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Weeds! Something that can grow alongside other plants, and can lengthen growing time or kill off agricultural plants. Weeding would be a default task for growing zones, so growing food would take more dedication than "put plant in ground and wait".

Also, a "cut grass" designation would be nice. I often want to get rid of grass in preference to other plants, but designating all those lone shoots of grass can be kind of tedious.

I just played a 462 colony with Cassandra Classic for 56 days. I can't check any of the poll options: the difficulty was mostly too easy (several 1-2 person raids and a couple of lone mechanoid raids) up until day 48, when a well-armed raid of nine pirates dropped directly onto my colony, killing three and incapacitating two. While I enjoyed the sudden drama of the raid, I felt sort of let down that it came so late and that the other raids were so easy to deal with.

Also, I got a bug: I built three graves for my dead, but I couldn't haul anyone to them and I still got the "Need grave" tip on the right of the screen. Will look for this in 4e shortly.

Personally, I would rather have visitors' purposes be a little less transparent than what this suggests/how the game currently is. I think the player shouldn't necessarily know if a raider group is scouting, if they will stage before attacking, or if they're attacking immediately.

I do agree with this suggestion, though. There's a lot of potentially interesting stuff to do with visiting factions, in a way that creates interesting choices and connects to in-world logic. Some more suggestions:

Diplomatic visits: a representative of a faction comes to visit the player's colony. They don't work, and can't be directly controlled, but require a bed and food. The challenge is to keep them happy and safe in order to gain a boost in relations with their faction.

Herders/Foragers: a group of tribals arrives on your map. Maybe they're herding muffalo, or maybe they want to collect all the specimens of a particular plant which is important to producing medicine. They're not necessarily hurting or helping you, but you could choose to attack them if you felt you could gain something important (muffalo meat at a difficult time) or if the cost of letting them do their own thing was too high (you really need that herbal medicine, man).

Standoff: if you've captured a member of a faction outside of combat, it doesn't make sense that that faction would try to kill that captured member in subsequent raids. A more complex response might be a sort of siege, in which groups of two or three enemy pawns  would surround the general area of the colony and harass any colonist who tried to move around outdoors, meanwhile demanding the release of your prisoner.

One interesting idea that was suggested a while ago is that some pirate faction might ask the colony to hold a prisoner for a certain period of time, in exchange for silver. Tynan seemed to like that, so it'll probably be its own kind of visit one day.

I have a couple keyboard shortcut suggestions.

1. I love making time lapse series of my progress in building/colonizing/etc. type games, but in RimWorld making these can be challenging because it's hard to get perfectly consistent camera zoom levels and fields of view over time.

I suggest adding the ability to define camera warp points assigned to e.g. the function keys. This also has more practical uses.

An example of how I might use such a thing:

F1: Local awarenes: A view centered on my colony's most important areas, zoomed in enough that I can see unit counts on individual stacks of resources
F2: Situational awareness: A high view, not centered on the colony, which would allow me to search the map quickly when there are running events I'd like to keep track of (fights between factions on the map, etc).
F3: A view suitable for showing broad changes in the structure of my colony over time.

2. I also suggest using the number keys for building categories in the Architect menu. The advantages of particular shortcuts aren't that great when you're switching between clicking options and pressing the keyboard; I often just click, even when there's a keyboard shortcut, just because I'm already clicking anyway.

I would be very interested and amused if someone somehow modded the mechanoids to behave like the robots in With Folded Hands.

I might be mistaken, but I seem to recall Tynan calling the challenge of making multi-tile vehicles that can rotate a "nightmare". Unless something happens to change that, we probably won't get anything like tanks.

I suggest that fear should raise the loyalty/mental break threshold over time. It would make sense that, say, chronic fear from knowing people are being executed and seeing corpses all the time would make one more likely to undergo a mental break.

I think fear should raise the mental break threshold over time. That would be a good counter to easy Fascist Doom Fort Colonies.

It's easier to just recruit a colonist if you need them to take a break. I usually have beautified eating areas in central locations where I send any colonist close to a mental break. Leave them there for a while and they will absorb beauty happiness bonuses and socialization happiness from interacting with colonists who are busy eating. By the time they are hungry enough to eat, they will be happy enough to be left alone for a while and will get food of their own accord.

Of course, if all else fails, it's handy to have a prisoner around to execute to keep the colony in line through fear.

Poisoned weapons that cause extra damage over a moderate period of time. Tribal raids would get real interesting.

June? Well, I guess if it's six months sooner than the next Dwarf Fortress update, you're still doing pretty good.

Just had to note that I captured a pirate and while reviewing stats I noticed the strangest thing.

Male pirate with an extra trait of "Pregnant"

This made my day. 

People often remark on this and find it funny but I think it's cool that RimWorld de facto recognizes that people have bodies that don't conform to our prevailing, limited understanding of gender as a simple biological binary.

Is it possible to mod diplomacy with external factions? I'm interested in adding things like alternate gifting options, maybe even receiving demands from hostile factions. That kind of thing doesn't seem to be in XML, so maybe it's an opportunity to learn some C#, but I don't know where to begin. Any direction would be appreciated.

I haven't had much of a problem with mental breaks due to raids or corpses. The biggest problem for me is removing them all before the next one. If anything, the corpses help prevent breaks by raising fear, and thus increasing loyalty, although the bulk of the fear bonus comes from witnessing death.

I had a problem like this recently. Specifically, colonists were starving for no apparent reason. It turned out I had suspended the standing bill to keep cooking simple meals while a less important food stockpile was set to the same priority level as the nutrient paste dispenser's hopper, so no one was hauling anything to it.