Official: RimWorld Alpha 17 - On the Road released!

[ITypedThis]

Redesigned how capacities are calculated from body part efficiencies with an entirely new collection of algorithms, to stop various nonsensical cases and simplify how health conditions can affect the body.

I really like the idea behind this, but I'm not so sure I like the execution.

Engie, one of my favourite colonists, is now almost completely useless in my current save. She got punched in the eye by a boomrat, scratched on the arm by cougar, and landed with a stab scar on her foot. Because of these three scars she now has, she is in a constant state of "medium" pain, and therefore has a permanent state of weakened consciousness. She consistently fails tasks, and often has to repeat construction jobs two or three times. (Fails building wooden flooring tiles twice in a row with a construction skill of 15 and an alleged construction success chance of 92%.)

When she gets food poisoning she basically becomes both mentally and physically handicapped, as her consciousness drops down to "poor." Engie crawls at a snails pace, can only hold half a stack of anything, and is effectively entirely unskilled at everything. She's almost completely useless because of a few unlucky injuries.

Ultimately I think this ties in to how scar in RimWorld are treated in general. Personally, I have a large surgical scar on my right upper thigh. The initial wound was quite damaging, and the scar still hurts on contact and occasionally aches. However, while uncomfortable the pain does not impede my ability to think and function, work with my hands, mind, or even the leg it occupies.

I have a rare musculoskeletal disease call Mc'Ardle's Disease. To put to bluntly, it makes life intensely painful when doing anything even remotely physical. While the pain is much more than enough to prevent me from doing many physical tasks, it does not impede my mental capabilities in any way. At the absolute worst possible amount of pain it has ever caused me, either directly or indirectly, I have been too distracted and distraught to perform complex thoughts or mental processes. At this point however I would be physically incapable of completing the tasks my poor colonists set off to do every single day.

Basically what I mean to say is that pain and especially scars have too high of an impact on a pawn's heath, consciousness, and general work capabilities; This seems to have a much greater impact this alpha than ever before. Comparatively, real-life consciousness is not weakened by large amounts of physical pain, only when in very large/exceptional to extreme amounts. The medical system is unrealistic in this regard and does not compare to the rest of the game where injuries, death, and illness will occur. All in my own opinion of course.

Side note: Love the new roads. 

[DariusWolfe]

Agree that scars/pain are a bit overblown. I once helped someone change a tire on the side of the road. A one-armed dude had also stopped (luckily, because he had more tools than I did) and despite being (at that time) a young, able-bodied Soldier, I honestly think the guy did more of the work than I did.

Losing an arm, having some scars will obviously impair your performance, but once you've healed and learned to cope with your handicaps, it's not uncommon for even badly injured people to have nearly normal levels of functionality; They just have to work a little harder to get there.

[deshara218]

some feedback; cobra shows up and attacks roosters, my colonist goes to kill it with her rifle, walks up to point blank range to start aiming and the cobra turns and attacks her. She eventually beats it to death, goes berserk from the pain of the bites, goes out and fights a raccoon, gets mauled some more, and while she's beating the raccoon to death she develops an infection from the cobra, snaps out of the mental break, I order her to go self-tend, she sits and patches up minor scratches (was never in danger of bleeding to death) until she collapses from the infection and dies.
Six hour play session, ended with 0 possibility to intervene.

[Ardshael]

Firstly, I'm liking a lot of the changes you've made Tynan.

I'm several hours into my 2nd playthrough (Cassandra, Intense, Permadeath) on A17. RIP to my first colony. They didn't stand a chance with 6 colonists. 2 of which were non-violent and 1 had his spine shattered early. Using EPOE on this playthrough and loving that mod.

Anyways, I've had some thoughts and feedback from what I see so far.

- The roads making traveling MUCH more viable and forming caravans are much better as well. At least now it's actually an option to traverse the landscape to the escape ship. I'm visiting nearby factions way more frequently as well. I like it.

- Zzzts - This even is my biggest frustration. I feel like this event occurs way too often. I think I've had it about once per season. It's very annoying and I feel like the frequency doesn't improve the game.

- Outpost and Items Events - It seems like these events occur more frequently at the start of the colony and less often as the colony grows. With that said, I haven't cleared an outpost yet so I'm not sure if there's a formula that maxes out how many outposts pop up.

- Rivers - they are a nice addition and I look forward to them being expanded upon. They feel like they are more aesthetic at the moment. Perhaps the land near water should be rich soil. Or the soil has a higher probability of being rich soil.

- I've really noticed a reworking of the economy (i.e. prices for selling items). Making money is definitely more difficult. Farming and sell extra food, hops, etc seems to be the best route to making money now.

-- With the reworking, I feel like Thrumbo horns aren't worth as much so for the events where that's the payment for completion, I'm less inclined to complete them. I may change my mind about the horns though.

-- Requesting caravans doesn't give much of a payoff now that they are much more expensive to request. Whereas before I would frequently request traders. I feel like a reduction from 1100 to 1000 or maybe 950 would be more viable.

-- Perhaps it's just this game but I've noticed caravans and factions have a lot more components. In past alphas I've always been painfully starved for components. I like this change (if it was a change).

-- Overall, I like the economy is better now. It's not as easy to become rich.

352 hours of play and I'm still enjoying the game. Keep up the great work Tynan and team. Thanks.

