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It would be nice if we got a second reminder of approaching caravans when they actually reach your territory too.  On a large, mountainous map if often takes a geologic age for caravans to get to you, and I occasionally forget about them until the announcement comes that they're leaving and it's too late.

If you have an AI core, you can "promise cake" to a colonist which will give a temporary mood buff which will eventually wear off and give an even worse mood debuff when the colonist realizes the cake is a lie.  A way to sort of borrow against mood tomorrow to deal with a critical mood problem today.

Potted plants shouldn't reset when they're repositioned.

I don't have an issue with trade beacon areas. You can select the beacons and it shows the area, it also has the capability of making a stockpile in the zone of the trade beacon. Which is very handy and saves a couple steps. I set up multiple trade rooms no problem.

I create giant refrigerated warehouses and then try to cover the whole building with trade beacons.  It's a pain in the ass trying to figure out if you've got every single space covered since the coverage is circular rather than square and you can't see the area of the other trade beacons while placing the next one.

A variety of crops of each of the different types, each with their own unique advantages and disadvantages.  For example:

Corn becomes...
Sweetcorn: Grows faster, requires more to make kibble than meals, requires better soil.
Maize: Grows somewhat slower, but produces more per plant, requires less to make kibble and more to make meals, grows in poor soil.

Potatoes become...
Potatoes: Grows better in cooler climates, grows quickly, produces the most food.
Sweet potatoes/Kumar: Grows better in warmer climates, grows more slowly, produces less food than potatoes.
Yams: Grows best in tropical climates, will grow in very poor soil, but produces the least amount of food.

Rice becomes:
Rice: Grows best in tropical weather, average yield.
Wheat: Grows best in temperate weather, very high yield, but requires good soil.
Oats: Grows best in cold weather, low yield, produces less human meals, but more kibble.
Triticale: Very hardy, will grow almost anywhere, in any climate, in any soil, but requires huge amount to make human meals and much less to make kibble.  Ideal for animal fodder with the benefit that it can be used to make human food in a pinch.

Haygrass becomes:
Grass hay: Grows in cooler climates, requires better soil, grows faster but with lower yield.
Alfalfa hay: Grows in hotter climates, requires less fertile soil, grows slower but with higher yield.

Berries become:
Berries: Grow in wetter, cooler climates, require better soil but have higher yields.
Nuts: Grow in warmer, drier climates, will grow in less fertile soil but have lower yields.

What the hell am I supposed to do with this thoroughly useless character?  I didn't ask for him, he just joined.  Now he sits around all day playing with the animals and eating food.  I guess I could harvest him for organs.

But after a while they would want their own room.

Possibly add a "gregarious" trait which gives people an improvement to mood when they're sharing a room.

- Charnel pit: I shouldn't need to dig graves for the rotting corpses of animals and hated enemies to avoid freaking out the colonists.  A charnel pit should have a HUGE beauty penalty, and should be large (2x2 or even 3x3), but should be able to hold an infinite number of corpses.

- Reinforced doors: The possibility of building stronger doors at the cost of a single unit of steel.

- Tarp walls: It should be possible to build yurts, tents, and teepees with walls constructed of wood and leather, skin, or cloth.  These would be extremely flimsy, of course.

- Planetquake events: Currently, all you need to do is stick a one-space pillar every 10 spaces and you can roof over the world.  It would add another wrinkle to think about if walls could randomly collapse during a planetquake event, forcing people to make 2x2 thick pillars for better safety and/or closer-spaced walls to avoid ceiling collapses.  It would also make mountain bases much more dangerous -- as they should be.

- A toggle for displaying areas covered by trade beacons.

- A way to expell a colonist from the colony.  To make it a little more interesting, give them a possibility of joining a hostile faction and later arriving to raid the colony.

- A way to release an animal without killing it.  Trying to get rid of self-tamed boom* animals is a pain in the ass.  Alternately, slaughtering tame boom* animals shouldn't make it go off.

- Tide turbines in deep water (installed from shallow water) as a way of generating electricity in coastal areas.

- Advanced meat-growing vats to allow production of meat without animals, requiring an animal (or human...) corpse to start the process.

