A18

[TheMeInTeam]

-Shelves
-Pawns eating at tables
-Pawns rearming traps without standing on them.
-Separate quality crafting (furniture) from non-quality crafting (floors/walls)
-More mundane research, like improvements on existing tech (shelves, super shelves, super duper shelves)

- Notification when animal targets colonist for hunting (currently one of the most annoying and assymetric non-features in the game).
- Steal trade caravan mod location so that vanilla caravans don't path into trap mazes/traps in general constantly or give disturbed sleep x23984
- Designate pawn(s) allowed for work stations, similar to UI for designating twin bed.  No more worrying about skill level at work stations when the distribution of skill/interests is awkward, no need to separate out most jobs (only your construction one then)
- Craftable neutroamine (needs to be a better way to incentivize trade)
- Early game agency wrt disease for tribe (same reason they needed passive coolers)
- Animals stop leaving zones where they are perfectly willing to freeze or starve just to take drugs with no active addiction

[Aerial]

-Shelves
-Pawns eating at tables
-Pawns rearming traps without standing on them.

Is this a thing?  I don't think I've ever had a colonist hurt while rearming a deadfall trap and I use them liberally as my first line of defense in every game. I've only played since A15, though.

-Separate quality crafting (furniture) from non-quality crafting (floors/walls)
-More mundane research, like improvements on existing tech (shelves, super shelves, super duper shelves)

Both of these would be great. 

Shelf improvements should include a weapons rack (I'm envisioning something like a standard law enforcement/military gun rack that would hold 4 guns per tile) and/or a gun safe.  Raiders or prisoners would be able to steal weapons from the rack but not the safe.

Shelf improvements should also include a clothing hanging rack and/or a wardrobe and/or a dresser.  I'd love to have the ability to assign specific items of clothing to specific pawns by putting them into a storage item (rack, wardrobe, dresser) belonging to that pawn and they would dress in those items only. 

- Notification when animal targets colonist for hunting (currently one of the most annoying and assymetric non-features in the game).
- Steal trade caravan mod location so that vanilla caravans don't path into trap mazes/traps in general constantly or give disturbed sleep x23984
- Designate pawn(s) allowed for work stations, similar to UI for designating twin bed.  No more worrying about skill level at work stations when the distribution of skill/interests is awkward, no need to separate out most jobs (only your construction one then)
- Craftable neutroamine (needs to be a better way to incentivize trade)
- Early game agency wrt disease for tribe (same reason they needed passive coolers)
- Animals stop leaving zones where they are perfectly willing to freeze or starve just to take drugs with no active addiction

Agree with all of these, too.  I haven't had any animals hunting colonist events happen since A17, though, so I don't know if that's still an issue.

[nowise]

Books and book shelves. Buildable writer's desks. Craftable books by pawns of high skill which can be read by pawns of lower skill for training skills (e.g. gardening book, construction book, etc). Fiction novels craftable to be read for joy. Procedurally generated stories much like art.

[mebe]

I guess I'd like a bit more depth and strategy around the tech tree and more depth around the items various bits of tech enable with particular emphasis on moving away from only having the "with electricity/without electricity" play styles being the only real choice - for example there are lots of techs and items around food storage that could be interesting alongside the attempts to balance different methods of food production (hunting, farming, gathering). I'm thinking of things like underground storage jars, pickling, canning - all real world technologies that are applicable to different food types. In general more choices to effect/enhance the in play decisions you make. If it were me I'd add fishing to make those coastal & river tiles a bit different. Hell if we had fish we could smoke them, in a smoke house.

Purely QoL - Please for the love of god Tynan help me find that sniper rifle I KNOW is buried somewhere in my huge stockpile when it's dark and raining, either a search option or just let me zoom in a bit closer. At the moment I have to create individual stockpiles for the stuff I need to find easily (armour, weapons).

[Limdood]

I actually have a thread discussing the idea of destroyed cities as a mini biome: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=33158.msg337971#msg337971

I'm aware.  i think i even added to it.  i like the idea, i just don't want to see it done half-assed.  A LOT of suggestions that are suggested for big new features seem to follow the "easiest, fastest, cheapest way to implement" - and some of them are WORTH a full alpha, full range of features, extended development. 

I BELIEVE Tynan is probably of the same mind, at least for some of the ideas...it would explain his lack of opposition to some of the ideas, his lack of weighing in on ideas with overwhelming support, and the lack of immediate and incremental changes to large, fundamental systems of the game, such as the faction system.  I think that a faction system overhaul is inevitable, and TBH, i'm kind of happy it hasn't been done as tiny, 1-feature-at-a-time bits, because many of these features need an entire range of support systems to interact with to actually feel their impact.

