Your Cheapest Ideas

Started by Tynan, October 09, 2013, 12:17:07 AM

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Wanderer_joins

Notification with multiple colonies: have the name of the colony where the event happens mentionned in the enveloppe.

Anomaly

Squads

Rather than have to pick out my defense team one by one, I would love to be able to drop them into squads that I could muster with a single click.

dv

Not sure how easy this is, but it seems like it could be a mod.

Greenhouses. How can you have hydroponics and not hothouses/greenhouses?

Add a way to refine sandstone into glass. If you build a glass room/walls (maybe 1 unit of steel and 4 of glass per tile), once it's roofed it will be 20-30C warmer than the outside temperature during the day, and retain some (but not all) of that heat through the night. Unless you build it around a geothermal vent. :-)

Pawns working inside would be risking heatstroke. Still reliant on sunlight for plant growth.

It wouldn't turn sea ice into farmable land, and it wouldn't be craftable until you have a smelter (so the middle of the tech tree; not changing early game much) but it would extend the growing season in cooler regions, and make it easier to get secondary colonies started.

voldemort

I'd love when in building mode you can add a "Replace" mode toggle. When you turn this mode on, you can place new items on top of existing items and the pawns would automatically disassemble the existing item then replace it with the new item without you manually having to select the existing item, ordering them to be disassembled, then putting the new item on top. This would be convenient in cases when you want to upgrade the wall (ie: from wood to steel) or replacing a badly made item (ie: shoddy bed)

Cook The NightHunter

#4099
Add remote C4 bombs for traps and TNT for mining
plus Laser designating missle
For the punishment of escaping my colony.
I hereby declare putting you in a abandon cave full of
rotting corpse and bugs without food or clothes until the upcoming spring.

Patrick Duan

water bottle and bathroom !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Encrtia

Duplicate Outfit Button.

When having an outfit template perfectly set up, but wanting only a couple of clothing choices different for other colonists, requires a complete re-ticking of all the desired & undesired clothing choices again.
~When death is smiling at you, just smile on back.

Alpha393

Might not be 'cheap' but it might be possible with bits of recycled code.

Target spotters, sensors, and range finders.

Detectors: motion tracker/tripwire/pressure sensor/other detects something abnormal, and relays the alert to other systems on the same power grid. An alert pops up on a monitor in your base, you get an alert, (optional, enabled by default) and you can then either send a team out to investigate, gather more data, or start shooting with a mortar or ten.

Cameras track the movement of targets in real time, allowing you to hit mortar shots much more consistently.

Flares guarantee a mortar hit on a nearby target, but blind nearby pawns.

Etc. basically, make playing defensively inside and outside more interactive. Oh, you're perfectly safe in your mountain, but blind to the outside world. Want to look around? Gotta run some cables out there. You on the other hand are worse for wear but you can see threats coming much more easily. Stuff like that.

mantelar

Apologies, I haven't read all 274 replies thus far.  Crowd source your base generation for world settlements.  You mentioned generating random bases was a problem...solution - don't generate random bases.  Allow your players to volunteer to data dump settlements.  recommend permadeath bases only, rough or higher difficulty.  this will ensure bases players encounter are fully shaped by the game rules and not simply fantasy mega fortresses.  use those dumps to randomly populate your world maps.  some would be destroyed, others thriving.  but if you offered players the choice to retire a settlement and submit to you for future use, intermediate states would be possible as well.  collated perhaps by value, a wide variety of quality destroyed and thriving settlements (by biome, too) could populate our worlds with minimum effort.  This would make raiding a settlement a high payoff effort...as you would fall in on something that already works for a given environment if you can manage to flush out its denizens.

mantelar

on a more crass note.  we can already harvest prisoner organs, sell them into slavery, euthanize them, and execute them.  you have 'sex slave' as a background, too.'  the colonists should be able to use prisoners for 'pleasure' as well.  one round of pleasure a day in exchange for a couple meals is approximate equal cost to a sniff of yayo.  have it raise the prisoners social skill over time, increasing their sale value.  drugs, weapons, slavery...may as well go full crime syndicate with it.

