Your Cheapest Ideas

[Anduin1357]

Removal of "Table needs chairs" warning.
Some things are purely aesthetic.
Addition to doors 'open doors' command to powered doors so that your poor colonists do not have to keep opening them.

[penquiney]

Could there be a wild plant that gives herbal medicine when harvested? Something along the lines of Aloe Vera.

[Thanok]

I did not read the entire 99 pages so I apologize if I copy someones ideas. And i'd like to apologize for my bad english.
I just had a few ideas and wanted to share them.

- Power-Conduits consume very low amounts of Power (1-2W each) as real cables do
- Plasteel-Conduits; Pretty much the same as the normal ones but a) no powercomsumption and b) they do'nt get short-cuircits. Costs should/could be 1 or 2 Plasteel each (maybe + 1 Steel?)
- New type of batteries. Lower efficiency, higher capacity. Maybe 50 Steel + 50 Plasteel each? Maybe an addition for later: When stored under a certain Temperature, they ca'nt cause cables to burn.
- Another type of reactor, like the ship-reactor but with more power-output and not suitable for the ship
- Ability to place hoppers at other objects then the dispensers (e.g. cooking stoves)

[Anduin1357]

I did not read the entire 99 pages so I apologize if I copy someones ideas. And i'd like to apologize for my bad english.
I just had a few ideas and wanted to share them.

- Power-Conduits consume very low amounts of Power (1-2W each) as real cables do
- Plasteel-Conduits; Pretty much the same as the normal ones but a) no powercomsumption and b) they do'nt get short-cuircits. Costs should/could be 1 or 2 Plasteel each (maybe + 1 Steel?)
- New type of batteries. Lower efficiency, higher capacity. Maybe 50 Steel + 50 Plasteel each? Maybe an addition for later: When stored under a certain Temperature, they ca'nt cause cables to burn.
- Another type of reactor, like the ship-reactor but with more power-output and not suitable for the ship
- Ability to place hoppers at other objects then the dispensers (e.g. cooking stoves)

What made plaststeel a superconductor? Fact is, it would be worse cuz there are plastics in it. add value please, it would be better for it to have a coating option.
"Another type of reactor" Get a mod.
"hoppers at other objects" Get a mod.

[Thanok]

Well, so why should we post ideas if those could be enabled with mods?
Personally i prefer to play the game as it was intended by the Devs and if they ask for ideas i am willing to give them ideas. If they think they are'nt good enough for the game that's fine. But for anyone else: Do'nt read ideas if you have a problem with new things coming in a game in Alpha stage. And do'nt update the game, because Alpha games usually get a lot of things.

To the Plasteel ideals: I do'nt think that the game wants to be terrible realistic. Plasteel is a very expensive and hard-to-mine material with pretty little use right now. That's why i would like to see it getting some more uses. Since it also contains steel, it should be able to conduct electricity.

[Anduin1357]

Mods are, in fact, one of the greatest ways to add content to the base game, you give the devs an entire repository of files to include in the base game. Remember that most, if not all mods are licensed under creative commons/some public use license which allows anyone to use, modify, incorporate (with credit)...
I myself found that an idea of mine was so cheap that I did it myself instead of waiting for the devs.
If your idea is cheap enough, maybe making a mod out of it instead is better.
I realised I just redefined the definition of cheap idea for Tynan.
If you think that the devs can do something better than you though (Such as writing on hard codes or changing something nobody else knows how to edit.), feel free to post.

[Anduin1357]

2. Prisoners should by default receive the worst quality food. There should be a check-mark similar to receive care/friendly chat that would allow me to give the prisoners I'm trying to recruit the good stuff. No more lavish meals swine!

And then make a mood "Segregated" that is -15 mood for being given the worst food on purpose than opposed to the other guy (us and them) increase chance to go psycho and attack said well-treated guy. 

[Thanok]

Basicly you can give them the worst food. Do'nt give them food but build a dispenser + hopper (wich should be reachable from the outside) in their cell. A friend of mine put human meat in the dispenser causing the prisoners to eat tasty human-nutrition-paste instead of his cooked meals.

@Anduin: Yes, that's right. As i mentioned, right now i prefer to play the game as intended by the Devs and therefore i prefer to not use any mods. I might change my mind later, but right now i have to wait for new stuff to be added.

