Community, tell me your usability stories!

[UrbanBourbon]

My #1 has got to be needing to haul or repair, and it not being selected. It drives me up a wall.

I'm glad they'll have well described reasons, but I really want there to be an option right from the context menu to *HAUL ANYWAY!!!* One for like "haul x1" or "haul forever." Then I can go change it back later when whatever emergency is over.

I can think of more, but that's still my #1.

But... There is the right-click option. You select a hauler colonist, right-click on a haulable (unforbidden) item and it should pop up an option "Prioritize hauling metal", for example, if it's a pile of metal. As for repairing, it helps if you have 1-2 colonists who have the repair job set to higher priority. Have you noticed the big red X in the Overview list, that reads "Manual priorities" next to it? If not, you should click that.

My #2 is "WHY WON'T THEY BURY THE BODY!!!" Are they not a hauler? Is there not a graveyard?! I can usually figure out the rest of the things in the game, like why aren't they building or why aren't they cooking chopping whatever. But why aren't they hauling drives me insane.

This relates to the hauling task and farming. Farming creates a lot of hauling task spam, and colonists are always happy to accept the closest task they can do. Dead bodies usually reside far away from your farming plots. Personally I would put hauling dead human bodies to the top of the hauling tasks, and make the task ignore the distance. It should be noted that storyteller AI is also a factor here - Phoebians don't see many raider bodies, while Cleopatrians have to deal with throngs of bodies.

#3 is "WHY WON'T THEY BUILD A STONE FLOOR HERE!!!!!" I still haven't figured that one out. It drives me nuts.

You need to build the stonecutter's table, place a stockpile of stone rubble (not slag) near it, and assign a colonist to craft stone blocks. Stone blocks are used for stone floors.

#4+ is stuff my brother's brought up. Making stone walls...

Just pause the game, Alt-Tab out of the game and read up the wiki. Leave the browser open when you return to the game.
http://rimworldwiki.com/Stonecutter%27s_table

[Monkfish]

Also, smooth stone floor (requires no resources) can only be made if the floor is rock. If it is soil/sand/not rock then it won't be made. Took me a while to figure that one out!

[UrbanBourbon]

Speaking of the "Manual Priorities" option in the Overview window, I think that's the number one problem - people are not clicking it. That option flies under the radar, hiding in plain sight. I've watched a ton of gameplay videos of RimWorld and I'd say less than a third of the video creators have that option enabled. When looking back, it took me a while to click it as well.

I'm someone who has been tempered in the fires of Dwarf Fortress. Nothing phases me anymore. No game is too difficult to master. I just don't give a shit. I'm tired to rage about the difficulty or seemingly broken mechanics. I will use a thousand tricks to circumvent the problem rather than ragequit. Ragequitting is still quitting, after all. I will use my full powers of observation to determine the nature of any mechanics that annoy me. If something doesn't work as expected, then that is the enemy and intel is needed about it. I used to feel frustration in games, but then I hit the point when I was too experienced and too tired to get angry. I had seen too much. There was a turning point and I would just study a game in peace. I took my sweet time to understand every last bit. The harder it was to understand something, and the more something pissed me off, the more focused I got, because I had faith that "Whatever this is, it has a function, a purpose, or a story behind it and I intend to find what it is." I used to walk right past anything that I didn't understand in 2 seconds, and that was the goddamn mother of my problems. It was time for mother to die. Uhhh.. did I say that out loud?

EDIT:
Oh my God, I almost forgot! The Item Selection Cycle syndrome! I don't know what else to call it. It took me dozens of gameplay hours to notice that you can cycle through the items residing on the same tile simply by left-clicking on the tile... slowly. Because you don't want to cause a double-click. Would've been handy to know that from the start.

[Teovald]

-I read the changelog so I knew that there were stone items. I started a new colony but soon I realized that even though I had a stone cutting workbench, nobody was working on these stone tiles. 
I did not know what to do, so I had to watch a youtube video to learn about bills (I either did not see the button, or did not click on the stone cutting bench). 
-After that, another issue was the need to get back to the workbench to order more stone each time my stock got depleted.. The whole process feels very grindy and it is easy to forget to recreate a bill. 
-On the cooking side of things, the bills are weird too. I often forgot to renew it and when I do renew it, it results in piles of plates around the cook.

[Monkfish]

I set a bill for unlimited stone blocks and keep the radius at the default. I then build a stone-only stockpile next to the cutting bench with a reasonably high priority (but lower than food). Once all stones are removed from the home zone, I can control the pace at which stone blocks are made by setting haul orders on other nearby stones. I typically only have one person set as a crafter too.

