Boomalopes/rats should only explode if their "sacs" are damaged, or if burnt.

[Call me Arty]

you see? i think that's boring. why dont rats eat a carcass and spread the plague[/i] instead? that would make for awesome stories! the way it is right now, only the death of bondes animals and these boomers will affect you in any negative way. sure, you couldve sold your elephant instead if it didnt die, but dying pets is never a problem as long as not all of them die at once or something.
it seems to me that you want the cake AND you wanna eat it. well you cant. boomers go boom because you live with the danger that they can. otherwise they'd be overpowered.

but if you want it so much that you can get your overpowered boomers, get a mod done where they follow your own rules. i'm sure it's not that hard to make. and if you like it and it doesnt throw off the whole gameplay, spread it. until then it is fair to assume that it will make the game seem very modded.

ps: i understand your point, but including me nobody seems to share your opinion here. it will quite probably never make it to vanilla. i am sure tynan wants the (ab-)use of boomers in rimworld to be always like playing with fire and not a free way of shooting rocket launchers at the enemy

   1. It's not a disease. They're engineered to be the way that they are.
   2. Loosing bonded and boomer creatures is pretty bad, and so is losing your only female, your only healthy battle creature, losing your milk-producing/egg-laying creatures when they turn grass into food and your colonists aren't good enough at growing or hunting to rely on one or another, losing your haulers in a colony full of "incapable of dumb labor", losing your rescuers when your last combat-ready colonist is down, bleeding, far out of the bounds of your walls. Animals are important if you utilize them right.
   3. I want the cake, and eating it would be pretty nice. However, I'm sure you could agree that eating that cake would be pretty tough if it blew your arm off when you tried to get a slice. I'm pretty okay with not eating the cake after it's been shot or set on fire . . . that's pretty commonly viewed as a ruined cake.
   4. I have grenades and rocket launchers in my colony right now. They can go boom, but only when I want them to. I can put them in the freezer, I can put them out in the desert during a heat wave, I don't even have to feed them, and they can explode yards away from me. What would make less explosive boomies more overpowered than those?
   5. If I was a pawn, my "Coding" would be at about a one. I play Rimworld to relax, I don't want to have to work for my games after I worked to buy them already, sue me. If it was that drastic of an issue, I'd have my idea buried somewhere in the mod requests right next to the Master Chief armor and dragons. I can deal with it, it's fine, it'd just be a nice touch. I'm not asking for a new system, it's a simple change. Do you want people to mod-in every little issue they have? I'm not saying that Tynan bends to every request we have or should, but small, minor elements are added to the game all the time.
   6.  "but including me nobody seems to share your opinion here." The game has sold 1,000,000 copies recently, pretty awesome achievement. Seven people have commented on here in total. Even assuming that everybody bought the game twice, that's a whole 1.4% of the community. I'm sure somebody else could see my point of view.
   7. "it will quite probably never make it to vanilla". . . just like caravans, a 3D world, a way to bring colonists back to life, orbital laser strikes, and animals that explode when they die.
   8. Boomies aren't free rockets. A free rocket is a free rocket. You don't have to feed rockets, rockets aren't slow, and you can't shoot a rocket in the brain before it reaches you.

[wwWraith]

The point is not about their power. This unpredictability of boomies adds some spice to the game. They would be less interesting without it. There are Zzzzt, Tornado, Flashstorms, etc., and boomies just provide us some more micro-incidents. Of course we can't easily calculate, but I suppose there are decent amount of players who will lose a part of their fun if these explosions will become more controllable. Many things become boring when they have no chance to break from the player's control. So I think this idea is more like for some mod than for vanilla so players could choose what they want.

[sick puppy]

you see? i think that's boring. why dont rats eat a carcass and spread the plague[/i] instead? that would make for awesome stories! the way it is right now, only the death of bondes animals and these boomers will affect you in any negative way. sure, you couldve sold your elephant instead if it didnt die, but dying pets is never a problem as long as not all of them die at once or something.
it seems to me that you want the cake AND you wanna eat it. well you cant. boomers go boom because you live with the danger that they can. otherwise they'd be overpowered.

but if you want it so much that you can get your overpowered boomers, get a mod done where they follow your own rules. i'm sure it's not that hard to make. and if you like it and it doesnt throw off the whole gameplay, spread it. until then it is fair to assume that it will make the game seem very modded.

ps: i understand your point, but including me nobody seems to share your opinion here. it will quite probably never make it to vanilla. i am sure tynan wants the (ab-)use of boomers in rimworld to be always like playing with fire and not a free way of shooting rocket launchers at the enemy

