I'm feeling okay. Raids are still weak because I'm frankly pathetic; Manhunters are kinda crazy common, but either I get free meat, or everyone gets cabin fever until the animal falls asleep. The new predator hunting alert is weird, because half the time, the predator has moved on to closer prey before I even find it, except the one time mentioned above; but overall, I appreciate it. It's telling that, on my normal difficulty, a scenario designed to make Naked Brutality look easy, is still doable; Had that original raid not been an RNG'd no contest, I might have been able to still have my original pawn, but now everyone else is standing up under her exile curse fairly well, (though they're probably confused why no one seems to like them); And honestly, that feels right to me.

I like to play this game on Intense/Rough with permadeath, but I sometimes do Alt+F4 thing when important pawns were killed.
I know it basically render playing the game with permadeath meaningless, but sometimes I can't resist myself from doing this.

It doesn't render it meaningless, it just softens the impact to somewhere above save-scumming. Unless the death was right after a savepoint, you've just lost up to 24 hours of progress, which especially in the early-mid game can be quite a lot of progress; Also if anything random but good happened during that period (you got a drop pod of uranium, for example) then that's gone, too. It's a choice you make; Lose the pawn, or lose everything else? I've chosen to lose pawns because it just wasn't worth it to lose everything else.

Pawns with food poisoning should take bed rest. Now they are going to field work and when it gains severity they are downed and need rescue.

This reminds me: Would it be possible to change the terminology between bed rest and sleeping? It's minor as hell, but I've had points where I've 'argued' with a pawn who keeps trying to 'rest' in the middle of the day because I didn't realize some infection or illness had kicked off and they needed treatment; I just thought they decided to go to sleep at 2 in the afternoon; Since I sometimes have pawns decide to get up at 3 am and go play chess, I try to regulate their sleep cycles by keeping them up if they're just a bit tired.

Differentiation between 'bed rest' and 'sleep' would help to make it clearer why the pawn is trying to head to bed.