[ITypedThis]

2. Prisoners should by default receive the worst quality food. There should be a check-mark similar to receive care/friendly chat that would allow me to give the prisoners I'm trying to recruit the good stuff. No more lavish meals swine!

And then make a mood "Segregated" that is -15 mood for being given the worst food on purpose than opposed to the other guy (us and them) increase chance to go psycho and attack said well-treated guy. 

Only to be beaten into submission with a length of wood by one of the prison guards as an example to the rest of them.

But in regards to the topic, I concur with the idea that prisoners should be given the worst of the available food supplies. Personally, I used to just leave raw human meat in one corner of the prison for the prisoners until the temperature system was implemented, which caused the meat to rot. I had tried to use a nutrient paste dispenser filled with the meat in a refrigerated room, but the hoppers counted as part of the wall and as such, were "outdoors." This was fine in the winter, but not in the summer or during heat waves.

While there are other solutions, they often require more resources and micro-management than they are worth, and would very easily be replaced by being able to dictate what food is delivered to a colony's prisoners.

[MikhailBoho]

Basicly you can give them the worst food. Do'nt give them food but build a dispenser + hopper (wich should be reachable from the outside) in their cell. A friend of mine put human meat in the dispenser causing the prisoners to eat tasty human-nutrition-paste instead of his cooked meals.

That wouldn't work with my current prison layout unfortunately. I have it set-up so that none of my prisoners interact with one another. I used to have them all share a large room, but the fights and the negative mood from sharing a room was just too annoying to offset. God forbid you end up catching a group with an abrasive and volatile prisoner. So many wounds...

Here's my prison. I have the Space Meals mod which makes those packaged survival meals terrible. Other than the fact they never rot (which I like for an emergency), I would like to be able to designate my prisoners eat those. My wardens wouldn't have to run to the other side of the colony to give them the good stuff, and my colonists wouldn't have to compete with them.


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[chase_u_97]

Im sure somewhere in the 99 pages someone probably had an idea similar, but i think there could be a second type of sand bag that is taller and impassible by colonists, raiders, and etc. This sand bag would be for colonists to shoot out from behind safer cover then the small sand bags. Because these sand bags would be taller and impassible, maybe turrets could not shoot through them because of the extra height. Another thought I had is that sandbags be a less preferred path for the colonists. I set up a square bunker with the middle line with two doors, one door led to out side and the other into the rest of the base. when the colonists left the base instead of going straight through the door right in front of them they would turn and slowly crawl out of the sandbags instead. Im not sure if changing the pathing is cheap or not but its something that has been constant in my worlds.

[Jezzibella]

These too may have been suggested in the last 99 pages as the person above has suggested, however most of my suggestions are around tweaking the start of the game to improve longevity and tweak the experience.  I'm new to the forums but have been playing a little while and thought I'd get involved

None of these are in any order of preference/priority.

* Lower probability of ranged weapons in initial crash "supplies".  Survivors should craft rudimentary melee weapons first which makes the low-tech population more of a threat.  Firearms should be a good early goal to find/develop rather than handed out for free.

* Security turrets make defence far too easy, setting up a bottleneck is easy and leads to near infinite base defence.  Make them harder to get and it means defence is more challenging and more interesting.  Also, a tier 1 turret should be one that needs a person to operate and can be upgraded later to be automatic.

* Higher tech pirates should not arrive until later - why would they bother to attack three petty little survivors, how would they even know they are there?  The nature of the threat should start low tech and scale over the course of the game.

* Apex predators hunting animals on the map.  This means that the survivors might need to kill it so their animal food stocks survive.  Winter has helped boost the challenge but I can simply kill a ton of unmolested animals if my potato stocks were insufficient.  If there's a massive king lion out there eating muffalo I'd need to go out and kill the lion which is not without risk.   How about a sacred lion, which then causes the low tech tribes people to not like me much and come for revenge...

* Domestication should be an "attack" option and take a while to do, but you can then setup pasture zones and the animals eventually breed.  Combined with predators coming after your chickens this introduces another layer of challenge.  The animals would need foodstock too, so you'd need to provide for them over winter if you want them to survive.

* New colonist type - robot.  Think Lost in Space style tracked, ungainly beast.  To begin it can do all of the menial labour jobs (slowly) but no research, art etc.  It will need power, needing to periodically dock with the power grid.  It can then be upgraded, adding a ranged weapon initially to function as a mobile turret, improved efficiency, better longevity between recharges and so on.  Susceptible to the same types of events that knock out electric items, EMP mortars etc.  Right now, if you get a colonist who won't do any menial duties like building or planting, it's pretty much an instant restart because on harder difficulties it gimps development.  Having a very basic robot survive too will offset that while still not overpowering more useful starting survivors.

