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Working on my resource compression mod and I've run into a bit of a snag. It's not exactly a bug, but it's ugly: http://puu.sh/7uosp.png

The problem: the display of available resources in the top left of the screen starts to clip off when there are a certain number of resources displayed there. Removing the <isResource> tag solves this. However, in order to buy and sell these resources as commodities from traders, the <isResource> tag has to be present on those thingdefs.

Is there a way to make these things purchasable from traders without also having them show up in the top left of the screen? I've tried removing <isResource> and adding the <purchasable> tag, but that just prevents combat traders from showing up.

So I added some new Things which I'd like to be able to buy from and sell to traders as commodities, but when I open the trading interface and try to do it, well:

http://puu.sh/7psiZ.png

Here's a sample ThingDef:

Code Select Expand

<ThingDef Name="CrateBase" Abstract="True">
<eType>Debris</eType>
<category>Item</category>
<thingClass>ThingWithComponents</thingClass>
<altitudeLayer>Item</altitudeLayer>
<passability>PassThroughOnly</passability>
<fillPercent>0.4</fillPercent>
<maxHealth>100</maxHealth>
<selectable>true</selectable>
<neverMultiSelect>false</neverMultiSelect>
<pathCost>55</pathCost>
<overdraw>false</overdraw>
<comps>
<li><compClass>CompForbiddable</compClass></li>
</comps>
<drawerType>MapMeshOnly</drawerType>
<naturalBuilding>true</naturalBuilding>
<randomizeRotationOnSpawn>false</randomizeRotationOnSpawn>
<designateHaulable>false</designateHaulable>
<dropSound>Interaction/Haul/JunkDrop</dropSound>
<saveCompressible>true</saveCompressible>
<stackLimit>1</stackLimit>
</ThingDef>


<ThingDef ParentName="CrateBase">
<defName>PotatoCrate</defName>
<label>Potato Crate (300)</label>
<basePrice>250</basePrice>
<textureFolderPath>Things/Item/PotatoCrate</textureFolderPath>
<alwaysHaulable>true</alwaysHaulable>
<storeCategories>
<li>PlantFoodRaw</li>
</storeCategories>
</ThingDef>


And here it is in the Trader Def:

Code Select Expand

<li>
<itemDef>PotatoCrate</itemDef>
<dropPriceModifier>Cheap</dropPriceModifier>
<amountMin>2</amountMin>
<amountMax>4</amountMax>
</li>


Am I doing something wrong, or is this impossible to do in Alpha 2?

So, I did the thing the game explicitly warns you not to do, which is disabling the Core Mod, just to see what would happen. It was a bit more total than I expected; now, no how many times I unzip a new RimWorld363, the game won't run. How do I fix this?

How exactly does <interactionSquareOffset> work? I can't figure it out at all.

[Ore!]

Toughrock

Description:
I made this mod to make mining a more dwarfy involved activity and to slightly extend the game's economy. Toughrock does this by adding new resources, structures, and recipes to the base game.

Features:

• Natural rock walls now have 1000 hitpoints instead of ~300, and now drop rock debris when mined.
• New Resource: Concrete. Concrete comes in bags marked "E-Z crete" and is produced by the "Make Concrete" labor at the Stonecutter's table.
• New Structure: Reinforced Concrete Wall. This new wall has 1200 hitpoints, but requires 10 concrete and 10 metal to build. Like the stone wall, it cannot take damage from fire and cannot conduct power.
• Changed Rock Debris: Rock debris has been changed to make it standable so that colonists will accept mining jobs in tiles otherwise blocked by debris.
• Constructed stone walls now have only 500 hitpoints, but require the same amount of stone blocks to build.
• Concrete floors now require one unit of concrete to build.
• Release 2 Additions follow:
• New Resources: Power Conduit Segments and Lights. Power Conduit Segments are required to build power conduits. Small and Large Light Elements are required to build the Standing Lamp and the Sun Lamp, respectively.
• New Worktables: Smelter and Electronics Workshop.
• The Electronics Workshop allows you to build power conduit segments and lights. 1 unit of metal yields five power conduit segments, while the lights cost 5 metal for the small and 20 units for the large.
• Ore! Instead of mining for metal, which can be used immediately, you must now mine for Metal Ore, which must be processed at a smelter to yield metal. To make up for the time you'll now be spending on mining and processing ore, each unit of ore yields more metal than mining a mineral tile would in the base game.
• New Worktable: Smelter. The Smelter uses 5000 watts and can be used to turn Metal Ore into metal and turn slag debris into metal.
• Silver is now stackable to 750 units rather than just 75. To copy this functionality to another mod or to the base game, just copy and paste 750stacks.xml into the appropriate ThingDefs folder.

