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Sparrow, Captain, has landed nearby. He is a space captain who was forced off of his ship by a mutiny. The mutineers gave him only an antiquated pistol with one shot.

"Where's the rum?"

Badass Robot Man.
He comes for your doods. Gals too.
He won't go away.

Threshold=subjective.
Bigger problem: how does stuff
get from us to them?

If you've got orbit,
what don't you have, man?

[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.

I think this could be implemented better with a slightly different wish of mine: give the player the ability to cancel jobs (without altering priorities) by row or by column. That way, this problem would be solved, and the problem of having to disable lots of jobs in a tense situation in order to get the most important stuff done, or avoid a bad outcome (like a colonist wandering going out to repair a gibbet cage right next to a pack of raiders), would also be solved.

Although, I must admit I don't see the problem with drafting someone until their mood improves. I send my draftees to the front hall, where there are lots of pleasant flowers to enjoy. It is kind of ridiculous from an in-universe perspective, but I believe Tynan has mentioned that entertainment-objects are too much to implement until later in development.

Shifts would also be great.

As the game stands now, I think the difficulty of obtaining new colonists is too high (and it also feels very artificial - it just feels weird to see 3 slave traders in as many days near the start of the game, and never see a single one after you have 10 colonists).

But in the future, when there is more to do besides just building a bigger base for more people, then I think  some of the focus might be shifted to other things. Right now, I definitely wish getting new people didn't get so much harder with time, but in the future it might make more sense from a gameplay persepective.

The artificiality of the limiting mechanisms is the only thing that annoys me. I'd like it to be more difficult to get a new colonist because the current colonists don't approve of slavery, or don't want to welcome a raider into their midst, etc., rather than for the well to simply run dry.

These problems aren't limited to large colonies. For instance, I've had the same problem with firefighting on my 14-person colony. A short circuit exploded deep inside the mine and the colonists took turns slowly chasing the fire as it spread from tile to tile. Worse, they would repeatedly catch on fire as they were firefighting, and colonists who had just finished fighting a fire would go about their businessâ€"or, in the case of an assassin, wander around placidlyâ€"right next to their burning comrade. It took a while just to sort out who was doing what and who was going to help douse the burning person in their midst (as it turned out: someone clean across the colony).

Similar problems happen when trying to build things, although this mostly becomes evident in tense situations like imminent raids. My preferred solution is to limit the jobs that colonists can perform, like having certain people only construct/repair or mine, since you don't need everyone to do everything even in a small colony, but that still requires a certain amount of micromanagement to avoid delays, not to mention that having only a limited number of firefighters can be dangerous in certain situations.

I haven't had the same problems with mining that you've had, however. I opened up my 34 pop colony just now and designated a straight line into the rock to be mined, and one colonist did about half of the designated work without stopping. In that colony, I have manual priorities turned on and just 6 colonists have mining at priority 1, while everyone else has mining at priority 4, and this was with about 25 idlers at the time. Do you have manual priorities set up? I think that might help your issues.

I do what mumblemumble suggests: right next to the battlefield is a cave with 3 corpse dumps inside. With a little bit of hauling and a molotov or two, disposal is quite easy, although you have to remember to turn the dumps off while the bodies are burning: if there are any leftover corpses your mans will foolishly try to haul them in and catch fire themselves.

I forego frag grenade disposal because they could easily damage rock faces or blasting charges, and because manually targeting ~60 raider corpses and waiting for them all to be destroyed properly is kind of a pain when I could be paying attention to something else.

I've got 30+ colonists on my Randy Random game. Higher numbers on Randy seems to be common. One important source of colonists for that game is raiders. Rather than actually fight the raiders, because their numbers are usually overwhelming, I simply wall off the colony at a chokepoint leading into the mountain (it's more exciting than it sounds, since doing so requires a certain amount of management with a lot of colonists, and thus has the potential to go wrong). After the raiders have finished setting fire to everything outside and bashing their heads against free-standing walls, they're often starving, so 1-2 per large raid will have a mental break, allowing me to snap them up. I suspect the same method would work on the Cassandra modes, but I haven't tried.

As for the wisdom of having mechanisms to keep the size of colonies down, I think it's a good idea, although I would rather have it be optional at a certain level. Though the game is strongly influenced by DF, it's still not the same thing, so I don't see the problem there.

[hated]

This is what happens when you let nobles run the place: fascist dystopian doomforts at the edge of the galaxy.

I was playing earlier today and I had a thought about doing this, but I had no idea what it would be like when effectively implemented. I've found the gibbet cages to be ineffective when placed near raider landing sites, and underwhelming/inconvenient when used to intimidate prisoners, but I guess I just needed to consider that their real use was domestic oppression. My dorfs colonists would probably break down just setting up the system of their subjugation, though.

See, this?

This is the sort of play-style that should be leading to mental breaks.

In the dark, surrounded by turrets and gibbet cages in inhuman conditions?

That's the sort of thing that leads to a leader being hated. And people who hate someone will risk their lives to depose him.

Fear should be only a temporary mechanic, something to do if you're desperate and your shit is being wrecked. It should work in the short term, but for every day a colonist's loyalty has been maintained through fear, his mental break threshold should increase by 1. Eventually (after three months and a day of this,) his mental break threshold should reach 101, while fear is capped at 100, and what follows thereafter should be a bloody revolution.

I agree with this, in that I think this kind of colony should lend itself to not infrequent mental breaks and revolutions, but I also think that it would be good if there were story-based reasons to set up a colony like this (a sadistic noble befriends all the marines and they decide the noble is Dear Leader) and (bloody) ways to keep it stable.

I backed Rimworld because I saw Scott Manley do a video promoting it, and I really liked the fact that it acknowledges and builds upon the ideas of Dwarf Fortress. The dynamic story generation of Dwarf Fortress, as seen through things like Boatmurdered, are what made me love Dwarf Fortress, so I couldn't resist the idea of helping along something that emphasizes DF's best elements. I think what really sold me was when I saw one of the colonists rescue another colonist in the midst of a firefight. That was a great moment, and when I read Tynan's "The Simulation Dream," I understood why and gained a great deal of confidence in what he's doing with RimWorld.

Building on the notion of two groups landing and fighting each other in the midst of the player's colony, I suggest an AI Director event (with a frequency of once or twice per colony) in which a traveler enters the map from one side and is shortly followed by raiders/pirates/bounty hunters attempting to kill or capture the traveler while the traveler attempts to escape through the opposite side of the map.

The decision of whether to intervene on the traveler's behalf presents an interesting choice to the player: either adopt an aggressive approach in order to gain a new colonist at the risk of losing one or more current colonists or let the opportunity pass by. This would also contribute to the Wild West feel of the game.