Your Cheapest Ideas

[Snowpig]

fluorescent mushrooms:

plantable only in the hydroponics basin they come in three colors (red, green, blue) and provide light 2 squares in each direction. In case of a blackout a well-placed basin of these could save your other crops.

cooking recipe: Fine vegetarian meal
- needs 12-15 veggies
- adds 88~90 saturation
- adds "ate fine vegetarian meal" +3 moodlet

traits:
- Vegetarian:
* adds another +3 moodlet "healthy meal" for eating simple/fine-veggie meal made of veggies
* adds a -10 moodlet "creature murderer" for eating fine/lavish meal or simple meal made of meat

- Carnivore:
* adds -3 moodlet "hate coleslaw" for eating simple/fine-veggie meal made of veggies
* adds a +5 moodlet "meat is my vegetable" for eating simple meal made of meat or fine/lavish meal

[Wex]

3 simple improvements:

- animals marked as "hunt" are unforbidden when die even if not killed by an hunter.

- left clicking on idle colonist on the right of the screen will select first idle colonist but not centre the view on him/her (useful for assigning people to mortars or defensive positions etc.), right clicking remains the same.

- possibility to order colonists to sleep and eat at player's will (right click on beds and food).

And one a little more complex: adding a new monster inspired from dune series, a worm that comes out from underground and eats corpses or eventually attaks alive persons/animals, only mouth is visible when it emerges and it does not move, it bites its pray and keeps it restrained and takes a bit to gobble, in this situation the worm's head is visible and vulnerable and marked as enemy, if attacked after some damage it never dies but just release its pray and burrows.

thanks.

The worm would be a pain in the side, but the previous 3 ideas are sound and I always tought they should be already in the game. Thanks for pointing them out.

[Cat123]

Under 4hrs... without knowing Tynan's coffee intake, this might be difficult.

Here goes - suggesting things that I can see in the code base, or should be entirely possible with code changes that aren't massive.


Engine / Code additions

Alignment of Trade / Information window needs changing

Alter the Trade / Information pop-up overlays: currently the information screen has the lower cancel button at exactly the same point as the trade ones, often meaning you'll click through to accept instead of just cancelling the information popup. Tiny change, will solve a lot of aggro.

Shift + Left Click trade good to select all

Shift + left click <- to buy all, Shift + left click -> to sell all. Please for the love of Jemima Puddleduck. Or even just make Shift+click = 100 units, CTRL+click = all.

Something to speed it up.

Colonists need a <STATS> tab that shows their current % resistances, THAC0 etc

The engine already calc's the % resistances from worn gear, hit chance and so on, but there's no way of working out their stats or visually checking it. If you wanted to be extra funky, make it a colony upgrade item that enables it. (e.g. "Colonist ID Scan")

Colonist job over-view screen could do with "sort by" options

At the moment, you get a nice list of all your colonists, which skills they have enabled and if you hover over a skill it shows their skill #. Unfortunately, remembering the colonists with the highest skills is a pain. This is especially the case if you're fending off a raid and want to select all your fighters to send to the front lines.

Right click a skill on the header, select a filter - highest - lowest; human/AI, etc. Just code it having high / low to start, modders can fiddle around adding different categories.

Shift+click to select all weapons onscreen

For some reason double-clicking a weapon doesn't select them all as a class (there's probably reasons for this, ranged/melee etc), so post carnage you have to manually enable each one to pick them up - could you make an override so that shift+click selects all weapon types at once? Even better, have a toggle so that all weapons are dropped with "pick me up scotty" enabled instead of disabled.

'Jump to' option for negative morale effects - options on/off

It'd be nice if you could set an option in the menu so that negative morale penalties triggered a pop-up: specifically for spotting rotting / dead corpses. There's often a lone corpse in the world hidden behind a tree that is a bugger to find but will slap massive -14 penalties on passing haulers, and you rarely notice at the point of the morale loss, meaning it could be 300 tiles away.