Mod Team:

• Nasikabatrachus

How to use:
Start a new game with Toughrock loaded to play. Toughrock is not compatible with existing saves and cannot be removed from a save.

I suggest setting up a Stonecutter's table next to a rock debris dumping zone just outside any rock mine you make, and build new tables further into the mine as your activities deepen it. Keep in mind that your structural defenses are now very expensive in terms of time and resources. Remember also that colonists move much more slowly over rock debris than they do over clear floors, so regular hauling is now a very important activity.

Download:
See bottom of post.

Screens:

http://imgur.com/mrULot2

http://imgur.com/ceRFcCk

How to install:
- Unzip the contents and place them in your RimWorld/Mods folder.
- Activate the mod in the mod menu in the game.

Notes:
Anyone may use any part of this mod's contents for their own purposes. Please credit me if it's practical to do so, but don't sweat it.

Any suggestions for improving aspects of this mod are welcome. If you wish to contribute a texture, defs, or code, please post them in this thread or send them to me via PM and you will be credited in this post.

Thanks to Rokiyo for their help making the rock debris standable.

Release 2 Notes:
The work time for creating concrete has been reduced from 1400 to 900.

The material requirements for the Smelter are 150 metal, 60 concrete, and 25 power conduit segments.

The Smelter uses the mining skill, and metal output is variable, so your best miners will get more metal per ore unit than everyone else.

The Electronics Workshop uses the crafting skill, and output of power conduit segments and light elements is not variable.

I'm aware that the new textures are a bit crude overall, so if you would like to volunteer better textures, just post them in this thread or PM them to me and I'll likely include them and credit you.

You may wish to use this mod to clear away debris as your game progresses. It should work fine, but I haven't tested or balanced it myself.

Known Issues:

• Since Reinforced Concrete Walls require two different resources to build, but only one resource can be dropped when they are deconstructed, you may notice a message in the console saying that leavings could not be placed. I don't know how to fix this currently.
• Reinforced Concrete Walls still look very similar to metal walls. I plan to change this in the near future.
• Metal Ore is automatically forbidden when it is mined, so you'll have to manually un-forbid ore after you mine it.

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

I made a rather simple mod that changes natural rock walls by increasing their hitpoints and making them drop Rock Debris when mined. However, this debris immediately poses a new problem: colonists won't take new mining jobs if a piece of debris is blocking their standing spot. Although I wanted to make mining a more involved process, having to endlessly designate new debris to be hauled away isn't fun. This screenshot shows the mod in action:

http://puu.sh/7fn17.png

The large field of debris outside is what was produced by mining. Inside the mine you see a stonecutting table, which is the closest I can get to automating the process of removing the debris. I tried setting up a dumping stockpile inside the mine with a lower priority than the stockpile outside the mine, but since zones can't be placed on areas occupied by structure like rock walls, in practice it's the same as simply designating new hauling jobs.

So, does anyone have suggestions on making the hauling process more automatic? Ideally, I'd like to be able to mod the home region to have debris hauling as an automatic job, but I can't figure out if that's moddable.  The other solution would be to make rock debris always haulable, so that stockpiles would accept draw in debris automatically. However, seeing little red Xs on all the map's debris would be kind of distracting.

