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Interestingly, in my last few games I've come to loathe thrumbos.  The first thrumbo to come through invariably sets up in my fields for a few days and eats all the crops.  And that's even in a forest biome where there are plenty of trees to eat.  Since it's early game, I'm not equipped to take on a thrumbo so there's nothing I can do about it.  It's like blight, only slower and more unicorn-like...

Try walling off your fields. Neutral animals won't enter your doors.

Early game.  I don't necessarily have walls up for anything but a freezer at that point.  Walling off crops is a long way down the priority list.

Rimworld needs a larger vocabulary.

This.  We just need more possible events in general, IMO.

If we just bully Tynan into adding more events, many of them are going to feel repetitive. Events are more fun if they make use of some new systems.

What we could do right now is think how to make some old events more relevant. How could we make players care about trees ? Thrumbo / Alphabeaver war, pick your side ?

In general I think it's too easy to wall off and build a fortress. Too easy to build, too easy to maintain. But that's not all. There aren't enough incentives to see sunlight. The map is not interesting. No fishing, minerals can be mined and forgotten about. Farming doesn't use all that much space, and farms can be completely walled off.

Interestingly, in my last few games I've come to loathe thrumbos.  The first thrumbo to come through invariably sets up in my fields for a few days and eats all the crops.  And that's even in a forest biome where there are plenty of trees to eat.  Since it's early game, I'm not equipped to take on a thrumbo so there's nothing I can do about it.  It's like blight, only slower and more unicorn-like...

I think manually replacing walls is currently very unfun. Try building initially out of wood then replacing it with stone. It takes a lot of micromanagement. Not only you have to designate some walls for deconstruction. You need to prioritize hauling wood left, because otherwise your constructor will haul wood from stone blueprint one by one, and go for 5 stone after hauling each piece of wood. If you deconstruct everything at the same time, roof will collapse. One more thing you need to oversee.

I agree.  There would need to be a task that deconstructed and rebuilt wall blocks in small sets as part of the game mechanic if the above were to be implemented.  The way deconstruction and construction are ordered now would cause too much micromanagement to be fun in the current scheme, as you point out.

The title of this thread made me think of something else. Small groups of builders can build ridiculous castles in Rimworld because walls don't need maintenance. I think walls should gradually lose HP, not max HP, just HP. Especially after rain, storms and other harsh weather.

I like the idea of weather damage a lot.  And I'd be pretty happy with walls only losing HP rather than max HP as long as there was a resource cost to repair back to full.

If baseline HP (max HP) degrades over time with repair, it would have the effect that player would have to MANUALLY replace all walls at certain intervals.

Yes.  The real question is whether that would result in an interesting/fun additional game play element.

My opinion is that it would add a new element to the game because the player would have to weigh the risk with weaker walls due to damage vs replacement costs in materials and pawn time.  It adds an additional element of randomness to the threat from enemies since the storyteller (I assume) would have no knowledge of the repair condition of your structures.  So what would otherwise have been an ordinary raid becomes a fight for survival because part of your defensive structure is still battle-damaged from the last encounter.  And it means construction skills remain important throughout the game, rather than having their usefulness decline sharply once a base is complete.  I am also speculating that the game re-balance that would be required with this mechanic would allow raid sizes to scale up a little slower and extend the length of the mid-game some.

On the other hand, it might also add a frustration factor because the player has to keep spending resources and time on rebuilding the same things rather than expanding.  That might start feeling repetitive and dull.  Without being able to play the mechanic, we're all just speculating about how it might impact our personal play styles.

Maybe just make it so animals don't like nearby gunshots and run away ? That would be natural, and no specific command would need to be added.

This would also add a new dynamic to hunting, as animals would scatter at the sound of gunshots.

Aerial, the advantage of a seed number or a 'magic phrase' is that it can be trivially posted on a forum, in a text message, on a wiki etc. It's the ultimate form of compression. A file can contain all that, but is awkward to move around. For example for me this forum is notorious for not accepting file attachments and I have to use third party intermediary websites like sendspace to attach savegames for bug reports.

Understood, but I was taking "seed" to mean a random generation seed.  If that means you could hit "randomize" until you got three colonists you liked and there was a single seed value you could then save off, that would satisfy the functionality I'd like to have.  But I was assuming you wouldn't have a single seed value because you had individually re-rolled each colonist.  That's why I was looking for a save file that I could use to recreate those three colonists' attributes.

I'm not sure if the OP's suggestion covers this, but rather than being able to save a seed that generated those three random colonists that happened to be good ones, I'd rather be able to save my three starting colonists in a separate definition file of some sort. 

I've landed on a couple of maps that were just unworkable... boreal forest three quarters covered in water, for example... and it would have been really nice to be able to generate a new map and import my starting colonists again.  And, per the OP's desire, you could share those saved colonists with others.

+1 as well.  This would also help give your not-highest skilled doctor useful things to do.