[TheMeInTeam]

Agree with all of these, too.  I haven't had any animals hunting colonist events happen since A17, though, so I don't know if that's still an issue.

It's not an event at all.  A hungry predator animal picks a target to hunt.  Sometimes, it will pick a colonist. 

You get absolutely 0 notification this happens until the animal executes a melee attack on your pawn.  Dangerous animals like bears, cougars, and wargs can easily kill a gun-equipped pawn even if you react instantly and fight back, and the rate at which they kill a pawn they down is fast enough to make them threatening even relatively close to a base.

Not getting a notification about this is similar from a design perspective to not getting notification of an infection, or not getting a notification about raiders setting up for a siege...but do get notifications.

Also, colonists + pets + caravans can all rarely set off deadfall traps despite having a clear path, and you get the consequential faction penalties or the occasional decapitated pawn.

This game is not about micromanaging individual pawns at all times.  That is why a work priority system exists.  These are not things that should be happening with routine setups.

[Aerial]

Agree with all of these, too.  I haven't had any animals hunting colonist events happen since A17, though, so I don't know if that's still an issue.

It's not an event at all.  A hungry predator animal picks a target to hunt.  Sometimes, it will pick a colonist. 

You get absolutely 0 notification this happens until the animal executes a melee attack on your pawn.  Dangerous animals like bears, cougars, and wargs can easily kill a gun-equipped pawn even if you react instantly and fight back, and the rate at which they kill a pawn they down is fast enough to make them threatening even relatively close to a base.

Not getting a notification about this is similar from a design perspective to not getting notification of an infection, or not getting a notification about raiders setting up for a siege...but do get notifications.

Also, colonists + pets + caravans can all rarely set off deadfall traps despite having a clear path, and you get the consequential faction penalties or the occasional decapitated pawn.

This game is not about micromanaging individual pawns at all times.  That is why a work priority system exists.  These are not things that should be happening with routine setups.

Sorry, didn't mean to label it an "event".  I know it isn't.  However, in A16 I used to have predators attack my colonists fairly often and I agree it was something that should have had a announcement similar to the "animal revenge" so that the player could respond in a timely fashion.

Since A17 I haven't seen it happen once.  I am wondering if something has changed behind the scenes to make the predator hunting colonists a much rarer occurance, i.e. if there are prey animals on the map in X radius, the predator will favor those over the colonist.  In that case, a predator hunting colonists would likely only happen in harsh biomes when prey is not available, and I would be okay with that not having a yellow announcement because the behavior is now something I can anticipate by looking around the map for prey populations.

[DariusWolfe]

I kinda, as much as I've hated it in the past, am okay with not getting a notification a colonist is being hunted. Predators rarely signal their intent before they strike, so it makes sense that you wouldn't have forewarning.

What I'd like is for colonists to stop treating predators in the wilderness as non-threatening. I'd like it if colonists treated a predator w/in a certain radius as though it were automatically hostile; thereby triggering the flight/fight/do nothing behavior assigned to each of the colonists already And honestly, I'd be just as okay if predators w/in a certain (notably smaller radius) automatically became hostile.

In the real world, if a human wanders too near a bear or cougar out in the wild, the animal will either move away themselves, or attack, even if they're not especially hungry. The same is largely true of prey species. The fact that they flee if attacked is a good improvement, but having them flee if a potential predator (human or otherwise) gets too close needs to happen.

Yes, that will break (manual) melee hunting, but mostly, that needs to be broken. Primitive humans who didn't have ranged weapons to bring down prey usually used persistence tactics to wear down prey (impractical for Rimworld) or traps/blind canyons to close the distance so they could use their spears.

[TheMeInTeam]

I kinda, as much as I've hated it in the past, am okay with not getting a notification a colonist is being hunted. Predators rarely signal their intent before they strike, so it makes sense that you wouldn't have forewarning.

What I'd like is for colonists to stop treating predators in the wilderness as non-threatening. I'd like it if colonists treated a predator w/in a certain radius as though it were automatically hostile; thereby triggering the flight/fight/do nothing behavior assigned to each of the colonists already And honestly, I'd be just as okay if predators w/in a certain (notably smaller radius) automatically became hostile.

