Your Cheapest Ideas

[Monkfish]

And a few more.
I think there should be a 'work region' of sorts, and pawns will only look for work in that area, unless told otherwise(ex: A cook will only look for food in the work region. Even if there is a shipment of meat outside the zone, they won't go for it. Haulers will also not go get it, unless you tell them to manually.)(of course, some jobs, such as hunting, will not be effected by this)

Also, pawns should only seek food from the home region. When I unforbid those survival meals that fell off a pod, I don't like only having one brought back because everyone all went out to eat them.

Finally, I think it would be nice to have a 'forbidden' zone that pawns will not go to for any reason. Maybe have it be possible to choose which pawns go in, so we could, for example, make a room for collecting and butchering human corpses, and forbid all pawns but our psychotic cook from going in.

These zones have been suggested several times. Also, an update to the change log says that colonists can be assigned to production tables. Which is nice.




IDEA! (unrelated)
Colonists, when going to bed, lock the door to their room so that they can have undisturbed sleep. Perhaps an "allow colonist locking" option on doors would be an effective way to control whether a door is locked or not (for example, if you have communal rooms you wouldn't want the first colonist in locking everyone else out).

[b0rsuk]

Walking on grass should damage it. That way, if you had squares pawns cross all the time, they would naturally turn into paths.

[Ykara]

I want Rimworld to be a first person shooter. The game just gets boring, please make it a good first person shooter in WW2 setting, like Call of Duty. Maybe Kevin Spacey wants to help you, I've heard he is short of money.
Shouldn't be that hard to do, so I post it here.
Visit my youtube channel, my name is bYYtcheZKILLooor2005 and I make cool videos of cod.

[anotherrimworld]

-Danger zone that colonists won't enter when eg. an alarm is toggled
-Extended research tree and prerequisite buildings/items for future items. If i were shipwrecked somewhere with only a gun and some food I have no idea how I'd immediately be able to build a wind turbine without specialized tools or ways to process steel.
-Visitor zones. It would be good building areas to try to tempt visitors to stay. Also, some visitors may decide to attack as well.
-Small groups of attackers that don't trigger an alarm when entering the area.
-SAM turrets to protect a small area from drop ships
-Ability to eventually have bionic/prosthetic versions of almost all body parts(I know some mods do this already)
-Option for fog of war (I know this isn't preferred by Tynan but hear me out) If we had this option you could add a sight skill, watchtowers, trip sensors,cameras and eventually maybe satellites. Guard duty, patrol zones and like i mentioned earlier, surprise attacks from smaller groups would always keep you on your toes. If small groups eventually set up little starter camps on the map essentially stealing resources on your map it could be incentive to patrol around and take out competition or even possibly have good relations with them. Also, the crashed ship part, mortar attack and large scale attack could just show a blip on your map so you know the general area.

[StorymasterQ]

Walking on grass should damage it. That way, if you had squares pawns cross all the time, they would naturally turn into paths.

I like this one. +1 from me.

[bartekkru100]

New diseases:
- AIDS - weakens blood filtration, making curing other diseases a lot harder. and can be cured by syntetic hearth transplant, there's a chance of it spreading after contact with infected blood, some colonist will have it from the beginning.
- Cancer - Will randomly develp in one of colonists from time to time. It will start from one organ and then attack the others, making them less effective, can be surgically removed when in early stages, after that you still need to get medicine, so it doesn't return, but if don't treat it properly after some time it will permamently damage organs and in worst cases whole organs will need to be removed.
- Diabetes - Colonist needs to eat even when not hungry, Organs will start to fail if you don't, when it happens you will need to give him medicine as fast as you can along with some sugar-rich meal. It will pass after few months (or years), you can also transplant a liver.
- Kidney Stones - From time to time a colonist will have attacks of extreme pain combined wtih very poor manipulation and moving abilities, it can pass by itself (medicine will increase the chances), but sometimes it will develop further and you will need to surgically remove it, sometimes you will need to remove whole kidney.

[The_Martion]

- FISHING: Colonists would sit by one of those ponds/lakes for about 20 seconds and would have a 50% chance of catching a fish, or maybe something like Silver.

[Kelnor]

I'll post this on the suggestion forum as it's own topic as well.. Discussion replies should go there to keep from cluttering up this thread.

Disclosure:
First off I'm basing my suggestion off code viewed from a de-compiler. So if I get something wrong, blame JetBrains.
Second: My understanding of the de-compiled code seems to indicate Map.PathGrid is used to calculate physical traversal speed AND the best path when a colonist chooses the route to take? If I'm wrong about that second part then my idea is bunk and ignore me.

Can you add a PathGridModifier Dictionary to the Pawn class? PathGridModifier will be an int[MapSize] that contains a cost modifying signed int, or maybe a dictionary keyed by cell indices? I guess depends on if you care about processor speed or memory usage?

Anyway then Modders/Devs call a method to add a PathGridModifier object that contains cost modifiers (positive or negative) for specific cells on the map to represent psychological preferences.
The method returns a generated hash key the modder can save and use to access their Modifier object later.

