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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.

you could get a summary a the end / any point of the game which is a full story about all the random things that happened. [...] Perhaps focusing on some of the more dramatic events

The game could take events from the history, then fill in a short-story-template like MadLibs, but I doubt that would be very satisfying. As far as focusing on "dramatic" events...that would pretty much require human insight. Building any kind of AI system, would be pretty well beyond the scope of a game right now. AI systems / libraries keep getting better, but I don't think we'll have anything for creating "interesting" stories for at least a few more years. Maybe a few decades.

it's very easy to go too far, when supplying a game-generated framework for events, when the player very likely will, and really should by design, generate as much as possible of that "story" themselves

Yup. That's why I also pointed out the lack of interface-support for the player to alter the written history of events. (Although maybe I fumbled the explanation a bit - this post went through a few revisions, and I might have missed a key sentence.) I think a simple interface for the player to rewrite history, highlight key events, embellish others, or write down their own ideas for the motivations of the people involved, would help a lot. It might not even be too hard to write one. I could definitely write an import/export script, that would allow editing the history in some other existing program, like a CSV editor or something.

I wouldn't mind vanilla ditching half of the leathers and wools. They all overlap a lot, and are all outclassed by Devilstrand anyways, which is relatively easy to farm. (And would save me fixing the errors 1.1 introduced into my mod...)

new animals [...] makes v1.1 feel like one of those mods that just add 'content' without considering balance, or even what purpose said 'content' actually serves

Dang, I was actually a bit excited to try the new animals after reinstalling the game. Most of the vanilla content is heavily in a 'niche', so that (nearly) every piece of content is unique. All the vanilla crops, stone blocks, foods, etc.

sad wander in prison

This seems like a reasonable way to handle it - at least the pawn won't freeze or die in prison. /shrug

[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.)

I actually think this could work pretty well. The interface could be made very similar to the work-priority tab, where you assign priorities (or disallow) each zone.

Aparello has goggles, among many other new clothing items.

Even just finding an "ancient brick-making factory" which has smashed machines (steel and components), a bunch of bricks to loot, and some auto-turrets would be more interesting than what we have now.

I'm using a mod which lets you plant brambles and tall grass in growing zones, and that interface doesn't say either. It could be the path-cost is in there to simulate pawns being slowed down by it - they just path around it preferentially, as if it was slow / un-desirable. If it does actually slow them down, you could keep searching the XML files for it, and pray it's not hard-coded. The path-cost might even just go into a forumula, for how much to slow people down.

Factions and/or settlements should get stronger or weaker, depending on what events you help them with, how you fight them, or what they have to deal with on their own. Right now, every faction is a static snapshot in time, always sending you the same fighters in different sizes, but they never have to fight off things like your colony needs to, like toxic fallout, blights, low population from wars, etc.

There's mods which separates meals made out of human / insect meat, so that you can use the existing restrictions to limit pawns eating them.

"skip" is a term that could be used anywhere in the world

Nobody in North America calls them skips. ;)

Skips - Are you American?  Did you know "Dumpster" is a registered TM?

[https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=dumpster]All relevant trademarks have actually[/url] been expired or cancelled for a while, probably because it's been in use colloquially for a long time as a genericized trademark, and it's a large hassle to fight people over those. Even without that, you're giving this mod away for free, and it's not a controversial / defamatory / etc creation, so it's unlikely you'd be sued by anyone anyways.

IMO the other mod should be called "Colonist Common Sense". Something like "Common Sense Balance" would work for this one.