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The flaps just block heat loss like normal doors, so you need some heat source inside your barn in winter. Last time I checked the XML defs (Xmas?), braziers had the most efficient wood to heat-output ratio, but their slow output means you'd be take up a lot of floor-space. You can also use a campfire or electric heater.

OK, this week I tried a few more memes, and have found some good ones: pain is virtue and tree connection. The reason is not their more obvious precepts, but Rough Living (welcomed) and Temperature (tough). That lets you have everyone sleep outdoors in many environments, which will save you a lot of space for the walls and doors normally spent on bedrooms. You'll also save a lot of resources by not needing beds or temperature control. So you'll be able to fit everyone jigsaw-style into the nooks and crannys of a tiny base, which is easier to maintain and defend! (Plus, it seems like Guaranlan trees are more space-efficient for food and medicine production, and they give a lot of beauty with their ground-carpeting moss. Also, they can grow on sand without any problems, so they're really great for desert tribes!  : )

I would have just reported it as a bug.

Pawns who are of an ideoligion which doesn't unlock slab beds, can't move those beds. The message when you right-click says "only <ideoligions in your game> can build", but your pawn isn't building the bed, just moving it.

I think the bottom image is just the vanilla-game ancient-asphalt tile, which is generated on lots of maps. The top looks like metal tiles between more asphalt tiles. It looks a bit funny because tiles have the 'hard edges' property set (I forget what it's called in the XML) and the asphalt is soft-edge.

The problem with that, is that the blindness meme isn't just pawns who enjoy blindness. The game tantalizes you with cool sci-fi powers enabled by your holy un-seers, and then fails to deliver something interesting. The game's already got a plethora of difficulty sliders to adjust, without using up a piece of brand new DLC.

First, I'd recomment backing up your saves manually somewhere that Steam won't overwrite them. I'm not sure if Steam's refund policy covers DLC, but if it does you could make use of that too.

Ideologies don't affect relations with the main factions, but your preferred actions make individual people annoyed with you. For example, a rescued person could hate all of your people because they're scarred pain-worshipers, making recruiting that pawn harder.

You can't normally change your ideoligion mid-game, unless you've got dev-mode enabled. Personally, I would enable dev mode just for this, if I hadn't already done it for other reasons. You're pretty likely to miss some choices when setting up your ideoligion at the beginning of the game, or decide later on that you'd prefer a different set of trade-offs.

I think pawns with conflicting traits will usually just get mood debuffs, but I don't think there's many traits that will override the ideoligion. For example, I think if you manage to convert a person to your cannibalism-cult, they start getting mood-buffs for eating humans. Note that some of the ideoligion's precepts have replaced some specific traits, such as transhumanism and body-purism, and possibly a few more. But that's because those specific ones have been expanded upon, more than just the single "got +-mood from X" from the vanilla game. (A couple buildings, other complementary precepts, etc.)

Appearances are applied automatically, based on the pawn that built or crafted the item. If you have two or three (the max, I think) appearances in that pawn's ideoligion and the specific item is affected by all of those appearances, the one farthest on the left is what it gets. So if my dudes are morbid and techist, my lamps are all morbid not techist. Some appearances also only affect certain objects - morbid affects statues, but techist doesn't.

This feels like the bug is having different 'sexes' of the insectoids. They're all from a hive, which I thought had a queen inside. (But I could be mis-remembering that.)

It adds a bunch of rituals, restrictions, and benefits for different types of ideologies / religions (combined in-game as 'ideoligions'), which you can mostly mix and match, based on the main picks. For example, you can be a tribe that exclusively eats meat, ranching cattle for that purpose, who loathe vegetables. Or you could be a bunch of prosetylizing, communal vegans who try to convert every visitor they come across. There's quite a lot of varitey, and some special items that only certain ideoligions can build, such as special gravel to grow mushrooms inside of your underground base, or auto-bongs to hot-box an entire room full of people.

Those things are fairly good, however they are in my opionion currently not balanced well enough, that your penalties will be much more annoying than any bonuses you receive. Worse than that, most of the options don't really work to facilitate, encourage, or reward new or novel play-styles; I've felt like I'm constantly dealing with hassles, except for the couple of choices which just boost already-powerful (or necessary) gameplay types and strategies. This thread (especially my replies) will elaborate more on my frustrations with the new DLC. If you're short on cash, I'd wait until a few patches come out.

Having played with a few of the memes and precepts this week, they all seem to fall into three broad categories for me: reward strategies that are already dominant (i.e. make an easy playstyle even easier), increase the difficulty without a new way to play to circumvent it, or ones that barely affect the game. For example, the blindness meme is basically a mood debuff, unless you make everyone nearly useless at most skills (warden, trading, a bit of animals, and psychic are unaffected). Or the techno-whatever, that just rewards the default behavior of cyber-jacking everyone up to their eyeballs. Or the tunneler or darkness memes, which reward mountain bases, which were already very powerful until insect infestations got buffed back in the day. (They're still a decent strategy if you can manage the bugs.) Or you take the pain meme and remember that combat is 25% weapon-range management, and 75% pain management.

And the furniture styles, that force everything to be The One True Way. Even if I enjoyed the styles for each item type (which I don't), I'd actually rather have the 'normal' boring styles most of the time, and reserve the rest for my shrines, social rooms, etc. But I don't get a choice.

The new items to build and trade - those are about the only things I consistently enjoy. (But they're locked the the aformentioned memes, so...)

It's under the pawn 'i' / info button, near the top. (Search works great in this UI!  : ) I just tested it, and it's a flat 30%. Seems fairly bad though, since vision is needed for so much of the game. If you take this precept, most of your pawns will be almost useless - wardens, councellors, traders, and dedicated psy-casters are about the only jobs not affected by sight. (So basically, the one person who's got social skill; Taming and training animals is unaffected, but animal gathering and tending are.)

Oh, woof. I didn't notice that explanatory text when I was creating my colony. That seems like it's going to cause problems if any more items get styles in vanilla since multi-style ideoligions won't really work. Same for mods that add multi-style items, or add missing styles to vanilla items.

Even without new styles or a mod that adds missing styles, the game could really use a way to pick styles. For example, I really like the skull-altar from the morbid style, but I hate all of their chairs and tables. I like the spiky jackets from spike-core, but think the columns and tables are a bit much. (So I'd rather have 'normal' unstyled variants.)

In multi-style ideoligions, styled objects are always one style. This prevents the player from choosing to, for example, have one altar-room in spikecore, but the other in morbid style. As far as I can tell, the objects are always one of the styles, seemingly at random, but always consistent throughout the game. For example, in my colony the statues, benches, and altars are always morbid, but the tables, lamps, and clothing are always spikecore.

If they were random each time, like clothing or statue quality, that would at least work since you could pick and choose which ones to use. (Random, within the ideoligion of whoever's building or crafting, in case you have work-guests.) Annoying, but workable.

I think there's a lot of limits in general which should be removed, not just plant harvest yield. There's the Un-Limited mod, but it would be nice if this was in vanilla. As-is, it makes bionic limbs less useful.

Are there more benefits that I don't know about? As far as I know, it's only a mood boost from the blindness precept, and psychic sensitivity from the blindsight precept. Sensitivity only affects psychic mood effects and neural heat. That seems pretty limited for benefits, compared to how much blindness affects your colony, even compared to other high-impact memes.