Age appropriate Rimworld

[gl33mer]

Hi all.

I'd like to play a 'age appropriate' version of Rimworld. It's for my 5 year old son (I'll be 'playing' and he's watching.).

It's my first time modding but I know some Unity3d and C#.

So what could make it age appropriate?
First to go are weapons. I may leave bows and spears for hunting. (Is hunting age appropriate for a 5 year old. Not sure.)
I'm still unclear regarding mental breakdowns/diseases.
Blood should probably be 'toned down' or cleared completely.


I've been poking around the code and xml files (ILspy, etc.) - but can't figure out how to go about it.


Any tips welcome and appreciated.

[gl33mer]

I guess for the blood I could play around with stuff in Filth_Various.xml in ThingsDef

[Kluge]

"Age appropriate" is a pretty personal decision. We can't help you, outside maybe listing some stuff some people may find questionable:

1) Butchering humans
2) Prison system, slaves
3) A 70-year-old male preacher can sleep with a 15-year-old male vatgrown prostitute (or however it's phrased).
4) Human mating entirely (there's technically no human spawn, and it is purely for the colonists' enjoyment)
5) Colonists physically fight as a result of negative social interactions with each other
6) Colonists inefficiently stab animals to death (certainly, with a spear), let them bleed out, cut off their skin, and use it to make chairs
7) Colonists are very unequal in ability which may lead to awkward interactions if your son asks why you let them live given he's eating all your food and making the other colonists go hungry
8 ) Real diseases causing slow, difficult-to-watch deaths which the boy may have personal trauma related to
9) Fossil fuel, deforestation, potential anthropogenic genocide of animals
10) Rooms are often left untidy because there are more productive things to do, like play horseshoes

ETA: Oh, I have more.

11) Amputation, removal of slave limbs for sale or transplantation in colonists
12) Determining which "in shock" pets and humans are worth saving given limited resources (including beds, of course)
13) Is it psychologically healthy for people to hole themselves inside thick-walled fortifications to prevent the outside world from getting in?
14) Maybe fantasy/fiction is itself dangerous?
15) People and animals burning alive (creatures in Rimworld don't die of smoke inhalation, they die from burns extreme enough to do so with no pain-numbing effects smoke provides)


Hope that helps.

[Pactrick Willis]

Find another game. Quite realistically- I don't think your son will know (Much less care) about whats going on. Whole mechanics would need to be reworked. May I recommend subnactica if your looking for an age appropriate survival.

[Kluge]

Find another game. Quite realistically- I don't think your son will know (Much less care) about whats going on. Whole mechanics would need to be reworked. May I recommend subnactica if your looking for an age appropriate survival.

Terraria and Minecraft also work. Was surprised daughter actually picked up on Terraria... 5, too. I personally hate Minecraft and refuse to expose daughter to it, but a friend's daughter can't get enough of the game.

Survival games tend to have some relatively complicated mechanics... I think maybe you're (ETA: audience suddenly switches to OP here without warning) hoping for critical thinking skills to develop more rapidly... but you may have to wait until the boy picks it up on his own. The trouble, I'd guess, would be related mostly to the fact that there are few games both a 5 year-old and a 25 year-old (or whatever) can both be engaged in at the same time.

It might be a good time to introduce Monopoly. The mechanics aren't too hard to grasp, there's tactile stuff there, and there's critical thinking involved. Not perfect. Risk can be introduced around 6, I think. Survival games are tough because there's a lot of potential for embarrassment and frustration. -But that's definitely a hump worth getting over, and getting over early, I'd think. ... But I'm not a child psychologist at all.

[1000101]

RimWorld is 'age appropriate' the problem is that your son isn't the 'appropriate age'.  RimWorld is definitely targeted for a teen/adult audience.

Seriously, trying to convert RimWorld into a game which is going to be rated for young children isn't going to be a small task or have the same feel.  I would suggest finding a game which is intended for an audience of that age or much closer to that age to begin with.

That being said, if you look at the incidents to remove raids, traders to remove the option to buy slaves and weapons, as well as the recipes to craft weapons, you will be able to achieve most of what you want as it will basically leave the game as a colony building sim.

[gl33mer]

Thanks all for the quick reply.

A lot to acknowledge. I'll respond in a random order and hope for the best 

I'm 45 (or will be very soon.). My son has been playing (on and off) different (computer) games with me from a young age. As far as board games - for example, we've been playing Carcassonne since he was 3 or so.

E ((2*b)||!(2*b)) :

That being said, if you look at the incidents to remove raids, traders to remove the option to buy slaves and weapons, as well as the recipes to craft weapons, you will be able to achieve most of what you want as it will basically leave the game as a colony building sim.

My "thinking" on the subject has changed over the last 24 hours since posting. So, yes...Maybe I'd manage to wrap quite a few sliders that would enable whomever could be interested in this sort of mod to change some attributes. Maybe enable non-red blood color.

That brings me to the first reply, from Kluge. His list is probably just the tip of the ice berg. Which, basically, makes me tired already.

This morning I had an idea. If I'm already modd'ing I might as well make something worthwhile.

