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Mine are definitely wind turbines. The reason is that they are the cheapest to make, relatively reliable and all drawbacks can be worked around quite easily. I dislike solar panels because of eclipses, the research requirement and the higher cost. Thermal is great once you get it and if you have geysirs, but that's a big if and eventually your needs for power might be higher than the amount of geysirs you have.

Wind turbines have a few issues. The lockout area needs to be kept clear. Long term solution: Floors. At the start you definitely just put crops there. Also you can put solar panels there if you want to. High/low output being random is solved by batteries. If you have enough batteries to save all the energy from the moments they are running at full capacity you will generally never have an issue.

Combining all forms is probably the most reliable solution. Wind/solar will generally not fail at the same time, and even if you can reduce the drain on the batteries with thermal or fueled generators long enough for the wind to pick up or the eclipse to end.

Anyone using fueled generators? I generally never use them. I prefer to spend my components on wind turbines right away.

Also: Did human meat price get nerfed hard? I remember it being pretty high, but might have been a mod. Now it's 40% of normal meat.

I would really appreciate if loading while the window is not in focus was possible.

Either way, it would be great if there were a few more background images, maybe some tips displayed or even just witty/funny loading text (think the Sims). Just to help keep the mind busy and interested while you have to wait for the game to load, which can take quite a while if you have lots of mods or a long-running colony.

The tips would probably the easiest, least work-required and most impactful change. Especially if you can cycle through them with a button or key during the load time (nothing is worse than starring at the same tip for 1-2 minutes).

I'm pretty sure the community would write up tips in a thread very quickly (plus we already have a thread similar to that), so all you would need to do is pick the best ones, spellcheck and you're good to go.

I just had an idea of how to make the component workbench a much more interesting thing in the game. Last time I checked there was just one recipe in this huge thing and many people mod it, because it takes a lot of steel and time to create components.

Making them so rare and hard to get is not a good thing IMO, because of how much you need them for everything. If you really run out in a game that can suck really bad and it happens often in flat worlds.

The idea:
Make two recipes. One that costs 25 steel and requires only 500-1000 work compared to the 3000 now. The other recipe should cost much less steel, ~10 - but it should require 3000-5000 work. So you can make components fast or cheap -> nice interesting decision.

Yeah, that was the point, that is a collection of random tips, this is supposed to be only advanced tips, aka things you might not know after 100-200 hours of gameplay.

[Penoxycyline]

Also known as specific tips, tips related to exact knowledge of game mechanics etc.

Basically tips that are likely to help a player who isn't a beginner anymore.

Penoxycyline
Grants 61% immunity to Malaria, Sleeping Sickness and Plague. This effect diminishes over time (hence why it says take every 5 days). The way diseases work is that they infect your colonists and after a certain time they are discovered.
If one of your colonists gets Malaria and has recently taken Penoxycyline then he will be immune BEFORE the disease is discovered, meaning you will never even know he had Malaria. For Plague and Sleeping Sickness that's not the case, but you can keep them working and not treat them and they will be immune before the illnesses become severe.

Even if you take it less than every 5 days it will still give a huge benefit against these diseases.

Further, the game decides how many pawns will get sick and then selects them randomly among your pawns and your prisoners. This means two things, first - Prisoners protect your colonists indirectly. Secondly, immunity makes it less likely for a colonist to be chosen. So if your doctor takes Penoxycyline regularly he is VERY unlikely to get sick. However, if all your colonists take it regularly then all have the same chance of getting sick again.

Conclusion: Regularly taking Penoxycyline makes fighting most fatal diseases (save for Flu and Infection) a lot quicker and easier. Giving it to just one or two very important colonists makes sure they are not the ones who get sick. Even just using 6 Penoxycyline on your doctor per year makes sure he/she barely ever gets sick and even if will be healthy enough to survive without bed rest or treatment.

Sterile Tiles
Reduce food poison chance and infection chance. I arguably never get infections in my hospital so I usually use those in the kitchen instead. The tooltip doesn't state it, that's why this isn't something known to everyone.
It can possibly be a good idea to put the butcher table not in the kitchen, because it creates lots of "dirt" - the butcher table itself reduces cleanliness too.

