Your Cheapest Ideas

[NeverPire]

I personally enjoy the Night Owl trait, because it allows me to stagger the times my colonists are awake and keep something running at all times, but it doesn't make sense that that's the only reason someone is up at night.

You can already organize your pawns to change their schedule to let them life during night,
they don't get any mood debuff.
If you do it nicely, you can divide by two the number of required workbenchs and equipment.

[dv]

1) On the schedule/behavior screen, assign pawns to guard duty. Pawns scheduled for guard duty will either wander or go to specified "guard" zones, and act like a turret.

2) If I can build a spaceship, I shouldn't be losing colonists to rabid chicken attacks. We need an elephant gun: require 10+ shooting skill to use, limit pawn mobility 50%, fire slowly. A one-shot, one-kill weapon for bears, elephants, muffalos, etc. Mists whatever body part it hits, and maybe some adjacent ones. Requires components and plasteel to build, or make it trader only. Using it against enemy pawns causes a mood debuff. Possibly a stacking one so it increases with every shot.

[glass zebra]

Make tamed animals not count towards wild animals in the zone, which at the moment reduces animal immigration.

It's weird that less wild animals enter the map because you got wild animals in your barn. It also kinda punishes you for taming animals in the first place, just shifting the game away from hunting towards feeding/slaughtering - with work and resources you spend to make that happen.
The reward for taming e.g. small wild animals is mostly their high reproduction rate and the costs to get that reward is heavily mitigated when in turn less game enters the map. It honestly stroke me as a bug that maybe on taming the animals don't get removed from the wild animal pool. As a feature it severely punishes taming many wild animals.

[asanbr]

It happens a lot that I see a notification that a trade ship has left comms range, even though I never saw a notification that they entered.

It would make sense that the GUI shows an icon somewhere whenever a trade ship is available. As infrequent and extremely valuable as they are.

Edit: I know there is (supposed to be, most of the time) a letter incoming when a trade ship enters range.
But I want a permanent icon showing for the whole duration, even if I accidentaly the letter or just didn't see it.

Reposting this since I think I have figured it out now.

If the comms is unpowered when the trade ship arrives, there is no notification of the ship. This happens a lot because of zzzt  and/or reasons.

I suggest adding a text notification identical to the "heat wave"  " toxic fallout"  notifications, which is constantly there saying "trade ship in range" for as long as the trade ship is there.

Also, another good feature would be if the time it will be there is shown, depending on story/design, whether it's reasonable that the colony would know this.

[asanbr]

For all the continuous values (0-100%) that can affect a colonist such as bleeding, toxic fallout, freezing, starving, etc, it is not always clear whether the value is currently going up or down (the derivative). I would like to see an indicator of that to easier know if something needs to change. For bleeding it is usually enough to watch them for a few seconds, but with toxic fallout I'm not so sure since it happens so slowly.

[glass zebra]

Tweak small animals' stomach/hunger thresholds - mainly malnutrition miscarriages.

Right now it happens very often that e.g. a boomrat is surrounded by food, goes to sleep slightly before they get hungry enough to eat and then miscarry at the end of sleep. Currently the only way to work around this is to make them quality beds so they wake up sooner, which is a pain to micromanage if you got lots of (small) animals.
This can probably also happen to other smaller and slower animals if they are allowed a big area and have to run back quite some time to get to their sleeping spot (and get hungry on the way). With boomrats though, it happens if they just fall asleep on the ground are and surrounded by food. I was wondering why my boomrats took such a long time to get pregnant in the first place (don't know if hidden miscarriages in the first hidden pregnant stage can happen but 1 pregnancy in 1 month suggests it does).

Getting "animal starvation" after it already affects creates in such a way also does not help recognizing issues like this. All in all the current system (hunger, wilderness) still seems to favor buying BIG animals (or chicken) in late game a bit too much in my opinion.

