I'm sorta hijacking this because I've also found hauling broken, but lemme respond to the other points
1. I don't know how the wealth system works, actively trying to stay poor for easier events and more morale seems a bit cheesy but then again for a normal player actually being a bit slow at harvesting stuff it'd make sense
2. How would doors work with this ? How do doors actually work in the first place ? Raiders and wild animals can't open them, so I assume your colonists have keys, but uuh ... your animals too. And the visitors and merchants. Anyway if doors wouldn't open as soon as the "visitors" steal your stuff, it wouldn't be much of a challenge, unless they were saboteurs : infiltrate your base in disguise and attack.
4. Thought about this too, but how would this work ? If you can camp like this, what's to stop the player from sending an expedition 1 tile away from the settlement to mine, hunt and forage ? And when you leave, does the game have to store its state in memory ? If so it's going to be hard to implement and resource-intensive. If not then the player can just keep coming back to that specific tile and generate a new area each time. Also if you can mine like this, long range mineral scanners are now useless. It would also make events such as toxic fallout way easier : just relocate everyone or send out hunters to gather food. And when you think about it, you wouldn't have any wood, mineral, stone, meat or foraged food shortage until you've cleared all the tiles in a radius around your settlement.
As for 3, I completely agree and I want to add a few points but also discuss balance.
Yes it doesn't make sense that colonists can only carry 75 of one type of item, while they can carry way more on caravans, so a fix would be nice, but there are a few problems. How does a colonist carry a big animal if he's limited to 35 kg ? How does he carry an uninstalled bed (which is like 80kg) or any other heavy item ? Keep in mind you usually don't have muffalos early on to carry big loads, too. It could be possible to make it so items heavier than a set amount (say 20kg) can be carried regardless of weight.
Another problem is that some items that can be hauled around easily are actually pretty heavy. 75 steel now would be like 20 steel with this change (is it 1kg per steel ?). And right now if someone loses manipulation, he loses item capacity (my frail colonist can carry around 40 items instead of 75), which by the way doesn't work in reverse : my augmented colonist still only hauls 75, but in any case since manipulation doesn't influence caravan carry weight, this would have to disappear or be reworked too.
Last problem with this is balance. Thinking back the game would've been much, much faster if this change had been in, and it's the main reason why I don't use pick up and haul. Hauling is like half of the game, at least for my inefficient colony, and faster hauling would mean more time for everything else and the game would've progressed way faster. Is that good or bad ? I don't know. All I know is that balance would change.
Anyway here are more hauling suggestions, which would also affect balance :
- Allow colonists to carry stuff on them. More than 1 meal. Another weapon to switch between long and short range.
- Allow us to decide what handlers carry around for taming and training. Make it so doctors carry medicine around so that they stop running around the place to treat patients and animals. Side-note : treating wounds without a bed.
- Fix situations where 5 different colonists assign themselves to haul 5 stacks of items close together which could've been hauled by only 1 colonist. Maybe when a colonist assigns himself, he also looks for similar items close-by to chain-haul and also reserves those. Goes for blueprints too (when 5 builders haul 1 steel each to your 5 power conduit blueprints).
- Fix situations where a colonist will walk 100 tiles away to gather 10 wood, and leave another stack of 10 wood 12 tiles away because it's slightly too far to chain-haul it even though it would save enormous amounts of time.
- Would seriously affect balance but let colonists plan their jobs ahead and haul more items, so instead of the cook going back and forth for each meal he prepares, let him take 70 rice, make 7 simple meals, and haul everything in one go.
- Let builders also plan ahead. Instead of the builder hauling 7 steel to 7 power conduit blueprints and then going back to fill the 43 remaining others, let him take 50 steel instead in one go and fill everything.
- Let several colonists haul items to a single blueprint at the same time.
- Make it so colonists haul items to blueprints before hauling items to storage. Usually, building is more important than getting stuff to their storage.
- Refine the AI so a colonist will haul the items closest to their blueprint. Say I'm building a geothermal generator next to some steel I just mined. Make the colonists haul the steel directly next to the blueprint so they don't waste time.
- Maybe allow animals to haul items to blueprints unless it's intentional for them not to ?
- Forbid colonists from hauling resources to blueprints if there aren't enough resources to complete it right now. Why let resources sit there wasted ? (though the player can just forbid the blueprint so it's not such a big deal)
- Prioritise hauling perishable items (metals and stone go last, wood goes before those but after everything else) especially during bad weather. Prioritise by a combination of value and hit points (don't let that legendary sniper sit outside ! stop hauling the silver ! haul that rice with 5 hit points !)
