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That said all of the above is only valid on the actual game. A mod is immune to any consideration other than the suggestion of child pornography and it would be a stretch to get masturbation in rimworld to meet that requirement.

I know I've said it multiple times, but I'm still interested in an explanation for how masturbation could possibly break any laws that "lovin'" in the game would not also break.  Short of modding younger characters, new art, or some other thing OP's mod doesn't do I don't see how anybody could possibly make such a case.

Either Rimworld is breaking the law right now, or it isn't and therefore the mod couldn't be.

it should be noted that america, mexico, canada, most of europe, japan, korea, and shockingly china have extremely brutal limits on content showing actors or suggestions of actors below the age of 15. Even if you have an actor who is older than 18 portraying a 14-year-old and that character engages in sexual acts on screen it constitutes child pornography in all of those countries.

Interesting, and very bizarre considering what is allowed.  Still, the law quoted here refers to "persons".  That law as written can't apply to Rimworld, as pawns are without question inhuman (they are literally aliens, and I've yet to meet a person on Earth that can haul an adult elephant unaided).  It would be hard to make a case even against the Sims with that code, though I could see why devs would want to avoid being too near that line, way more risk than reward.

It's not blocked. It's just not being distributed through Steam. Ludeon hasn't put in extra code in the game to prevent that mod from working, which seems to be what some people think. It's simply a mod that they do not wish to promote or host.

By "they", are you referring to Ludeon or Steam?

If it's the latter it's both less surprising and suggests the title of OP is mistaken.  Steam management is worse than just hypocritical, though that's certainly still an accurate assessment of them.

The precedent is that the game's creator doesn't feel like having THAT PARTICULAR THING in his game, so has blocked THAT PARTICULAR THING.  His feelings on other aspects are utterly irrelevant.

If he wanted to make a game where torture was encouraged, while blocking atheism, he can.

The only precedent here is that the creator is blocking things he doesn't feel should be in game.  full stop.

Just to confirm, it's Ludeon doing this and not Steam?  It's a hypocritical practice regardless (Steam is on record for objectively lying about its censorship practices and wildly inconsistent enforcement of their non-stated rules so I would not put this past Steam).  In fact if you asked me to guess who would block this mod in advance of seeing the thread I'd first suspect Steam, because they have an extensive track record of hypocrisy and lying.  Ludeon being so openly hypocritical would be surprising in contrast.

Regardless, we're talking about explicitly blocking a mod, not about choosing what goes into the default game.  A mod that is legal under any standard the game itself is legal, that at worst violates a social norm (as if burning people to death doesn't violate a social norm).

Sure, Ludeon/Steam can do this, just like they could "block atheism" in Rimworld.  I'd have the same objection in both cases, or even if they blocked the inclusion of poodles because reasons.  It's necessarily arbitrary enforcement and when that is practiced the sensible response is to trust the person/organization/whatever doing it less. 

It's both within rights to do it, and also within rights to denounce objectively hypocritical choices as such.

*ahem* Keeping gory comics, with a lot of brutal scenes, isn't a reason to send you to jail basically in any country.
Keeping japanese doujinshi comics, with completely fictional underaged women with lolita complex in them, is a reason to send you to jail in many states/countries.

I don't know every country's inane laws.  For any country with that nonsense on their books, Rimworld would already be illegal regardless of the mod (minors can do "lovin" in vanilla), so the mod would not change anything.  Unless there is a country that legally accepts depiction of sex but not masturbation?

You have never dealt with governmental regulations. Do you think they exist in a world of logic and planning? HA.
If you notice pawns in rimworld are never younger than 14. There is a reason for that. Regulations are weird random and the people who enforce them give exactly zero shits what you intended or not.

You've moving the goalpost.  I don't think anybody is surprised to hear government regulations are arbitrary nonsense.  That doesn't change the point of what you quoted.  If "masturbation" would be a violation, so must be vanilla Rimworld's "lovin".

Regardless, the law quoted above isn't relevant.  Rimworld characters are not "persons".  They are not real.  That is why you can make one sponge 30 bullets from a rifle for fun or forcibly remove organs until they die w/o consequences.  If they were "persons", doing these things would get you a life sentence at minimum in most states/countries, regardless of their age.

Simply put, it's Ludeon's game and they can decide what they will and won't allow in their game.

Nobody in this thread has said otherwise.  OP is making a case that restricting this mod is hypocritical, and that assertion holds.  Whether or not you care in this particular case, this is a demonstrably hypocritical situation because any credible standard applied to block it should also block vanilla mechanics.

I don't care about the mod, but I do care about the precedent.  Dishonest moves lose trust.

There are lots of viable designs, ranging from heat traps to melee to the usual "forced no cover spot with concentrated fire, limiting how many raiders can be there at once".  These can all struggle vs infestation/drop pod raid/siege/sappers, so you will still need some micromanagement/control of drafted pawns to defend properly.