CTRL + Click on zone / item to copy preferences

It'd be great for certain cases if you could CTRL+click on a zone (mostly storage / dumps) or item (chest etc) to set the build window to "copy that zone / item and selected preferences". Newbies won't notice it, but long term players will love you for it. i.e. when you lay the zone it shares the preferences from the one you cloned and/or the item inherits the same, cursor auto-jumps to that build option.

Shift+click when building sets override "build with selected colonist"

Really annoying when you want to build a number of low work items (e.g. graves) with a single colonist point man, only to have colonists from miles away claim the work - meaning you have to pause, select them, R them, then go back, select the point man and force the build back to her. This little option would be a life saver.

Set rally points: either via an item (alarm bell etc) or just right click + select

Would be really useful for defense.



Content

Gases - both environmental & weapons

Code is in for fog, use small radii to enable:

Environmental

• Swamp gas - toxic damage, located in swamps
  
• Methane / firedamp - pockets generated in mountains using same code as those random buildings, just rock walls. Fire = booooom
  
• Localized fog - generated over water + sun (time set? mornings / evening?)
  
• Smoke - generated by burning stuff; funky - if burning = not vegetation, then toxic. Grey for vegetation, black for constructed stuff. Dioxins are bad for your health!
  

Weapons

• Toxic bombs / mortars. On landing, creates cloud of toxic gas - bonus points if wind effects it
  
• Stun gas. As above, has % chance to incapacitate pawns (set to ZZzz). Lots of fun with this if there are buildable generators set to flood trap rooms of raiders!
  
• Aliens that have it (!!) - lots of potential here, just the initial code for a skunk or something would give people something to mod
  

Hazardous liquids / pools of (timed) water

See above for the types - grab the icon from oil + color (green = poison, blue = water etc) and have them generated with timers. Water + electricity = death pools; mobs spawning acid pools on death, etc.

This idea should be self evident, the content writes itself, the coding is the important part


Animal dung (POOOOO) & rotting giving +fertilizer

Have large animals (deer / boar > muffalos larger piles) occasionally drop dung that gives a small +fertilizer bonus to the ground. Very short term effect like a fertilizer pump, prevents animals totally over-grazing areas so quickly.

Rotting corpses should likewise give a larger +radius bonus to fertile while they're present (in rotting stage). And yes, expect twisted players to make corpse gardens.

Blight should effect one <type> of plant only, have duration

As it says on the tin - atm the effect is dumb. Have it be a timed effect during which that plant cannot grow. Selects from whatever is being grown at that time. (CURSE OF THE IRISH)

Option: night is dark.

Selectable option - atm "night" is hardly dark at all, eclipses are barely noticeable etc. Turn up lighting effects by at least 50% so that lighting becomes important / desirable. Inspired by the mod event "Black Void", but obviously don't go mad and make that the default setting.

Bonus points: will make hearing actually do something. If pawn can hear something, put !!! above the originator in the darkness.





There's loads more, but most of those are under 4 hr jobs, and would be funky.

[Barley]

Need Craftable Dusters.
Perfect compliment to cowboy Hats!
Must have stylish Colonists!

[Cimanyd]

Need Craftable Dusters.
Perfect compliment to cowboy Hats!
Must have stylish Colonists!

Adding dusters to be tailored? it would be pretty cool

Changelog, Oct 24:

• All melee and neolithic weapons and most apparel are craftable now.

"Most apparel." I assume dusters and jackets will be craftable, but not, say, power armor.

[REMworlder]

A spotlight.

A light source that extends much farther than any other source of light. Only shines in one direction, in a highly-focused beam of light. Meant to improve night fighting by removing the darkness modifiers against accuracy.

Could use large amounts of electricity to ensure they're only used temporarily as combat aids (off of batteries), as opposed to aesthetic or plant-growing light sources.

Would be the only light source that's weatherproof, so as to be used outside.

[Kagemusha]

A spotlight.

A light source that extends much farther than any other source of light. Only shines in one direction, in a highly-focused beam of light. Meant to improve night fighting by removing the darkness modifiers against accuracy.