Edit: Additional miscellaneous question: Is it possible to have the rock walls drop rock debris only, say, 50% of the time instead of every time?

At 244 days into the life of Suttu, I thought Cleopatra was out of surprises for me. Then this happened:



The notification took me to the usual Giant Raider Ball Of Death up in the left corner; imagine my shock when I zoomed out to see that there were other raiders scattered all over the map, and that they had spotted the colony and were beginning their attack early. Note the entrance in the lower right corner: that was sealed almost immediately. Cleo's next surprise follows:



Somehow, Chrisâ€"an assassin, appropriately enoughâ€" got into the mountain itself and started taking potshots at my mans from the hydroponics section.

Feature? Bug? I don't know. I just know it was fun, and I wish Chris had been able to cause more trouble.

So, has anyone else seen a raid like that? This was a unique event for me. I assumed at the time that Cleopatra was punishing me for having taken out most of the prior raid with some very well-placed blasting charges.

I just downloaded a gif capture program called LICEcap (probably not the best, but it's free and works on OSX) and was eager to try it out, so I decided to demonstrate one of the sillier aspects of the latest release.



There were at least five Trotavellis in that raid, and yes, all three shown had gone through mental breaks. Not shown: the four or five Edward Toons who were also part of the raid. I guess it was a family thing.

[Lessons Learned (AKA TL;DR):]

I've been playing Rimworld way too much a bit since build 334 was released, and after playing three colonies, the story of one man's (brief) survival after the scouring of Suttu is by far the most memorable of all the colonies I've played.

160 days into the life of the colony of Suttu, a raid came. This was Tough Cassandra, but I wasn't worried: raiders are pretty incompetent against a single wall built into a 1-tile-wide rock tunnel, and after a little while with nothing to do they just start cracking. (I get a lot of prisoners with this method; more than enough to prevent mental breaks with executions alone.) So when this raid came, I kept some colonists outside the main entrance a bit too long, and a fast running raider managed to get inside the main entrance, run past my retreating colonists, and stand inside a doorway to prevent it from closing, preventing a successful wall-off. Of course, it wasn't just because he was fast. If you've read Boatmurdered, you might remember how the main door of that fort was kept open to invaders by a single butterfly. In the case of Suttu, there was a stray gun preventing the outer door from closing properly. I had no idea that would happen. A single gun let the raiders inside.

As the raiders began to beat down the last door between the charred remnants of the outer colony and the interior of the mountain, I recruited every colonist I could find and brought them forward to meet the horde. When the door came down and the mob rushed forward, I knew it was the end. I paused and saved this particular state of affairs, and reloaded an autosave from a few minutes before.

The next day, however, I got curious about what would happen if I let it play through. Was it as bad as I thought it would be? Could the colonists fight off the raid with a little pluck and sheer determination?

Of course not. It was a foregone conclusion; without turrets around, raiders like to move in close and use melee attacks, so that the forward runners prevent colonists from using firearms while the slower raiders settle in and fire with virtual impunity. (Rimworld is one of the few places where I'd like to bring a knife to a gun fight.)

As the last of the defense team was either killed or incapacitated, I took one last look at the colonyâ€"and noticed one last colonist, Pete, asleep in his bed.

Pete first came to Suttu over a hundred days earlier. He was around when the buildings outside the mountain were just starting to be abandoned because it was impossible to repair them all in the face of the frequent raids.

Convinced he wouldn't last long, I nevertheless recruited Pete and had him hide in an unused room down the hall, deeper into the mountain. I figured he could use the long hallway to his advantage, allowing him to take out a few raiders in a final blaze of glory before he died.

To my surprise, however, none of the raiders found Pete. They walked straight past his (frankly, somewhat obvious) hiding spot, preferring to patrol the 1-tile wide exploratory mining tunnels in a loop. I even had Pete shoot at a couple raiders, one of whom shot back, but Pete was able to go back into hiding without much trouble. This rudimentary stealth game was fairly tense, given the circumstances around it. It makes me wonder if a colony could be constructed around hiding from raiders rather than fighting them or walling them off. Prior to this, I didn't even know it was possible for colonists to hide from raiders (if that was even what was happening).

