Your Cheapest Ideas

[9ofSpades]

You make a good point about the triggers. I guess the simplest solution would be to just exempt raiding pawn relationships from being a trigger. It doesn't fit thematically since the raiding pawn is there to kill and pillage your colony so the colonist's relationship must be strained to begin with. 

Friendly fire is not as simple as you pointed out and I can see being handled many different ways but I don't know what would be best. I agree it could also be exempted as a potential trigger. Perhaps it could be replaced with a targeted Murderous Rage break against the responsible pawn?

Pawns with guns would need a lot more attention to make this mental break work well and not just kill off another pawn. I could see this coding issue taking this mental break from a cheap idea to a more complicated suggestion.
My "easy" answer would be to give the Revenge pawn near perfect accuracy and target the nearest enemy pawn within range or move closer to the nearest raider via the safest path available.

They would slowly move closer to the target raider until they were downed or the raider was no longer an option (either flees or dies). They could receive a mood boost for every raider killed during this break but a large boost if they get to take revenge. Failure to do so would result in a mood debuf but end the mental break.

I am beginning to see that this idea can quickly expand beyond a cheap idea with all the contingencies possible. 

[AndrewArt]

Chest - for storing valuables like silver, gold - in a bigger stack. Maybe make it a buried chest so that it can't burn, and make enemies have to dig it out to take the valuables

[TheMeInTeam]

When pawns have a disease that needs periodic tending, place a small bar on their portrait indicating how much time is left until they need to be tended again.

When pawns have hypo/hyperthermia, use blue and red bar buildups on their icons.  When they have toxic fallout buildup, use green.

These are little changes that would go a long way to preventing the player having to constantly manually click on pawns to check their conditions one by one during events/diseases.

[GabMSouza]

A cheap idea that I beleive would add some interesting stories in Rimworld while utilizing game mechanics already in play would be to have a situational mental break similar to Murderous Rage

Murderous Rage
A colonist becomes maddened, and will attack a randomly chosen colonist or prisoner with melee until they are dead.

Introducing a Revenge mental break that would occur to a pawn during combat. Revenge would be a mental break that would occur to a pawn, at risk of mental breaks, when another pawn in the colony, whom they have a strong connection with (e.g. spouse, brother, lover), is killed by an enemy raider. The Revenge mental break would cause the pawn to seek out to kill the enemy pawn who had just killed the colonist. They would do so without regards to their own safety and be uncontrollable to the player. A melee geared pawn might just charge straight towards the enemy without any concern for cover. A pawn with a ranged weapon might move closer to a more optimal range and with increased accuracy and fire rate attempt to kill the enemy pawn without regarding the need for cover.
Increasing their combat stats during the break would make them a bigger threat to the targeted enemy pawn while also presenting the opportunity for the player to lose another pawn. However, with the stats of the mentally broken pawn increased it could also turn the tide of the battle and scare off the raiders.

We see this situation played out in movies all the time where the sudden death of a character caused the underdog to rise to the occasion and defeat the enemy (or die trying)....

When pawns have a disease that needs periodic tending, place a small bar on their portrait indicating how much time is left until they need to be tended again.

When pawns have hypo/hyperthermia, use blue and red bar buildups on their icons.  When they have toxic fallout buildup, use green.

These are little changes that would go a long way to preventing the player having to constantly manually click on pawns to check their conditions one by one during events/diseases.

Two great ideas (except maybe the murderous rage one, seems like it's just a slightly different version of the common berzerk, but the revenge one is pure gold!)! And they seem cheap! Thumbs up

[Phyrwurx]

I don't know if this has been suggested, but ...
Currently, when I left click on a stockpile or zone, it tells me the name of the zone in the bottom left box. The rest of the box is empty. What if when I clicked it, it also listed all the items in that stockpile or zone? For long lists, it could either abbreviate the items into groups, or be scrollable when the cursor is in the box. (Sometimes, when looking through my trade ship stockpiles, I will scan the screen for a while before finding the item I want to select.) Perhaps, within the list in the box, we could click to select an item or group of items within that zone, as well - or, even just put our cursor on the item in the list to highlight the item in that zone. Perhaps it could also give a count of items within that stockpile.
Thanks for the many, many hours of fun!

[sick puppy]

I don't know if this has been suggested, but ...
Currently, when I left click on a stockpile or zone, it tells me the name of the zone in the bottom left box. The rest of the box is empty. What if when I clicked it, it also listed all the items in that stockpile or zone? For long lists, it could either abbreviate the items into groups, or be scrollable when the cursor is in the box. (Sometimes, when looking through my trade ship stockpiles, I will scan the screen for a while before finding the item I want to select.) Perhaps, within the list in the box, we could click to select an item or group of items within that zone, as well - or, even just put our cursor on the item in the list to highlight the item in that zone. Perhaps it could also give a count of items within that stockpile.
Thanks for the many, many hours of fun!

