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If you have a good crafter, making cotton for him to work with makes financial sense.  But why are you guys forgetting about Smokeleaf?  *Everyone* can make them, and at 11s per 0.01kg it beats everything - even silver.  In fact, now that I think of it, why am I even selling it?  Everyone buys it, you can store 11x the value on a single tile... I should be stockpiling joints and using them to buy what I need.

And seeing as there is no interstellar DEA, why are joints so valuable?

I too am a fan of selling joints.  They just have so much going for them, and I feel they're a little bit exploity.  Here's why.

1)  It's easy.  Joints are labor-intensive, yes...  but it's bottom-rung unskilled labor almost anybody can do.  If you have a Grower with 4 skill (and I hope you do) and anyone physically capable of crafting and hauling then you can start your own smokeleaf farm.  Unlike most other options which require some level of skill, the barrier to entry to begin cranking out joints is so low you have to be careful you don't trip on it.  Even tribals can do it from day one.

2)  It's free.  The only cost to setting up a smokeleaf farm is space - You need space for the farm, space for the stockpile, and space for the crafting spots.  So, roughly the same as for any industry.  However, you need nothing else - Other industries might get you more money for the work unit, but other industries also require things like power or steel or components to even start them.  It's hard to go wrong with free.

3)  It's convenient.  Joints might as well have 'legal tender' written on every one because every caravan will buy them.  You can use them in place of silver for most intents and purposes.  Again, you can make more money per work unit by selling armchairs or parkas or even corn I hear, but it's much harder finding someone to buy it.  With joints any old caravan or trader who shows up will be happy to relieve you of them until they run out of silver.  This makes it very easy to amass huge sums of silver for the things you really want to buy.

4)  It's useful.  You know what one of the nice things about having tons of smokeleaf on hand is?  Mental breaks aren't that big of a problem anymore.  I forbid drugs to everyone so they don't burn through my stash, but I can authorize a hit or two in the event someone's on the verge of a breakdown.  This gives me a nice bonus while pursuing economic security that most other crafts don't provide.

I've yet to find another good money-making method that offers as much as smokeleaf does.  It might not be the best option in every single category, but unlike other trades which have advantages and drawbacks (beer has to be climate-controlled, armchairs and clothing tie up a high-skill pawn, corn is hard to sell, flake/yayo need expensive drug labs, etc) smokeleaf only has one drawback - high labor time - that's easily mitigated by the fact it's something all but the most useless colonist is capable of helping with.  All in all, it just seems like the best general choice for economic independence.

Before I respond, I'd like to say this should probably go in the Suggestions forum.

1)  Dry thunderstorms are a huge hazard on smaller maps.  You can minimize their impact by choosing to play on a larger map where they're less likely to strike near you and can't turn as much of the map into a moonscape before the rain arrives.  If one of them strikes near you, anywhere near you, it's best to try to put it out IMMEDIATELY.  For ones that've had time to spread, fight them like you'd fight real fires - You can't put out fires faster than they can spread, but you can use Clear Plants to create firebreaks.  Fires can only jump one tile in my experience so a two-tile-wide firebreak should stop it from incinerating your base.

2)  My only issue with mental breaks is how they often make the problem worse.  The bonus the pawn gets from catharsis is canceled out by the penalties from not sleeping, not eating, sleeping on the floor, being naked, and all the other stupid things they do.  This can then lead to them immediately having another break.  Pawns who aren't suffering an extreme break should still sleep and eat.

3)  I like the idea of not using expensive medicine on small stuff.  Perhaps sort injuries by the amount of damage inflicted by it (minor, major, critical) and diseases by severity (chronic versus fatal) and be able to assign a different level of treatment for each.  I'm not going to take the same steps for a bruise or a scratch as I am for a gunshot or a missing limb.

4)  Supported.  If you don't want to implement multiple carry and dynamic switching, perhaps simply have guns with bayonets on them that modify melee damage.  Not as effective as a proper melee weapon, but better than using your hands.

There are no bad colonists. There is a colony manager, who can't find a niche for them in the colony

I see your claim and raise you an Abrasive Chemical-Fascinated Pyromaniac Convent Child/Sheriff.

I suspect it's more that you remember the really terrible colonists.  I've started dozens of colonies and still remember the two or three times I've gotten truly useless people who are either social time bombs or literal time bombs.

An 'estimated travel time' indicator for tiles clicked on in the World screen would be nice, so you can see about how long it would take to send a caravan to a place without having to actually form a caravan first.

How did your frozen potatoes catch fire, exactly?  And how did a potato fire cause your entire colony to enter a death spiral?  There has to be a funny story here...

No.  They can however hit friendly pawns in proximity to the enemy.  Make sure your pets and melee folks are well clear before you open fire.

