Your Cheapest Ideas

[Mkok]

We need an option to allow/disallow certain food types for colonists. For example peasants would be allowed to eat only nutrient paste, while high level pawns are allowed to eat lavish meals    It could be done similarly to how allowed clothing is done.

[Boba Phat]

- Make corners consistent.  Sometimes you can interact with things in corners and sometimes you can't.  You can't water a potted plant in a corner, but you can turn on a lamp in a corner.  You can't build a wall in a corner, but you can grab and haul things in a corner.

- Wearable jewelry which makes non-ascetics happy.

- Silverized clothing which wearing greatly reduces the risk of infections.

- Veganism trait which keeps colonists from killing, milking, or eating animals, eating eggs, or wearing leather.

- Clams, a harvestable "plant" which produces clam meat and grows in shallow water.

- Zen garden which produces joy for ascetics.

- LED lights which require research, but consume 1/10th the power of standard lamps.

[Serenity]

You can't build a wall in a corner

I've found that they don't necessarily build it themselves, but manually telling them to works

[delor]

  How about a "crude prosthetic arm" at the blacksmithing table?  That seems like it'd be a simple def file mod, so super cheap.

  Have it consume a little bit of steel and slightly more wood, and return 12% manipulation.  It doesn't obsolete the dependency on outside sources to get good prosthetics- even the simple prosthetic arm returns more- but it does at least give you a tiny sop to throw armless colonists once you reach blacksmithing levels of technology.

[Boba Phat]

a "crude prosthetic arm" at the blacksmithing table

Groovy.

[mumblemumble]

Allow a thing (animal, pawn, electrical equipment) to be vomited on (causing panic / fleeing / attacking, disgust / hate / attacking, and electrical failure chance respectively)

The hilarity of someone throwing up on something causing a problem would be both extremely unlikely, and hysterical.

[poolday]

There is a mod around called Caveworld Flora by Rikiki, it has been one of the few mods I've been using and it feels very natural to the game. Many games have mushrooms inside the caves so perhaps this content could get to RimWorld. The glowing of the mushrooms is a really nice touch too.

[TrashMan]

Power-generating floor tiles:  Every time someone passes over one of these tiles, it generates a tiny bit of power.  In reality they steal a bit of kinetic energy from each footstep, so they could somewhat slow movement.  But a clever person could seal a whole pile of chickens in a room filled with these floor tiles and turn it into a generator.

They are energy-inefficient even in crowded areas.
Chicken would impart so little energy that it wouldn't matter.

[OFWG]

Have turrets defend colony animals like they do pawns.

Currently the turrets will only fire at stuff that's aggro to a colonist, leading to frustrating situations where say a grizzly bear walks behind my turrets and eats the baby alpaca and (later) baby muffalo and I can't do anything about it. Even if I have a pawn shooting the bear, the bear is such a damage sponge that the baby animal is a goner regardless. As soon as the bear eats the baby though, it turns on the colonist and is instantly roflstomped by the turrets.

Not that I'm salty about it or anything.

[delor]

a "crude prosthetic arm" at the blacksmithing table

Groovy.

  Heh, yeah.  After I posted I thought of that and considered going back in and inserting an Ash reference.

  Looks like prosthetic arms date all the way back to 200 BC, and definitely in the dark ages.  Hooks and fake hands so that a person could equip a shield.  I'm totally down with Rimworld's decision to limit the colonies from producing stuff they clearly have the tech level to build to incorporate a reliance on trade, but if the crude prosthetic arm was noticeably worse than the simple one I'd still want to trade for something better when it became available.

  It also seems weird that prosthetic are featured so prominently in the game, yet the only piece you can really reliably get is a peg leg.  All those prosthetophiles and prosthetophobes have little to love and fear!  Personally, I'd like to see the blacksmithing station to offer you not only a crude arm, but also hand/legs for people with lesser amputations, as much to exercise the prosthetics systems and for flavor reasons as because it's mechanically a big deal.
(plus, hook hands with a stabbing bonus! ... OK, stopping now before I start suggesting eyepatches and the matching relationship bonuses/penalties...)

[SpaceDorf]

Have turrets defend colony animals like they do pawns.

Currently the turrets will only fire at stuff that's aggro to a colonist, leading to frustrating situations where say a grizzly bear walks behind my turrets and eats the baby alpaca and (later) baby muffalo and I can't do anything about it. Even if I have a pawn shooting the bear, the bear is such a damage sponge that the baby animal is a goner regardless. As soon as the bear eats the baby though, it turns on the colonist and is instantly roflstomped by the turrets.

Not that I'm salty about it or anything.

Agreed. Anything attacking your stuff, whatever it may be should be identified as enemy, by your pawns set to defend and in addition to your turrets.

Sadly I allready see the counter argument : My turrets mowed down three colonists while defending a baby alpaca .. make them stop ..

[Quenching Quel]

Larger name pools?
Playing permadeath usually leads to me seeing Lumi so many times as of now, and then there's Engie and Lilith and a bunch more names I see over and over in each play through.
A larger vanilla name pool would increase it's aesthetics IMO and it's relatively easier than adding a new mechanic. 

[Zhentar]

Once the predator reaches within 12 cells of it's prey, it starts being considered hostile and I think should be attacked by drafted colonists. Not that it helps much since you'd have to keep drafted colonists spread over the whole base.

I know turrets were intentionally changed not to target predators. And I'm okay with that, specifically. What I'm not okay with is that it's impossible to deal predators attacked your tamed animals reactively (for the reasons noted), and the only ways to prevent it proactively are either build giant walls around your pastures/base so none of your animals are ever outside, or to exterminate all predators on the map. It's ridiculous that a peckish cougar senses a housecat on the other side of a brick wall and then walks past half a dozen wild prey animals on a very long trip around that wall, navigating through a base and a dozen people for it's one true chosen lunch. And then the player has faces non-trivial repercussions (death of a bonded pet) for failing to take the very game-y steps necessary to avoid the unrealistic, unintuitive predator-prey behavior.

Not that I have a specific incident that I'm grouchy or anything.

[Zhentar]

Larger name pools?
Playing permadeath usually leads to me seeing Lumi so many times as of now, and then there's Engie and Lilith and a bunch more names I see over and over in each play through.
A larger vanilla name pool would increase it's aesthetics IMO and it's relatively easier than adding a new mechanic.

The random name pool is fairly large. However, there's a very small pool of "name in game" player-created backstory characters that can spawn as female raiders (7, to be precise), so you see them pretty much every game.

[Quenching Quel]

Larger name pools?
Playing permadeath usually leads to me seeing Lumi so many times as of now, and then there's Engie and Lilith and a bunch more names I see over and over in each play through.
A larger vanilla name pool would increase it's aesthetics IMO and it's relatively easier than adding a new mechanic.

The random name pool is fairly large. However, there's a very small pool of "name in game" player-created backstory characters that can spawn as female raiders (7, to be precise), so you see them pretty much every game.

Larger female raider name pool then?:p