Pregnancy/having kids

[CodeRen]

I know people talk about this a lot, I just wanted to point out that Dwarf Fortress had infants and I think Banished could have children be killed. Pregnancy and child birth should be in the game.
I think since Rimworld doesnt have much going on in terms of graphics it can get away with having children. Also, 60 days a year isnt that long and now with this talk of settling and exploring the planet and making other colonies it makes more sense to survive even longer now and have large groups of colonists! Who wants a whole planet full of slaves that you converted? Not me.

Sure you get a wander here and there but 2 colonists giving life and then you seeing them grow up and potentially die means a lot for storytelling. I can only imagine the life stories that will be written here.

Also before anyone says Tynan said a definite no and tries to speak for him, here: https://twitter.com/TynanSylvester/status/794003347376377856

[Marmar]

I think it would be great to have pregnancy and babies in the game. After all, your tribe should be able to reproduce, shouldn't it? And your colonists would want to stay and develop their colony.
I guess it may be hard to play with pregnancy and newborns, but hey - that's what life is in the end, right?

[JuicyPVP]

This is a mega duplicated thread. Use the search bar to find the other threads.

[vyn-halcyon]

Being female is as pointless as being male in most games these days.

At least with pregnancy, having a gender at all actually has a sense of agency.

And it's very conducive to gripping stories when a baby dies to miscarriage, because the mother got shot.

Isn't stories what Rimworld is all about?

[Elok]

To save you the struggle, the most basic reason why there's no pregnancy or kid in Rimworld is most probably because the Devs wanted to avoid the morality issue of having situation like kid going crazy and start eating the raw flesh of it's death pregnant mother who died of the plague as a result of a deadly fight with raider where the kid had to fight for his life.

Elok

[McBobbish]

It's probably because the timeframe of most Rimworld colonies is far too short. It takes years for a baby human to be able to even feed itself. Most colonies die by the second year. You would end up with a colonist cripplingly ill (in game terms) for the better part of a year, then you would have an incredibly useless creature that might become useful if your game makes it into the double digit year marks. And by that point, you should probably just start a new colony.

[Fluffy (l2032)]

but what would children actually do? Wander around all day? Be stuck to one of their parents as some sort of parasite?

Having children as glorified dogs that can't do shit for at least 6 or so years doesn't sound like fun. Having them be 'normal' productive* pawns is stupid. Properly implementing them would take a lot of time. I honestly just don't see the point.

(in as far as a pawn can be productive, damn lazy haul refusing buggers)

[Belgord]

@fluffy it sound's like you have some of your own useless pawns. But I agree no kids thanks. Don't really need that.

[Goldenpotatoes]

If you want to see how the game works with current progression, download the Children and Pregnancy mod.

The result of playing two colonies with it? The game's current progression is aggressive and raid scaling makes long-term colonies become death fortresses or crumble to the swarm. Unless some serious work is done on revamping the game's progression to be much more gradual with more content, children will never be viable.

Do they add some interesting dynamics to the storytelling part of the game? Yes, it does. Gameplay wise? Not much, essentially another mouth to feed with no foreseeable benefit in the reasonable future.

[Kenneth79]

Children is in most Civilization games. Why can't children be implemented? Also why can't they also improve gameplay? Adding children is adding meaning into the game: more stories and values put into the game. Gameplay wise, yes, they are another mouth to feed which makes it even more of a challenge in the game. You as the manager have the power to decide to have kids or not, it is your responsibility. Which brings up another idea. People in Rimworld need valid titles within the colony. For example, colonists can acquire title of being colony leader or colony teacher. The teacher can help educate the kids into being more useful. A meter system should be in place to understand the kid's competency level to preform tasks within the colony. However trauma or other things can prevent the kids from learning to haul or firefight. It is the kid's development that creates a story. I do understand issues with kids not doing anything, however, I propose that maybe these kids by default (before being taught by teachers) should have the ability to do chores within the base. Think about it, having colonist clean and haul is laborious and means shorter workforce. Having kids automatically clean the base and haul things would be beneficial and menial labor is minimize which means you as a user have more time to look over more important agendas than assigning colonist to haul, flick switch and clean the base.