It seems there is a difference on hunger thresholds for veggies and animals that can eat meat, though that mostly makes sense for hunting animals (carnivores with low hunger rate for their stomach size. On scavengers/omnivores it helps not wasting live plats nutrition, though side effects like miscarriage from sleeping don't.

[Bolgfred]

I want a in/off trigger for sunlamps turning off at night. And by the way, this behaviour+trigger should be added to every light.

Bonus feature: activity mode - lights turn off, when no colonist is nearby or in the current room

[RemingtonRyder]

Improve the use of fermenting barrels

At the moment, the way hauling to fermenting barrels works means that 50 wort might be distributed among three empty fermenting barrels - 20 in one, 5 in another, and 25 in another - when it would fit just fine in two.

Wort doesn't keep for very long, so producing more than will actually fit in the fermenting barrels is wasteful, which is why I tend to modify a Do X times bill on the brewing table to produce batches of wort in multiples of 25.

[Rumi♫]

"Healing touch" trait:
Better at medicine and mood boost for every woulnd tended and every succesful operation.

"Silver tongue" trait:
More effect on prices when trading and better recruit chance.

"Clingy" trait:
+15 opinion on all other colonists.

"Loner" trait:
-15 opinion on all other colonists.

"golden touch" trait:
Better at construction and mood bonus for every succesful construction.

"Separate mind" trait.
Not bothered much by pain, hunger, starvation, exhaustion or having organs removed.
Much more bothered by colonists' deaths, insults, break ups, abrasive colonists, lack of joy and comfort. Opinion on other colonists not affected by "staggeringly ugly", "ugly", "pretty" and "beautiful" traits.

"Mindless" trait.
Not bothered by lack of joy, comfort, ugly enviroment, colonist deaths, break ups, insults and abrasive colonists. Very bothered by pain, hunger, starvation, exhaustion and having organs removed.

[CucumberedPickle]

Oh I know!
A little shooting target. Like a horseshoes pin, except a colonist needs a gun and his shooting skills go up much faster, and accounts for passion for shooting. Targets will be very durable, but a Constructor will have to fix it from time to time. Targets give joy, but not as much as a horseshoes pin. There could also be a melee version to punch, stab or slash at.

[SpaceDorf]

Oh I know!
A little shooting target. Like a horseshoes pin, except a colonist needs a gun and his shooting skills go up much faster, and accounts for passion for shooting. Targets will be very durable, but a Constructor will have to fix it from time to time. Targets give joy, but not as much as a horseshoes pin. There could also be a melee version to punch, stab or slash at.

Good Idea I can practically see it before me.

[glass zebra]

An "expand" button on stockpile-/zones

right now you have to:
- open architect menu
- open zones
- choose e.g. "stockpile"
- finally click the zone to expand

Just doing that from the zone you want to expand would be so much faster and you have to select the zone anyway. Just with several extra steps.

[SpaceDorf]

Give a Warning for Timed maps before they run out. ( Five Hours until I have to leave .. )
So I have time to get my shit together and sleeping pawns are not left behind  !

[NeverPire]

Give a Warning for Timed maps before they run out. ( Five Hours until I have to leave .. )
So I have time to get my shit together and sleeping pawns are not left behind  !

Sleeping and even incapable to move pawn are never left behind !
During the force leaving of the timed map you always have the possibility to recuperate any item available on the map.

[Pantalaimon]

- Consider changing the way prison rooms are designated to be based on zoning rather than prisoner beds.

Beds cause a lot more issues than necessary. Usually either not having enough beds, ability to build beds quickly during/after battle, or room to add spots inside the prison area, or the room changing temperature so that the capture task is no longer possible.

If you could zone an area as a prison you could quickly rig up an empty room as a make shift prison.

Currently some annoying things happen during winter or high summer (especially when your prison gets attacked or broken out of), changing the temperature of the room, and making it not valid as a prison. Even having heaters or coolers, cranking them up, is sometimes not good enough to allow capturing!

- The temperature of the room should only matter to the colonist, so not below or above their clothing level.