[makkenhoff]

@ITypedThis

You can remove damaged parts as a trade off - more consciousness for less physical ability - might use drugs to dull the pain briefly for those important tasks, I know I use go-juice and wake-up in my games - though sometimes it does backfire on me. You might be able to peg leg her, or go bionic in later stages; assuming you've got a good enough doctor and medicines. Usually I can find a town or two that has what I need - though I have to admit preparing expeditions is more challenging in A17.

[ITypedThis]

@ITypedThis

You can remove damaged parts as a trade off - more consciousness for less physical ability - might use drugs to dull the pain briefly for those important tasks, I know I use go-juice and wake-up in my games - though sometimes it does backfire on me. You might be able to peg leg her, or go bionic in later stages; assuming you've got a good enough doctor and medicines. Usually I can find a town or two that has what I need - though I have to admit preparing expeditions is more challenging in A17.

I think it's telling that it is a realistic option to just entirely remove a limb because of a small scar.

That's a decent idea though. The colony is still very young, so I don't have a hope for proper hospital and three bionic implants, nor to have a steady supply of drugs to fuel her every waking moment. (Plus extra bionics for whatever else must be replaced by the time I can reasonably acquire them.) Currently I've just shoved her into a cryopod for long-term storage, because she can't do anything useful and just eats without working for it. As a bonus I'm recruiting the pod's former occupant to replace her.

The fact that I actively chose to put my favourite colonist on ice for who knows how long just because she got a few unlucky hits is just unfun. Frustrating to watch her fail everything and produce terrible goods because of so little.

[Neotic]

I just realized this was announcing that A17 was released i thought the was on the road to release

[MadsMartinMadsen]

Liking A17 very must so far, on vacation so dont have time to play as much as I would like.

I am sure I cant be the only one but the rivers and creeks make me think watermills 

Thanks for yet another great update to all of the people working hard on Rimworld!

[taha]

No. No cheers for him.

Besides the long time between updates - the amount of time seem to increase directly proportional with the game sales - most of the vet players concerns were graciously ignored.

End game content, mood balancing, late game performance, useful mid / end game skills, etc were legit concerns, and were expressed more than once on forums. The only thing Tynan actually did, was the ability to self treat (there was a mod for it anyway).

It's obvious I'm displeased. You, guys, will be too, once the shine of the new update wears off.

[mumblemumble]

I expect there may be another mini update which provides more balancing, but this is how tynan has done it - mini, concentrated updates on a few speciic things, to make sure the update is not a huge mess, while also fixing older issues.

Wanderlust update was huge, and needed lots of work, which a17 is bringing

this has pretty much been the theme forever : new features are added, and possibly have new, or more noticed imbalances, and next updates add new things, while fixing previous imbalances.

EDIT : Really should make bruises not use meds to treat. This has been mentioned before, and I kinda chuckled seeing yetis first a17 episode, where he mentioned this too..

[Tynan]

taha, have you tried playing a really long game? Late game performance should be very much improved. Not to mention things like map gen speed are a lot faster now too (go ahead and measure it). We put a lot of time into all of this.

Mood balancing - I haven't heard any specific consistent complaints about this so I don't know what you're referring to. (Though some aspects of mood were rebalanced anyway.) There's no thread with the word 'mood' in the title in the first 3 pages of the Suggestions forum. I'd be interested in a link to what you're talking about.

End game content - We added a bunch of work quest stuff, but yeah, that's the midgame. One step at a time. Can't do everything at once. A17 was a refinement update with some content bits added in. It was really more about the 500+ bugs fixed and dozens of systems rebalanced than new content.

Useful mid/endgame skills - Not sure what this refers to. However, you'll note that Research was redesigned as Intellectual, and is used to make advanced drugs, taking the skill from endgame-useless to endgame-useful. So now all skills should be useful in the endgame.

[ReZpawner]

Talk about killing the buzz.

[kenmtraveller]

Speaking as a software developer, I think anyone who thinks this isn't a lot of content for an update is out of their mind.  I think people who aren't programmers often grossly underestimate the amount of work required to do feature development in a way that doesn't break what is already there.  And the bigger your code base gets, the more work is involved in 'not breaking what is already there'.

A lot of what went into this update is foundation for what can come in the future.  There's no skipping that work, even though it doesn't provide you with anything new to play with.  Think of the new quests as the beginning, and as a framework for modders, not an end state.

And, from what I can tell A16 was the biggest update in a long time, and in truth it had a lot of bugs, because it was extremely ambitious in scope.  It's natural for the next update to be more about refinement and bug fixing.

[ShadowTani]

Besides the long time between updates - the amount of time seem to increase directly proportional with the game sales

Take note that A17 is two alphas in one. We had a vote on the forum if we wanted A17 to be released as a pure polish update, or wait until there were additional content as well; people voted in favor of waiting it out. As such A18 might not take as long since the amount of necessary polish have been taken care of; though the need for it will always pile up with every new update, so think of those as "leap year" updates.

[Panzer]

Speaking as a software developer, I think anyone who thinks this isn't a lot of content for an update is out of their mind.  I think people who aren't programmers often grossly underestimate the amount of work required to do feature development in a way that doesn't break what is already there.  And the bigger your code base gets, the more work is involved in 'not breaking what is already there'.

This. When I saw how enemy bases were generated in the A17 introduction video I thought 'holy shit, that must ve been so much work'. I really like how much thought is put into the features and implementation, I ve seen quite the opposite in a lot of other games.
Loving the new features so far, the hit & shooting rebalance turned this into a bit of a maim fest, the percentage of completely healthy pawns in my colony is quite low but a missing hand or eye doesnt seem to have that much of an impact on performance anymore. Still havent played enough to give more solid feedback, but will do so in a few days