After the raiders left, almost everything was wrecked and dead bodies lay everywhere. Only Pete and the prisoners remained alive. Since Pete had several skills disabled, including Warden, and only so much food was left in the stockpiles, I had Pete deconstruct all the doors, letting most of the prisoners go. Pete shot those who remained in order to maintain his fear/loyalty level (kinda messed up, but it does mesh with his backstory).

After that came the business of survival. You might think that one man alone in a smoking ruin would have relatively hard time surviving, but I found the opposite to be the case. The hydroponics tables were wrecked and the batteries were all destroyed, but there was a large crop of agave plants just outside the entrance thanks to the previous 159 days of selective cultivation. Between that and the food leftover in the interior stockpile, Pete could have lived on more or less indefinitely. Even the dead bodies were good for keeping Pete's loyalty up, as the multiple Horror Colonies posted here on the forum have shown. Pete's daily tasks consisted of deconstructing everything with metal that did not serve some crucial function.

Pete didn't live indefinitely, however. Apparently the pirates weren't satisfied with their work, so two raids came by just to pick on poor little Pete. During the first raid, Pete hid for a while, then came out of hiding to kill a couple stragglers as the raiders lost interest. During this first raid, I found that molotov cocktails are probably the most useful weapon in close quarters. Most guns in Rimworld are either not lethal enough or can't be fired fast enough to give a single person a chance against two other people (imagine if they were unarmed instead of wielding grenades or pistolsâ€"you'd be slaughtered!), and grenades can be dodged with a certain amount of ease. Molotov cocktails, however, can block off narrow hallways and force enemies to run around wildly. Using molotovs and a shotgun, Pete managed to get the better of two raiders.

My overconfidence got the better of me again during the final raid, however. I had been making Pete prepare a defense at the main entrance, consisting of three doors and some blasting charges, but it was only partly completed when the raiders mounted their assault. Pete was unable to hide, as the raiders got too close to him, and was chased through the mountain until he was surrounded in a hallway. Despite managing to put up a fight with his molotovs, Pete was hit with a molotov himself, and burned to death. It was kind of surreal, actually, since the raider who killed Pete had the same name and backstory as one of the dead colonists. (I saw several of those, even during the last two raids).

The colony died on day 163.

Lessons Learned (AKA TL;DR):

* It's surprisingly easy for one colonist to survive in a ruin. Thanks, new stockpile system! Also, thanks, raiders, for not taking the colony's stuff!

* Always check vital doors for blockages. Like guns.

* Melee is a bit overpowered, but so are molotov cocktails. It would be interesting to try "walling off" a natural chokepoint with molotov cocktails. Heck, it would probably even be simpler and more reliable than walling off with actual walls. At the very least, molotovs should be on hand for a final defense.

Instead of just "Space Liner Wreck," why not have multiple backstory conditions that affect the psychological makeup, goals, and technology available to colonists? Suggested possibilities:

â€"Wayward Colony Ship: The survivors of the wreck expected to wake up on a green paradise dozens of parsecs away, but for some reason the colony ship lost its way and struck an asteroid around RimWorld. Now the survivors have to make do with equipment and training unsuited for the harsh desert environment. (This one is how I've started to think of the standard game story, since the survivors are so capable, relatively speaking.)

â€"Lost Troop Transport: These soldiers were on their way to shore up the crumbling civilization of a nearby star system, but sabotage by ideologues means their mission is over. Soldiers and space marines have access to advanced defensive instrument designs, but might not be so ready to live with constant suspicion of each other and a sense of failure. You don't want to know what happens when these people have mental breaks, but you will find out.