Different leather names vs merged leather types appeal to different people. People who are excited by new functionality and new possibilities (like me) prefer to only have types of leather that actually differ. On the other hand, some people are excited by leathers with different names and different colors. But it does lead to awfully large stockpiles and inability to craft pants if you have 49 raccoon leather and 1 mufallo leather. People who worship names and colors love to download mods that add 20 new plant types that are virtually indistinguishable.

If it was up to me, I would merge meat types too. Because functionally there are 3 meat types: animal, insect, human.

I would merge stone types, and add new craftable resource: paint. You would build walls out of generic stone then apply desired paint on it.

I agree with merging meats, but leathers have different colours. Perhaps combine the different leathers of different animal types by stats, but keep them separated for crafting. Then labrador hide and Yorkie skin would be functionally the same but have differing colour. Rhino hide, bearskin, thrumbo leather etc would all be tougher than others, while rat skin, hare leather and other small critters would be weaker but lighter. etc

I also disagree with merging stone types. I dislike that Minecraft did this from the start. Different stone has different properties; slate is brittle, granite is hard, limestone weathers easily and marble is very soft. This means the stone types you have from the start actually affects your playstyle of that colony. If you don't start with marble, you can't as easily make a living from art sculptures. If you don't start with granite, you'll have weaker stone walls and be more susceptible to sapper attacks. If you don't start with slate, good luck finding something quite as nice as the black walls that slate offers.

The more unique resources (with their own uses) there are in the game, the better, imo. It would be even better if biomes had some resources specific to them, too. This encourages more specialisation in terms of playstyle and gives more incentive to spread out and settle other supply colonies to gather resources from nearby tiles. This all, of course, requires more uses for these resources, but I'm sure there are hundreds of things that could be readily added to the game that requires specific resources to use, build or research.

+1 to this.

I will say, however, that some of the leather types really should go away.  Not because there are "too many" but because rat leather should not be a thing.  Who in their right mind is going to skin three hundred rats in order to sew a pair of pants? 

Killing a rat should get you a small portion of meat and that's it.  Same with squirrels and any other very small animals.  Rabbits, raccoons, chinchillas should give small amounts of fur rather than leather, which can only be used for specific items.  Rabbit fur hat - awesome!  Rabbit fur t-shirt - not so much.

The same thing on the other end.  Elephant leather?  Might make a great couch, or at least a really durable one, but I'd think elephant leather pants would chafe and be highly undesirable.

The real problem with all of the different types of meat and leather is that they don't have different functionality and should.  As long as you can make any piece of clothing out of any leather with no real difference in the end product, there's no reason for different leather types.  Same with meats.  If it all goes into simple/fine meals, who needs to differentiate?

The problem there is that finding good uses for the variety of resources is a major source of enjoyment of the game.  Taking the variety away will lessen the gameplay for many people.  Instead, I think there should be better variation in clothing and cooking based on the wide variety of resources that have been  made available.

Give people the 'Deadman's Apparel' mood debuff for wearing stuff made of human leather.

Wrong thread, dude.  This is the *bad* ideas thread    That's actually a good idea.  Everyone but psychopaths/cannibals should get a debuff for wearing things made of human leather or sitting in chairs made of human leather.

I'm not sure how I feel about any animals being able to open anything other than an auto-door. It's actually always bothered me to see chickens roaming around opening my doors and what-not.

I still agree with the idea the initial idea, but giving the manhunting boomalopes & boomrats the capacity to enter your base bothers me.

I don't think manhunters should be able to open doors, but they should be willing and able to batter them down to get to the munchies and crunchies hiding inside.   Some rebalance to the scaling of manhunter pack size with difficulty/wealth would be needed in that case.

The ability to have overlapping but isolated circuits would be really useful.  Right now, you can't run wires across each other without making everything on both loops part of the same circuit.  I'd like to be able to run appliances A, B and C on circuit 1 and appliances X, Y and Z on circuit 2 with a different power source without having to somehow physically arrange those things so that the power conduits of circuits 1 and 2 never cross.  Colors could be used to designate wiring for different circuits. (We already have the glowy blue wires for the current view of power connectivity.  There's no reason we couldn't have glowy yellow, glowy red, etc.)

+1

Though this might be a behavior to reserve for the highest three difficulty levels so that those playing on easy settings can still hunker down and be (largely) safe inside their bases. 

That's not criticism.  People play the game for different reasons and like different aspects of it.  But for those who want significant pressure from the raids without being outnumbered 20:1, the OP's suggestion could really help.

I like all of these ideas, except...

Fire-starting - I'd like to get rid of the pyromaniac trait and simply make fire starting a possible but rare mental break.

So you want to make *all* pawns pyromaniacs? Can we please not?

The problem is that it's such an annoying/destructive trait that no one wants pyros in their colony.  I'd rather make it a really rare response to a mental break (something the player has more control over) rather than a common behavior that just gets that pawn euthanized immediately.

Brick walls around a geothermal plant work even better.  Keeps out raiders too

Just remember to mark it as an unroofed zone before enclosing it in walls.