* New colonist type - android.  This is to all intents and purposes like Ash from Alien.  The crash wasn't an accident, it was deliberate because there's something on the planet they need, maybe an unusually aggressive alien   When it's found, the android then goes berserk to protect the secret.  Make this a rare event though, as losing a colonist we've invested time into could be counterproductive.  But finding the artefact/alien/treasure AND surviving the android should certainly add flavour to the story.

* Sieges from loads of weaker, low-tech units before firearms have been found.  The benefit from beating it is still minimal - what exactly will you do with 10 pila and some loin cloth? - but represents a challenge for survivors without firearms.  It means you need to be sufficient ASAP or you'll need to sally out and break the siege.

* An inverse of this, and perhaps not a quick win, could be befriending the locals so they view you as gods and giving occasional food/gold/silver offerings or rallying to your defence.  Ideally, you'd be able to see their camps on the game map.  They could even be a target for more advanced pirates looking for slaves so you'd have the option of defending the locals or letting them be abducted and you escape notice.

* By a similar token, you could have pirate scavengers land looking for resources and take a random tour of the map looking for things.  If they don't find anything after xxx minutes, they leave for richer pastures.  If you can power-down and hide, they might not notice you...

* Traps.  From low-tech spike pits etc. through to land mines, barbed wire as you suggest and beyond.  You could even give colonists the option of mounting the heads of dead enemies on pikes - to reduce the morale of attackers at the cost of offsetting our own sanity.

* New resource type of "tech", needed to upgrade your research bench, robots or make other buildings more efficient.  This can be combined into...

* Drop pods/caches that are found should be rarer, but more useful.  e.g. finding a firearm, or armour or the new "tech" resource.  It could also be a benefit from cryptopods too, once the threat is beaten and the pod empty you can steal the computer and put it to use doing something else.  It also could be needed to build the ship to escape as right now, beating the game even on harder levels is too easy once you've turtled up.  Making one of the resources you need to survive then escape something you need to fight for would stop every colony becoming "find a bottleneck, spam turrets and mortars, profit".

* New biome type (maybe for a particular "game type") of death world.  Taking a leaf form 40k, the flora and fauna are all harmful to some degree so even getting a basic colony going is much harder but your survivors soon become a hardened band.  Give everything an attack radius, make plant types that are carnivorous etc.

* Ammo.  I'm in two minds about this.  Right now I think infinite ammo makes things too easy but would worry that adding in ammo would introduce needless complexity.  Overall I think it'd be a benefit and even if it's cheap and easy to make, the fact you need to make some and manage a supply (especially for your turrets) will help make defence a challenge & a focus.

Another higher level concept could be to make the game a variant on Swiss Family Robinson.  Rather than have the end-goal be to escape or bust, your survivors could have a hidden attribute - namely, whether they want to escape or actual grow to love their colony and want to stay.

If you move the orbital communication platform WAAYYY back in the tech chain (and be harder to build), the long term goal is not so much "build a starship" but "build a signal flare to attract attention".  This could also be the trigger than sees higher-tech pirates aware of your presence.  Instead of orbital trade, your survivors are found and can be rescued - their hidden attribute is revealed and those who want to leave go but some of their rescuers find the wild frontier life appealing and choose to swap places.  Factoring in relationships/romance, you can have some incredibly difficult choices when a couple choose to split, or someone who wanted to leave stays for the sake of their new family.

This also then means the game has even more longevity/open-endedness.  Some of your colonists who survived years of living on the edge make it away to safety and you can be happy they escaped.  New faces have arrived who may or may not integrate smoothly and you base transforms into a colony and again into a small town.

The ship building option changes from being "escape" to unlocking trade with vessels in orbit - after all, you need to get the goods to them somehow, and having a powered, repaired ship and a landing pad (more facilities to add/research/build) will give you more options.

With your new found wealth, facilities and people comes the threat of pirates and invasion though.  Your fortified town and population will be a ripe target you will need to defend...

I realise some of these are varying levels of easy to do integration and may even be existing ideas but as I say, I'm new to the forums and simply wanted to share some ideas.

