A World of Story is NOT released! - Rimworld needs a chronist

[Bolgfred]

Introduction
The dark shadow of Tynan's beta announcement and the related post's topic did remind me the fact that rimworld is mostly about telling stories, even having a storyteller.. BUT! When the game ends, all of this, will be forgotten, so this storyteller did a really bad job, huh?
As it's for me, this could be the most important thing Rimworld is missing: The Colonies chronic.

Idea

Everything that is happening in your colony, will be logged. Whenever the game ends, successfully or not, a chronicle file will be created, which tells the story of The colony, as a very epic tale.
I imagine this kind of as followed:

"In Septober 5500 the escape pods from [Random Ship name] hit the surface of the planet.
The only survivors were Trauma Johnson, Doctor Pete and Mediveal Madelyn.
In Decembruary they setup barracks and started planting rice.
In 5501 a criminal named Chanel joined the colony and they named the colony "cookware of teaching". After that, afridge was build for storaging food.
The same year a tribal assault was fought of. Johnson was shot in the head. Madelyn treated his wounds but did a bad job.
In 5502 Pete crafted the first compound bow, which was excellent quality an Pete and Madelyn had a fight in the dining room.
In Septober 5503 Madelyn go attacked by a rampage rabbit and took a real nasty bite qhich got infected soon. The same day a hospital was build and Johnson had to cut off her leg, as the infection couldn't be resisted. In 5504 Madelyn died from natural lead poisoning. Nobody liked her anyway."

...and so on. For sure not everything can be put on protocol and there might be some things that are easier or too difficult to detect for a script, so my example will probably not be able to written in the same way, but if only rooms, items, events, injuries and relations will be logged, the result would be a memorable story, that might be fun to read.
If these get stored in a chronical tab, every game one every played will be stored for eternity, which really triggers my nostalgic genetic.

Bonus
As a very extraordinary element I imagine one colonist be chosen the chronist of the colony. When he gets chosen he will start random chattings with other colonists, and then writes down events that happened for that single pawn.
Afterwards depending on the chronists social skill, his writing will be good or bad. Bad writing could look like this:
Colony founded. Johnson and Pete married. New barracks now. Dining room done. Fire in hospital. Madelyn bad cooking. Tribals attacked. Killed tribals. ....

[SpaceDorf]

+9000

[khun_poo]

+1

Very interesting and creative idea. But that seem hard to pull out though I guess.

My colony story in the middle game should be a loop of : Colonist train wild boar, Wild boar snooze Colonist, Wild boar pregnant, Wild boar deliver piglet, Colonist train wild boar... and a rarely... Wild boar got food poisoning.

[SpaceDorf]

If you look at the message logger mod, which creates a list of all messages you recieved through your game and the story element display mod that shows events that are collected throughout the game for Art purposes there is quite a bit of data that gets collected
that could be mined for usefull.

The Art History is even quite detailed when you look on the description of artifacts.

for example :
the picture shows  chuck smiling while mike is falling on his ass, it is a reminder of
the 1st of septober 5504 when chuck kicked mike in the face because mike looked funny at him.
With the new combat descriptions this could become even more detailed.

Now putting this list through the art fluff generator and lining it up in sequence generates quite a nice story allready.

[Bolgfred]

+1

Very interesting and creative idea. But that seem hard to pull out though I guess.

My colony story in the middle game should be a loop of : Colonist train wild boar, Wild boar snooze Colonist, Wild boar pregnant, Wild boar deliver piglet, Colonist train wild boar... and a rarely... Wild boar got food poisoning.

To avoid this I think about some kind of logic, which counts all events of a season or something. Every 15 days then, all log entries get counted together, which turns 30x hunting an animal into "hunted a lot"

If you look at the message logger mod, which creates a list of all messages you recieved through your game and the story element display mod that shows events that are collected throughout the game for Art purposes there is quite a bit of data that gets collected
that could be mined for usefull.

The Art History is even quite detailed when you look on the description of artifacts.

for example :
the picture shows  chuck smiling while mike is falling on his ass, it is a reminder of
the 1st of septober 5504 when chuck kicked mike in the face because mike looked funny at him.
With the new combat descriptions this could become even more detailed.

Now putting this list through the art fluff generator and lining it up in sequence generates quite a nice story allready.

True that. Actually its totally okay, if the prose is repeating itself countlessly, as it's more about the point that we don't forget what happened.

[Tyrantissar]

+1
I would approve of such storytelling element to be put in place, especially it covers random events like heat waves, blights, fires and all the important bits.

[Dingo]

I don't think this kind of feature is necessary or even beneficial to the way RimWorld tells stories. Consider these points:

1) It would be insanely difficult to make something like this readable. The game records a tonne of events. Making sure the final summary is cohesive and unique is very hard to pull off. It would be easier to make a general structure/template and fill in the gaps with random stuff that happened, but that would defeat the purpose.

2) Different people ascribe different meanings to different events in their playthroughs. Some people might consider their well oiled production chain to be the only thing that matters and expect that to be written in the Chronic. Others would be disappointed if that one fatal injury isn't there.

3) RimWorld relies on the player to tell their own story. Making some "official" version of a colony's tale would take away a significant portion of that charm.

Maybe it would be nice to have a non-structured chronic, though. Being able to browse all the tales and pawns you've encountered, reminiscing about what happened that lead to your victory or defeat. I think that's much more doable and doesn't take away RimWorld's charm in terms of storytelling.

[Bolgfred]

Maybe it would be nice to have a non-structured chronic, though. Being able to browse all the tales and pawns you've encountered, reminiscing about what happened that lead to your victory or defeat. I think that's much more doable and doesn't take away RimWorld's charm in terms of storytelling.

Actually that's what I am talking about. Focus lies on writing down everything that happened, so it will not be forgotten.
Actually I can imagine a filter function, where you can sort out basic elements like raids, weather, social, construction, crafting -  or focus only on these.

The idea should totally not be a story written better than a player could (player write very bad, too).
Focus should me more on Making Every story unforgotten.
I know I have many many many colonies with great names, and sometimes great things happening, but I cannot remember the complete story of "The reign of aunt" in "teacher's bones", so I need a slave who writes these down for me :-)

[iota_x]

I fully love the idea, but it seems impossible enact from a dev sense, and besides, writing our own interpratations of the events is what the storytelling is all about!

We all care about different things, events, happenings, etc. I do like the idea of making a full log more accessable though. This would make it easier to go back through a very long log and find the events whoch we forgot about when writong our own stories.

[Third_Of_Five]

+1

Definitely would love to have this. It would be a cool way of showing off to other RW players too.