When I'm looking at power systems to implement in my base, reliability trumps everything.  I want to make sure that the things I need to work are going to work when I need them to, and as long as the short circuit event functions as it does I definitely want to minimize my reliance on batteries.  So when I look at solar vs. wind, I ask myself which one is going to more reliably power my base.

On the surface, wind power seems more reliable - Solar power is shut down by nighttime, inclement weather, and eclipses, while wind always works.  But where wind becomes unreliable is in the quantity of power it produces.  When my solar generator is running I know exactly how much power it will produce at peak.  I have no idea what my wind generators are going to put out at any given time.  The lower cost of wind generators is offset by the increased need for batteries to make sure things keep working when the wind dies down.

I'd say wind is the weakest power source right now because of its wildly fluctuating output.  If I absolutely need something to run, I'll use geothermal generators or fueled generators, since those always work.  For general power consumption, solar power works fine.  Wind, though?  Wind is what I use to top off batteries, if I use it at all.

Or just the ability to consolidate a stockpile.  Watching 400 smokeleaf joints take up 15 stockpile spots instead of 1 makes me sad.

Because games have rules you're always going to be able to cheese them somehow, as long as you understand those rules.  The idea of getting better at the game is to be less reliant on them and learn to play the game as intended, and then find even better and more creative ways to break things if you're so inclined.  Don't like the penalty for wearing dead peoples' gear?  Find ways to get your own, better quality, self-produced gear into the hands of your colonists so you don't need to rely on dead people for clothes, or find a way to off-set the penalty with some positive mood bonus if you absolutely have to.

Avoiding convent child/sheriff like the plague, kill pessimist/too smart on sight, and since the drugs update, chemical fascination.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but it's starting to sound like you are avoiding getting better at the game by reacting to things that don't line up with exactly what you want for your colony. That will always get you frustrated in a game like Rimworld. I don't recall the covenant child trait but sheriffs usually have very good combat skills. They can be very useful as a hunter/fighter in a larger colony. You may or may not want them in a smaller colony if you already have good fighters, but my point is that it's situational.

Convent Child means they can't attack.  Sheriff removes almost every ability except attacking.  This is a near-worst-case scenario for random backgrounds, since the resulting pawn can barely do anything at all as the only skills they can possibly have are Animal and Art.

I had a self-tamed boomrat get into my storage, chug an entire bottle of beer, overdose, and explode right in the middle of the stockpile.  I'm glad I didn't lose anything important - That would've detracted from how funny it was.

Edit:  Just had my other self-tamed boomrat (I got two, how lucky!) eat an entire brick of yayo with similarly predictable results.

Did you know a single stockpile tile holds 400 smokeleaf joints?  Even with over 1500 of the things in storage to sell to passing trade ships, only once have I ever seen a full stack.  What could be stored in 4 tiles is instead scattered across 20-25 tiles because of the lack of organization.  Would love to have a way to organize this stuff a little better.

Instead of making it its own subsystem then, why not make it into traits?  Something like this:

Glutton:
This colonist is always hungry and has put on a great deal of weight as a result.  Their excess weight makes them slow, but they'll last longer without food.
- Always has Fat body type.
- Increased hunger rate (150% of base).
- Movement speed reduced 10%.
- Malnutrition progresses at half speed.

Waif:
This colonist eats very little and maintains a small, fragile frame as a result.  They consume less food, but can't take as much damage and suffer from malnutrition very quickly.
- Always has Thin body type.
- Body part hit points reduced by 10%.
- Decreased hunger rate (66% of base).
- Malnutrition progresses at double speed.

If you really wanted to be thorough you could also have weight loss modifiers based on the job they're doing.  Sitting around idle would have a low weight loss modifier, as would largely-stationary jobs like researching and crafting.  Some jobs would be middle of the road, like hauling or cleaning.  Active jobs would have much higher weight loss modifiers - Farming, construction, plant-clearing, and especially mining.  Traits could even factor in, with traits that affect movement and work speed also affecting weight gain/loss (so an Industrious Jogger would be more likely to be slim while a Slothful Slowpoke could get fat even doing an intense job).  For super bonus points, Heat-Lovers get hungry less often (as their bodies don't produce as much heat) while Cold-Lovers get hungry more often (because theirs produce more heat).

I do disagree with fat people having a movement speed penalty.  Most fat folks I see walk just as fast as their slimmer counterparts.  It's running that's harder.

Those are some pretty tough questions Friend...

"How many eyes does the average person have?"
Does the third eye count?

"Earth has how many moons?"
This is widely debated in the astronomical community.

"How many days are there in a week?"
That depends which calendar system you use.

"What is the powerhouse of the cell?"
The cell in biology, or Cell from Dragonball Z?

"What is two + two?"
In what base number system?

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