[QOL] Borderlands-style comparison system. Also: Textile inconsistencies.

[Call me Arty]

For your benefit of not having half the screen being an image, here's the link to the kinda thing I'm talking about.
http://i.imgur.com/Iv2iHv4.jpg

There's a lot of stats for various things in Rimworld. Alone, a ranged weapon has eight stats to keep track of (Damage, accuracies, range, etc). Even ignoring mods that can add in dozens more weapons, there's already a pretty large variety of weapons. Just something simple, that could easily show me the stats I'm looking for, or what I need for a specific task.
There's a ton of weapons. What's the best choice for range and low damage, so I can down enemies for recuitment, but not kill them? I can either sift through everything in my stores and on my pawns, pausing the game whenever I check the stats of a weapon, which is a real issue. That seems lame. *Or* I could go out of my way to google it, which works fine if there's already been a topic on it, or if the Wiki covers it. Both mean postponing a lot of time for colony management in a colony management game.
What about textiles? I thought they were all the same, except some are really rare and expensive. Nope. Polarbearskin is worse overall than Artic wolfskin. A matter of fact, the stats on leather are pretty arbitrary. Polarbearskin and standard Bearskin are identical. Odd, but okay. Maybe animals of the same type have similiar skin. Nope, Artic Wolfskin is better overall than Timber Wolfskin. Okay then it must be based on biome. Nope. See: Foxes, and the bears above. Okay, maybe now that you have your weather-proofed clothes picked-out, you want some defense. So, you go out of your way to take-down an elephant. Nope. Same defensive stats as a rat. The only animal with leather that's any better for defense is the Rhino. I only know any of this after spelunking through the wiki and a spreasheet. An easy way to display the defenses, insulations, and values of various textiles would be very welcome.
   What about plants? The longer the Rimworld team and modders, work, the more "the best" will be debated. Which kind of tree will give you the most wood in a year? Which crop will give you the most food in a quadrum while people are starving?

These are all things that bring many questions and analysis. As it is, that analysis is pretty tough. Click the object, check the info, remember it/write it down/screenshot it, compare it to the next item, repeat. New players could benefit greatly from this, and even experienced players can benefit from a little bit less hassle, especially when there's not a dedicated spreadsheet to all of the many mods being made each day by the wonderful community. Even then, you'd have to go from the Rimsenal spreasheet to the RT's Weapon Pack spreadsheet, and don't even get me started on Vegetable Garden or Apparello.

TL;DR: We could do with an easy-to-read display for the various stats of the many weapons, apparel, plants, and more that clearly displays the strengths and weaknesses between them.

[AileTheAlien]

The textiles could use a bit of cleaning up. Instead of having a tonne of different leathers, which is a hassle for the player and more work to keep (balanced) in the game, I'd make a few generic leathers, and some high-quality named leathers:
- leather
- hot-weather leather
- cold-weather leather
- tough leather
- rhino leather (even tougher)
- thrumbos leather (is hot, cold, and tough)

That'd fix it for people who don't want to scroll through long lists trying to figure out what leathers to keep and which to sell. On the other hand, it'd reduce options for people trying to role-play. On the other other hand, if you're role-playing, you could just ignore the in-game name of the textile (I have to do this all the time :S ). Especially since half of the textiles you might want to use for that purpose have poor stats anyways.  : )

[Boston]

If you read the description on the "Information" page of all leathers in-game, you will see that they are all already dried, tanned, and scraped.

Once you remove the hair or fur from a hide, all leather is pretty much the same.

I would like to see animal pelts divided into "hides" and "furs". Hides are pelts that are dried, tanned and scraped, and furs are pelts that have been preserved with the hair/fur on.

Furs would be much better for cold-weather clothing, while hides would be tougher, for general-purpose use.

Of course, in my opinion, animal pelts should be rebalanced, both to be worth more and to 'give more material', as it were.  When i made my buckskin leggings in real life, it took 3 buckskins, not 30.

[jamaicancastle]

According to his reddit post about 1.0, the leather thing is on Tynan's radar, and the plan is to condense them into a small number of categories based on their current properties.

As for comparing items, what I'd like is actually not so much a direct item comparison as an in-game encyclopedia, like you'd find in a game like Civilization or Total War. If you could see what the base stats of an item were before you crafted it, and look through other items in a menu, I think it would be easy to compare across without needing an especially complex UI.

[Call me Arty]

As for comparing items, what I'd like is actually not so much a direct item comparison as an in-game encyclopedia, like you'd find in a game like Civilization or Total War. If you could see what the base stats of an item were before you crafted it, and look through other items in a menu, I think it would be easy to compare across without needing an especially complex UI.

I wasn't thinking of too complex an UI, putting the selected items up together with some green arrows for a higher stat, or red ones for a lower stat.
As for an encyclopedia, why bother doing that over just putting in a link to the wiki? It's got everything you'd need to know about pretty much everything in the game. If you need something more condensed and in-game, than the help-tab should just be expanded into something more than it is right now. I'm sorry if my tone comes-off as rude, it just doesn't fit with my original idea well. Why not make a post about it yourself? It'd probably get some good criticism and discussion.