mantelar

I may as well keep dumping.  My wife and I play this game religiously.  An opiate add would be worthwhile.  Perhaps allowing for neuroatramine manufacture.  You could have a flake/yayo dynamic.  i'm taking that meant crack/cocaine.  for an opiate you could have something like dream-smoke/mainline for opium/heroine.  being able to add a still to a brewery (same size as a micro-analyzer), to produce spirits would be cool.  recommend the same for a drug lab...high value drugs, especially neuroatramine and medicine, should take more investment than making simple drugs.  Different raid types would be good for the story telling experience, assassins (perhaps small in number but highly skilled) targeting a specific colonist, a slaver raid, a prison break, etc.  Some could start disguised as traders to get close.  I'm also personally a fan of a fog of war...an option to toggle it on/off would mollify players who don't want it.  But a fog of war dramatically changes player behavior for the better, in my opinion, in games like this.  right now, though, I'm more concerned (and very hopeful) about the direction you're going with this mod.  I posted above about perhaps reducing your workload in creating quality random settlements...caravan auto-foraging and hunting could be included to reduce the food consumption rate in more fertile biomes, which makes sense.  your fans who've played dwarf fortress are dying for you to allow our worlds to be persistant from game to game - you could force a feature to not allow settlement too near an old one to prevent exploit...again, little work on your part, big payoff for your customers.  anyway, many, many more ideas.  like anyone on this thread, I'm humbled if you read this and take any of it on.  thank you for a great game a fair price.  as interest in the game wanes, as it inevitable does at some point, i'd pay another round to keep you going.  i'm sure a lot of others would too.     

Lobstercraft

  • Very light steam effect in cold rooms. So you know by seeing which rooms are freezers
  • Windows on cryptosleep caskets where you can see whats inside
  • Colonists dimming(so lights still make sense) lights in their room before going to bed, or door switches. Probably not new idea
  • TV giving light when watched by colonists
  • Randomizing look of sculpture. With real random forms. Probably not so cheap

CalenLoki

Make melee skill meaningful. ATM difference between lvl 1 and 20 is almost non-existent (something like 70%  and 100% hit chance). IMO linear scaling would work much better (10% at 1 lvl to 100% at 20 lvl)

Marduk

#4108
Vanilla windows for buildings, aka no power required light during day, nevermind another reason not to build massive  single building bases (the window light would reach only so far inside, and would need to be exposed to unroofed outdoors on one side).
Cheap greenhouses would also be made possible.

More zones to designate, say a hunting zone, where all wild animals would be automatically hunted, and protected zones of 2 types:
Crop protection zone, where all live plant eating animals that enter are automatically hunted and treated as hostile (as if maddened).
Pasture protection zone, where all wild predators, especially if in hunting mode, that enter are automatically hunted and treated as hostile (as if maddened), also giving a warning of one sort or another. The last one is especially important, would have saved me so much livestock over many games.

Ability to force trained carnivore\omnivore animals to prioritize hunting wild animals over eating stockpiled food.

Ability to put on clothes on an incapacitated pawn, sometimes useful for wounded\prisoner mood and heat.
And after that, ability to craft and dress animals in packs, harnesses and so on, especially for caravans.
An ability for pawns to use pack animals they are masters of for mass hauling would also be nice. Even if it has to be done semi-manually, we can already sort of do that through caravan formation.

Also, with the new surgery fail damage area mechanic, it seems to me that it might be quite easy to implement something similar for weapons, a called shot\strike mode, where the attacks would be slower\less accurate, but successful hits would hit a specific body part, or near it.
Say, want to capture someone? Aim for legs. Annoying pirate has a good vest? Aim for head, or legs. Sniper? Aim for arms. You have a really good sniper and lots of enemies? Attempt eyeshots.

tocsin1990

I'm pretty sure someone has already mentioned it (not reading through over 200 pages of posts) but it would be really nice to have a floor type that slows movement, rather than speeding it up.  like "sand" or "glue", something that works in place of the "alternating sandbags" system we have now for slowing approaching raiders.