Could use large amounts of electricity to ensure they're only used temporarily as combat aids (off of batteries), as opposed to aesthetic or plant-growing light sources.

Would be the only light source that's weatherproof, so as to be used outside.

I like this.
I would go with Floodlight rather than Spotlight since a Spotlight implies a much narrower beam.
Although on a secondary reading of your post I think you do mean a Spotlight.

What I mean to say in revision is that I would prefer a floodlight. A directional light that extends further and is (maybe with more research) waterproof. Uses more electricity than the equivalent standard lights. In other words if it provides 3 times the range of light then it should us more than 3 times the amount of power as a standard light otherwise they would be used as standard lighting by layering them methinks.

[StorymasterQ]

A spotlight.

A light source that extends much farther than any other source of light. Only shines in one direction, in a highly-focused beam of light. Meant to improve night fighting by removing the darkness modifiers against accuracy.

Could use large amounts of electricity to ensure they're only used temporarily as combat aids (off of batteries), as opposed to aesthetic or plant-growing light sources.

Would be the only light source that's weatherproof, so as to be used outside.

I like this.
I would go with Floodlight rather than Spotlight since a Spotlight implies a much narrower beam.
Although on a secondary reading of your post I think you do mean a Spotlight.

What I mean to say in revision is that I would prefer a floodlight. A directional light that extends further and is (maybe with more research) waterproof. Uses more electricity than the equivalent standard lights. In other words if it provides 3 times the range of light then it should us more than 3 times the amount of power as a standard light otherwise they would be used as standard lighting by layering them methinks.

And a Bat-Signal!

[giannikampa]

The worm would be a pain in the side, but the previous 3 ideas are sound and I always tought they should be already in the game. Thanks for pointing them out.

The 3 ideas are really simple (and so desired every minute i play rimworld), way less than 4 hours of coding all together imo, hope developers read them.
As for the flash eater worm i posted it as a request for a mod as well, although it requires a quite simple mechanical, i don't know if doable for modders.

[ToXeye]

Fording water. After a while, only half the head is visible and bumps up and down. It's easy to add, just add how visible he is due to swimming (shooting into water is ineffective) and add that half of his body dissappears when he's in shallow water, or perhaps add slopes to the water pockets so that they linearly "halve their visibility" until they reach deep water. How deep something is would be determined by distance to land, rather than a certain tile, and depth of the local water pocket.

*edit* for now, just make half the body disappear in shallow water, and only the head visible in deep water. Then the rest can be added, etc. It's probably not too much.

*edit* or make something similar to the weapons system, such as 4, 15, 30, 60

depth would be a bit like the following function on fooplot http://fooplot.com/plot/mu67cqwm6v

brown means depth (depth of the walking surface)
red means the depth where you can no longer stand on the walking surface
and black means distance from the center of the lake
this would require a certain concentric gradient that is calculated for each lake, and means you can't make changes to it

Instead making different depths such as
25% 50% 75% 100% <-- length of human body.
would mean that you can easily make it so that you can dig holes and make flowing water
at 125% depth it's actually any depth deeper than that you can touch the ground

Cheap idea:
* holes
* moats

Holes are 25 to 125 in depth, where 100 is the depth of being able to reach up from the hole. At 75 it gets easier, and so on.
Moats are swimmable, but slow down due to swimming (a new system, sorry for not making that idea "cheap"...)

*edit* Since I know you don't like having more than 100% for anything, I guess 80% would be the depth of being able to touch the ground when in water. Then the depths are easy: 0 1 2 3 4 5 in enumeration, meaning that the graphics only needs to be made 5 times, once for each depth, or fewer if you choose to make 5 deep water and 1 2 3 4 shallow water, and 0 ground. It's pretty easy.

*edit* and adding flowing water would be expensive for those who would choose to abuse it to their own disadvantage (that is, to lag their computer down) and then complain about it. So perhaps not that. But a kind of hole would be nice. Would give disadvantages to whoever falls into it, and can be connected to other holes.

