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I noticed a UX problem, if a mod adds items or recipes, which are unlocked by multiple researches. For example, if the Super Deluxe Throne is unlocked by two researches, Complex Furniture (from the base game) and Super Deluxe Crafting (from the mod), both of those research items will say at the bottom, "Unlocks: super-deluxe throne". The issue is, that the player needs to click on both researches to know that they're both needed to unlock that item, but they aren't guaranteed to click on both of them.

Since the game's UI doesn't itself highlight situations like this, what's the recommended way to handle it? Always have things unlocked by single researches, which have the original research-prerequisistes? Then there's at least lines, drawn between the prerequisite- and child-researches.

Now that all research shows what items it unlocks, the debug buttons to finish research can be un-clickable, because they're "behind" the links to the items the research unlocks. To reproduce this, start a new game with the Lost Tribe, and click on the Complex Furniture research item. The buttons will be only clickable off to the side, where the info-links don't overlap with the buttons.

While searching for info on item-modding, I found this message discussing the average time between carcinomas, when a pawn has a nuclear stomach. The sentiment was that it was too harsh, but I was confused, since an average of two years (I'm assuming that 'mtb' means mean time between, or mean time before) before developing a carcinoma seems totally easy to deal with. These things give you 3/4 of your food to trade away for more medicine (to excise with), and your pawns will never get food poisoning. So it's like an implanted nutrient paste dispenser, but also stacks with the NPD. In my last game, I just used one of my hundreds of medicine every year or so. If anything, I feel like 60 days for carcinoma, or even 30, would be a more reasonable balance. What are your thoughts on the nuclear stomach?

I'm trying to make a new decorative plant, that's like one of the glowing mushrooms, but can be planted in a flower-pot. As far as I can tell from PlantBase, Plant_Daylily, CavePlantBase, and Glowstool, I should have everything I need, to allow this plant to be grown. It shows up in the list for the plantable-plants in the flower-pot, but when I right-click there's no option for my pawns to sow it. I've got a bit empty room (no light to kill mushrooms, the message correctly shows up if I select this plant on the pot in a lit-room), that's heated to 18 C (normal for other plants), but nobody can sow the thing.

I vaguelly remember there being some trick to allow plants to be sown, but I can't find any XML defs, which allow the other plants in the game to be sown. (Like, a work-giver...work-option...something def...)

Raiders will steal animus stones ("take what they can, and leave"), but the item's description says it's normally ignored by them. I've had this happen on two different raids, and it happens when I spawn a raid, then spawn an animus stone. They just walk up and take it (if it's uninstalled), or uninstall it and then take it.

[TLDR]

TLDR

   
• history -> messages reads like server logs, not a story
• random, separated events -> not a coherent story

Anyone know of plans to change these systems?

Longer Version
I've played a lot of Rimworld, and had a really good time with a lot of it. Learning how to farm, optimise a base, hunt animals, deal with raids. All of the small, minute-to-minute stuff is pretty good. The medium-term stuff is also pretty good - trading caravans, sieging a raider camp, and planning the next cycle (year) of your base, are all enjoyable. Even the romances, friendships, tantrums, and mood-swings of pawns, are enjoyable.

However, it seems like the long-term portions of the game and the related interfaces, are lacking. They're what made me dissatisfied enough to stop playing the game last year. Afterwards, I realised that about the last half of my game-time before I'd actually quit - I was mostly going through the motions, and didn't enjoy that either. The things which got me to quit seem fairly core to the game - not easily modded (at least by me). The game is subtitled as a "story generator", but I think it's got some major shortcomings there, compared to the very fleshed-out mechanics in the rest of the game.

The one that seems easiest to address, at least with an MVP first slice, is the interface for the history -> messages. The one where it shows when a raid happened, or when people got married, etc. For a story-generator, the story-events seem like they haven't received much attention. The UI is just a flat list of events, that reads more like computer server-logs or scientific data-points, than a cohesive story. There's no separation of months, years, and no way to make your own groupings, like the war that lasted 4 years. After a quick search for my starting-message text, it seems the save game is plain XML, with this history located in <savegame><game><history><archive> for both the <archivables> and <pinnedArchivables>, so it's definitely possible to export this somewhere else. (But I probably would be unable to write an entire editor myself, and I have never seen mods or editors for this.)

The larger problem I always came back to, is that all of the events in the game are almost totally unrelated. The Burger Snackers raider gang doesn't hold a grudge, because you killed their current leader's father, and their grandmother before that, and their great-grand-uncle before that - they're just sending raids all the time, because of their constant -100 aggression, and random timers. The game hints at what might have once been intended - when a faction's leader dies, it gives you a message of who their successor is, but it goes no further. Even smaller-scale events, like a new infection in your colonist, are just random. Jane's old unhealed wound from a previous raid didn't predispose her to sickness; It was just some dice.

