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So compact!
It's been almost a week since I booted the game up, but with fields like that I would worry about Blight very much.

Blight events seem to attack any contiguous set of growing zone. So a simple 1 width walkway in 5x squares or whatever you like both speed up your pawns and cuts down on blight (pun mortar incoming)

1) Roughly double the listed grow time of any plant, to figure out when you'll actually have it. Day/night cycle is a thing.
2) Pawns eat twice a day, using 1.4 to 1.8 nutrition depending on what you cook. 2 meals * #pawns. Or 20 vegetables/meat * number of pawns (if you have a cook). Or 32 vegetables/meat/pemmican * #pawns for raw

I suppose I think that meat and leather drops are reasonable...with a GOOD cook.
I have not looked at the production curve for this, but rarely feel out of leather.

That said, even with a 10+ cook, a MEGA-SLOTH boi only gives enough leather for a duster+hat.
Adjusting spawn rates down and material drops up would be acceptable, to go along with size increases.

Tangent - since we're talking animal hunting, anyone want to start a thread about Animal Handling = Stealth? It's seeming overpowered to me right now, with a 75% stealthed shotgun wielding maniac chasing deer and muffalo. But some Rhino just showed up, so I sense fun incoming.

Danielle, 3rd Entry, Decembrary 2nd

So much has happened!
Early September we started getting "raided". A Manhunting cariboud here, a crazed tribal there. I'd laid down a few deadfall traps, and despite them not being reusable they've been invaluable.

Feces really hit the nutri-system dispenser on the 6th though. An escape pod fell out of the sky with Fields in it. We immediately hit it off discussing his past after my daughter patched him up. He decided to stay and is quite good with his hands. Belle says his breathing is due to some of the wounds he's taken, but whatever, it still creeps me out. At least he's good at quite a few things.

That same day we get a call on the radio...someone is in trouble. So we send out a ping and Carney shows up...chased by raiders who we quickly dispatch.

The day after that, the sky turns green and things started to die. The harvest had just come in, but we had to shift it around and put some more roofs up. Greenhouses from here out it is, thanks to my research work.

Things have just been trucking along since, more raids show up, die to my traps and get shot. I'm also finally training the huskies.

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Still on build 1974 for all that. Raids were quite a bit easier compared to a couple patches ago. The graph has 3 dots, but I've had 5 raids and a manhunter so far. One raid caused by chased refugee.
I can see how having a resource cost for deadfalls makes complimentary sense with IEDs. Building them from stone is a bit work intensive, but wood is precious in the mountains.


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Upward adjusting the caravan animals to match real world would honestly be a nice change. I doubled Muffalo/Rhino/Elephant/Thrumbo sizes in B18. It doesn't have to affect meat qty too much, honestly. How much USABLE meat could you putt off a Thrumbo, accounting for organs, etc. if it doubled in size?

Increasing size + increasing meat drop also creates a negative pressure on hunting. Right now I hunt my maps down to vermin whenever possible, and it rarely feels like enough. Hunting a muffalo and feeling set for 3-6 days would pair well with the extra micromanaging we have to do in 1.0, like trap and turret fixing.

Danielle, 7th Jugust
It's a veritable circus here! Three huskies, a male and two females smelled the blood trails from the sloths I've killed so far. No time to train then, still need to get walls up and plant more.

Some...cats showed up? A whole feral colony. But they're too stupid to do anything but beg for handouts, despite the rats, rabbits and squirrels that abound here. I'm letting them starve.

An alpaca took a liking to our rice field and seems content to hang around.

Caught my daughter shaking her ass at Jacob. But he's smart enough to know what's what.

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OOC: It seems like cats are too stupid to do anything but starve. They have the entire map to hunt on but refuse to do so despite being .26 to .15 body size advantaged vs smallest prey animals. They really ought to do what standard cats are good at and clear vermin. They're sleeping wherever they like since I have no animal spots layed out, but 12/12 of them are going to die due to starvation.

Daughter Belle flirting with her stepfather, despite him being married and her mother right THERE. If this doesn't have a lower rate of occurence than standard flirting, it should. Or...*sleazy jazz music intensifies*

Several mad animal events stopped by Slate deadfall traps. 3+ injuries per trap.

