School and Learning

[LouisTBR]

This seems pretty cool!

If Tynan is planning to make relationships the 'Next big thing' for Alpha 13, there is one key element: Pregnancies (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=16376.msg176573#msg176573). With pregnancies, there is, inevitably, children. With children, there is, inevitably, school and learning. This is a pretty interestingly complex system, so please read through it with me!

Here goes!

School:

Classroom - A room in which school desks (new item) are placed. Children sit at these desks and learn from a blackboard (new item)
Management - A tab to show you all of the possible educational paths (Construction, Mining, Growing, Social, Doctoring, Handling, Cooking, Crafting, Tailoring, Smithing, Art, Research) and allows you to select which colonists will be taught which skills. You can also choose the ratio of lessons, so construction may be a double lesson, whereas art may be a normal lesson. A maximum of 5 lessons can be taught per day per child.
Teacher - A work task which allows colonists to enter a classroom when a lesson starts to teach pupils.

New Items:
Blackboard - A piece of equipment required for teachers to teach pupils.
Schooldesk - A piece of equipment at which pupils sit.
Large Schooldesk - Like a regular desk, but gives a 10% boost to learning.

But, an idea never works until the mechanics are explained:

Pupils enter the classroom when a lesson is scheduled. They will sit at their desks throughout the lesson all the way up until they leave for the end. If they have another lesson straight afterwards, they will not leave and will stay at their desks. The teachers do the same, but they enter and stand next to the blackboard.

Learning:

Learning consists of a pupil getting better at a certain skill. Per lesson, a pupil will get 500+ points in that subject/topic. If they sit at a large Schooldesk, they will earn a bonus 50+ points on top of the default 500+. Pupils are forced to stop tasks immediately to go to a certain lesson, and will not leave regardless of needs or tasks that need fulfilling.

This has lots of room for expansion. On Monday!

[keylocke]

inb4 :

[BetaSpectre]

Would be interesting to see school determine a person's background.

[SlimeCrusher]

Just make kids follow a certain colonist around, while learning the stuff that colonist does. Imagine a miner, doing mining stuff, while the kid watches him do that he learns mining too, same for other jobs. That eliminates the need for classrooms as such unnecesary crap that make the game even more tedious and complicated. We're on the rimworld, an abandoned rock, not on a glitterworld.
And seriously, why is everyone speculating about colonist relations and kids just because Tynan added animal mating?

[Boston]

I see no reason not to include something as simple as a 1-room schoolhouse. They existed in pretty remote areas

As for your "children" question: because it is the logical progression, based upon the mechanics included in the A12 update (animal husbandry + mating/birthing) and what is hinted to be the next A13 update (colonist "relationships") although what forms the A13 update takes is unknown.

[keylocke]

why would there not be any sexy times and/or getting preggers?

some people can actually make their colony survive for more than a decade in this game. 

it's more weird that colonists aren't doing anything kinky or making kids and getting accidentally preggers.. for years.. (i can't even last more than a month without sexy times.. seriously)

besides.. just like neurotrainers, there could just be an "age-booster" item. (like neurotrainers)
which could magically add 15 years to someone's age..

i could come up with dozens of more implausible stuff that happens in rimworld other than getting preggers, or taking a dump, or drinking water. haha. it's about rebalancing the time ticks or something. (some tasks just shouldn't take up so much "time" in the first place)

[REMworlder]

I have to agree that expecting kids in the game is really optimistic. There are a lot of other areas Tynan wants to explore first, and lots of features that need to be set up before children can become a realistic creation. Relationships and kids aren't going to appear in the game sequentially; kids are going to come last.

FYI the lack of children in the game isn't for any PR reason. They just haven't been essential yet. Lots of other more critical things to do first. e.g. I wouldn't try to implement children without first implementing a relationship system. Kind of goofy to have kids but not have any framework for their relationship to their parent to actually mean something.

But let's say Tynan suddenly rides in from his break on a moose and releases a human children feature tomorrow. How do they interact with the framework in the OP?

One consistent theme that comes up when Tynan addresses children is they won't age:

But yes, other thread pretty much covers my thoughts on procreation. Even in DF games rarely last long enough for a kid to grow up. Growing up is slow!

