Mods you concider "must have"?

[Golden]

These are the mods I always use.  I add others as I try out different themes (for example Megafauna can be fun!  )

PrepareCarefully
PrepareLanding
Doormats
FuckFriendlyFire

[Boston]

EdB Prepare Carefully- Because people with the level of incompetence exhibited in 'vanilla' colonists would never survive

Combat Extended- Because 'vanilla' combat is a lesson in absurdity

Vegetable Garden - Because 'vanilla' agriculture and cooking is boring and uninspired

Children and Pregnancy- Because it is how real-world colonies gained a sense of permanence and 'set roots', so to speak. Plus, my colonists have sex all the time, so children would be a natural result of that.

[SurrealSadi]

Of course, number 1 on the list is Hugs Lib. After that is Prepare Carefully, Hospitality, most of Skullywag's mods, most of Telkir's mods, Tribal Essentials, A Dog Said or EPOE, RimFridge. QualityBuilder is fantastic, you set an item to be built, then set what base quality you want, and it's never below that quality. I'm learning to love Apparello. Doormats are so amazing they're almost game-breaking.  The Industrial Age mod from jecrell's Rim of Madness collection adds some absolutely lovely lighting options to the game, especially if you are playing tribe-origin. SeveralPuffins' Rumours & Deception and Romance Diversified are also amazing and add so much to colony interactions.

[maculator]

I had two hilarious failed attempts on leaving the planet since I made this thread.
Both with alot of mods and now I'm going for a modlist that I concider "vanilla+"
So basically this is all the mods I concider essential, and not a single one more:
    HugsLib
    StackXXL
    Doormat
    Fuse
    RimFridge
    AnimalsLogic
    CombatExtended
    MadSkills
    Moody
    IdleFix
    RotTickFix
    RuntimeGC

Following the example of previous posters I'll explain shortly why I concider those the most essential mods ever made:

HugsLib: is needed for:
StackXXL:
Is really essential if you want to prevent your base from beeing 98% storage barns. Whats the point in beeing able to store like 10 let's say 20x20x5cm boxes of packed meat on a m² on the floor? Can't they stack? Sidenote: I set XL to 2 times and use it for food related stuff, XXL is set to 10 and used for resources.
Doormat:
Keeps dirt out of buildings and frees up worktime for people.
Fuse:
A somewhat balanced way of countering the "zzzT.." event.
Rimfridge:
Also frees up worktime since your people can grab a meal out of the fridge and cooks can put meals in fridges etc. Fridges are awsome!
AnimalsLogic:
Rename animals, have them obey the master immediatly, assign beds to them, etc... AND (this is the fun part) butcher everything into "chicken" meat. I mean do those colonists really care? saves space in the fridge and in the end nobody will know or care what they really eat!
CombatExtended:
After getting wrecked by raiders because they just eat like 10000 bullets, while walking straight forwards to knock down my shooters, I got sick of it all!
This mod is basically the best thing ever made. Ammo, turrets, embrassures and everything is awsome, BUT the best thing is: Straight, quick and brutal fights!
No more bullet-eating sons of Bs wreckig you in unbalanced melee because they refuse to go down with high bloodloss.
MadSkills:
Skill degredation is a nice thing as long as I don't loose a level. So I set it to "tiered" and "100%" wich lets me loose the current progress in XP but not across levels, NICE!
Moody:
Keeping track of everything! Its just amazing. It combines so many info mods and tab mods into one thing. Normaly I get suprised by breakdowns, now I see them coming and can ignore them willingly!
The rest:
Performance Stuff. Never really used RuntimeGC because I'm worried about relations, but when the time comes that I survive more than 3 years and I should notice some lag it'll be nice to have.

[Ra_silk]

I personally enjoy using:

Prison Labour: for my evil lynx men only tribe. they dig, they farm, they cook and cut stone!

Beast Men Tribes: Because I like the challenge of only having one race in my tribe specifically lynx people.

Vegetable Garden: because farming is awesome!

Any Weapon Expansions: more guns and varietys to find and make.

Medieval Mod: the next step after tribal's enter the medieval age.

Tribal Planet And Extras: so no crazy energy weapons and pirates. also lore fires and stone ovens

Prepare Carefully: so save and always have my four starting lynx people.

[Swat_Raptor]

Auto seller-  it allows you to set up scripts to sell your stuff, and automates your pawn to initiate the sale, and figure out the best mix of things to sell to get all the traders available silver, all you have to worry about is producing the goods.

[maculator]

I guess the interessting thing here is the difference in philosophies and "threadshots".
Content mods aside, leaves us with QoL ones. And My philosophy is to have as few mods as possible (right now, might change in 2.4s).
So I kicked every mod I don't concider "essential" to do so I have a thradshot wich is arround the "QoL-Level" of "hand me that brick".
Everything more usefull and essential (in my opinion) made it into my list, every thing less usefull didn't make it.