Next, refactor calls to the Map.PathGrid's get. If the function wants a physical pathgrid leave it alone so they get the unmodified one for traversal reasons or whatever.
However, If the function wants it for path choosing purposes, then they call an overloaded get method that accepts Pawn. The method then iterates through the dictionary doing matrix adds to PathGrid and returns the modified PathGrid. (Possibly caching the result?)

Make the ImpassableThreshold constant public. Add new constants for varying levels of like/dislike for a cell.
ie. Dislike, Hate, Avoid, OhGodPleaseDontMakeMeGoThere (That's just so different modders have common an idea of what numbers to put in their PathGridModifier.)

That's the cheap idea. It should be fast and then the modders can go crazy. The following ideas are not cheap. I'm including them to give other modders ideas and to point out this change will make them easier to implement if you decide to do it.
Use Examples: (Note, when I say cost here, I mean the psychological cost, not the physical cost. Defining a traffic zone won't change how fast the pawns move, just whether they want to go there or not.)

Safe Zone:
I thought of this idea because it seems to be the cleanest way for me implement a safe zone as a modder. You draw the zone then create a modifier object that adds ImpassibleThreshhole + OhGodPleaseDontMakeMeGoThere to cells outside of the zone for colonist Pawns. Unless someone else seriously reduces the cost penalty of those unsafe zones, the Colonists will stay inside since the outside will seem impassible to them.
It'll keep them inside, but if a trapped colonist is about to starve to death, and if starving adds a modifier object that reduces the perceived cost of all cells evenly, then he'll make a break for the colony's Food stockpile. Figuring it's better to get shot than to starve to death.

Preferences:
You can now easily change a pawn's preference when choosing a path. IE. If pawn is below a certain mood threshold, then reduce the cost of cells based on beauty. He'll take a longer more beautiful route to his next job.
Increase the cost around corpses for non-antisocial pawns. They'll now path around corpses because they don't like them.
Reduce the cost of cells closer to the colony/home region/squad flag. Now colonists will path through the home zone as much as possible before breaking out into the wild.
Reduce cost of cells near a friendly Pawns, greater reduction if hostiles are on map. Safety in numbers.
Reduce/Increase cost of cells near socially Liked/Hated pawns. The prosto-phobe colonist ducks into the Dining hall to path around your full bionic colonist because he doesn't want to see those nasty limbs. Or a colonist takes a longer path to walk with a friend he likes when headed outside to harvest crops.
Increase the cost of rooms with a single colonist sleeping in them. Jobs inside the room are less attractive? (not sure because the job giver code was gibberish from the de-compilier) At the very least colonists will use the hallways instead of charging through some poor guy's room now!


Player controlled pathing:
Create a traffic zone. The traffic zone reduces the cost of those cells for colonists. Colonists will now prefer path AROUND your temp controlled rooms instead of through them.

Desperation:
Reduces the cost of all cells evenly based on how likely a pawn is to die from X. Or how desperate they are for some alchohol or maybe they're just lonely.
Maybe the colonist doesn't want to go there (or through there,) but IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO NOT DIE. Time to take a deep breath and go for it.

What do you think?

Edit: Almost forgot, you'll want to add a hard impassible flag to the PathGrid object's cells, when adding cell modifiers flagged cells stay at impassible. Although maybe if the colonists scared enough they'll keep trying to claw their way into the mountain because the other paths are just that bad muhahahaahah. Sorry DF sadism moment.

[joeripor]

I love the ideas I see around here, but often they tend to be on the complex side. Often, assembling a lot of simple systems and letting them interact is better than designing a big complex system. I want to hear your ideas for full systems and modules, but I'd also really like to have the suggestion stream be balanced between big and small ideas.

So I'm making this thread to specifically ask: what ideas do you have for the game that are really cheap to implement? Ideally these are things I could do in less than half a day. Try to think of things that re-use already-existing systems with minor tweaks to create new variations.

Here are some examples:
� Barbed wire: A building that slows down movement.
� Molotov cocktails: Grenades that start fires.
� Assassin: A raid from one super-powerful raider.
� Weaponbuyer: A story event where a trader offers to buy all of your weapons for a high price.
� Potatoeater: A muffalo gets a taste for human crops and starts eating them exclusively.

None of these, by themselves, will set the world on fire. But put into the simulation together, they can create new stories. And I can afford to do a lot of them. So, have at it! What are your cheapest ideas?

An idea is cheap if a developer could sit down today and have the feature finished in four hours or less.

If your idea is at all complicated or uses game systems or AI behaviors that are not already in the game, it is not cheap and should be posted elsewhere.

what about that prisoners can work for you as a slave

[hector212121]

How about a bunker? Gives 90% cover and has 5000 hp, but costs 2000 steel. Can house 5 colonists at gun ports, who take a penalty to accuracy.

[TLHeart]

Being able to auto strip a dead body before cremation.

[AllenWL]

Being able to choose whether you're cremating a rotten corpse or a non-rotten corpse.

[UAwardog]

Add water system water

[bartekkru100]

Add water system water

It isn't a "cheap idea"

[PotatoeTater]

Giving prisoners clothing OF YOUR CHOICE.

So, you know, you can actually GIVE them psy-foil?

You technically can just drop that stuff on the floor of the room they are in and if they are naked they will auto pick it up and wear it.