In the real world, if a human wanders too near a bear or cougar out in the wild, the animal will either move away themselves, or attack, even if they're not especially hungry. The same is largely true of prey species. The fact that they flee if attacked is a good improvement, but having them flee if a potential predator (human or otherwise) gets too close needs to happen.

Yes, that will break (manual) melee hunting, but mostly, that needs to be broken. Primitive humans who didn't have ranged weapons to bring down prey usually used persistence tactics to wear down prey (impractical for Rimworld) or traps/blind canyons to close the distance so they could use their spears.

No.  I am willing to accept the position that the mechanic is okay if and only if there is self-consistent reasoning for it.  Neither Tynan nor anybody else has managed that even once since this has been brought up multiple times.

The reasoning you provided would apply equally to numerous other game mechanics I listed in addition to a few I didn't.  To be okay with animals hunting colonists, one of the following must be true for your position to be self-consistent:

1.  You would be fine if the game simply didn't notify you for raids, caravans, disease, zzt, and tons more.
2.  You have a (yet to be listed) gameplay reason that *uniquely* applies to animals hunting colonists specifically.  And it *must* be gameplay reasoning, given the game's tolerance for abstraction as a whole.

Absent one of those conditions, being okay with animals hunting colonist w/o notification but not being okay with removal of other notifications is not a rational position regardless of who takes it.  For example to be consistent with your own statement you'd have to argue that the action of clicking on a predator should never reveal who it's hunting (after all how could you know, and if it exists then the hunting argument amounts to "the game is better when it has more mundane, inconvenient micromanagement), same for what raiders target etc.

Most importantly of all, you have to consider what agency the player has to deal with the mechanic.  In the case of animals, it involves lots and lots of slow speed watching to either manually hunt down predators or constantly watching individual pawns while playing at a slower speed.  What's the upside that this is okay, but ONLY in this instance?

Your proposed auto-avoidance mechanic wouldn't change the issue in practice at all, because you'd still have no notification of a predator coming after a colonist offscreen.  It would make interactions with animals a little more believable and could be nice, but it doesn't fix the predator hunting issue.

The issue is that unless you painstakingly micromanage individual pawns or pan around the screen at low speeds, the game will make your pawns die at random.

[nowise]

I guess I'd like a bit more depth and strategy around the tech tree and more depth around the items various bits of tech enable with particular emphasis on moving away from only having the "with electricity/without electricity" play styles being the only real choice - for example there are lots of techs and items around food storage that could be interesting alongside the attempts to balance different methods of food production (hunting, farming, gathering). I'm thinking of things like underground storage jars, pickling, canning - all real world technologies that are applicable to different food types. In general more choices to effect/enhance the in play decisions you make. If it were me I'd add fishing to make those coastal & river tiles a bit different. Hell if we had fish we could smoke them, in a smoke house.

Purely QoL - Please for the love of god Tynan help me find that sniper rifle I KNOW is buried somewhere in my huge stockpile when it's dark and raining, either a search option or just let me zoom in a bit closer. At the moment I have to create individual stockpiles for the stuff I need to find easily (armour, weapons).

I like the idea of canning and smoking. There should be more ways to preserve food other than a fridge or pemmican. Make jars from something (sand?). Use on stove or dedicated canning station. Voila, canned corn/potatoes/whatever. Chance of botulism for untrained pawns.

[DariusWolfe]

Here's one: Raids/Caravans aren't animals; Specifically, humans aren't animals (in any sense that matters). Whatever detection is used to justify getting notifications on anything at all is tuned for humans (and maybe mechanoids; I gather mechanoid raids come later on, but I rarely get that far; I build the ship or just quit before then, mostly). Honestly, I'd understand the reasoning if all of these sorts of alerts were to be gated behind some sort of research, but for now, it's safe to say that humans trigger alerts, where animals do not.

Unless, of course, they actually attack. If I'm shooting a bear and it suddenly comes straight for me, I'm going to notice. Once it's actually hit me, I'm going to notice. If it's quietly stalking closer, then I'm unlikely to notice until it's close enough that I'm not going to be able to run away from most predators (which is neatly covered by movement speeds).

This logic gets a little shaky with manhunter packs, obviously, especially for squirrels and smaller critters. I would grudgingly be okay if these no longer triggered alerts.

Regarding bzzts, disease, etc. it's easy to justify any sort of emergency in the Home zone. If you disagree, we probably aren't going to have a fruitful discussion, because that's so obvious it doesn't need explanation. Specifically with disease as I understand it, you *don't* get a notification until it's well underway. The way diseases happen (randomly in batches, rather than actually using contagion vectors) is an issue to discuss at another time.