Note: I refer to my above post, not the op because my philosophy, as you can see, has changed since then.

Mods that are on the edge of my threadshot are:
-hand me that brick
-multiproduce
-anything surgery related

And since my last failed attempt combat extended is the bare minimum. I simply refuse to get overrun by melee characters and die the slow death of multiple infections. When I go I want to go with a big BANG and blood and guts everywhere!

[TheMeInTeam]

QoL ones are by far the most must have, since they can improve experience w/o altering rules.

Wildlife tab
Animal logic (some of it)
Hand me that brick
Hunting alert
OSHA compliance
Trading spot

This kind of stuff is top tier.  Once you get into rules alteration it's more YMMV, but reducing #inputs for same-output is a strict gameplay improvement.

[maculator]

Whats osha compilance?

I use the wildlife tab, its one grade A QoL mod!
Doesn't change a thing, makes your life so easy!

I just noticed while playing that my life wouldnt be the same without moody, I use it all the time and itst so helpfull.

[Sola]

Whats osha compilance?

Pawns always treat traps as armed.  Fewer accidental deaths via re-arming.

I'd love for 'Hand me that brick' to be in vanilla, and technically, it should fit within my moral compass (You can make critical-priority stockpiles right next to the building itself), but for some reason, it just doesn't rub me the right way.

[maculator]

I'd love for 'Hand me that brick' to be in vanilla, and technically, it should fit within my moral compass (You can make critical-priority stockpiles right next to the building itself), but for some reason, it just doesn't rub me the right way.

Thats exactly the reason why Its at the edge of my threatshot! It would be REALLY nice to have it, BUT the way I play the game is the follwing:
YOu got 5 zones. Zone 1 is for danger and restricts my colonists inside, zone 2-4 are "workzones" I set them up and select the beds, joy, food and then depending on whats needed a area they should work in.

I would wish for the ability to restrict them to zones over time like you can do with sleep/work/joy. A second bar where you can put in zones in relation to time of the day would be the best thing ever made!

[TheMeInTeam]

Whats osha compilance?

Pawns always treat traps as armed.  Fewer accidental deaths via re-arming.

I'd love for 'Hand me that brick' to be in vanilla, and technically, it should fit within my moral compass (You can make critical-priority stockpiles right next to the building itself), but for some reason, it just doesn't rub me the right way.

In practice it is vanilla rules.  You can, with extremely painstaking micromanagement, force haulers to haul building supplies to each spot for construction without mods.  The variance of doing this vs using the mod in *game time* is virtually nothing. 

In terms of IRL time the difference is large.  There's not much of a coherent "moral" argument to be had here.  If vanilla forced you to only give 1 order to build at a time (IE you can only place 1 chair then must wait until it finishes or one segment of walls), you could still match game-time progress just like now with more micromanagement/IRL time usage and pausing...and a mod allowing you to queue orders like building 5 beds or an entire 50x50 box of walls and letting the pawns complete that automatically would have the exact same arguments for/against as "hand me that brick" or "OSHA compliance" (you can bypass the advantages conferred by OSHA entirely with user micro in vanilla, but this is busywork with a false choice component).

In a SP game, automating what would otherwise be micromanagement busywork to save time but give same results is strict QoL improvement without changing actual design of the game's mechanical interaction...even in MP you can make a case that basing advantage on robotic inputs without real decisions attached is a poor excuse for design, but that's outside our scope for now anyway.

This is in contrast to mods that add or remove features or content, or confer you the ability to do something you could not technically accomplish by interacting with vanilla, which is why I qualified some parts of animal logic but not others.

[Trylobyte]

In a SP game, automating what would otherwise be micromanagement busywork to save time but give same results is strict QoL improvement without changing actual design of the game's mechanical interaction...

This is my main logic for suggesting 'Vanilla Plus' mods whenever a thread like this comes up.  They're all things you could theoretically accomplish with base-game behavior but they reduce intense amounts of micromanagement, RL time-wasting, or in-game clutter associated with those tasks.

[maculator]

This is my main logic for suggesting 'Vanilla Plus' mods whenever a thread like this comes up.  They're all things you could theoretically accomplish with base-game behavior but they reduce intense amounts of micromanagement, RL time-wasting, or in-game clutter associated with those tasks.

I guess performance is a thing here too. You can't just pack every mod and feature in the game. "Moody" ofr example is a verry verry verry usefull mod but it alone puts like 20% more load on the core that handels the game. Combine this with some other mod that adds cpu load, add a few colonists and you got yourself a pretty slow mess.

[LordMunchkin]

Anything that reduces micro.