So, the basic back story: Sometime in (current) earth's future a family (could be just a bunch of colonists too) is sent back in a time manipulation gadget to the Cretaceous period.  They are to collect dna and biology (eggs, embryos, little dinos, etc.). The collected artifacts are sent back using a (portable) time manipulation gadget (maybe one could receive parts through this gadget in the games future to build a gadget that can send you back through time. Maybe generating a new map in the original future. That could lead to one time affecting the other. Success in the Cretaceous could influence the state of the world in the original future, etc. ).

I apologize. I digress.

I should probably stick to realistic goals for my first modding experience 

On a different note. I'm playing around with ideas. https://twitter.com/AlanZucconiAlan Zucconi is writing a series of articles on the subject of Evolutionary Computation. Would be cool to experiment with that in rimworld. The examples in the article are Unity3d/C# based.

And I will find an alternative game for my son. He just had a glimpse of me playing it and really wanted to take part. I've never played Subnautica, Terraria or Minecraft.

Ok.
Cheers,
gl33mer.

[RawCode]

adult\18\21 based of local laws.

as long as personal computer is connected to internet, user can get "offended", i wont paste dramatica link, just google it.

[chchgreen]

you could always just turn raids and all the bad stuff off in dev mode and just play a nice farming sim with a vegan diet...

[gl33mer]

Old topic.

5 years on (son is 10) - still quite sure it's inappropriate (without a mod etc. that would change very basic things about the game).

[Alenerel]

The thing you mentioned at first I think it actually makes the topic easy. If you are playing and your son watching, you can just avoid butchering people or avoid people doing things, or disable raids completely, etc. I would even be sure that he wouldnt know what is going on with two adults in a bed where pink hears are coming out...


The problem now might be that you want your son to play it instead of watching, and thats the mod problem which as you said is already tiresome to read a summary list...
An idea would be to know how you feel about side step the matter like some anime and games do it... For example, replacing the blood with white/black stuff. Or replace the humans entirely with robots... Or tell your kid that they are all robots... But I think that violence between sentient beings is all the same, robots or not.

On a side note, it also depends on what is age appropriate for you. For example, I dont think that butchering animals for eating is in appropriate for any age. It would be difficult to watch... But people need to get used to this.
In my personal case, i can tell you that its disgusting to me to see butchered skinned animals and I would probably starve to death than do that myself... Even tho I love to eat meat... And this probably would not be the case if I was around that stuff when I was young. So protecting me from seeing that actually was a bad thing.

[AileTheAlien]

Depending on what you would find objectionable, I think this might actually be do-able, at least now that your son is 10 rather than 5. There might still be a lot that's complex for his age, but that's solved by handing him the dictionary or encyclopedia. (Contrast with age 5, when like...95% of the game would just be too many things happening all at once.) The worst offenders as far as "adult" topics, should be change-able with small, simple patches, that just remove them from the game. (Deletion shouldn't unbalance the game too badly, since a lot of this stuff is already balanced by the material-value that gets counted in your colony for raids, so if you just don't have items, it's not counting them, and there's other items you would be using instead. For example, most of my furniture is already cloth just because it's easy, rather than because I'm removing human-skin or animal-leather from the game.)

For a lot of this stuff, you'll mostly be CTRL-F searching through the XML files for the name or IDs, then making patches to remove the thing, and any usages of it. Some usages might be indirect like if, for example, human skin is in a group of items, and some recipes use that group rather than specifying human skin specifically. (Some recipes like meals might also be defined in the stove-item, rather than in the ingreidents...and maybe some other ways too. It gets messy sometimes.) My own animal-materials mod deletes half of the leathers in the game, because I find them pointless rather than because I'm a child, but I also had to add some new items and remove items from traders. So these files would be similar to a lot of what you'd be doing.

• human butchery
• human-skin and -meat items
• human-skin and -meat in recipes
• slave-traders

   
• should be relatively easy to remove as a type of trader
• remember both the on-foot traders and orbital traders!
• blood color

   
• should be moddable to purple or whatever
• organ-harvesting surgeries
• pain-spike implants
• human mating

   
• I think this one already just uses euphemisms for the text, and pink hearts visuals over top of fully-clothed people "in" a bed, so it might be old news
  depending on what type of sex-ed he's getting in school or talks from you and your wife

Removing or changing human romance, so that there's no drastic age-differences might be more work. (I only do XML mods, since they're just easy text basically.) However, I think the game already limits romance to people over the age of 16 (which has historical precedent in some communities and cultures, especially remote farms). Maybe even limits it to 18+ pawns, or only allows pawns age 16-ish to 20-ish to romance each other? I think it might be a preference thing for the dice-rolls, rather than strict rules.

From your phrasing, it sounds like you're North American, so maybe the amount of guns are already OK for 10 years old, given that they don't have much details, and it's just text descriptions? There should also be mods already, that add or change guns into just stun-prods or stun-guns. I don't think it's possible to have certain guns usable by the enemy but not by your own people, so you couldn't for example, limit your colony to stun-weapons, defending against the pirates with machine-guns. (Well, at least not without some C# modding, which I have never had the time to get into.)

[Alenerel]

Rename slave traders to friend traders.... Other than the name there us nothing indicating that they are slaves. No shackles, no forced labor, etc

About romance... This is getting out of hand. I don't think there is anything inappropriate other than the highly metaphorical sex.

And about guns... Replace the bullets with netfs or paintballs lol

[RawCode]

same level of cringe as arachnophobia mode from satisfactory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNEUAL38RN4