â€"Space Liner Wreck: The passengers of the Star Ship Costa Concordia thought they were in for the party of a lifetime. These middle managers and accountants will have great trouble eking out a life in the desert of a hostile world. (i.e. reinterpret the standard backstory as a kind of "Hard Mode")

â€"Slave Ship Salvation: When these denizens of a medieval world were captured, they found what they saw and experienced extremely difficult to interpret. They don't know why a slave ship would take people from star to star, but they do know there's no going home. These lucky former slaves don't have access to electricity, but they do know how to thrive in a low-tech environment.

â€"Transcendent Descent: The "Randy Random" of backstories. These survivors were kidnapped from various worlds by beings of inscrutable power and incomprehensible motivation. Were they brought here as a favor, a punishment, or an experiment?

Not everyone on Earth speaks English. Since this is true, why does everyone in RimWorld speak Space English? Or, rather, why would we expect everyone to do so? Since so much of RimWorld is influenced by the premises of its universe, in which human societies are only loosely connected between star systems, I suggest that language differences between colonists/potential colonists be introduced.

What language difference would do: decrease the effectiveness of socialization between colonists who don't speak the same language and make it harder to recruit travelers, etc., who don't speak the same language as their wardens.

Ways to get around this: Since the typical human culture in RimWorld that isn't currently in a post-apocalypse can be expected to at least maintain light-based contact with other cultures, it's reasonable to suggest that a database of human languages of the galaxy is compiled and maintained by somebody, so the idea of a Universal Translator is actually pretty plausible. Universal Translators could be purchased from traders and allow colonists to socialize with each other effectively. However, since it's plausible that some languages wouldn't be included in a database, a Universal Translator might be useless for certain colonists. In such cases, and in cases where Universal Translators are unavailable, the Different Language Penalty for socialization effectiveness could be gradually reduced over time, modeling the development of a pidgin language unique to the colony.

Different AI Storytellers could have different rates of language difference between colonists. It also seems likely that people traveling on the same space liner would speak the same language, so the original three survivors should be biased towards Space English (or whatever language they speak, as long as it's the same one).

It's also quite plausible that a colonist would speak more than one language, and even that multiple colonists who don't have the same native language might speak Space Esperanto.

I was thinking about the problem of orbital bombardment, and why a colony too resistant to raiders wouldn't just have slag or bombs dropped on it if they're so insistent on killing people, and while I don't know how it could be implemented in a way that's not ridiculously unfair, it did make me realize that there are a lot of interesting possibilities to explore in the relationship between raiders and passing traders.

For instance: what if, instead of sending you the Space Potatoes you paid for, that skeevy slave trading ship that keeps coming around for some reason plopped four or five raiders right on your drop beacon instead? Even if it only happened once every few forts colonies, it would shock the unwary player, force them to be suspicious of traders in a way you really should in a Wild West type of scenario, and change the way colonies are structured.

The way I see it, deception and trust should be a big part of how the colony deals with outsiders.

What other ways could traders "trick" players, and vice versa?

Reading this forum, I've been a bit surprised at how other people interpret the setting of RimWorld. The way I see it, the rim world itself is inhabited, probably by peoples of varying culture and level of technology, but rather sparsely. That's why it's hard to survive, but is still frequented by trade ships (which are probably incapable of interstellar voyages) and pirates seeking plunder. That's also why it's easier to trade with a space ship than with another settlement.

Other people seem to see it as a sort of desert island, alone as a habitable world in its system, and the raids the colony experiences happen primarily because passing ships detect the colony or the space liner's wreck for some reason.

There are many ways to interpret the setting, many of which are equally valid. How do you interpret the setting, and why?

[values]

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been doing a few things: playing RimWorld a tad more than I should, watching waves of raiders die at my colonists' feet, and thinking about what I would ideally like to see RimWorld become.

