Your Cheapest Ideas

[Neutromancer]

Cheapest idea ever: Change the envelope icons, so that different kind of news have a different icon. Specially the Raiders, should have a distinct icon that screams "DANGER DANGER DANGER".

Collapses, fires, etc maybe slightly less, but still noticeable. Environment effects (eclipse, solar flare) could have a simple icon of a sun or moon or something.

[timegrinder]

So far I've only got a single idea that I've noticed.

Make fog alter the light level (and thus alter the energy output of solar arrays) - just like in reality, on a cloudy or foggy day the energy output on a solar cell is lower as the sun is obfuscated.

[Nasikabatrachus]

1. Some kind of display showing whether or not, and how many, colonists are currently recruited as soldiers would be nice.

2. At times, I've turned off my nutrient dispenser to save battery power, only to have a colonist suffer a mental break because I forgot to turn it back on. When food is tight, it's possible that all the colony's food is bound up in the hopper (I think that's what caused the break), so some kind of reminder that important buildings like Nutrient Dispensers are offline would be very helpful.

[Thunder Rahja]

- Colonist names underlined in the colony/jobs window while they are drafted.

- Floating point prices for commodities with final cost rounded up to nearest whole silver, and rounded down when selling. For example, buying 12 food at 0.8 silver each from a farming merchant for 10 (9.6) silver.

- Allow a colonist with doctoring job to heal an incapacitated colonist (on the field or in bed) once per day using 1 medkit to heal for 5-30 HP depending on medical skill level. Give a "healing" thought for +5 happiness that lasts for 1 day.

- Use hours instead of days for measure of thoughts' durations when they are less than 2 days remaining.

- Increase maximum stack size when a commodity stack is in a stockpile. Supposedly things in a stockpile would be more organized and allow for more efficient use of space.

[DarkMyau]

- A few more colour's for carpets. yellow, orange and purple would be great. Dont forget Taupe...taupes very soothing.

[Thunder Rahja]

A few more.

- Allow reserved tasks to be overridden by closer colonists. Say a fire breaks out with one colonist next to the fire and the other colonists across the map hauling things. Since firefighting is priority one, they almost immediately try make their way to the fire, but the one colonist already finished beating out one tile of fire and can't fight the rest, which is burning down valuable furniture. Since the one colonist is there available to fight the fire, he should be allowed to override the task reservation of the other colonists to prevent as much damage as possible.

- Alternatively, allow multiple colonists to work on the same task on the same tile/entity (with some exceptions like research, equipping, hauling, etc.), like how multiple wardens can be talking to one prisoner at the same time.

- Add a minimum stock requirement to hoppers, preferably configurable and default to 50% capacity, before a colonist with the cooking job attempts to refill the hopper. This will save valuable time in that a colonist with the cooking job won't have to come refill the hopper with 10 potatoes each and every time someone gets a nutrient paste meal, while still keeping the hopper from going entirely empty.

- Allow colonists to pick up partial stacks to carry a full 75 when possible. For example, there are three stacks of 50 metal next to each other. From my observations in Alpha 1, the colonist won't pick up any more if the total of both stacks is more than 75. In the pre-alpha, they made more efficient use of their time by picking up that 50 and another 25 from a second stack, requiring only two trips instead of three.

- Prevent a task prioritized by the player from being interrupted by the colonist's job priorities or needs. In Alpha 1, a hungry colonist constructing a nutrient paste dispenser will stop building it and try to eat raw food after the player told them to prioritize building the dispenser.

- A constructable and unrepairable target dummy you can order drafted colonists to shoot at or melee attack, to help build their skill levels. Perhaps 1000 HP or so, and passable-only.

- Make circuit fault events require a wall to be at ~60% HP or less to happen. My repair team keeps these walls pristine and they suddenly can't explain why there's a big hole in my armory.

[timegrinder]

I wasn't able to find it while searching (though I did find the 'seperate firefighting/cleaning zones' thing).

Prioritised home/cleaning/firefighting zones, like the prioritised stockpile/dump stockpile zones except for cleaning/firefighting.

e.g. You have buildings you want to be kept clean, but you'd also like the outside of your base kept clean too, so prioritise cleaning the inside of the buildings before the outside (as I have colonists cleaning random bloody messes on my outer perimeter).

Same thing would be done for firefighting, could the code be recycled for stockpiles and instead of setting the zones to 'store these materials here by importance' set it to 'do these tasks in this zone by importance'.

Then if you so wished you could leave a fire blazing in a certain zone (as fires are useful for cleaning up dump stockpiles) while you tended to more important cleaning/fire things in another zone.

(As a side note, I don't think this second part would be 'cheap' but a negative status effect for being near something that's on fire (especially if it's corpses/buildings) due to the smoke and pollution you're creating).

EDIT: Another thing - maybe a notification when a ceiling collapses that tells you if a person was actually killed by the collapse, as sometimes I have warnings of collapses (eg, I cause a LOT of collapses) but sometimes a person disappears and I don't notice right away as all the warning says is that 'this person was hit' but not 'this person was crushed to death'.)

[lewisd]

I'd love to be able to override someone's "reservation" of a task though the right click menu.  If there's a fire next to Alice, but Bob from across the map has decided to come fight it, if I select Alice and right click on the fire, it tells me that Bob's on his way to do it, but doesn't let me say "No, I'd like Alice to do this instead" which would be really nice in emergencies.

Right now I'm resorting to finding Bob, drafting him, then going back to Alice, telling her to fight the fire, then going back to Bob and undrafting him, all while paused.  It works, but boy oh boy is it a pain.

[TheGoudafather]

Babies and booze

[invisible worm]

Those lovely pictures for the narrators? Put them in the messages, so the art gets used more and the emails feel more personal and less cold.

[ApexPredator]

A power meter? least some way of knowing how much power you have available / drain. (is it sustained power?)

This would be nice.

[Xell3h]

It would be nice if you pressed 'h' key and it would auto return you to your home location on the map.

[Shaithis]

The ability to forbid things from interaction. For example, a lot of structures deteriorate over time but often I'll colonists running of to repair them when I would rather have a million other things done. Could you let us say... forbid chunks of a wall? They would be ignored and wouldn't get repaired until the forbidden flag is removed.

[lewisd]

Some more cheap(ish?) suggestions:

- Walls that don't have power conduits, are cheaper to build, and don't degrade as quickly.
- Some way to designate areas as unroofed. (Edit: just saw this is already in the change log for next release! yay!)
- Research that unlocks longer range and/or higher damage turrets, either as unique things (like blasting charges and hydroponics tables do now) or upgrades (like turret cooling does now)
- Double doors, or allowing side-by-side doors.

[ApexPredator]

A vault building that stores silver/currency and can be linked to the launch pad. I have amassed a huge amount of silver in around 120 days and the stockpile I have set just for silver is about 1/4 the size of my colony. It looks like I am creating the rimworld version of ducktales.

Also on the same note maybe research in inventory management that will allow you to make larger stacks. Maybe research into wheelbarrow or some space version of that so people are not moving one rock at a time like cavemen that can also fly spaceships.