When pawns have a disease that needs periodic tending, place a small bar on their portrait indicating how much time is left until they need to be tended again.

When pawns have hypo/hyperthermia, use blue and red bar buildups on their icons.  When they have toxic fallout buildup, use green.

These are little changes that would go a long way to preventing the player having to constantly manually click on pawns to check their conditions one by one during events/diseases.

to me, these two are instant-additions to vanilla

[alligator76]

Very simple idea: add an "allow sowing" button to the hydroponics basins, like for the growing areas.

[sick puppy]

Very simple idea: add an "allow sowing" button to the hydroponics basins, like for the growing areas.

i'd expand on that with an "allow harvesting" button for both hydroponics and sowing areas, when you are low on food and dont want your colonists to get the cotton harvest first

[Armored Stone]

Please let us interrupt weapon cooldowns by trying to move drafted colonists to do other things than stand still. Reloading a weapon shouldn't be REQUIRED right away, it just ends up getting them hurt more often than not. Still retain the need for the cooldown but only for after the colonist has stopped moving

[Phyrwurx]

For worktables, under task details, there are the options to drop the item on the floor or to take it to the best stockpile. Suggestion: add the option there to take products to the nearest stockpile that accepts that item. Why? If the crafter drops the item on the floor, it gets put wherever, in the way. It becomes clutter. If the crafter takes it to the best stockpile, it may be quite a walk, one item at a time. So, add the option to take to the nearest stockpile (that accepts that item). That way, a player can place a lower-priority stockpile near the worktable, out of the way, allowing the crafter to drop items in a nearby designated location, which allows more efficient crafting and allows others to haul the items based on priorities within stockpiles.

[giannikampa]

For worktables, under task details, there are the options to drop the item on the floor or to take it to the best stockpile. Suggestion: add the option there to take products to the nearest stockpile that accepts that item. Why? If the crafter drops the item on the floor, it gets put wherever, in the way. It becomes clutter. If the crafter takes it to the best stockpile, it may be quite a walk, one item at a time. So, add the option to take to the nearest stockpile (that accepts that item). That way, a player can place a lower-priority stockpile near the worktable, out of the way, allowing the crafter to drop items in a nearby designated location, which allows more efficient crafting and allows others to haul the items based on priorities within stockpiles.

You just set a stockpile under the workbench, set it on low priority and 'drop on the flor' in the bill.
Side suggestion: put a single hi priority single square stockpile nearby for the ingredients to reduce time to collect them by the crafter/cook

[FuriouslyEloquent]

A small change to shelf stocking behavior would reduce my micromanagement significantly, as well as alleviate some problems with the various ingredient stock idioms, a common issue here it seems. When a shelf becomes empty, increase its storage priority by 1. Similarly when a shelf becomes full, reduce its storage priority by 1. This will enable shelves to function as intermediate storage, with full pull-from-storage and push-to-storage cycles between your production and warehouse.

Lately I have been spending a large amount of time managing my ingredients for my cook. These changes would enable similar strategies to the hysteresis approach to stocking (which I believe has a mod for it), but will also enable pushing from shelves for output materials as well. Simply set your ingredient shelves 1 priority higher than your bulk storage, your haulers will then fill until full and then stop as the priority has reduced; finally when the shelf is emptied by your production its storage priority will increase and haulers will again refill. For output shelves, set them the same priority as your bulk storage but closer to your production than the bulk storage, your production will stock to these shelves when full which will then reduce that shelf's stocking priority; now your haulers will push from the shelf to bulk storage at which time its storage priority will raise and production will continue stocking the shelf.

Implementation of this would be as simple as sub-classing building_storage and overriding the Notify_LostThing and Notify_ReceivedThing components. I will likely be spinning this up as a mod myself in the next day or so, once I figure out how to determine if a building_storage is at full capacity.

Edit: Over a month later, and some serious feature creep and I've finally posted this ... funny how that worked. Guess it wasn't too cheap ...

[giannikampa]

make the message on top left "thing has rotted away" clickable so the view centers on the interested stockpile.

[Elevator]

I just want to duplicate my ideas here. I believe they are cheap enough.

1. Brief description for diseases would help new players a lot.
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=39253.0

2. Extra word file references at "Mods\Core\Defs\RulePackDefsRulePacks_Global.xml" will make generated texts much reacher, better and easier to read in different languages (if someone overrides them in DefInjected).
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=37216.0

[Alerter]

We can strip our prisoners/pawns, but we can't dress them. Idea is simple: add clothing policy for prisoners and allow pawns to dress someone according to policy (ability to haul might be required).