As the Xty-first wave of raiders charged through my minefield and into the hail of gunfire from my turrets and colonists, I wondered how a person in this situation would feel about what was going on. Who among my colonists would disapprove of recruiting one of the raiders who had just attempted to kill them all? Who would approve of a prisoner being executed, or one of their fellows being sold as a slave for some extra money? Who would be disturbed by a raider being shoved into a dungeon with some occupied gibbet cages? How do my colonists feel about being ordered to shoot a fleeing raider in the back? Do any of them ever question if it's right to shanghai random travelers who might be useful?

Though I have tried to shape my colonies and the duties of my characters according to what I think their values are, as a sort of role-playing by proxy, by, say, giving the best apartments on the map to the nobles and giving the guard-houses to the marines, in the end I can't avoid the fact that despite their sometimes dramatic variations these castaways are all fundamentally the same. They all react with unhappiness and fear to a prisoner being beaten or sold; they all like daylilies; they all welcome and accept each other, no matter how scurvy a dog or dainty a noble they be; they're all in for a social chat with any of the others.

The colonists are people with no values. Sure, they're nerds, or have illuminati connections, or are evil and famous, or hate technologyâ€"on paper. But that doesn't change how they interact with each other, how they feel about what the colony is doing, and what they think should be done. For the most part, they only come into conflict when they have literally snapped. Mostly.

Let me tell you about one of the most memorable things I've witnessed in RimWorld. It was very simple, but it was the most interesting single moment in the game so far. It was just after a raid. I had walled my colony off from the raiders: the colonists were sealed into the mountain behind a 1x4 capstone. Nothing was going to get through, so the raiders were doing their thing, mucking about in the wreckage of my walls. After a while, of course, the raiders start to starve and have mental breaks. One raider called West snapped and began attacking a raider called Rogers. Though Rogers was an assassin, he ignored West and was incapacitated. The other raiders left and I had my people take West and Rogers captive. Two for one! Right? I thought so, but after a period of recuperation, Rogers woke up and for him the fight was not done. Roger killed West right there in prison. He beat the man to death. Whoa.

What happened? Maybe Rogers was still hostile to West, despite both of them being prisoners and despite West no longer being hostile to Rogers. Maybe I had accidentally ordered a bunch of vicious beatings for West and didn't notice. I swear, though, I saw Rogers killing West. Whatever actually happened, I wanted to interpret it as an assassin taking vengeance on someone who had humiliated him and threatened his life. This is the kind of storytelling I want, not just the storytelling choreographed by the AI: an emergent story based on the dynamic interaction of character personalities.

I want to see personal vendettas that result in bloodshed. I want to see close friends who can't live without each other, and won't leave on the ship if the other can't go. I want to see the haughty noble take control with the help of some marines because he believes that he deserves control because of who he is, who demands regular beatings because he believes that fear and discipline are essential. I want to see the permanently grumpy commissar whose desire to execute prisoners is overruled by the peace-and-love majority. I want to see a colony that slowly becomes populated by more and more pirates and so becomes a friend to raiders and thieves. I want there to be a real difference between the kind of colony that would press-gang a stranger and the kind that would give them a meal and see them on their way.

After all, Firefly is awesome, but so is Battlestar Galactica, and the latter arguably bears more resemblance to RimWorld. What made Galactica (the remake) so enthralling wasn't the dogfights or the CGI fights with Cylons (but those were great): it was the conflicts of values between characters. Not just Cylon versus Human, but Human versus Human, and Cylon versus Cylon.

Okay, okay. We already know that colonist personalities are going to get more complex. The quirks are already right there in their profiles. What I suggest is something deeper that hooks into those personality traits, something that affects colonist loyalty, establishes a basis for relationships based on shared/opposing values, and which acknowledges the moral content of player decisions while also refraining from being the kind of Morality System that punishes players for making choices in the game world.

Instead of a Morality System, however, it's a Value System, because even Hitler had values, doncha know.