I also suggest replacing wood walls as fast as possible with stone walls. They are much tougher and don't burn at all. Stone Cutting isn't too big of a problem and the walls are pretty cheap too. Stone floors are the problem if you don't have tons of stone around. I mean, it's obvious why. A 11x11 building only has 11+11+9+9=40 walls aka 200 stone bricks, but it has 9x9=81 floor tiles meaning 244 stone bricks for the floor.

You surely remember the traders or visitors (especially if you have Hospitality) that just do something stupid or happen to be where a manhunter pack or raid spawns. Tell us about those stories.

Today I had visitors and during the last year I had several yayo cargo drops. The leader of the visitor group overdosed on those and died, spreading around 50 meals, a doomsday rocket launcher and other nice things across the floor. The meals were mine of course.

There is some more of these. Addiction Council is one of them, gives nearly the same but social instead of research. Low-wage worker, as bad as it sounds is actually one of the best backstories. Combat engineer is also pretty good. All the tribal backstories are good, because they have no downsides. There is a few that are really good but disable one or two not-so-important things (social, cooking etc.).

My favorite isn't a skill combo so much as a background combo.  There's this one set of backgrounds that basically covers every miscellaneous task you want.  Social, medicine, research, crafting.  Some researcher or whatever.

Exiled researcher?
Shooting +2
Medicine +4
Artistic +2
Crafting +3
Research +8
(no downsides)

What about skill combinations? What kind of skills do you like to see together? I already wrote a few examples what I personally like together (stuff that is done outside the base, stuff that is done inside the base).

Why are you all mentioning optimist? Sanguine is the same but stronger.

The reason I prefer Iron-willed is because it is stronger when it comes to preventing breaks.

Some are very picky when it comes to starting colonists and colonists that join, others will make due with anyone. Whatever type of player you are, you still like to see certain combination of traits and/or skills.

An extreme example is this trait combo:
Iron-willed
Very Neurotic
Industrious

4% better break threshold, 175% global work speed. If that's your constructor/crafter, GG. But no matter what he is good at, that will be a top-notch colonist.

Some combos are more specific and those are the ones I'm more interested in.

For example - someone who is good at growing, medicine and cooking. This colonist will stay inside the base at all times, because his skills allow it. A bad combination would be animals/shooting with medicine/cooking. They want to hunt/tame but need to stay at the base to cook or tend to people regularly, resulting in conflicting priorities. They often will wander across half the map to hunt/tame and then return half-way because someone needs their flu shot or a hamburger.

Shooting/Melee/Animals is another good combo because that guy can go hunt/tame and do reasonably well in a melee fight with the animals. Also animals/brawler for the same reason - doesn't make a good hunter though.

I like my constructor/crafter to be separate, even though they don't really hurt each other like above example. It simply is annoying that you have to choose between crafting the clothing/weapon your colony needs and building whatever needs building right now (especially if no one else can do it since quality is relevant).

I like a high research score on whoever is doing things that aren't always in need to be done - e.g. a doctor/crafter could research reasonably well even if research is not higher priority than his main jobs.

What combination of traits and skills do you like? Personally and objectively?

For me there is only three types of colonists:
Those that are good at one or more important things.
Those that are not, who will become haulers or janitors.
And cowboy hats.

I'd model it instead as a malus percentage of tiredness and a (small) bonus percentage of consciousness. No mood boost; +consciousness is already really useful. (Consciousness affects almost all skills.)

Make it somewhat easier to make - there are a lot of small steps in food or drug production that Rimworld just doesn't model. I'd think coffee beans directly to cups of coffee would be fine. If you don't want to have a whole bunch of prepared mugs lying around, put in a coffee-maker pawns use, like the nutrient paste dispenser (but much smaller, of course).

Finally, tolerance and addiction should go up fairly rapidly, until you hit moderate tolerance. For addiction, I don't mean anything as bad as flake, just slightly more than beer.

Withdrawal should give a -5 mood modifier, and be pretty fast.

The whole idea was to NOT have addiction be part of it. The positive effect should be small, because the negative effect should only be the time/space you sacrifice for the coffee production. Coffee isn't really addictive IRL either.

You can change the storyteller and difficulty level at any time through the options menu.  Phoebe is definitely slower-paced than the others.  I haven't played with her since my first colony.

I know and I did - I was just surprised how little happened with Phoebe on intense. I had 3 raids in like 2 years or so.