*idea*
Hole zones. If you make a hole zone, the holes in that zone will be connected and will be walkable without having to crawl up from one hole to another. This would give the player a disadvantage so I don't know why you would do that unless it would give a combat disadvantage to be in a hole. Either holes or z-levels, and I know z-levels are graphically expensive.

[Darkomen43]

I dont think it would take to long but either a more detailed loading screen when loading a save or even an interactive one where you could like fly a little 2d ship or play a game, squish bugs or..something i dunno.

Edit: I also think it would be cool of if your colonists could multi task in a sort. Rite now when you want to build something even if priorities are set so that the job is in line with the colonist sometimes they dont do it how you want it done. Ive had miners walk around a mountain because they wanted to mine from the other side, if i could que them to do specific sections first it would save that problem, same thing for building. build floor then tables not the other way around. maybe when you set something as a priority it goes to a priority tab on the colonist, if you mess up you can go to the tab and remove it.
Then to have them do something immediately as the priority function does currently you could just add a Do immediately command to send the selected action to the top of the priority list.

[Wulfik]

1.) In crematorium there could be setting ( about animals ) that will burn only those dead bodies you cant use for meat.
2.) I would really appreciate speed up during combat or so because sometimes it takes ages for some action.
3.) Action that will make one of your colonists to focus on some place/building/zone e.g. you have 2 stations with different settings you need one to be occupied non-stop and the other just as bonus and you want to assign the best colonist in that particular skill to that work. Same with building/zone but that will affect every action in that zone e.g. you build hospital and you have there medical beds with patients + chopping block for meat :3 . And you want somebody to take care of this.
4.) Action to build roof. Sometimes I need to rebuild whole zone to make roof appear.
5.) Windows or glass roof.
6.) Teleport. Furniture like thingy to move you from one to another.
7.) Force moving resources ( when you wanna trade and you need to move stuff without need of changing whole settings of stockpile zone.
8.) Automatic fire extinguishers ( turret like or AoE ). Might need water ( just like power but water ).
9.) Fog of War would be nice and you would need some spotlights for area revealing or radar to show you movement around it.

[BattleFalcon]

A journal. The would be a button in the lower right corner, in the same box as Overview, Research etc. You can type in it, recording events that have happened. Like this,
"Nov. 3rd, Year 1. Inigo shot and killed by Tiger. Tiger jailed." "Nov. 10th, Year 1. Tiger released from jail."

It would have no effect on gameplay, and would just serve as a way to record events without paper, which you can reveiw when the colony is finished. I think it would really help the lore part of the game.

[mipen]

-Allow colonists to not need rest or food (as set in xml files - currently there is a reference exception if this is done)
-Allow us to define our own Backstories, and choose to not have them available to any random spawning pawn (so unless a pawn is explicitly given the backstory, it won't be able to get it) this will help with modding pawns belonging to the colony faction.
-Allow us to be able to set traits to not be available to random spawning pawns.
-Add an enum tag into resource def that gives it a sort of 'category' this could be oreIron, oreSilver, oreGold (for metals examples). Then anything that has one of these tags can be used in any recipe as that sort of resource (ie. if a resource has the tag oreSilver, then it can be used in any recipe that uses silver, even if it is not explicitly silver) this would help with mod compatability and with adding resources in the future. (Idea from minecraft forge, if you have any familiarities with that)
A bit mod-oriented these suggestions, and the average player wouldn't really notice them, but they would help modders immensely

[christhekiller]

1. A priority list for hauling and other tasks. For instance you can manually prioritize hauling weapons over corpses, or rock chunks over metal.
2. An option to allow certain things to be unforbidden when they come into the map. For instance, instead of corpses being automatically forbidden when something is killed it's automatically allowed, this makes post-battles less of a hassle and in deserts with animals starving to death all over the place it puts them to good use instead of them just rotting because a player doesn't notice it.
3. On the weapon rack allow us to deselect/ select all the weapons! Sometimes I just want a weapon rack to store a single weapon, and frequently I'll set up one rack per weapon. You can imagine the hassle this causes.