In addition to the usual stat generation, each character on creation is assigned a range of preferences for a fixed series of values based on their background and on the RNG. Each individual value's number ranking functions as a statement of the importance of that value to that character. I don't necessarily endorse Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, but I think it provides a useful framework for this system. According to Haidt, there are six major foundations for morality: harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and purity. These are mostly self-explanatory, although ideas like "liberty" are of course highly culturally limited (A U.S. citizen will almost certainly think differently about the term "liberty" than a French or Chinese person, for instance). "Purity" is also somewhat of a wild card, as what is "pure" depends on what is viewed as contamination: in other words, it is affected by other values. The exact names of values don't necessarily matter, but what they should reflect is an individual character's individualism vs communalism, selfishness, sense of justice (i.e. do they require retributive punishment or do they accept rehabilitation without such), views on hierarchy, fairness, compassion, and the value they place on happiness.

What does this mean in practice? This is speculative, and may not be entirely consistent, but I'd like to put forth an example of how this might work.

Character 1: Stone, Oaf, was born a Medieval Slave and grew up as a Medieval Farm Oaf. Living in a feudal society, Stone was taught that he owes his fealty to his Lord, ingraining a deep respect for authority in Stone. As a result, his preference range on the authority and loyalty values is limited to 14 or above (out of 20). In game, Stone will be receive a strong colony loyalty bonus if a Medieval Noble is around (and in charge?), and may have relatively low loyalty if he is around a bunch of egalitarian midworlders. Coming from a hierarchical culture, Stone values hierarchy and retributive justice.

Character 2: Singh, Pirate, is a Vatgrown Pirate. Singh hates technology, is Evil, is extremely selfish, and extremely hierarchical.

At first, Singh is captured in a raid, and though the player would like to recruit Singh, other colonists like Stone feel Singh must be punished. After supplying Singh with a few vicious beatings, Warden Stone feels better about Singh and recruits him after some friendly chats. Being a bully and disliking Stone, Singh bullies Stone and other colonists until all fear Singh and elect him as colony leader. Realizing this will make a great screenshot, when Singh demands to re-name the colony, the player re-dubs Crashville as Botany Bay. Still carrying a vendetta against Stone for those vicious beatings, Singh finally has Stone arrested and executed, making Singh ecstatic. Having the greatest stake in the colony as it exists, Singh is now maximally loyal. Sure, he may start beating the other colonists if his daylilies are dead, but no one will fight to the death like Singh.

I've referred a number of times to certain colonists becoming the leader, by hook or by crook, so I'll clarify now that although I think colonist Values naturally lead to some kind of quasi-governmental arrangement, and would be a great expression of colonist Values (including Dwarf Fortress-style leaderless anarcho-socialism (until the Nobles arrive, that is)), it's not an integral part of the idea. This also assumes that colonists will have potentially quite strong personal feelings about each other, which, well, of course, right?

Values do lead to a number of interesting possibilities, government and property-divvying style among them. If a Noble gets in charge, that likely means the Noble will demand the biggest, prettiest bedrooms and the best food and equipment. Values also lend themselves to the notion of reputation, meaning that as the colony grows and makes contacts and trades outside the bare necessity of survival, it develops possibilities based on the actions taken by the colonists themselves.

For instance, right now just about every player will arrest and recruitâ€"or sellâ€" travelers simply because it's useful for the colony's survival. There is essentially no difference, right now, between the player and a raider. Values would force the player to make a choice with both immediate and lasting consequences. Depending on their values, colonists will either have their loyalty boosted or eroded by the decision to waylay a stranger, and the operation of these values lays the groundwork for dynamic interaction with the wider world. Perhaps if the player is scummy enough, it could open up the possibility of positive relationships with pirates and raiders. After all, you'll do anything to get home, right? Alternately, be such a goody two-shoes, but ruthless against raiders, and perhaps there will be a reason besides the number of your turrets that 60 of them have just landed outside and are baying for blood.

If you've read all of this, I'm sorry. After all, though, this is NaNoWriMo. I apologize for any rough or incoherent bits, and being super rambly, as I'm not a great editor, and I look forward to everyone telling me how bad this idea is and why it won't work.