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After enduring over three thousand years of relativistic hypersleep (with a bit more during the trip while her daughter and husband were shiphands), the Danielle crashlands on the Rim!

The ship AI kept screaming something about 1974 villagepeople...

On the way down, the crashpod cameras were showing us a mountainous area, with our resources badly distributed. There looked to be a promising geothermal system valley to the west..but we were going to come down in a sharp sided mountain meadow. Good thing my daughter and I know how to dig.

Amazing! Belle found a seam in the slate and followed it. We've opened up a cave, so the work to get to the west valley is much reduced AND we have shelter.

Thermal imagery indicates cave systems to the north, but we have more pressing concerns for the moment. The crashpods only contained a few seeds, some of which say "For Experienced Farmers Only!" I guess we're sticking with corn, rice and potatoes for now. At least we have fertile soil on which to plant.

Jacob thinks we're going to need some walls, and soon, so he's been chipping rocks in the cave. I think we're going too be busy for many days to come, but at least I can snuggle him at night.

Danielle Mays, First Log, Aprimay 14th, Planet Mahasim-8
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This was a neat char-gen. Mother and Daughter were there from the start. I had to stop when the  husband showed up. Danielle must have been drawn to him because of the child spy background they share.

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I like the idea of this.
Since pawns are primarily modified by traits, we know certain things are possible. We've got Psychopath, Transhumanist, Wimp, Masochist that all change pawns up, so the system has room for additions.

Can you outline exactly what you'd want from an "evil" group? Maybe it can be a new trait that modifies other things.
Ex.:
Remove the social aspect from Psychopath so moods are easier to manage, but add a Sadist bit so they like hurting people.

I'd enjoy a small change to how diseases are talked about:
1) Combine all the notifications for a single disease into a single letter. It will be a bit less cluttered that way.
2) Give us a new line under the mood warnings ( 2x Major Break Risk / 1x Minor Break Risk, etc). This line dynamically updates with who has a disease, and the immunity/infection. This will let us get rid of the letter after we get the notice.

Thanks!

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If you built traps in .1972 or prior and continued that save into .1973, the old traps will require the Debug-Destroy tool to get rid of. Or maybe grenades. They also won't have any of the commands that new traps will have.

An interesting concept. Good luck with it!

I think something like this would end up a lot like the Toxic Fallout event. You simply end up barely going outside your base because it will hurt your pawns.
I tend to not be afraid of 1-3 pirates after a while, though. So going and dealing with them like you would a siege is another option.
Maybe an emphasis on them hunting down nearby animals/picking bushes clean/building non-sandbag structures?

[1. Should the game have a such a thing as bad luck outcomes that's not induced by some obvious, non-pressured, voluntary player decision? Or should I make a universal design standard that nothing bad ever happens unless the player actively induces it or makes some clearly-traceable mistake to cause it?]

What a topic. Thanks for 1000+ hours of game. Thanks for having a game that is so easily mod-able. I play this largely as a meditative base builder, re-load on even basic mistakes/rng diseases (prior to 1.0 at least).

1. Should the game have a such a thing as bad luck outcomes that's not induced by some obvious, non-pressured, voluntary player decision? Or should I make a universal design standard that nothing bad ever happens unless the player actively induces it or makes some clearly-traceable mistake to cause it?
It's interesting to have both types of events, but I think there should be ways to mitigate the RNG elements from the player side.
From a flavor/story perspective I think it's important to make a real distinction there. This both teaches folks how to play/lets them mitigate it, and helps set expectations. Further up this forum for example, someone lists Muscle Parasites as needing 300% total tend to remedy. The game doesn't tell us this, so I've only ever treated them with my most common medicine at the time. If the tool-tip for the disease said "This needs a great deal of high quality medical attention" (to be vague) or "This needs 300% total tend to be remedied" (to be clear)..I would be damned driven to go get some Glitterworld meds to cure it, because now I know there's a solution that gets the pawn up quickly. Given many colony states, it might not be possible to go get medicine right then. Some diseases can be blocked with Penox, some can't. That gives real utility to going caravaning, because keeping everyone on Penox takes Colonists x 12 Neutroamine a year, or some such. It's a choice we don't have to or can't make, but we're punished for it, sometimes.

