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This would need balancing. First of all, they could only treat gunshots, bruises, cuts, burns etc. (All relatively minor), and it would need to take a long time. They would, in my opinion, also need to use some sort of medicine, as otherwise it would be too OP.

Yeah, it definitely would need balancing. The most appealing suggestion I've seen is requiring special bandages or something to be held in the colonist's inventory, so while it gives colonists more flexibility for minor scratches and frostbite it requires a little planning ahead and medicine.

Just another reason for psychopaths so they won't be affected by feelings. I love how whenever a new feature comes out in RimWorld, someone finds a way to exploit and/or avoid it.

On the flip side, psychopaths might miss out on all the mood buffs of friendship and family just as easily as they miss out on the negatives.

[-How do hauling and harvest times increase as field size grows?]

Thanks Skissor! I like doing this stuff, but it's hard to find a good topic with numbers behind it. I'm always happy to hear feedback.

I'm trying to get a rough list of all the questions being brought up to try and address a few later in depth. Feel free to point out what I've missed or add.

zandadoum:
-How do hauling and harvest times increase as field size grows?

Regret:
-Biodomes: can heated and constantly-lit buildings provide a boost?
-What effect does animals eating growing plants have?
-Does the nutritional value of a plant change as it matures?

b0rsuk:
-How time intensive is cooking meals?
-How does hay storage efficiency compare?-

METATERREN:
-How many colonists/animals can a cook provide for? (note: this is hard to do without exact hunger/tick info)
-What wastage happens with meals when they provide more nutrition than the consumer actually needs? How does this compare with raw foods?

+ hay growing zone doesn't use much space

Just to address this point, it's the opposite of what the numbers show. Compared to cooked food growing hay takes up almost twice the space for the same nutritional value. The 1000 nutrition example illustrates this a few different ways, from cooking lowering overall raw food needs to corn having a higher natural yield per plant.

As for rich soil, it's actually included in the second table of the OP where best case growing scenarios are compared. To that end, corn receives a bigger fertility boost than hay in rich soil, and if you cook it the nutritional disparity between corn and hay is actually bigger than on regular soil (3.6% vs 2.5% nutrition/day)

I'm going to echo that it's probably not SEX and BABIES. More like inter-colonist relationships to flesh out the relevant kickstarter tile: "colonists form relationships. Friendships, romances, and rivalries."

I'm going to try and focus on this in terms of animal feed, but these results translate into human feeding too; cooked is better than uncooked.

Your chart only really matters if SPACE is the issue...eg. i can't FIT more food into my base/map/hydroponics/whatever.

If you have lots grazing land and no winter, you don't need to grow animal food. Only if the player runs out of land or has winter, then stored animal fodder is needed. In either case of limited available land or limited winter storage, space is a constraint.

In terms of total labor involved, cooking time grows inversely with needed hauling. Cooking decreases the raw food needed by 41% [(0.85 - 0.5) / 0.85], and this is a massive reduction in the necessary raw food that needs to be hauled. For 1000 uncooked nutrition that means 2000 raw units need to be hauled. When cooked only 1177 units need to be hauled. This frees up a lot of time. Even if haygrass does grow slightly faster, the player is still moving massive amounts more for the same nutritional quantities as cooked food. One last thing is a cooking colonist gets better at cooking, but a hauler doesn't get better at hauling.

Adjusting for yield size per plant, corn gives 22 units and hay gives 18. For the 1000 nutrition example, the difference is planting 432 corn plants versus 802 hay plants. I'd guess this also reduces planting and harvest time in addition to hauling.

Here's a rough sketch


Another problem with hauling massive amounts of crops is that as crop volume increases, distance from the colony also increases. A small field can be close to the colony, but as the field grows larger so does the distance the farming colonist has to travel.

I'm ignoring hauling from the cooking station because the stove can be next to or inside the stockpile and the cook can drop the meals at his feet. This means effectively no cook-stockpile hauling needed, or very minimal.

What about non-ice maps, where lots of people will be using fine meals as their primary meal source, and now are cooking with meat too (also, more hauling...)

Mood is the only upside to lavish meals. Lavish is a little worse raw food in terms of input efficiency. Absolute best case scenario the base nutrition per unit of a lavish meal is 100%/20=5%, or on par with raw food. But the additional nutrition from lavish meals is negligible and often partially unused since eating begins around an 80% so the actual nutrition added per unit is much worse, like 80%/20=4%. So, feeding animals lavish meals is an especially bad idea.

if you just want an efficiently running colony where production per colonist labor hour is maximized, then maybe raw is better

In terms of maximizing wealth as the output of production, the cost savings mean the colony can focus on growing the most profitable crops instead of raw food, or doing the most profitable activities instead of hauling.