   1. It's not a disease. They're engineered to be the way that they are.
   2. Loosing bonded and boomer creatures is pretty bad, and so is losing your only female, your only healthy battle creature, losing your milk-producing/egg-laying creatures when they turn grass into food and your colonists aren't good enough at growing or hunting to rely on one or another, losing your haulers in a colony full of "incapable of dumb labor", losing your rescuers when your last combat-ready colonist is down, bleeding, far out of the bounds of your walls. Animals are important if you utilize them right.
   3. I want the cake, and eating it would be pretty nice. However, I'm sure you could agree that eating that cake would be pretty tough if it blew your arm off when you tried to get a slice. I'm pretty okay with not eating the cake after it's been shot or set on fire . . . that's pretty commonly viewed as a ruined cake.
   4. I have grenades and rocket launchers in my colony right now. They can go boom, but only when I want them to. I can put them in the freezer, I can put them out in the desert during a heat wave, I don't even have to feed them, and they can explode yards away from me. What would make less explosive boomies more overpowered than those?
   5. If I was a pawn, my "Coding" would be at about a one. I play Rimworld to relax, I don't want to have to work for my games after I worked to buy them already, sue me. If it was that drastic of an issue, I'd have my idea buried somewhere in the mod requests right next to the Master Chief armor and dragons. I can deal with it, it's fine, it'd just be a nice touch. I'm not asking for a new system, it's a simple change. Do you want people to mod-in every little issue they have? I'm not saying that Tynan bends to every request we have or should, but small, minor elements are added to the game all the time.
   6.  "but including me nobody seems to share your opinion here." The game has sold 1,000,000 copies recently, pretty awesome achievement. Seven people have commented on here in total. Even assuming that everybody bought the game twice, that's a whole 1.4% of the community. I'm sure somebody else could see my point of view.
   7. "it will quite probably never make it to vanilla". . . just like caravans, a 3D world, a way to bring colonists back to life, orbital laser strikes, and animals that explode when they die.
   8. Boomies aren't free rockets. A free rocket is a free rocket. You don't have to feed rockets, rockets aren't slow, and you can't shoot a rocket in the brain before it reaches you.

this is getting ridiculous.
1) and the way they are right now is that they explode no matter what caused their death.
2) at that rate you could also say the death of grass or a bush could affect you badly. that's not what is meant. if you only have a single fighter and that fighter is an animal, you made bad decisions beforehand. and dont come up with even less probable or interesting scenarios. in most scenarios you have a bunch of pawns and most are capable of most things. and single animals are not as much worth. if you wanna have a single nudist rich explorer that cant haul or fight and your only animal that can help you out in this regard is a boar and it dies, well, ok. that is one, highly improbable case. most players dont play scenarios like that though. an animal in rimworld is not as important or good as a pawn. an exception could be the thrumbo but it is very difficult to tame and teach. you have to put a lot more into teaching it to attack and haul than to recruit enough pawns to get the same effect. and there is no need to make boomers as strong/useful as them.
3) so what are you trying to say? the longer you stick to the cake metaphor the less sense it makes.
4) grenades need pawns to throw them. boomers are automated heat seeking incendiary missiles and you can release a whole army of them at once. they reproduce by themselves and can even conventionally attack enemy pawns before exploding if they are fleeing for example. they produce chemfuel. and they barely increase your colony's wealth.
5) modders already do that, day in and day out. then there are meta modders that gather all these small mods to make one mega mod out of it. if you look for a change like this in the mod section, i wouldnt be surprised if somebody did it ages ago without throwing a fit.
6) if people are as annoyed as you are by this issue, they tend to come here and open the same threads over and over again. yet, there arent any more answers here, not even a mod merging this with an old thread.
7) friendly reminder to you that 1.0 is around the corner and that tynan doesnt seem very keen on taking new stuff into it.
not only that but they have infinite range and will come back to your arsenal if their target dies prematurely. honestly, i have never used rockets extensively in my playthroughs, but boomalopes and boomrats? hell yeah. they are very well worth the risk to be able to wreak havoc among enemy ranks, especially around corners, but also have so many other options with.

[Call me Arty]

 Okay, this is getting crazy, so I'm not going to respond so in-depth to everything again.

This suggestion - the product of an idea and originator of this thread - was after I set a boomalope to slaughter, and had to rescue two burning pawns and minimize the damage to a burning barn. I thought "Wow, that's stupid" because it is. I then thought "well, what if slaughtering didn't kill them?" That didn't make sense, as slaughtering is just cutting the neck, yet, we couldn't cut anywhere else? If only cut damage was excluded, bullets wouldn't ignite them, and we should include blunt damage too, and so-on and so forth.

Giving the explosive creatures a unique organ simply made the most logical sense. Now, you can butcher them, they can die of natural causes, and you can still kill them in the wild, you simply have more control over when they explode in your base. Expecting a player to prepare for a heart attack or infection, or even a designated slaughter area for two kinds of creatures out of fifty-ish is asking too much, you can see a similar reaction to player's feelings on infestations and tornadoes. You can prepare for a raid with turrets and traps, stock-up with some proper medicine in preparation for a plague or suite of parasites, and keep clothing and temperature systems ready for sudden weather changes, but somethings are seen as . . . unfair. Tornadoes come with no warning and can erase hours of progress, and hives can punish players who play smart (bunkers beat mansions in the middle of a field).

This is where my concern comes from. Giving the player agency, but not a free ride. The amount of care and security put into boomies outmatches the drills we use to mine chemfuel, the cows we use for food, the places we use to manufacture weapons and the rooms we use to house those who handle them. That's ridiculous. Sure, some may welcome it, but overall it's a hurdle many players (including me) aren't ready to leap. I simply ask for more freedom to have them without the almost forced penalties that come with caring for the critters. Fire, gunshots, arrows, whatever. They ignite them all the same, just like old times, but now noncombatant deaths aren't going to ruin a day.