Kmst's suggestion list

[kmst]

Dear dev(s),

Thank you for such a fun and addictive game. I love Rimworld. Here's a list of suggestions to make it even better. I'll provide reasons so they're more likely to be implemented. I'll number them so they're easy to address individually. None of the items are sorted by preference or importance. Happy to clarify anything that's unclear. Please take every suggestion with a healthy pinch of salt. Being seasoned developers you certainly know better, so I will be glad if you just read it, even if you don't agree or if the implementation work is too high to justify the benefits. However, if anything below sounds like a particularly bad idea, I'd love to hear why.

1- More Shortcuts. Shortcuts, especially keyboard shortcuts, are some of the cheapest Quality-of-Life improvements that can be implemented. They improve the replay value of the game. It keeps hardcore players around longer, generating publicity for your (great) game. Some obvious ones:
1a- Number increment/decrement buttons (for trading, bills, etc): Clicking the button while holding SHIFT could increment it by 10. CTRL could increment it by 100. CTRL+SHIFT could increment it by 1000. Right clicking the + (or increase) button could double an already positive value, halve a negative (e.g. when selling goods) value. This should allow us to get rid of the six +/- 1/25/250 buttons on bills.
1b- Add a (bindable) shortcut to select all colonists
1c- Scrolling speed should be adjustable

2-Build similar features from critical QoL/balance mods into the game. Doesn't need to be exactly the same, but generally these mods feel like they should be part of the game because they make it better.
2a- Medical tab: It's really useful and a big time saver
2b- Defensive Positions: A game is fun when decisions matter. Placing the same colonists in roughly the same positions on most raid isn't fun. It's just a boring but very necessary micro requirement.
2c- More Trade Ships: Given how easy it is to request traders from nearby villages, who have similar or better selections of items, orbital traders should either be more frequent or more interesting.
2d-ReclaimFabric: Getting some leather back, even if a little, makes sense and dovetails nicely with the smelting weapons and deconstructing mechanics for every other item type out there.
2e- Allow Tool: Huge, massive time saver given how simple it is. Maybe we just need the "Allow All" button. Super handy after raids or supply drops, or to generally pick up dead animals.
2f- QualityBuilder: Players often would prefer if some items were built by (some of) the best crafter(s). It's also a pain to keep deconstructing by hand if we're trying to get a masterwork+ quality set of items. It doesn't change the balance of the game, just removes uninteresting, repetitive "work"
2g- The animal management part of Colony Manager: Having a chicken farm is micromanagement hell. Being able to mass assign animals based on type and gender to areas or keep populations under control would be huge. This could be a researchable tech or require colonist work to execute. The point is not to make the game easier but to reduce boring repetitive work.

3- Merge similar leather types. There are a lot of types of leather which have (near) identical stats. These should be merged into one or at most a handful of types. Leathers/textiles with special attributes (wool, devilstrand, thrumbo, etc) can stay as is. Too often we end up with tiny amounts of 10-20 types of leather that can't be used to make an item and take up a lot of storage. We have the same kind of wood from all different trees so why not make it so each different leather type is actually different in terms of stats. Same for non-special meat types

4- Improve Bills UI. Crafting bills are an outsize pain point in the interface due to the constant player interaction during a game. Lots of little things would help:
4a- We should be able to copy bills between similar workbench types, perhaps even link them (so changes in one are reflected in the other)
4b- Drop on floor should be the default, as it is used far more often by players that know about it
4c- Each bill should take up less vertical space so we can fit more bills at once
4d- The bills panel should open automatically when selecting crafting furniture. The Bills button is the next click 95%+ of the time when selecting them.
4e- It should be easier to mass forbid certain ingredients from being used. If I'm running low on cloth and want to save it but have 3 tailor benches each with 6 bills, that's a lot of clicks
4f- It shouldn't be possible to enable or disable required ingredients. If I don't have a choice of using an alternate, I shouldn't have the clutter of seeing them in the enable/disable list. Same for the rotten button for most non-food crafting.
4g- It should be possible to copy bills between workbenches just like we can do with storage areas, since we can't move them. It's a pain to have to manually add several bills, configure allowed ingredients, drop on floor, set ingredient radius, etc when "moving" by deconstructing and constructing a bench.

5- Building a copy of something should also copy settings/bills (e.g. coolers/heaters, hydroponic crops)

6- Bleeding is too slow. Can we bump the speed 50-100%? Unless there's a catastrophic event where most colonists are downed, it's almost impossible for a pawn to bleed out. Generally it's fine to wait until a raid is over or the doctor finishes eating to pick up someone that was shot 8+ times and bleeding at 200%/day. I feel the bleeding dynamic would be more exciting it there was a real possibility of bleed-outs. I'd have to call off raid defenders to rescue severely injured colonists, raiders or pets, having injuries far away would actually be problematic and it would add an element of drama/excitement to not truly know if a patient would have enough blood remaining once treatment started. Maybe a bandaged wound could bleed a little for a while too if we don't want to up the bleeding rate much.