Going back to the 1000 nutrition example, consider 100% of the field planted with hay (802 plants), or 53% planted with corn (432 plants) and the remaining 47% filled with crash crops or medicine.

If anyone wants to give me some hypothetical hauling or cook times I'd be happy to stab at modeling this. I'm sure there's a meals/day cooking constraint at some point equal to (total time in day)*(average cook's cooking rate). Unlimited trained pig haulers and only one cook station could look like this.

I just ran the numbers and hay really is kind of useless.

Games like hearthstone have craftable feed types for animals. That might make the most sense to enable animals to sensibly avoid cooked food, since right now eating cooked food is the best thing the animal can do.

On a suggestion for trained animals to avoid cooked meals and eat raw foods instead, NoImageAvailable brought up that animals eating cooked foods was actually a good thing because of the improved nutrition in meals. That made me curious about the nutritional relationship between hay and other foods when they're cooked.

I used the recently posted data behind the Detailed Crop Growth Information on r/rimworld by Oertelbrein. I only used the given harvest yield/day and didn't adjust for difficulty. If any errors do exist, I'm hoping they're equally applied since this is for comparative purposes.

I started by cleaning up the data and looked at the best case growing scenario for each plant. The yield/day is how many units of output are grown every day, best case scenario. The following is the non-cooked nutritional output each day of growth represents.

_{In terms of raw nutritional yield/day haygrass is the best}

When a meal is cooked, the nutritional value per input unit rises. A simple meal costs 10 input units and gives 85% nutrition. So the improved nutritional value per unit is 85%/10=8.5%. What does cooking the raw food given look like?

_{When the raw food is cooked, haygrass becomes the second-worst source of nutrition}

When the raw food is cooked, haygrass becomes the second-worst source of nutrition, just a little better than strawberries. But this is assuming every plant is growing in its optimal location like hydroponics or rich soil. What happens when all the plants are grown on regular soil?

_{On soil the relative rankings still hold.}

The takeaway is the high yield of hay makes it initially attractive, but since hay lacks conversion value crops with lower yields that can be made into food become more attractive. So if you have a decent cook be sure to use it. Since I don't know current hunger tick stats to give an applied colony or herd feeding example, here's an example of the value of cooked food in play:

An animal eating 5 times equals roughly 85% nutrition consumed five times= 85%*5=425% nutrition. In cooked simple meals, feeding 425% nutrition requires 50 raw food units. In uncooked raw foods, that same 425% nutrition requires 85 raw food units. Over the course of 5 meals 35 raw foods units are being saved by not eating raw food, which is enough for 3 meals by itself.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet I used.

force us to micromanage clothing to such an extent that my colonist will go insane from having an old pair of socks

To be fair, you can eliminate this micro with the game's clothing management system

Food, even fast food, shouldn't substitute for entertainment.

Food can easily be entertainment. Going to Ruth's Chris for steak and wine is entertainment. Food and wine festivals, for example, are entertainment.  Yes it fills a need, but in a completely non-necessary way. Just like RimWorld beer offered 5% nutrition, its biggest aspect is the recreational entertainment factor.

Even a movie night isn't directly comparable, because movie night is often a social activity

Subcategories like includes social activity are meaningless in terms of the broader scope of entertainment. By that logic (has social activity) movies aren't at all related to alternative media offerings like Netflix, which is wrong because they obviously are. They are both part of consumer entertainment spending.

By that same social activity logic, any game with multiplayer isn't comparable to RimWorld. Assessing in terms of recreational value allows for different modes of consumption to be included; there are tons of options competing for the consumer entertainment dollar and squashing those modes into narrow categories ignores the scope of options available.

People can and DO ask the manufacturers those questions.

I agree consumers should be price conscientious and at some level are, but the idea of consumers directly ringing up the corporate office of Levis or McDonald's and asking about price is absurd.

That would be like comparing a loaf bread at $100 to your electricity bill

That example doesn't work because electricity isn't a substitute good for bread. That said, the electricity cost of baking the bread yourself could be used as a comparison. And even if it ultimately cost more, the consumer might choose to bake bread out of entertainment.

Because for recreation many entertainment substitutes exist. How is the consumer going to spend Friday night? Playing board games? At a movie? Playing RimWorld? Watching netflix? Wining and dining? They're all viable entertainment substitutes the consumer has to choose from for fun.

