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It would actually be pretty easy to mod this in by making a custom storyteller and using the scenario editor. Each of the storytellers has a desired population that they try to steer you toward. Randy Random doesn't care until you reach 50 people, so if you want to make a huge settlement, Randy is the best choice since he doesn't care that you have so many.

I really do agree with you in principle; I just worry about the complexity of these production chains.

What RimWorld grains would be usable for beer? Or would I need at add barley to the game?

I'm very much of the opinion that less is more; making two dozen kinds of alcohol from their corresponding real life ingredients is a project for modders. What I would suggest is removing hops and allowing players to make generic "alcohol" from rice, potatoes, corn, or strawberries. It simplifies the supply chain even more than what we've got at present, and it makes intuitive sense.

If you want to make it a little more complex, you could keep the above system, but use hops and add a grain for making a mid-tier beer, and add grapes for making high-tier wine. Add a cooking skill requirement for the better stuff. If it were up to me, I'd keep it simple, and let the modders make the fancy variety stuff if they want.

The more people you have, the less each of them matters individually. Rimworld's stories are largely about individuals rather than civilizations, so keeping the numbers down lets the narrative focus remain on individuals.

No.

The idea that storytellers use only (or even primarily) wealth to determine how to scale threats is a myth.

This is nonsense, at least for alpha14.

You do realize that the person you just quoted is the author of the game, right?

Shhh... it's funny watching him tell Tynan to reverse engineer it.

I like the idea.

The price you pay for being invulnerable to outside attack. Pick your poison, I guess.

People who say that it's free if it doesn't cost resources are forgetting about opportunity costs. Time is money in any setting where you can generate money by spending time doing stuff, and Rimworld is one of those settings. Just make it so that repairs take long enough that fixing things isn't more profitable than the huge number of other ways to make money in this game. Repair kits or patches are an inelegant solution to the problem when you could balance repairs simply by making them take long enough that it's no longer the best way to make money.

This person is definitely on the wrong amount of drugs.

I think making a needs-nulling rule like that would go against the spirit of the 'complex, emotional simulation' basis of the game. People are gonna fall in love with their cows and chickens like they do their coworkers, it happens. That's how vegetarians/vegans are born.

This is basically just modern sentimental bullshit. Best friend growing up had a farm, they raised cattle. No tears were shed when it came time to butcher them. It takes work to anthropomorphize something like a chicken, and the idea that my tribal colony would suffer psychological trauma from butchering chickens is ridiculous.

The anecdotal example on why this is just 'modern sentimental bullshit' is appreciated, but as someone myself who was raised on a farm and then taking from it a disgust of the practices became vegan, it happens more often than you think. And isn't this game set in the future? Wouldn't humans in-game be more modern and progressive than us now?

Anyway, I'm not saying the odds are high that every cow becomes a loved one when you're a crash-landed labourer trying to survive, right now bonding is perhaps too frequent, but it happens, and I'm glad it's represented in-game. It adds complexity to the game's underpinnings, beyond some min/maxing function-assignment simulation. So hopefully we see it balanced.

Sarcastically dismissing my anecdote so you can present your anecdote. Super.

As for farms being the source of vegans, I'd say it happens less often than you think, since veganism is markedly less popular in the more agrarian parts of the country. Best places to find vegans are urban centers with lots of upper middle class white kids.

The game is set in the future, but that doesn't mean anything about what people's attitudes are. You seem to be assuming some sort of inexorable march of ideology (presumably your own, since that's how people like to pretend those things go) when reality isn't anything like that, and Rimworld is explicitly a setting full of isolated planets with huge variability in technology, culture, etc. I'm sure there are planets full of people who would be pushed toward a psychotic break from slaughtering chickens, just as there are probably planets full of cannibals or whatever other weird thing you can imagine, but there's no reason for it to be a standard feature of all of your colonists to react this way. Maybe throw vegetarianism in as a trait that gives mood debuffs for eating meat or slaughtering animals.

As others have already pointed out, there are ways to make alcohol out of just about anything you can already grow in the game. Hops just make it taste better. I'd rather not see time wasted on putting in two dozen varieties of alcohol (leave that for the modders), but having any of the basic crops as a suitable ingredient for fermentation would be a good change. Hops could just let you make a better one, in much the way that you can make simple, fine, or lavish meals depending on the number of ingredients.

I can't tell if this is some kind of avant-garde performance art or if this person is just a freaking idiot.

Then it is per definition Art !

I hope I never reach the level of pretentiousness required to look at the trainwreck that is the first post in this thread and say to myself, "Yep, that's not actually stupid."

All of their posts are like this. It's like somebody scrubbed this forum along with a middle-schooler's D&D campaign and fed the results of both into a Markov text generator.

I think making a needs-nulling rule like that would go against the spirit of the 'complex, emotional simulation' basis of the game. People are gonna fall in love with their cows and chickens like they do their coworkers, it happens. That's how vegetarians/vegans are born.

This is basically just modern sentimental bullshit. Best friend growing up had a farm, they raised cattle. No tears were shed when it came time to butcher them. It takes work to anthropomorphize something like a chicken, and the idea that my tribal colony would suffer psychological trauma from butchering chickens is ridiculous.

I can't tell if this is some kind of avant-garde performance art or if this person is just a freaking idiot.

Having it remember your settings is good, but it definitely shouldn't be enabled by default.

It's more rewarding for players to have a "click here if you're a badass" button to turn it on instead of a "click here if you're a wuss" button to turn it off. It's the same button either way, but this is a dumb quirk of human psychology that's worth paying attention to.

Kind of like how car insurance used to cost $X and if you got into an accident it increased to $Y, until somebody figured out they could just charge $Y to start with and tell people who hadn't gotten into an accident that they were getting a special discount down to $X for being safe. And if you got in a wreck, they'd "forgive" you by not increasing your premium; you'd just lose the "bonus" and be back at $Y. It's the same damn thing either way, but people react to each system very differently. Another example: a few years back a car company (I think it was Ford?) had a "special deal" where everybody could use the special employee discount, which in practical terms means "we don't have an employee discount anymore."