[Serrate Bloodrage]

I do it exactly as Monfish does by the sound of it. Seems to be the easiest way to control it.

[Teovald]

Now that I think about it, I have don't know how to recruit bypassers. 
Am I supposed to arrest them ? or is there any negociation option ?

[Serrate Bloodrage]

At this point you arrest them

[Monkfish]

Yep, you arrest them providing you have a spare prisoner bed free. If you don't, the quickest thing to do is to turn a colonist bed into a prison bed (assuming everyone has their own room) and build a new bed elsewhere whilst the prisoner is being collected. This allows you to immediately capture someone and you can worry about allocating new beds out once they've been captured.

I hope (and somewhat assume) that Tynan will be working on friendly recruiting methods too. I'd like to see something like;

- Issue "Invite to colony" command. A Colonist then approaches the person and there's a chance they will convince the person to come and take a look around, which would be based on their social skills. Failing this chance check would result in the person leaving (although they could be arrested with a heavy negative to loyalty) or, on rare occasions, becoming hostile.
- Invitee then becomes a visitor that stays for a day or so (in a spare colonist bed) and wanders about chatting with colonists and scouting the place out. They would access food of their own accord but won't be available to assign jobs to.
- Wardens would approach this person and attempt to recruit them in the same way they do with prisoners (although just setting all of your wardens to recruit would have a negative effect).
- The visitor would join the colony if they wanted to (could happen at any time) and leave if they didn't want to (They could still be arrested though).

[SlimeCrusher]

- Wardens would approach this person and attempt to recruit them in the same way they do with prisoners (although just setting all of your wardens to recruit would have a negative effect).

Visitor: Aah, what a beautiful day on the colony!
*A blob of wardens run towards him*
Warden 1/2/3/4/5: JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US!!!!!

Now, that would be what will happen if text bubbles get added into the game... lol

[Monkfish]

I'd like to see something similar for prisoners too, whereby they are negatively affected if all of your wardens come to pester them about joining. It'd also be cool if some tried to escape.

[Benny the Icepick]

Ooh, the talk of prisoners reminded me of another issue:
What's the difference between arresting someone and capturing someone?

I managed to nab a fleeing raider and throw them into my prison, but they just spazzed out and melee attacked all the other prisoners until the prisoners killed him.  And of course, being assigned as a prison room, the dead body just kinda chilled there until I managed to recruit the others (which took a while.  Because of the body.  Sense my frustration).

One of the big issues for me is the lack of explanation on the Wiki, which is essentially the closest thing we have to a manual.  I'd like to take the time to update it, but it's probably best to wait until Alpha 3 comes out, as it sounds like Tynan is tinkering with mechanics in a pretty major way.

[Cryotech]

More of UI quirk, but personally I find it slightly annoying as a perfectionist to make precise measurements. Why not have a little marker on the sides of your 'ghosted' build thing, to show how many blocks you're placing? Even something simple like "5 units" or "5 blocks" would be great- if you wanted to go the extra mile though, maybe even scale it. Something like 1 block being 2 meters or something.

[dd0029]

I managed to nab a fleeing raider and throw them into my prison, but they just spazzed out and melee attacked all the other prisoners until the prisoners killed him.  And of course, being assigned as a prison room, the dead body just kinda chilled there until I managed to recruit the others (which took a while.  Because of the body.  Sense my frustration).

For fleeing raiders who turn blue, ie capturable while not incapacitated, I have had the most luck grabbing them after they have been blue for a "while". If you snag them immediately, they seem to go bonkers right off the bat. Letting them wander, hoping that their former buddies don't decide to cap them, has given me about a 25% success rate for a safe capture where as the immediate pickup has been guaranteed crazytown.

[porcupine]

Not sure about other items, but when crafting stone blocks, and then dropping them into a stockpile zone, the colonists won't restack piles.

IE: I have a stockpile zone with ~20 tiles occupied.  All tiles are occupied with a random quantity of stone blocks (~2-50 blocks per tile say), and while more blocks are being crafted, they're dumped around the bench (over a dozen stacks, ironically, stacked in piles of 75).

There is plenty more room in this stockpile for more items, but the colonists won't simply shuffle the blocks around to make stacks of 75 for some reason.  They're perfectly content with the stack of 2 stone tiles taking up an entire block, etc.