Not to take away from the main point, you wouldn't walk into your local Spec's or Target and ask why they charge so much for that?, that consumers wouldn't normally question price points around a similar range anyways.

I like how this addresses a recurring control issue, that players have to engage in lots of micro to change colonist behavior. Of course that's frustrating when the player knows the change only needs to be temporary, like setting plant cutting as priority #1 to harvest crops threatened by a sudden freeze. Shifting the categories you want to have priority seems like a pretty straightforward solution.

One possible problem I see is if the player wants several jobs to be set on equivalent priority. The current system has 4 priority states, where the suggested version would have a sub-state based on the left-right sort order? So for 20 job categories that's like 4x20=80 levels of priority if there aren't some categories that can be set equal to others.

That's a good idea about the colonist, I hadn't even thought about the roles of the colonists involved in trading.

I like the idea of having arbitrary outcomes where things aren't entirely inside the player's control. At the same time I see how that could be frustrating, especially to new players. Do you think there's a way to turn the outcomes where the player gets scammed into learning experiences or entertainment?

Floors in general could use some love and ^{could be so much cooler}, but like furniture they're probably a work in progress we'll see some changes to next version.

But I'm pretty sure metal tiles being expensive is a conscious decision made to reflect the beauty of stone floors, because metal tiles are the nicest floor you can build from day 0 without using precious metals.

Here's how the beauty offered by metal tiles compares to the beauty from statues:

^{For the record, all the sculptures in question are steel}

Doing quick and dirty math, metal tiles are equivalent to normal quality small sculptures. Considering the player doesn't have to invest all that's required for making a sculpture, including talent and the risk the produced sculpture is bad quality, metal tiles are a nice bargain.

There are other factors, but I think this sums up the value proposition for metal tiles pretty well.

note: I couldn't get a normal grand steel sculpture to spawn in dev mode if you're wondering about the 3 cited grand steel sculpture types. Need to pray for forgiveness from the data gods because it can be a little misleading...

I mean, I can't be the only person here who reckons that saying $30 of video game is the same as $30 of food is not a legitimate comparison?

No, they're totally comparable when the activities being compared fall under the same category, which is recreational spending.

[I. Smuggler? I hardly know her]

An upcoming feature mentioned by Tynan is ground-traveling trade caravans from other factions. As the caravans set off in search of distant markets, they're weighed down heavily by not just wares and silver but also intrigue. Here are a few events that might happen. Since we don't know much about how trade caravans might work, assume the messages happen in a manner similar to the Chased Refugee event.

I. Smuggler? I hardly know her
The player receives a message from a local enemy colony, sent by a smuggler. Your factions are enemies, but the trader turned rogue needs to get rid of the goods desperately.
  Options- ignore the offer or send over some silver in exchange for the goods in question.
  Outcomes- random chance of nothing happening, or the badly wounded smuggler appears on the map with a message that his traitorous trading was discovered and he joins the colony

Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (2003).

II. With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
The player's relationship with a local faction is great. Members of the allied faction appear on the colony map and politely demand food from the player, claiming their colony is starving and it's desperately needed. They offer nothing in return but goodwill.
  Options- give the faction the raw food or meals demanded, or refuse to help them
  Outcomes- the faction takes the food and leaves, or, if refused or ignored, attacks the colony and steals what food they can

III. hey its me ur brother
The player receives a message, saying "hey its me ur brother." The message asks to trade with the player for weapons.
  Options- the player can agree or refuse
  Outcomes- if the player agrees, the player receives several inexpensive low-quality weapons, or a legendary weapon with a description

^{Caravan - Martiros Saryan 1926}

IV. Black Market Friday Deals
On a day that's a multiple of 7, the player is messaged with an offer about GREAT HOLIDAY SAVINGS. The seller offers heavily discounted gold or items made of gold.
  Options- the player can buy the goods or refuse
  Outcomes - if the goods are bought, the player can get really good deals on gold

MACBETH: Duncan is coming here tonight.
LADY MACBETH: And when is he leaving?
MACBETH: He plans to leave tomorrow.
LADY MACBETH: That day will never come.

V. Lady MacBeth
The player is asked to kill a factionless (eg spacer) neutral visitor on the map in exchange for compensation.
  Options- the player attacks the visitor or doesn't
  Outcomes- if the visitor is killed by the player, the player receives silver. If not, nothing happens. A spooky spot of blood appears near the silver.