- Short-range blink gates to allow teleport from one part of the map to another.  This creates the possibility for bases spread out across the entire map or even completely sealed-off mountain bases.  As a balancing factor they should require a lot of resources to build, a high amount of research to blueprint, a colossal amount of power to run, and a breakdown might leave you trapped inside your base -- perhaps lethally so if you can't tunnel your way out before you starve.

- Tasers, sticky foamguns, and tranquilizer dart rifles for capturing rather than killing raiders, animals, and berzerk colonists.

- Leghold traps to immobilize animals (making them easy to hunt or capture animals -- though captured animals would have broken legs) and temporarily immobilize raiders.

- Allow disassembly of walls and floors at map edges.  I can understand why you aren't allowed to build there, but why not allow disassembly of what's already there?

- Grand piano as a joy structure, giving bonus joy to artistically-inclined colonists.

- Respirator head-gear to reduce the chance of acquiring disease or requiring treatment for asthma.

- Buffet table which can be given bills to serve as movable meal-serving station to reduce travel time to and from food storage facilities, and which slows food spoilage slightly.  An electric-powered hot/cold buffet table would slow food spoilage still further.  Eating from a buffet would also count as eating at a table.

- Vermiculite as a minable resource which can improve soil fertility.

- Catapult/trebuchet as a low-tech, early-game alternative to mortars, with rubble and blocks as ammo.  Would also allow sieges by tribals.

- Alphafrogs which can swallow a single pet or colonist whole on a successful special attack.  Kill the alphafrog within a few hours or they die.  (Jungle and temperate only.  Arid and deserts get identical alphatoads.)

- Chainmail hauberks, cuir bouilli vests, and suits of wooden laminar to go with the swords, maces, and spears.  Useless against firearms.

- A "tools" item (consisting of a variety of implements such as a hoe, a wood axe, scythe, a pick, and a shovel) which can be equipped as a (very poor) weapon, but give a speed bonus to planting, harvesting, digging graves, chopping wood, and mining.  Wooden version gives smaller bonus than steel or plasteel versions.

- Smelting rocks should have a small chance of producing steel, uranium, silver, or gold.

- A bookcase which can be used as a joy-producing item, but can also act as a repository for a single skill.  A bill can be added to either teach it a skill or to learn a skill.  A colonist adding a skill can teach it up to one level below his or her skill level in that specific skill.  So a colonist with 15 doctor skill could teach the bookcase up to level 14.  In turn the bookcase could teach another colonist the doctor skill up to 14.  Maximum allowed skill would depend on the quality of the bookcase.  Masterwork would be required to teach up to level 19, the maximum possible.  The rate of skill gain rate should be slower than by practice, for the sake of balance, but allows you to educate otherwise idle colonists, and without wasting resources.  A successful colony might eventually have an entire library of high-skill bookcases to bring new colonists up to speed.

- Funerals.  We already have weddings and parties, why not funerals?  You could even allow them for pets.  It partially offsets grief debuffs.  Requires the construction of a grave or sarcophagus.  Alternatively, at the cost of some wood, you should be able to construct a funeral pyre which acts like a one-use incinerator and allows for a funeral, then eliminates the body.

- Boxing ring and/or dojo mat.  They require a lot of space, but act as a joy producer for physically-inclined colonists.  As a side benefit, colonists who end up in a fistfight will do it in the ring/on the mat and result in half as much damage (so neither of them is downed and there's no chance of someone getting beaten to death).

Normally the first thing I do when starting a new game is kill and butcher any pet which can't be trained to haul stuff: cash, grass, or ass, no one rides for free.  But wargs have me undecided.  Technically they can be trained to haul, but they're so difficult to train that iit'll be geologic ages for it to happen, all the while wasting the time of your trainers every day.  On the one hand they're handy in a fight, but generally you want your pets out of the line of fire anyway.  And while they will feed themselves without your help, the down side is they'll murder every animal near your base, making it a real chore to find anything to hunt for yourself.  They won't eat kibble so you can't just confine them to base.  And more than once they've eaten a boar or fox I've been trying to tame.

So what's the consensus?  Are wargs worth it?

I play Phoebe on Basebuilder which is, according to what I've been reading in the forums, part of the problem.  It reduces the probability of raids, but still has the same number of random events -- which means you are much, much more likely to get a malaria event.  I'm not even playing jungle, just temperate, and I'm still getting reamed by malaria.

