More crops and animals

[patoka]

so we meet again granite:

Variety for the sake of variety is not the name of this game.

while i do agree with you on this part, please explain colored lighting in rimworld.
protip: you cant.
but since you came up with a good excuse for beans i let it slide and let you answer the unanswerable question another time.

(using "" instead of bbcodes because of working offline on my phone)
"Halving the yield to make it double the work for the same yield would be the best way to go"
nope. it is unrealistic. it is a well established fact in rl that aside from actual insect meat, any kind of meat is much less efficient than if it was made from plants, also proteins.
A (as in one in many) good way of implementing beans or whatever else that fills the niche for high protein plants would be "normal" yields (whatever that means) and "normal" temperature and growth niche, but giving pawns a lower debuff than they would get for eating raw food.
my reasoning is that you make simple meals to get rid of the ate raw food debuff. fine meals give you an additional 5 mood for eating a fine meal. a lavish meal even 10 more. fine meals force you to use at least 5 veggies and meat each, while lavish meals force you to use double the raw food. (not talking about additional cooking time)
now if you introduced beans (as a place holder for any easily growable vegetable that can replace meats in fine and lavish meals) it would rid you of the need to hunt (or the need to kill your own animals or letting your  pawns become cannibals) and you could start your own full-on veggie dream world where only animals hunt and they only do it to survive, while everyone else lives of plants and live happily ever after.
this is problematic for one reason: meat is dilishuss...i mean this would make the game unbalanced. meat goes bad much sooner than any other plant based food does and you usually have to hunt for animals (or have to get cannibal debuffs or sacrifice your pets) so you have to have large stockpiles of meat in freezers in certain regions to make it through hard times, including (volcanic) winter. getting rid of the need to hunt essentially gives you a very easy way to get a constant +5 mood buff on all of your colonists permanently, especially mid- to late game when the land doesnt supply enough meat for all of your pawns anymore or they are too far away for you to be bothered.
solution? give a small debuff. everybody hates vegetarians anyway with their obnoxious ass declarations that they are vegetarians all the time as if they were something better and that is coming from a pesci-vegan (because eff fish)
i don't care how much that would be, if -1 or -2, as long as it is better than eating a simple meal or anything else that gives you similar debuffs. i guess a fine insect meal would taste worse for all pawns than a fine veggie meal. (use logic for the other combinations)
[noticed spacedorf's "ew tofu" comment too late]

nothing to quote here in specific, but i guess you forgot how much rice sucks to grow in gravel, but normal soil already makes it an annoyance. you cant really call rice a fast growing plant since it only does so in rich soil (and hydroponics basins of course). sure, technically it is the fastest growing one, but is it that fast to justify it as a niche? in some cases strawberries come close to rice' efficiency. strawberries!
it really would be nice to have something other than potatoes to realistically grow in gravel. heck i'd even take a very low yield plant that just grows anywhere at a high speed just to be able to level up some of my pawns. dont even care about the yield at times, also i could just ignore the harvest if that plant at times if i had better things to do more easily. you really wouldnt wanna risk your corn the same way, afterall. but i guess even rice would be annoying to lose over randy's story telling style.
and to come back to fast growers, growing rice in gravel instead of potatoes is a really bad move. only time i could imagine this ever is specifically ice sheet maps (not tundra, not sea ice, only ice sheet) where you dont have anything else than gravel, otherwise you'd use soil or rich soil. and even there you'd only do it because you'd be afraid of starving to death before the first bunch of potatoes are ripe. problem is, you can totally harvest them early (or if you're smart, a part of them) and you start off with a considerable amount of food in all scenarios and can also resort to cannibalism. in rare cases you DO get wild animals to hunt, even in ice sheet maps. besides, if i am able to somehow survive on sea ice, so i am sure most people can survive in ice sheet. i am not an exceptionally good player. if anything, i'm an exceptionally bad player.
lastly, isnt it like the first move people do on ice sheet maps? finding a good location to build their house on so that they immediately have gravel to grow potatoes in?

and to add proper content: i'd also be very interested in some new fauna and flora. maybe horses, maybe giraffes, maybe kakapo, maybe manbearpigs, maybe beans, maybe soybeans, maybe figs, maybe coconuts, maybe yams, maybe aloe vera, maybe flesh eating bacteria.
i dont really care what, but there are unused niches out there that are waiting to be filled. i am sure tynan knows about them.
one thing i do care about though are lions, tigers and giraffes. how do we have elephants, rhinos, gazelles and genetically modified buffalo, but no giraffes? how can i make a rimzoo like this. also, how do lynx' and cougars exist, but no lions and tigers? cant explain everything with darwin, megasloths have also been brought back in rimworld. also, how do we have panthers but no leopards? panthers are a special kind of leppards afterall. cant have enough big cats on the rimternet anyway.
[...]
speaking of bringing back megasloths, why on earth i mean rimworld did humans in rimworld bring back megasloths? just because of their nice fur? seems like an odd choice if you could have also brought back mammoths and all the other animals from that time. (i assume even in rimworld they couldnt go all jurassic park on us)