Colonist seed !

[b0rsuk]

Just like there's a world generation seed, there could be a colonist generation seed. The seed that was used to generate all the colonists. I know there would be problematic issues like how to handle player rerolling one or more colonists, but look at these fellas !



Second one:


And the third:


What's not to like ? They landed in a rainforest. This is movie material. Only I started this game on difficulty 1 Phoebe Friendly because I wanted to test some new stuff in dev mode. I would like to carry them to a serious game and not devmode testing.

I would love to carry such 3 colonists around, and recommend them to someone just by uttering a magic phrase.

I made a savegame just in case I decide to salvage this game by changing storyteller on the fly. They look hard, but not hopeless. Only one small scar and they can haul, plus there are good researchers.

[mumblemumble]

Neat idea, and arguably more useful than world seeds

1 +.

but at first when you said colonist seed, I thought you were being inappropriate 

[Aerial]

I'm not sure if the OP's suggestion covers this, but rather than being able to save a seed that generated those three random colonists that happened to be good ones, I'd rather be able to save my three starting colonists in a separate definition file of some sort. 

I've landed on a couple of maps that were just unworkable... boreal forest three quarters covered in water, for example... and it would have been really nice to be able to generate a new map and import my starting colonists again.  And, per the OP's desire, you could share those saved colonists with others.

[b0rsuk]

Aerial, the advantage of a seed number or a 'magic phrase' is that it can be trivially posted on a forum, in a text message, on a wiki etc. It's the ultimate form of compression. A file can contain all that, but is awkward to move around. For example for me this forum is notorious for not accepting file attachments and I have to use third party intermediary websites like sendspace to attach savegames for bug reports.

[Aerial]

Aerial, the advantage of a seed number or a 'magic phrase' is that it can be trivially posted on a forum, in a text message, on a wiki etc. It's the ultimate form of compression. A file can contain all that, but is awkward to move around. For example for me this forum is notorious for not accepting file attachments and I have to use third party intermediary websites like sendspace to attach savegames for bug reports.

Understood, but I was taking "seed" to mean a random generation seed.  If that means you could hit "randomize" until you got three colonists you liked and there was a single seed value you could then save off, that would satisfy the functionality I'd like to have.  But I was assuming you wouldn't have a single seed value because you had individually re-rolled each colonist.  That's why I was looking for a save file that I could use to recreate those three colonists' attributes.

[GridLink]

Aerial you can use a mod (EnB Prepare Carefully) to do what you want. Use the randomise buttons to get a set you are happy with then you can save and load that group as a preset.

You have a number of other options as well but you don't have to use those.

[mumblemumble]

having 1 seed, instead of individual seeds, sounds like a dumb idea. I'd rather be able to mix and match exactly as I wish, with seeds

but prepare carefully is a very good point.

[b0rsuk]

having 1 seed, instead of individual seeds, sounds like a dumb idea. I'd rather be able to mix and match exactly as I wish, with seeds

Depends on exact implementation. Do you fancy posting 5 colonist magic phrases instead of one ? Because tribals start with 5 colonists. And no one says 5 starting colonists must be the maximum.

[mumblemumble]

I would rather post more, yes : otherwise seeds will be next to useless, because the more colonists, the less control over the seed.

[Hans Lemurson]

I approve of this suggestion!

[b0rsuk]

What if the seed is actually several seeds concatenated together, so its length is directly proportional to the number of colonists ? Win-win ?

[Xena]

I more or less approve of this suggestion but feel that it is somewhat similar to what is already in place.  You can randomly generate characters, some of them having been created by the community.  You can also edit them with EdB's Prepare Carefully, and save the group of colonists to your files.
Why not just upload a copy of said files to the forums and deliver a group for all to play with that way?  Granted, they'd need EdB's mod but it is a similar solution that may or may not be easier. 

I am not a modder, nor am I a coder, but I wanted to add this in case it was a solution to the OP's liking.  I'm fairly new to this forum, and I've played RimWorld for a little over 4 weeks as well as shamelessly putting in over 300 hours of gameplay.

[mumblemumble]

What if the seed is actually several seeds concatenated together, so its length is directly proportional to the number of colonists ? Win-win ?

Not sure how well that would work, but ok..

[b0rsuk]

What if the seed is actually several seeds concatenated together, so its length is directly proportional to the number of colonists ? Win-win ?

Not sure how well that would work, but ok..

String concatenation.

[Greep]

In agreement with others, separate seeds sounds better imo, but also loving the idea

@Xena, I'd agree, but this looks pretty tiny and useful for vanilla.