Tired of useless colonists

[Shurp]

isn't the vanish penalty the same as colonist death penalty (-3)? Assuming no other additional penalties (friend/wife/etc)

Also, the real problem with the minstrel above is that vatgrown soldier disables social. Otherwise he'd at least make a good recruiter and sculptor.

Combinations which inactivate a bonus should be flat out prohibited. Either that, or the bonus should reactivate the skill. Perhaps at a base of zero, so the vat minstrel gets a social skill of only 4.

[mndfreeze]

I 100% agree that combinations where one job disabling another should be ruled out.  I've had one to many pawns pop in that are supposedly experts in something only to have their second job or trait completely disable it.  I feel like the negative traits, bad stats are almost weighed to heavily in the game now.  I get that there is supposed to be bad traits and things are supposed to go wrong and thats part of the challenge but why is it even when I'm sitting there rerolling my rich explorer it takes me 10 minutes to find someone who isn't literally about to die of a heart attack, with a bad back, a pyro with a drug addiction all at once, BUT HEY HE HAS 15 SHOOTING BUT EVERYHTING ELSE DISABLED.

etc.

I'm a firm beliver in trying to play the game in vanilla as intended as most mods feel cheaty to me, but I pretty much have to use prepare carefully now to help microadjust my colonists initially or it just isn't fun.

Perhaps the system could be adjusted a bit so colonists can be just a hair better to outweigh the negatives when they get rolled, or something can be done where based on the difficulty you're playing adjusts the numbers of your colonist possibilties.  If you're playing on extreme then more bad colonists make more sense.  As it is, for most games, I pretty much let 80% of the joins/spacer crashes/prisoner captures die/let go because its not even worth it to deal with all the BS just for an extra set of hands. 

[TheMeInTeam]

Personally I'd like to see significantly less "incapable of" (not removed entirely) and also less interest/passion so that these are more meaningful.

I definitely don't like self-inconsistent backstories like a pawn having a violence-disabling childhood then somehow having a warrior backstory as an adult (despite not being able to fight).

[mndfreeze]

Things definitely seem to have slowly drifted to be more negative and more extreme on colonist RNG, at least to me.  It used to be you got a fairly even mix, both when rolling new characters on start and as joinee's later in the actual game.  It *WAS* possible to get someone who had high stats and good traits, but not common, just as it was to get bad stats and bad traits.  Now it really seems like whatever system is used on the back end (let's assume points like prepare carefully uses for the sake of discussion) is far to heavily weighed towards negative stuff.  It seems like there is a tie in to the stats and passions a colonist has to being old as fuck, bad back, alzhiemers and dementia.  Traits sort of feel the same, but not quite as bad.  Good traits, not ancient, and not incapable of important stuff are my go-to's since you can level up the actual stats, but without passions.... ugh.. it can take forever.

Really though, all of that is fine, just needs to be tweaked a tiny bit less negative on occurance.  The jobs that contradict each other should definitely be fixed.  Needs to be some sort of rule built into the code that says if a colonist specializes in X, then he can't have Y or Z professions that remove it.  The actual text of the stories at some point should be fixed and adjusted of course but thats not nearly as important at this stage of the game.  That can be done last or post official release even since its just backstory and not game affecting.  Just immersion breaking.