In short: Not a single industry professional in their right mind would go anywhere near this shitstorm. And this is only the legal aspect of it, not moral or ethical issues.

It might strike some as surprising, but Rimworld characters are not "minors" no matter what number you put next to them.  They are not real people, nor are they depictions of real people.  In vanilla there isn't even a difference in appearance between characters vastly different in age.

On legal grounds there's nothing relevant to this thread.  If there were, the vanilla game's "lovin" would have the same issues because you can have someone 25+ sleep with someone who is < 18.  In the strict sense, this would violate anything the mod allegedly violates.

There is also no viable moral argument against fictional characters in this context either.  I'd probably extend that to in general, but certainly for Rimworld.  That's doubly true in a game that allows slave trade, organ harvesting, and outright murder (sometimes against the player's will!).  I'm not seeing how anybody can come up with coherent reasoning that a 16 year old getting shanked through the eye by a steel knife until they die is somehow more acceptable.

I see no reasoning masturbation that adds anything to the game.  You can just pretend that's what "meditation" means and get the same practical result.  Doesn't make a gameplay difference.  However, there's also no reason to flag this mod, OP is correct to call it hypocritical.

Wouldn't sarcophagus in freezer keep the body preserved until you secure the serum?

I, for once, like infestations as an event. To make it more interesting, you could use "OneSpot" mod to allow multiple pawns stay at the same tile. It gives melee characters an edge when swarming someone, so choke defense becomes harder, since you can't kill insects by tanking just one at a time.
It may be masochistic, because I also like high hills and mountain biomes.

If you allow stacking to this degree grenades become a pretty ridiculous weapon!  There are ways to have AI clump this way in vanilla (the vanilla stacking rules are a bit bizarre) but the timing is hard.

Oh, that is indeed a world of difference, very different from that time I got a person who mined a tile too deeply gibbed w/o counterplay in beta.  That sounds even more generous than the drop pods, I can see why bbqftw is saying they're easier now.

Were infestations changed so that they don't spawn-tap you?  Even in the late beta you could be instantly attacked by a couple scarabs appearing on a pawn, and they'd slow that pawn too much for it to escape the rest.  That's why I've still avoided mountains on the off times I've played Rimworld 1.0...dangerous as drop pod mechs/pirates could be they never instantly erase a pawn w/o counterplay so I preferred them.  If infestations no longer do this it's a whole different evaluation.

Sorry, hang on.  Did you just say no one enjoys the industrial mid game, but then complained that the game lacks depth now?  Personally, I think the game only really gets interesting once you hit the spot where you're actively choosing research to improve your colony, and you have the sustainable base to be deploying multiple caravans at a time.  Sure, I'd love for some more interactive events in the late game, a higher density of choices, but that's a criticism, not a complaint.  Please don't act like you speak for, you know, the *entire player base*.

There are two ways do deal with games that have extended "won" late games.  You can add a lot more game, which is expensive and difficult to manage, or you can shorten the end game.  IMO Rimworld didn't need advanced components or extra techs near the space ship.  By the time colonies can sniff that stuff they're established and stable.  Even on merciless game over is very unlikely at that point.

When you think about what makes Rimworld interesting to play, it's tough to reconcile that situation into something that matches the early-mid game.  I'm not sure why the slowest part of the game was extended without a substantial overhaul to the decision-making and pacing of it.

It's true that incentives in the game are incongruous/inconsistent with some design intention statements. 

In particular, the mental breaks/risks from taking hits mean exposing yourself to pure RNG on high difficulties.  Some of the more recent mental breaks further distort incentives...pawn going wild is particularly ridiculous/punitive especially while colony is still small.

The implication is to win fights while taking minimal or no damage to your pawns.  Efforts have been made to remove strategies that do this or make them more expensive, but there are still several ways to defeat raids on merciless with no damage consistently w/o big investments or end game tech. 

1-10 effectively claim that the player should manually monitor the map and do tedious, false-choice inputs to hedge against a threat.  This is in contrast to the overwhelming majority of threat/benefit events in Rimworld and does not add anything of value, unless you consider manually panning the map constantly to have value.

Complaining about spam when suggesting that players should hunt predators isn't self-consistent.  If you actually kill the predators, they won't spam you.  Given this is exactly the argument presented against the notification, it's strange to make a complaint for the same solution.

Predators hunting colonists isn't a frequent thing in friendly biomes, not sure what you're on about there.

It's true that the end game grind for uranium and advanced components sucks.  At least you can caravan to the AI ship and call it a day, though I usually just consider an established colony a won run.

^Rimworld is a lot less random than you might think if you know all the events and prepare/invest properly.  For the purposes of comparing finish times or completing a narrow objective minimizing RNG is the correct choice.

120 days is a short timeframe for research and especially for gathering uranium.  Is the AI ship disabled (presumably the "escape ship" means that)?  If so this is certainly an optimization challenge, though I expect resources to bottleneck worse than tech if this isn't tribal.