Kids could definitely be in the game. They wouldn't grow up though. I think that works. I mean, it's about stories, right? And there are lots of stories where a kid begins and ends the story as a kid. Nothing wrong with having a character who is just a child.

This is pretty consistent with in-game themes. Procreation and aging take awhile. Even Thrumbos take somewhere like 1-2 full years just to finish gestation. Depending on how the doubling of day lengths is implemented next patch, aging could progress even slower or take longer in game than it does now.

What I'm getting at is hypothetical children won't age much. A child will always be a child in the game.

This makes the purpose of educating kind of odd, since these kids won't grow up. So education either happens purely for its own sake, or because the player expects to use the kids as child labor later on anyways and is just trying to boost the kids' stats for slightly better labor a few months from now.

Why go to all this trouble instead of using a neurotrainer? Why educate kids if they learn while performing labor anyways? Even Dwarf Fortress only uses a very simple form of teaching, and that's only as a way to improve military skill among soldiers. Teaching is just a neat, complex solution to the problem of uneducated adults that likely won't exist.

[deslona]

I think classrooms should work in a similar way to learning as things do now. That is students in a room (that has a teacher) should have their skills in the taught subject trained at the working rate and also affected by passion level. So if a student needs to travel a long way to get to the class they will only get a smaller boost for the lesson instead of an arbitrary number.
I would also want to say that the teacher can only train up to one level below their current level. This is to prevent your brain injured cleaner with no good skills in anything living next to the classroom being 'exploited' to teach all your colonists level 20 shooting.
This doesn't need to be for children, it could be for any colonist.

[Wex]

This doesn't need to be for children, it could be for any colonist.

Yes. This is the point. If you need a surgeon and your is sitting on his butt, you should be capable of teaching someone. Maybe only to half skill, but having someone with medicine 7 is way better than medicine 3. The day your surgeon is injured and needs surgery, you can hope he will get healed, this way.

[Toggle]

Having your colonists have children, even if you have some kind of vatgrowing machine, will still just be worthless. You could capture a few downed raiders to gain colonists instead of waiting forever for vatgrown ones that would be expensive as heck.

[LouisTBR]

I didn't check this thread earlier as I imagined it wouldn't be popular... What a mistake...

Thanks for all the feedback! I am going to try to reply to everyone here:

BetaSpectre: Yeah, I guess this would be interesting. But how do you mean? Could you specify which background changes this would make? Traits?

SlimeCrusher: Well, first off, this is a good idea, but to make this worthy of a dedicated Alpha it would need more than a few learning mechanics. All of the items in the game are there so each new alpha brings out something new and interesting. As for the mating thing, isn't it obvious? Animal mating and keeping comes in, the natural instinct is for humans to follow!

Boston: My thoughts exactly. Obviously, it wouldn't be 'Come on, let's get a classroom!' 'Oh, what about food and shelter?' type deal, but somewhere along the line it would be pretty cool to include.

Keylocke: Sexy times - Yes! Now, the thing about the colony: Wouldn't the game get boring after 10 years of playing the same colony? The neurotrainer thing got suggested to me in the pregnancy page I have linked in the first post, exactly the same words more or less. As for time, it definitely needs a rethink to include babies and sex.

REMworlder: Yeah, it is always good to look forward to something, especially with Alpha games. With the animal thing: Most animals take about 3/4 of an in-game year (120 days) to go through the whole pregnancy stage, and babies age up in about a year. This is 2 years total, which seems about right for a human IF it was in Rimworld. As for the trouble, neurotrainers would either have to be nerfed (ie $5000 per) or removed completely. The education is based, as I said, on education BOOSTS as well as LEARNING.

deslona: Yeah, interesting system. Like real life, it takes a knowledgeable person to pass on that knowledge to others. You can't teach something you don't know, after all! Maybe children could be taught to 1 below the teacher, but colonists to equal the teacher as they have the same physical capabilities.

Wex: Yeah, I was gonna include this in my reply, but then I thought against it as you wouldn't be mentioned 

ZOMBIE2: Again, systems need to be rebalanced and nerfed in order for any of this to work.