Reading the recent dev blogs, and searching some of the forums, and Steam's discussions, it doesn't seem like there's much related to this, and nothing related in the devs' plans. (I also installed the game, and verified the UI is at least the same. I haven't read anything about the random events having been overhauled, so assume they're the same now in 1.1) Does anyone know of any plans in these areas (like, maybe I missed some forum thread, with my terrible searching skills)?

Thanks in advance! :)

(Originally posted in Steam discussions, but I figured that might be a demographic that doesn't follow dev-logs, plans, etc as closely as on these forums.)

For anyone who, like me, got sick of the overwhelming number of useless leather types, I made this mod which simplifies the leathers in the game! Most leathers were inferior to devilstrand or the high-tier leathers, and patch-leather is basically vendor-trash.
- cuts down number of leathers from 19 to 9
- removes the patch-leather recipe
- removes sloth wool
- tortoises and insects give shell when butchered, which can be used to make plate armor

I could have put this in the "unfinished" forum, but this is 90% done, and I only work on these mods on the weekends. So, unless I decide to add these things, it's done!
- colored leathers, for fashion!
- add research requirement to shell-armor
- add down feathers for use in jackets, parkas, and tuques (Yeah, it's probably not really a "tuque" if it's stuffed with feathers, but it's close enough.)

How does tradeability work? I used to think it worked like this:
- <tradeability>None</tradeability> means the item cannot be bought or sold.
- <tradeability>Sellable</tradeability> means you can sell the item to traders, but that traders would not stock it (in case it's in a category that they do stock).
- <tradeability>Buyable</tradeability> means that traders will buy it from you, and can also be made to sell it to you, if their stock-generator defs contain the item (or category).

However, after changing the traders to stock my modded item, I'm getting errors that it's tradeability doesn't allow them to stock it. It's set to "Buyable". The weird part is, that I didn't have errors for about a week of using this mod, and only got errors once the game re-loaded all of my mods (I was messing with mod order).

So, does tradeability actually work like this?
- <tradeability>None</tradeability> means the item cannot be bought or sold.
- <tradeability>Buyable</tradeability> means traders will/can stock it, but you cannot sell it to them.
- <tradeability>Sellable</tradeability> means traders will/can stock it, and that you can also sell it to them.

The only other info I could find for tradeability was this older post, that's mostly unrelated, and has "Stockable" instead of "Buyable", which would seem to support my first interpretation of tradeability. However, the errors seem to support the second one. :S

Looking at the trader definitions in the game, it seems like the <stockGenerators> tags are what control...their stock / inventory for sale. However, I can't seem to find anything that controls what they will buy. Do traders / settlements just buy anything that they sell?

I've wanted to make a bed-like device, that acts like the Enertron in Chrono Trigger. ("You feel rested and healthy, but you're still hungry.") How much of this would be possible with XML only?
- rests pawns quickly
- keeps pawns alive
- heals disease
- gives some kind of debuff or negative mood
- feels futuristic and post-apocalyptic

Looking at normal beds and bedrolls, it seems like I could use these tags to get close:
- <BedRestEffectiveness>: This would be set very high.
- <Comfort>: I can make it avery uncomfortable bed, and I *think* that would give a bad mood.
- <ImmunityGainSpeedFactor>: this would keep pawns alive if I cranked it up, but I'd rather have the pawns dependent on the device full-time, and not gain immunites. Is there something that would stop diseases from progressing instead?
- <SurgerySuccessChanceFactor>: I'd set this to 0, since the thing should be self-sufficient, and not be useful for surgery, but I'm worried pawns would still try to use it, and fail constantly.
- I could give it a suitable sprite, or just use the cryptosleep casket or something.

[TLDR:]

TLDR:
Does anyone know if someone's gone through and modified the core game's art, to make sprites that have the color defined in XML rather than being baked into the sprite?

Extra Info:
For example, stone bricks and wool in the base game use a greyscale image, with the color defined in XML. As a more complex example, beds have a mask to define sections of the sprite which will have their colors from the image file, and sections that will be re-colored by XML. However, many items such as simple meals, rice (harvested), and berries (harvested) have their colors baked into the sprite, despite looking (to me anyways) simple enough to be easily re-colorable.

[<recipeUsers>]

I'm making another mod, but I'm stumped on this one. My recipe to make ice-blocks can't be interacted with; No pawn does it automatically, and right-clicking on the crafting-spot doesn't pop the menu to force work. It works just fine in the bills tab of the crafting spot, and you can set a target amount, etc. I've used <recipeUsers> to add it to a crafting spot, which should be the same way that stone-cutting tables' recipes work. I also tried making a custom crafting spot by copy-pasting the base-game spot, and adding the recipe to that (not on a branch, so you can't see this version). This lead to the same end - a non-working recipe. No errors show up in the dev logs either, so my hunch is that I've got something wrong with the recipe itself. Anyone know what's up?