I think this game is being dropped by you because of poor planning, not unwinnable conditions. 

Translation: git gud.

You realize that not everyone who chooses to play this game will be a min-maxing sperglord who researches mandatory non-obvious preparations for events they have no idea are even possible, and which will result in a game-over when the happen, right?  A large part of the charm of RimWorld is the variety of play styles and development paths which are (or rather, appear to be) possible.  Random, roving, lethal diseases out of the blue with no warning and no way to avoid them will feel like pointless developer schadenfreude to people who don't make a career of playing Roguelikes (ie/filthy casuals).

I'm guessing you enjoy Dark Souls.  Yahtzee loves the game, but refers to it as being "repeatedly kicked in the bollocks."  I hate Dark Souls.  With a passion.  My life is highly stressful and plentifully filled with unwinnable scenarios against vastly more powerful enemies.  I play games to get away from that.  I was under the impression that RimWorld offered the possibility for casual play.  If that's not supposed to be the case, then I should probably stop playing.  But I think it's rather more likely that, like every developer forum on Earth, those most fanatically attached to the game are the "git gud" types constantly pushing the developer to make the game harder and less forgiving.  I'm not a lesser species of human because I have no interest in being repeatedly kicked in the bollocks in my off time.

You're right that impossible odds shouldn't happen in a game, that's poor game design.

The reason I ended up in this thread is because I did a Google search for dealing with malaria in RimWorld.  And that's because I'm about to abandon my current game as unwinnable.

I have five colonists.  I have 18 units of medicine and about 500 units of herbal medicine.  I have two colonists out of five with 10 medicine skill and I thought that would be plenty.  They both got malaria at exactly the same time.  I've tried going back as long as three days, but they always get malaria on schedule, so I'm assuming you get the disease long before it shows up.  So 2 out of 5 colonists have malaria, and the highest medical skill I have other than them is 2.  So I put them in a clean room with nice beds and force them to stay in bed.  (The first time through they ended up killing themselves by constantly getting out of bed to treat each other.)  Even keeping the room immaculate, even building the one hospital bed I can make with 18 units of medicine, they die every time.  Every.  Time.  I scrub the floors the instant they get dirty, I give them only the best food, and no matter how many times I reload, they both die. 

And the worst part is one of the doctors also has a high animal skill, so all the load-bearing animals in the base (wargs and bears) which took forever to train are bonded with him.  When he dies they all go berserk and murder the whole colony.  The only way to avoid that is to slaughter all my animals.

So no matter what I do, the best possible case is losing all my animals and both of my doctors and being reduced to three colonists who can't treat injuries and can't train animals.  That doesn't seem right.  I don't mind a game which is harsh but fair.  I do mind a game which feels like it's being deliberately trollish and putting me into no-win scenarios.

The game is supposed to be deadly.

Yes, but it's a GAME.  In the real world random, unavoidable things happen and there's no chance of escape, no hope of survival.  You wake up one day with lymphoma or a necrotizing fascitis and poof, you're dead.  I've played Roguelikes for a long time and beaten NetHack a couple of times.  I don't mind if a game is vicious, but it shouldn't be unfair.  You should never be put in a position where a random number says nothing you do will make any difference.  Otherwise, why bother playing?  I could just flip a coin and say if it comes up heads I win, then not even have to bother loading it up.

Jumped by a timber wolf while disassembling a spaceship part, bitten to death before anyone could get to him.  Suddenly his two pet wargs back at base go completely gonzo, having telepathically discerned that their master is dead.  Before I even have time to react, two more colonists are dead, sending their pets into a frenzy, and now I have a swarm of wargs and grizzly bears roaming the halls murdering my entire base.

I reloaded because fuck you.

Olive trees provide opportunities nothing else does right now.  First, they can be harvested as wood if necessary, but they can also grow olives.  Olives are useful as food in and of themselves, but it should be possible to build a press (hand-cranked and electric-power hydraulic version) to make olive oil.  The reason olive oil is important is it should be possible to process it into plastic, and the plastic combined with steel into plasteel.  This allows you to move from neolithic to space-faring technology without the need for trading.  The press would be useful for making other things too, like cheese from milk (properly pressed cheese would remain edible a long time, like pemmican), and whiskey from corn.