Also, you don't get to dictate how I give reasoning. Ever. You can disagree, but you don't get to dictate.

But I would be quite okay with the removal of various notifications: Caravans entering the map, "passers by" (I don't get why I'd care anyway) If some sort of "stealth" raid were to be implemented (i.e. deliberately attempting to avoid detection... you know, the way hunting predators do)

Finally:

Your proposed auto-avoidance mechanic wouldn't change the issue in practice at all, because you'd still have no notification of a predator coming after a colonist offscreen.

You're massively wrong. It would change the whole dynamic of predator and prey. The primary reason that this is an issue is that the predators will begin hunting your colonist pretty much at the same moment they begin attacking. I've witnessed this. They don't decide to hunt your colonist when they're half a screen away (unless there is literally no prey anywhere nearby, which only happens if you hunt out all the prey and leave the predators alone; In which case, you got what you deserved.) It's a problem because your colonist is in close proximity and they're hungry, and your colonist doesn't even have a chance to react until they've been struck, as they never considered the predator a threat until that moment.

With what I've proposed, your colonist would begin avoiding as soon as they were nearby; If the predator were deliberately coming for them, they'd get the opportunity to get some distance before contact, and depending on your reaction settings, potentially even getting some shots off before the predator reached them. With a good enough hunter, this will be sufficient to even the odds considerably by the time it reaches them.

[TheMeInTeam]

Here's one: Raids/Caravans aren't animals; Specifically, humans aren't animals (in any sense that matters). Whatever detection is used to justify getting notifications on anything at all is tuned for humans (and maybe mechanoids; I gather mechanoid raids come later on, but I rarely get that far; I build the ship or just quit before then, mostly). Honestly, I'd understand the reasoning if all of these sorts of alerts were to be gated behind some sort of research, but for now, it's safe to say that humans trigger alerts, where animals do not.

That is not gameplay reasoning!  Humans aren't batteries and animals aren't fhwagads either.  The game has identical detection framework for all 3 storylines for all events...IE no canonical thing identified, nor does it need to be for gameplay.

The fact of the matter is that in one specific instance, information available to the player exists but is "gated" by mundane actions arbitrarily.  If you did receive notification that animals hunted colonists, but not that a raid is happening, I could say the same thing "animals are not people" --> this is not an inherently or context-based useful thought process.

Regarding bzzts, disease, etc. it's easy to justify any sort of emergency in the Home zone. If you disagree, we probably aren't going to have a fruitful discussion, because that's so obvious it doesn't need explanation. Specifically with disease as I understand it, you *don't* get a notification until it's well underway. The way diseases happen (randomly in batches, rather than actually using contagion vectors) is an issue to discuss at another time.

If it makes sense in the home zone, then let's just make that larger!  Or do we have some "detection method" that picks up on a conduit going bad?

Speaking of "detection method", how are we seeing so far?  Maybe we should implement a fog of war by this logic...

Except that wouldn't be consistent with the game's systems, similar to the issue with animals.

Also, you don't get to dictate how I give reasoning. Ever. You can disagree, but you don't get to dictate.

I dictated the conditions under which the position would be coherent (self-consistency is a requirement for that).  I did not and will not say that someone can't give incoherent reasoning, but I will disagree that incoherent reasoning is useful as a framework for deciding what goes into the game.

For example if someone wanted to argue that whales should be in the game because you're allowed to grow corn, I would similarly point out that the reasoning isn't coherent.  There are conditions under which the reasoning on including whales would be coherent, even if Tynan or anyone else disagrees that adding whales is useful.  But that one wouldn't be; the presence of corn does nothing to justify the existence of adding whales as a mechanic.

But I would be quite okay with the removal of various notifications: Caravans entering the map, "passers by" (I don't get why I'd care anyway) If some sort of "stealth" raid were to be implemented (i.e. deliberately attempting to avoid detection... you know, the way hunting predators do)

More reasonable then, though I still question the utility of "constantly check x" with no decision making in a game like this.

You're massively wrong. It would change the whole dynamic of predator and prey. The primary reason that this is an issue is that the predators will begin hunting your colonist pretty much at the same moment they begin attacking. I've witnessed this. They don't decide to hunt your colonist when they're half a screen away (unless there is literally no prey anywhere nearby, which only happens if you hunt out all the prey and leave the predators alone; In which case, you got what you deserved.)