1. I don't know how the wealth system works, actively trying to stay poor for easier events and more morale seems a bit cheesy but then again for a normal player actually being a bit slow at harvesting stuff it'd make sense
2. How would doors work with this ? How do doors actually work in the first place ? Raiders and wild animals can't open them, so I assume your colonists have keys, but uuh ... your animals too. And the visitors and merchants. Anyway if doors wouldn't open as soon as the "visitors" steal your stuff, it wouldn't be much of a challenge, unless they were saboteurs : infiltrate your base in disguise and attack.
4. Thought about this too, but how would this work ? If you can camp like this, what's to stop the player from sending an expedition 1 tile away from the settlement to mine, hunt and forage ? And when you leave, does the game have to store its state in memory ? If so it's going to be hard to implement and resource-intensive. If not then the player can just keep coming back to that specific tile and generate a new area each time. Also if you can mine like this, long range mineral scanners are now useless. It would also make events such as toxic fallout way easier : just relocate everyone or send out hunters to gather food. And when you think about it, you wouldn't have any wood, mineral, stone, meat or foraged food shortage until you've cleared all the tiles in a radius around your settlement.
As for 3, I completely agree and I want to add a few points but also discuss balance.
Yes it doesn't make sense that colonists can only carry 75 of one type of item, while they can carry way more on caravans, so a fix would be nice, but there are a few problems. How does a colonist carry a big animal if he's limited to 35 kg ? How does he carry an uninstalled bed (which is like 80kg) or any other heavy item ? Keep in mind you usually don't have muffalos early on to carry big loads, too. It could be possible to make it so items heavier than a set amount (say 20kg) can be carried regardless of weight.
Another problem is that some items that can be hauled around easily are actually pretty heavy. 75 steel now would be like 20 steel with this change (is it 1kg per steel ?). And right now if someone loses manipulation, he loses item capacity (my frail colonist can carry around 40 items instead of 75), which by the way doesn't work in reverse : my augmented colonist still only hauls 75, but in any case since manipulation doesn't influence caravan carry weight, this would have to disappear or be reworked too.
Last problem with this is balance. Thinking back the game would've been much, much faster if this change had been in, and it's the main reason why I don't use pick up and haul. Hauling is like half of the game, at least for my inefficient colony, and faster hauling would mean more time for everything else and the game would've progressed way faster. Is that good or bad ? I don't know. All I know is that balance would change.
Anyway here are more hauling suggestions, which would also affect balance :
- Allow colonists to carry stuff on them. More than 1 meal. Another weapon to switch between long and short range.
- Allow us to decide what handlers carry around for taming and training. Make it so doctors carry medicine around so that they stop running around the place to treat patients and animals. Side-note : treating wounds without a bed.
- Fix situations where 5 different colonists assign themselves to haul 5 stacks of items close together which could've been hauled by only 1 colonist. Maybe when a colonist assigns himself, he also looks for similar items close-by to chain-haul and also reserves those. Goes for blueprints too (when 5 builders haul 1 steel each to your 5 power conduit blueprints).
- Fix situations where a colonist will walk 100 tiles away to gather 10 wood, and leave another stack of 10 wood 12 tiles away because it's slightly too far to chain-haul it even though it would save enormous amounts of time.
- Would seriously affect balance but let colonists plan their jobs ahead and haul more items, so instead of the cook going back and forth for each meal he prepares, let him take 70 rice, make 7 simple meals, and haul everything in one go.
- Let builders also plan ahead. Instead of the builder hauling 7 steel to 7 power conduit blueprints and then going back to fill the 43 remaining others, let him take 50 steel instead in one go and fill everything.
- Let several colonists haul items to a single blueprint at the same time.
- Make it so colonists haul items to blueprints before hauling items to storage. Usually, building is more important than getting stuff to their storage.
- Refine the AI so a colonist will haul the items closest to their blueprint. Say I'm building a geothermal generator next to some steel I just mined. Make the colonists haul the steel directly next to the blueprint so they don't waste time.
- Maybe allow animals to haul items to blueprints unless it's intentional for them not to ?
- Forbid colonists from hauling resources to blueprints if there aren't enough resources to complete it right now. Why let resources sit there wasted ? (though the player can just forbid the blueprint so it's not such a big deal)
- Prioritise hauling perishable items (metals and stone go last, wood goes before those but after everything else) especially during bad weather. Prioritise by a combination of value and hit points (don't let that legendary sniper sit outside ! stop hauling the silver ! haul that rice with 5 hit points !)