[Anduin1357]

Agreed with 1st point, thing is, can we start off with no weapons whatsoever? You could grab a tree log and start off...
2nd point Defenses are supposed to be cracked, the AI needs to be updated with more ways to siege than mortars ie. continuous waves of attackers, make it the new Stalingrad.
3rd point Maybe. Randy might send mechanoids at your 3 dudes but I think the first responders would be natives since they are most perplexed by "things falling from the heavens".
Higher tech pirates *might* have detected the crash and the 3 pods though.
Apex predators, predators, alpha wolves... the problem with them is that right now, the end result would be predators raiding you, the game just cant handle it atm...I think.
Domestication is maybe a good idea but since confining wild chickens is a bad idea due to stress and being "cooped up"... No.
Unless, of course, you buy livestock from orbital traders or smth, an animal that is used to being around humans.
Bots and stuff *REQUIRE* a AI computer core. It's too risky to do such a thing in lore.
The low tech units would need a casus belli to siege you or attack you so if they came after you, you must have been renegade to them.
What could possibly make them believe that you are a god when they were descendants of the spacers? They know who and what you are and you are most certainly not a god.
(At least until you fire energy weapons and vaporise their projectiles with personal shields etc...
Pirate scavengers would not even bother to attack you, they would just leave to find a building more abandoned.
They would have less stuff than pirate raiders since they scavenge from destroyed colonies and not meant to do combat with one.
Traps. There was once an explosive charge that could be detonated manually as a trap / mining etc It's gone for good reason
(being able to kill 20+ raiders who stacked up in one square is OP)
There are mods for traps other than the charge anyways.
errata tech resources, bench upgrades.
When a lot more content (more than this game plus all the mods currently compatible atm) times 5 (especially weapons and a need of weapons stockpile)
Different armor types, 3 times more of Project Armory, fleshed out power generation from solar, wind, water, thunder, heat, uranium, cold fusion, electromagnetic energy extractor...
Then let's talk about weapon caches n stuff.
New biome type. MORE LIKE NEW PLANET TYPE!!!
Let's try: surviving in an half-mined asteroid.
Surviving on mars equivalent.
Surviving on ocean world (floating waste islands.)
Surviving on glass marbles (post-nuclear holocaust)
Surviving on derelict ship
Surviving on star energy harvester (mass effect power gen station)
... Basically, avoid this for now until the dev got time.
Ammo? Make an ammo mod that rewrites all weapons to treat burst shot count into clipsize that causes firing on dead bodies just to empty clip stop, reload and shoot other target.
Homemade ammunition would require lead/metal for firearms, wood for darts, arrows etc.
Would make boomerang an asset in time.
edit: too much work, derp.
Maybe having a ship is not all, maybe it would instead be used to ferry supplies about, make a space station and ultimately do something mankind could not do yet.
Asteroid mining.
Make a new world, make it be space, have empty space like ocean, can't "land" on, make asteroids that has uranium or metal or granite etc.
I probably talk rubbish.
The more supplies you have, the greater raids will be.
Built assets do count as raid size increase incentive.
Build up your ship only to find that would-be traders are pirates and are trying to take over the ship.
End result, initialise a new instance of rimworld, ship spawn in space and your colonists defend your ship in ship boarding combat.
If you can take over enemy ship, kudos to you, if you die off, ship gets removed from game, obvious fate of colonists.
If you capture enemy ship, +1 to ship fleet, both would need more crew.


Nice try, you have still much to learn. Good job on the post too.

[prancingfox]

Don't know if this has been suggested, but here goes.

A automatic switch option for sunlamps. During those desperate times when you're farming outdoors and don't have enough power for the sunlamps, sometimes you got to keep them off during the day and only turn them on at night. Why not have an option for them to turn themselves on and off during the night and day?

[MikhailBoho]

Don't know if this has been suggested, but here goes.

A automatic switch option for sunlamps. During those desperate times when you're farming outdoors and don't have enough power for the sunlamps, sometimes you got to keep them off during the day and only turn them on at night. Why not have an option for them to turn themselves on and off during the night and day?

I would love a priority system for power that we could fiddle with. So say, my batteries are at 75% capacity, I can set the luxury items to shut down to conserve power (like the workstations). At 50% the lights go off. 25%, the sunlamps and hydroponics. Once we're out, bye turrets. Odds are, we're dead

I usually do this all manually, but my god it's tedious.