Suggestion: Make Day and Year Cycles world traits.

[Barley]

So Tynan has been messing around with the length of months and length of days quite a lot recently. I think he's trying to make preparation for winter easier, but personally I liked how threatening winter was -though longer days are certainly nice, too.

Then I thought "Hey wait a minute. Rimworld isn't just a colony sim. It is, in Tynan's own words, a story generator. Why would he want to make changes that actively prevent us from telling epic stories?"

Well the obvious answer is "Game Balance", but frankly its borderline impossible to balance seasons when people can just choose warmer or cooler regions during colony landing phase. So why not make the seasons themselves an adjustable element in the world generation table?

Every Planet has a different orbit and rotational speed, so when we should be able to account for that in the world generation table. How cool would it be to generate you own version of the "A Song of Ice and Fire" world? you could do that by extending month length to, say, 300 terra-days. Or how about a world with days so long your colonists need afternoon naps? Or the opposite: A world with days so short that you need to build greenhouses (Basically a wood shack with a sunlamp and dirt ground for growing) to get the food growing at a decent rate?

Of course, now we have the problem of coming up with a standard time unit to measure everything. I recommend the Hour. When setting up a world, a slider (with "random" toggle for seeds-generator purists, of course) is offered. You set day time in hours, and then month time in that planet's days. That way you still have even numbers for time units.

[Kegereneku]

I say, why not ?
Sound cool.

Myself I'm hoping there's enough other Events available that Eclipse can be relegated to something periodic rather than random mean for the storyteller to adapt the game experience.

[Kingmob]

Sounds really cool, you could always make it an 'advanced' feature of world generation, to prevent new players from getting completely stuck.

[s7jones]

This sounds like a great idea, and relatively easy to implement.

*POTENTIAL PROBLEM*
I think an extreme (either long or short) day or year cycle planet could be very confusing and difficult for a new player though.

*POTENTIAL SOLUTION*
To combat this the world generation could have some options a la Dwarf Fortress, e.g. day cycle - standard / random, year cycle - standard / random.

*POTENTIAL PROBLEM*
A differing day cycle might not work depending on how the sleep needs are coded.

*NO SOLUTION*

[bordas1234]

The solution is easy, make the colonist automatically go to sleep when the rest bar is low, i think that is implemened but im not sure

[Mckee]

Yeah, I'm pretty certain colonists will sleep when they need to, but seem to prefer sleeping on a night (In so far as they choose to go to sleep on a night at a higher threshold, no moodlets as yet).

I think it'd be interesting to see non-standard day night cycles effect sleeping patterns, as well as animal behaviour.

[CodyRex123]

I think they sometimes perfure to go to sleep at night, but i think they only go to sleep when the need is low, sadly, they won't get up even if the bar is full intill morning, which makes having people work at night kinda hard.