If I were massively wrong, I wouldn't have reloaded predator targeting colonist on 3 different occasions within 2 years of a single playthrough and observed otherwise.  In each case, I'd 1) hunted nothing whatsoever and 2) on watching predator carefully post-reload it chose colonist as target from over >1 screen length away on 2 of the 3 occasions.  The 3rd time was ~firing range for LMG.

I don't doubt that they point-blank you too, and I agree that colonists should generally avoid predator animals.  But right now, it doesn't work.  A panther will dive into a row of raiders to "hunt" them (if we're talking about realism wrt animals, this is a no-sell).  In fact realism arguments wrt a tedium mechanic in general are really, really, really flimsy.  We're accepting abstractions not just for notifications, but for weapon range, food growth, heal rate, and much more, to say nothing of the abject absurdity of a wolf successfully defeating someone armed with a fully automatic weapon at close range, while this same person can outrun an elephant.

Realism isn't the call to rational implementation standards here.  From a gameplay standpoint, "oops, your colonist died because you don't play speed 1 constantly" isn't good design and it should be fixed.

Corn doesn't justify whales.

[DariusWolfe]

Corn doesn't justify whales.

And we're done here. I don't expect that you're going to have much else to say worth listening to. Instead of respecting legitimate reasoning, you want to try to confine it unnecessarily, and then make completely nonsensical comparisons. "gameplay" is not, and never will be in any game with fictional space, the only legitimate reason to make design decisions.

Take care.

[TheMeInTeam]

Corn doesn't justify whales.

And we're done here. I don't expect that you're going to have much else to say worth listening to. Instead of respecting legitimate reasoning, you want to try to confine it unnecessarily, and then make completely nonsensical comparisons. "gameplay" is not, and never will be in any game with fictional space, the only legitimate reason to make design decisions.

Take care.

I don't know what meets the standards for "legitimate" on the internet, but the reasoning given was not coherent.

I gave a more extreme example to illustrate a point, but in gameplay terms they're equally useful in justifying the position as you stated it. 

Perhaps a better example would be to say that heaters and coolers are different things, therefore you should have to manually lower the temperature of your freezer every 6 in-game hours without exception because hot and cold are different things.  Every in-game instance of heaters consistently applies heat so we can say that's canonical, but not coolers!  Coolers are different!

Okay, but what is the reason the player should have to manually turn down the cooler ever 6 hours?

The same reason you say the player should interact with animals right now.  Giving me incoherent reasoning then saying "we're done" is intellectually rude.  If you're going to give me incoherent reasoning that is nonsense in relation to earlier gameplay arguments, it is awkward to then call me out for making "nonsensical comparisons".

Gameplay might not be the "only" reason you do something in games, but it's a top priority consideration.  Whatever choice is made still has to work in gameplay terms.

Rimworld does not sell itself as an "attention to mundane tasks" simulator, and applying shifting standards to "realism" wrt animals does not change that.  This is the same game where you can aim a modern rifle at an animal at its near-maximum effective range, and if you hit it the thing instantly knows where you are, that you're the one who attacked, and charges right for you.  THIS is the framework under which we're going to (selectively) invoke realism in animals vs human behavior and detection?  Really?

[Bozobub]

If it makes sense in the home zone, then let's just make that larger!  Or do we have some "detection method" that picks up on a conduit going bad?

NO, I'm not even remotely down with making the Home Area even larger automatically, than it already becomes with automated expansion set to "on".  First off, you already can do so manually!  Second, I don't want my colonists wasting time punching out fires in no-man's-land, as an easy example, when there's more important stuff going on in my actual home area  .  Perusing the forums, you'll find some people use the Home Area as the basis for some rather complex job priority schemes, as well.

Personally, I'd solve the issue by notifying the player *when the pawn notices the attack*.  I'd make this pretty much immediate if the pawn isn't otherwise occupied and can see the predator but on a random scale, if the pawn is busy (thus, "distracted") ranging from "immediately" to "OmigawdbeareatingmahfacegetitoffAIIIGH!", heavily weghted by cognition and perception levels.

Important note:  No matter how fine-grained any simulation is, eventually you WILL find inconsistencies between its paradigm and actual reality, especially if that sim is also a game.  Simply put, it's not real and furthermore, must satisfy a paying audience, unlike reality .

I'll also note, TheMeInTeam, is that it's your current confrontational attitude that's the biggest problem with your argument, not the content itself.  You might want to dial it back a bit; I think you'll see a better response.