EDIT:
This seems to be something weird with my recipe that only uses ice-pellets, rather than ice-pellets + another ingredient? The cost of ingredients shows up just fine for all the recipes, but only this one is affected like this...

EDIT 2:
Now I'm even more confused. After successfully crafting two of my 4 recipes a single time each, now none of my recipes work...

Since Rimworld's been officially released, and Tynan's basically done with the game, could we get a stickied post, setting the expectations for this forum?

With the official release on Steam (and anywhere else that's had marketing), I'm sure there will continue to be more new players; I've seen several first-time posts from new people, in this very forum! Those new people are going to have some confusion, when they see this sub-forum called "Suggestions - Suggest ideas for RimWorld here.", and then get told that the devs are finished adding to the game.

Is this forum a black hole of wasted effort? Should it just point to the mods forum? Will this forum fuel some minor DLC a year from now, or even a sequel? I feel that some kind of official answer would be very useful.

Thanks!

I want to make foods that give two or more different thoughts, similar to how human nutrient paste gives a thought for cannibalism, and for nutrient paste. However, that's given by the ingredients and the meal itself; A single meal def can't give two different thoughts, because it's not a list, but a single tag. (The reason I have separate meals, rather than use the ingredients-tag-thingy, is so that I can restrict pawns for cannibal / insect meals.) There's some other limitations / annoyances with the base game, so maybe this is best summarised as a list:
- meal def can only have one thought
- meals spawned from cargo pods never have ingredients (e.g. nutrient paste will never be cannibal nutrient paste)
- I want the cannibalism trait to matter (so defining individual thoughts for different meals won't work by itself)

I think the only thing that might work, is making these meals act like drugs, and give invisible hediffs, which give the appropriate thoughts. I'm pretty sure that'll work because beer gives two hediffs, and a hediff can have an associated thought...

EDIT:
Yup, having food -> hediff -> thought works.

I made some new recreation buildings, by copying off of the chess table, poker table, and tube-television. Despite showing the percent-effectiveness for recreation, my pawns won't interact with these in the game. Is there something else I'm missing, that makes the game recognize these as places for pawns to recreate?

I made a mod that adds (with XML patches) two new categories to items in the game, so you can set up stockpiles more easily (things that need refrigeration, and things that need to be indoors). However, this doesn't work on meats, or on corpses. Are those things just not XML-patchable, or am I missing something else?

I made a new type of wall, but it isn't replaceable with doors, coolers and vents. If I deconstruct the wall, or cancel a wall blueprint, I can place those things normally, but I can't seem to make the wall replaceable like vanilla walls. I made this wall by copy-pasting the vanilla wall def, but I also tried it subclassing vanialla walls, and neither one seems to work. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

It would be very useful for modders, if the thingClass Building_FermentingBarrel was generic, to allow turning different ingredients into other things. Right now the barrel appears to be hard-coded with wort and beer. Other things that could be made to work similarly (especially if custom descriptions were allowed for all the text). You could turn:
- milk into cheese
- berries into wine
- vegetables into sauerkraut
- raw fungus into drugs

Right now, the closest you can get, is to copy the infinite chemreactor, to spawn your items. However, that can only be made to require electricity, and cannot be made to require fuel. Even if you make it a fueled building (like a stove, campfire, etc), it will continue to produce the item, even when empty of fuel. Ideally, you could specify multiple ingredients with individual amounts (e.g. mix 50 potatoes and 1 meat, to make cannibal-vodka), but I'd settle for a single ingredient and amount (e.g. 75 berries produces one bottle of berry-wine).

EDIT:
I just thought of some even more clever use-cases while playing:
- a (powered) machine that turns cotton into prisoner clothing (would require power the spawning to be confined by both ingredients and power)
- turn corpses into maggots (for a horror / Cthulu-themed game)
- eggs into sulfur (for gunpowder)

I noticed on the unstable build today, that there's a brand new menu, to restrict foods for pawns!

Does anyone know if the options for specific things like human meat, or corn - does that apply to just the raw items, or to meals cooked with them as ingredients, or to both?

After a pawn replaces broken components in a watermill generator, it does not resume producing electricity. Saving the game, quitting to the main menu, and re-loading the game fixes the issue. This seems to happen 100% of the time, when replacing components in watermill generators. (I'm not sure if it affects other generators, as I'm playing on a river, and stopped using my wood-fueled generators before any of them broke down.)