2. Should I just ignore some classes of player feedback as simply not linking up with what RW is? Are some players worth leaving alone to try to make a game that's different from the usual assumptions? Even if it leaves them pissed off because they interpreted a story generator as if it were a skill test?
People being what we are, negative reactions hit us harder than positive ones. We'll always moan about bad RNG while ignoring the good RNG. It's a cognitive bias. So take it under advisement, but not as a 100% opinion.

3. Should players be able to consistently avoid losing people/resources even at high difficulty? At any difficulty?
No to #1. Maybe to #2, if the breadth of your setup allows it. A longer description of each difficulty and what it changes wouldn't hurt.

4. Is there a way to set expectations (relative to the whole game, or relative to a given difficulty level) to encourage players to accept some degree of randomness to game outcomes? Or will they always reject this randomness and demand to be rewarded in accurate proportion to their skill/effort?
See question 3. I personally love a detailed description, but understand some folks don't like to read paragraphs.

Reading through this topic, I'm surprised that a few things haven't come up. But I'll reinforce what some have said before I get started on that.
Tynan, please don't compromise your vision of the game to appease those that are really negative. You have more data on how things interact than anyone. Set the RNG where you want it to be.

That said...here's something inherently supported by the game, and I absolutely love it: folks have modded the ever loving hell out of it. If you set up your RNG a certain way, that's the vanilla experience (and that's great). Give modders the tools and info they need to change as much as they can to how they see fit and create new branches.
Example 1) Medieval Times for B18 and previous iterations added better low level armor. It is also one of the few mods that took advantage of pawns having more than stumps at the ends of their arms, which the vanilla game does not. There is a variety of boots and gloves which protect/enhance ability.
You know what I did with this? I had a castle full of heavily armored mace swinging brawlers to slam into Infestations. In B18 where you could set up 2 ranks of pawns, I'd put shooters behind them.
The armor gave me a new way to deal with a vanilla issue. It also heavily mitigated damage from small arms fire, but never felt overtuned.
Everyone walked around in steel plated boots or better.
Example 2) I will definitely download a 1.0 mod at some point that tweaks miss chances so that a gun going off by my tough brawler's ear doesn't shoot their eye out. I feel they should be more likely to get shot if in melee with the enemy, instead of guarding an ally. Sometimes they'll do both at the same time, which means it should be a 50/50 or maybe just 25/75 they get shot on a critical miss.
Example 3) I'll probably always have a Recycling style mod, because otherwise there is low utility in stripping pawns after early game. It keeps haulers and dogs occupied. Dogs are actually useful in 1.0 even without mods, so I try to keep a pack around now.
Example 4) It would be a largish re-factor of the ThingComp def, but I'd totally get a mod that let me select Dusters, Material , Quality x5 instead of Material first. It would make caravans so much easier to put together. As is, I'm stuck with limiting on base creation to certain materials to get a similar effect.

Something of a vanilla/mod inconsistency highlighted below:
If the game allows you to control an issue in event X, make sure it allows you to do so for Y and Z as well. Example mod: Animal Logic/Better Pawn control/Pick up and Haul. At home base, I can create zones and policies with different haul levels in different stockiples to control who consumes what, whether animal/prisoner/etc. I should expect the same on Caravan. My muffalo don't get into my Fine meals because the pawns restrict it. Pawns don't eat kibble with other stuff available just because they have some in pocket from training their bonded dog.

I saw in patch notes that deadfalls have a exclusion range now. That's fine. But I found an exploit immediately.
The exclusion works in Blueprint stage and excludes other blueprints just fine.
Once a trap goes to Partial Build stage, the exclusion disappears! So you can micromanage pawns to deliver resources, then move on.
You can even forbid the partial build until you get things laid out.
When a trap is finished, the exclusion zone detects the completed trap.



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A side effect of this would be that you could forbid firewood so that torches/campfire/passive coolers don't get auto-refilled. It's a roundabout way of not deconstructing them when you don't need them.

But you'd still have wood to make sculptures and doors with. Interesting idea!