7- Performance can and should be better. This really matters. I have a high end macbook from a few years ago. The game runs fine early on but struggles on anything but normal speed mid and late game. This severely affects my willingness to replay a game. Others will have even slower machines. The beauty of a game like RimWorld is that most computation doesn't need to be done every tick. I'm sure you're already doing lots of this, but the playability wouldn't be affected noticeably if plants only grow every 60-100 ticks, or if items decay in even longer intervals. An item that doesn't decay (furniture, items in the shade or say, a chunk or body part) doesn't need to be checked unless something is looking for it. Even better, work can be spread out over many ticks. So if we update plants every 100 ticks, we could take the plant index mod 100 and update 1% of them each tick. A lot of this computation could be done over multiple threads as well, granting a 2-8x performance boost on almost every modern machine. (OK I saw the frequent suggestions thread) Late game in Factorio, a game that I'm sure many RimWorlders are familiar with, will have tens of thousands of items and inserters in a much larger game map, with thousands of enemies and hundreds of construction bots handling jobs constantly and still run buttery smooth. It has to be possible to make RimWorld's tick logic significantly faster. Of course that would take a *lot* of work. But it really is worth it and makes a big difference in the enjoyment of a game if it doesn't lag. It might also allow for a 4x game speed, which would be nice since nights are usually pretty quiet.

8- Grass tends to die off really easily. Due to fire mechanics and very low "seeding" range, after a few storms, all the grass on the map except for the edges is gone, leading to a wasteland look, despite entirely natural causes. New grass should be able to spread from a larger distance from existing plants and/or grass fires shouldn't propagate as evenly and thoroughly as they do right now.

9- Trader mechanics are too easy to abuse right now. Get comms console. Call all 4 trader types from a faction. Let them gather around an area surrounded by turrets. Hide all your colonists except for one. Fire at the traders and run away. The turrets (even a small amount) will kill most of them and route the rest. Fleeing traders don't seem to fire back. In the ensuing carnage, capture the many survivors (they won't bleed out for ages, no hurry) and release them. Now relations are good enough so you can befriend them again for far less silver than you just stole from the corpses.

10- Fleeing pawns should do a more tactical retreat where they can fire back here and there. Most bases have strong defensive points but a few tiles away from it, even fleeing raiders could do a lot of damage to any pursuers. Right now it's too easy to camp a few colonists/turrets near the escape route (they often run away the same way each time) and gun the raiders down with impunity.

11- It would be great to be able to mass select mechanoids and shut them down. Same for executing downed enemies. See the Achtung mod.

12- It would be great to set eating policies like we can do for clothing and drugs. E.g. ration so colonists eat once every two days This would make it far less micro-intensive to conserve food (hungry colonists lose saturation more slowly), rather than eating at full speed and running out.

13- The room cleanliness bonus to impressiveness should be tweaked to make other floor types viable. Right now sterile is the way to go for most uses. In addition to making rooms with lots of statues more impressive than even gold tiles due to cleanliness being the lowest stat, it also reduces cleaning burden, food poisoning/infection chance and improves research speed.

14- Walking speed modifier improvements. Rough stone/soild should have a higher move penalty. Chunks and other obstacles seem to limit the pawn speed to a fixed value instead of reducing speed by some % of the max. This is not confirmed but a double-bionic-legged jogger high on drugs seems to walk over chunks about as slowly as a peg-legged sick slowpoke.

15- Giving doctors a bionic arm or two seems to completely obsolete spending ages training them or using higher-tier medicine as it boosts surgery success chances to >100%. Maybe we need a scaling factor like is done for raw medicine skill?

16- Expanding storage/growing zones seems pretty unintuitive. Maybe this is a bug. If I drag a new zone that touches an existing one, sometimes they will merge, sometimes they won't. It's really hard to expand some existing zone to touch another one since sometimes the expanded area goes to the wrong zone. If I start dragging a zone from a tile owned by some existing zone, it should *always* expand that zone. If I start in a tile that is empty (zone-wise), it should *always* create a new zone.

Thanks for reading!

[Krog]

+1 to these suggestions, especially shortcuts (1) and bills overhaul (4).

There's a mod that might help with grass growing ( 8 ) by randomly seeding grass across the map: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pmupgn3yurpiyfh/Grass%20Spread.zip?dl=0

[Draegon]

+1 especially to the grass suggestion. I've seen the after effect of large fires, the grass comes back from under the burned grass pretty fast.

[skinicism]

  I think a poster already mentioned scorpion blimps
with each containing a laser emitted from the tip of
the tail (and a bunker flipped around and back over
the blimp) but wanted to see what you think Tynan
thinks about such a thing.

[kmst]

  skinicism, I smell a hint of trolling here...

[Hori75]

16- Expanding storage/growing zones seems pretty unintuitive. Maybe this is a bug. If I drag a new zone that touches an existing one, sometimes they will merge, sometimes they won't. It's really hard to expand some existing zone to touch another one since sometimes the expanded area goes to the wrong zone. If I start dragging a zone from a tile owned by some existing zone, it should *always* expand that zone. If I start in a tile that is empty (zone-wise), it should *always* create a new zone.

You need to disselect the stockpile zone before making a new stockpile zone

[kmst]

Thanks for the tip, Hori75! That's helpful. However, I think it would still be more intuitive if the location where the area starts being dragged from determined if it would be a new area or an extension of an existing one, don't you think?