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Playing A11, getting back into Rimworld for the first time in months, I found myself frustrated that colonists who were arrested for having mental breaks are so hard to re-recruit and return to productive life. After several rounds of this I finally realized I could just release them and they would go back to work.

I learned the wrong Rimworld!

Are there any other recent small improvements that make old ways of playing maladaptive?

I'd really love to see an incident in Rimworld that mimics episodes 19A/19B of Welcome to Night Vale. In those episodes, every citizen of Night Vale has a double of themselves created by a sandstorm, and every citizen fights their double to the death.

If you've paid attention to RW lore, you know that this kind of surrealism is fully possible in-universe, and I think it's an under-explored angle of the game.

Some ideas for implementing it:
This might be precipitated by an object or weather event, like the evil ship part or the volcanic winter.
It could be as simple as a raid featuring pawns identical to the colony's pawns, but healthy, or perhaps every humanlike pawn on the map could be cloned on the spot and go berserk until its double is dead.
There should be thoughts associated with the event (A new "I had to kill myself" event or perhaps the existing "Witnessed an ally's death" would suffice).

If anyone is interested in doing this, I'd love to participate, especially with regards to the writing involved. (I'd do it myself, but I don't know how to code at all!)

Here's my current base:

http://puu.sh/ixMMj/1ad91ee27e.png

When a sapper raid comes, they usually try to dig into the poorly covered eastern and western sides (for example, into the room where cervantes is), but get distracted by the turrets (there are usually more) and the entire group becomes incoherent, splits up, and very easy to take down.

Honestly, it's kind of disappointing. I expect to be rushed in a vulnerable spot and they just don't deliver. They even keep digging when they've already made a way into the base!

Waste!

These people don't poop!

Food doesn't seem to generate any other kind of waste!

People never get dirty and don't need baths!

Reasons waste might be nice to have in the game:
It's a small but reasonable challenge to have to set up a system for managing waste.
It adds verisimilitude.
Think about the consequences having a dirty base in the middle of a siege. I bet you wish you'd built a HyperAutoToilet now!

Productive applications of waste:
Fertilizer
Compost (creates soil you could put down?)
Psychically generated fecal demons

Possible implementations:
Latrine zones
Buckets for prisoners
HyperToilets that turn waste into soil or fertilizer
Potato (etc) leavings that can be packed into compost piles that turn into soil
Regular toilets and waste lines that deliver waste to e.g. fields to fertilize them
Showers/Sonic Showers
Hyper Washing Machines
Medical waste (and another need for incinerators)

It would be nice to be able to copy/paste colonist schedules, save them, and invert them (that is, shift all time assignments by 12 hours to quickly switch someone over to the night shift).

At one point about six months ago I was working on a mod to have a player-built building with the same properties as the evil ship part, with the idea that it would defend a colony's cryptosleep tomb indefinitely. Of course, one can get the same results by putting everyone in their pods while a ship part is on the map, so that's no big deal.

To address the original question, I like the evil ship part, but if it occurs more than once I just go to dev mode and destroy it with the dev tools. I vastly prefer even sieges to getting more than one ship part simply because I find the idea of it happening more than once implausible.

My favorite thing, though, is getting raiders and mechanoids to fight, and a ship part is a very good way to do that.

I love that aftermath screenshot. It's great that something as simple as vents can bring down a whole colony. You might even say it's !FUN!

RE: Batteries, my usual course of action is to charge up batteries and then disconnect them from the grid. So I'll wind up with a room with 3 independent banks of charged batteries, all ready to be reconnected when the 1 or 2 batteries still left connected to the daily use grid run dry.

I feel like I've done too many horrible things to accurately recount, but what stands out in my mind is the time I built a stone wall to seal in a prisoner who had gone berserk. There's butchering people in front of their comrades, which is bad, but re-enacting The Cask of Amontillado, even though I did it because they were dangerous, stands out as a dark moment in my rimworld history.

my own preferred endgame is to put everyone in cryptosleep pods. in fact i think the one thing i really want to do is make a heavily walled off cryptosleep pod room deep inside a mountain and then see whether the enemy AI ever figures out how to break inside.

It's been said on these boards multiple times that sandbags don't block shots at turrets, but I see tons of people that do build them around it anyways.  Can I get a confirmation on this either way?

it would also be useful to slow down enemies meleeing the turrets

I found a good way to generate DF-style weird mashed together colony names:

https://xuntroubled.merchantquest.net/pwgen/ppgen.cgi?wordcount=2&minlen=2&maxlen=8&randcaps=none&numlen=0&submit=Generate+Passphrase

Here are some I just generated:

ionsjaundice
pouncedconsoled
incominganne
cullingskater
sweatersrippling
louisannually
bunchanchovy
waywardvaginal
emptiestgrossman
dam'sclerical

I will probably use this from now on. I can't wait to show off the adventures and trials of Wayward Vaginal.

Flanistan

I have some similar thoughts. Here's a post I wrote out before checking on any other door suggestion threads:

I agree with the decision to go back on the "colonists have to lock doors to forbid them" thing with this latest release, but I'm interested in seeing just a bit more depth when it comes to door controls. I propose three toggleable settings for doors:

1. Forbidden/Unforbidden. As it is now.
2. Locked/Unlocked. A toggled state which must be switched by colonists. Locked doors keep enemies out and prisoners in, but take longer to walk through than unlocked doors. Unlocked doors don't need to be broken down by intelligent enemies.
3. Left Open/Left Closed. A Closed door is just a door as it currently works; colonists open and close them as they walk through. An Open door is simply open the next time a colonist passes through.

Why 2? I think it would allow for more creative defenses and more realistic and detailed security options (like if I want to fill a hall with doors for security, I should have to lock them all if I don't just want to slow my enemies down by a few moments). It fits the theme of hardscrabble life on the edge as well�the raiders are coming, rush to lock all the doors! Etc.. Let's not forget that a door left open was a key part of one of the greatest Dwarf Fortress stories, Boatmurdered.

Why 3? Well, in real life we make decisions about whether to leave doors open or closed all the time based on privacy, security, temperature, airflow, psychological reasons, so it is frustrating on an intuitive level that Rimworld doors aren't more controllable.

How all these should interact (like forbidding a Left Open door) are more specific decisions that would need to be tested by trial and error.

Another strat that really works is build a larger roofed structure over them and have one support holding the roof up next to a turret, when they spawn they will blow out the support trying to kill the turret and the collapsing roof usually incapacitates all of them at once. Then all you need to do is go in and clean up.

Note to self: stop piling metric tons of rocks on all my roofs.

In order to reach the planet, a solar flare (or, I guess, a coronal mass ejection associated with a solar flare) would have to travel to a point in its orbit which is actually ahead of the planet, wouldn't it? In the eart-sun system a CME takes a couple of days to reach earth's orbit. So it's entirely possible that there would be an eclipse and a solar flare/CME event affecting a planet at the same time. If anything, the moon's shielding effect, if any, would be greatest a quarter cycle before or after an eclipse, depending on which way the moon orbits around the planet.

It would actually be nice if there were a way to predict solar flare events. Something to use a telescope for besides Joy that would use the research skill for something ongoing.