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Alright, I want to preface this by saying that Rimworld is by far my favorite game, and I've got over 1000 hours playing it in steam.  So, my suggestions come from the point of view of someone wanting to see an incredible game be even better.

To be honest, when I heard that the consensus was that Rimworld didn't need to model water I was shocked.  Rimworld is a survival game, based on meeting needs.  And the big three needs are food, water, and shelter. 

I don't think rimworld needs z-levels , although I wouldn't mind a simplification (say, 3 levels total, to represent flat ground, elevated areas and ditches) , but adding water would add the potential to add a great deal of interesting content and decision making to the game, especially now that we have the ability to move on the world map.  With the detailed biomes that Rimworld already has, it wouldn't be that hard either -- just calculate where the water table is (or if one even exists)  on any given map (for wells), how to collect rainfall, and whether any lakes and rivers existed.

Currently thirst is , I suppose, abstracted away in the hunger stat. This would make sense if thirst behaved like hunger, but it doesn't -- one can go hungry for much longer than one can go thirsty and still survive, for example, and how thirsty one gets depends more on external factors like temperature and work load than hunger does.  Currently people go nut pretty quick if they don't eat.  With water added, it would make sense for pawns to be able to go longer between meals, but not between drinking.  You would have biomes where water is easy to get and food is difficult, and vice versa. 

Water also has interesting interactions with food production, animal behaviour, defense, and electrical generation (IE, if we had rivers water wheels would be a first tech solution for tribals getting electricity).

In short, I think adding water would add a lot to the gameplay, while making RimWorld more in sync with the genre it represents.

Ken

Justs wanted to chime in, I've seen this behaviour also in my current game (which is using multiple colonies (unsupported) , so who knows what is going on).  A tamed caribou in zone that also contained a kibble stockpile, starves rather than pathing a half screen to it and eating.  In my case,  the path it could use was only a few tiles wide, maybe there's something going on with pathing in A16?

First of all, it's incredible how great this game is, especially given that it's developed by just a couple of people.
I voted for an incremental update (16.5)... and yeah  , I'd be fine with it being on the beta tab.  But so many sytems were put in place in v16... I think an update solely based on refinement is fine.  But, I don't use mods, FWIW.

On the subject of AI sub-optimality:
It's jarring for me when the AI makes decisions that seem really bad, so if it's easy to fix them I think it's worthwhile.

I'll just give one example:  If I tell a pawn to go pick up the contents of a crashed cargo pod on the other side of the map, once he gets there he aggregates multiple stacks and carries back what he's capable of , which is great.
But, if the same pawn is loading a launch pod that I'm sending to another colony, he will instead walk over to my corn field where I just harvested corn and take a separate trip for each tiny stack. 
I expect this is an oversight, I'm just giving it as an example.  But, if it were intended to balance launch pods, it would be a bad way to do so because:
1) it's inconsistent (pawns behave smartly when hauling, but less smart when loading)
2) it takes us out of the space of 'being in the game' because the loading is occurring in a way it never would in reality
3) it forces one to be gamist in order to work around it... making sure that everything is hauled from the field before launching the cargo pod.

Ken

At this point, I've played much further and so far have no issues.  Looks to me like deleting an unneeded map from the save file is an effective way of working around this issue (out of memory error when attempting to save).

Ken

Yeah, I took a look at your save file today, it's human readable xml.
There are separate entries for each colonies, I counted and verified that my previously abandoned colony wasn't one of them.
So, I loaded up a save w/o the problem, abandoned another colony, and saved that.  Hopefully that will free up enough space that things can go forward. 

Thanks!
Ken

Hey,
I'm way into a vanilla A16 multiple colony game...I've been trying for the 'reach the spaceship' ending by building multiple colonies 66 hexes apart on the way there.  And now I've hit the known issue where the system gets an out of memory error when saving the game, which I suppose happens because the serialization process runs out of memory due to having too much stuff to track. 

I currently have 4 colonies active, one abandoned.  I know all of this is unsupported

I'm wondering whether going back to an earlier save and abandoning more colonies before proceeding might help -- does abandoning a colony reclaim its memory footprint?   Also, do abandoned colonies count towards the 5 colony limit?

Or, I could just wait for A17 and start over   Please advise.

Best game ever, by the way!

Regards,
Ken

First time poster here, but I have hundreds of hours logged with this game.  I always play Randy Extreme, crash survivors.

In A16, I decided to forgo the 'build a spaceship' win (succeeded with it once in A16) , I am currently trying to win by reaching the hidden AI spaceship.
What I've done is to turn up the max colonies to 5, and I am trying to win by establishing a series of colonies 66 map tiles apart (max drop pod range) on the way to the ship, which is far away on an ice sheet.  I've got my second colony pretty much well set up, and I'm about to start my third.  So far I've managed to stay in temperate forest zones but I'll soon have to cross harder climate zones on the way to the goal.

Colony 1 just has a skeleton crew harvesting wood for chemfuel and growing corn behind very good defenses;  I regularly export to the second colony to keep the wealth down at the first.  I'm still doing all my research at this base.

Colony 2 has most of my colonists, and just got its base built out , and also has 2 muffalo and 2 dromedaries in case I decide to use an actual caravan.  It's gearing up to launch my best 3 colonists to begin establishing colony 3.  Colony 2 currently relies exclusively on thermal generators (2 of them) for power.

Looking at the map, colony 3 will also be in a temperate zone.  I don't know yet whether the performance hit from running 3 colonies simultaneously will force me to abandon colony 1.  I also don't know whether abandoned colonies count against the 5 colony limit;  if they do I will have to complete part of the journey with caravans, which I'm avoiding because I hear they are buggy and the drop pods are pretty easy.
This way of playing is super fun;  splitting up your colonists allows for easier recruitment at each base and also keeps raid sizes down.

As an aside, I just got an infestation on map 2, even though I was careful not to dig out any underground areas -- I just constructed against the edge of the mountain, except for a few single tiles here and there which I'm pretty sure I fully replaced with stone walls.  I thought this was impossible!  I guess I'll go back to my 'construct a huge unused unlit area in the mountain for infestation bait' scheme.  Fortunately for me, it happened in an area with no active pawns and I was able to relocate turrets for a good killzone and bait out the bugs.

Ken