What's the most lacking part of Rimworld for you, and how would you improve it?

[saulysw]

Many, many good points brought up so far.

For me, the biggest lacking thing is ... the map edge and being bound by one map. I certainly know about caravans, and how they work. I also know you can start more than one colony (ie have 2+ maps going at once). However, if this game was perfect I would expect that if my pawn walked to the very edge of the map they would go to the next map. Why not? Seems natural to me. Of course, you can only see one map at a time, so they would "grey out" at the top, until you selected them, and then you would switch maps and see them. It seems silly to me that a hunter can't go into the next map square to hunt, or to even manually walk a few tiles to get to the nearest town. Also, if you don't like where you start, you could peek into the adjacent tiles and see if you liked those better. Caravans make sense for long journeys, but I want to have the freedom to walk to the next map. I am realistic though - I don't expect this to be added at this stage of development.

[dogui]

Many, many good points brought up so far.

For me, the biggest lacking thing is ... the map edge and being bound by one map. I certainly know about caravans, and how they work. I also know you can start more than one colony (ie have 2+ maps going at once). However, if this game was perfect I would expect that if my pawn walked to the very edge of the map they would go to the next map. Why not? Seems natural to me. Of course, you can only see one map at a time, so they would "grey out" at the top, until you selected them, and then you would switch maps and see them. It seems silly to me that a hunter can't go into the next map square to hunt, or to even manually walk a few tiles to get to the nearest town. Also, if you don't like where you start, you could peek into the adjacent tiles and see if you liked those better. Caravans make sense for long journeys, but I want to have the freedom to walk to the next map. I am realistic though - I don't expect this to be added at this stage of development.

I completely agree. I think that if the development could a day take the normal game mechanics onto the whole map, it would be the perfect game.
A great sum of age of Empires+Civilization+Sim+Simcity: a game where you can simply use all the map and do what you want. Build colonies, streets, military or trading outposts, docks, customs.

But forget to find hundreds of herbivorous in your local map. They will follow real migrations, in order to seek fresh water and heater temperatures. Your hunter will have to learn this cycle and follow it.
Forget to find everything you need as building materials, items and weapons. Resources will be spawned onto the whole map. Maybe building a big solar generator would be a bit more complicated.
Forget to find precious metals out of your door. Gold, silver are spawned onto the whole map. Maybe someone has a strong militar outpost there.

In this new idea, choices count and make sense.

A real planet where biosphere influences what to grow, where to hunt, what to trade, how to build defences, how to live.
Unrealistic?

[b0rsuk]

- no fishes in ponds. This makes ice sheet like a nuclear wasteland.
- herbivores can't graze in winter. They just ragequit.
- you can't tell two tribes/outlander towns/pirate bands apart. It would be very nice if factions of the same type still had some preferred apparel style, weapons, or goods manufactured.
- there is no GUI for how many days worth of food you have. This is a very basic feature in survival games.
- desert is actually quite nice to live in, other than heat waves sometimes you can just put hydroponic tables outside (no sunlamp). Cold biomes are distinctive and quite fun, but hot ones are just... bland. There should be corresponding difficulty mechanics associated with too hot biomes, like accelerated food spoilage, or dust storms.
- you can wall off any field you need quite easily.
- biomes are largely interchangeable. I distinguish these: temperate, cold, year-round growing zone, ice sheet.
- I haven't played with ambrosia, but there are otherwise no wild plants worth getting. You can just farm everything.
- the only way your colony can truly die is raids. Everything else is manageable, and you can pre-plan for it.

[Third_Of_Five]

1. No ability to camp. If my caravan is starving and I want to stop to gather food, I have to either settle a new tile permanently or hope that I get ambushed. I'd like to be able to set up a temporary camp which generates a small plot of land that I can camp on for a few days before I have to leave again.

2. I'd like to be able to see my trade caravans enter the towns that they trade with. The game currently only generates towns when I attack them, I'd like for the game to also do that when I'm just peacefully trading with them. It would work exactly like a trade caravan event only in reverse. There could also be events where the town you are trading with gets attacked while your caravan is still there, forcing you to help defend the town.

3. Fences. I've suggested this before in multiple threads so I won't go into any detail. Basically they'd be just like sandbags except animals can't walk through them.

4. This:

1. Ruined city biomes, we've already got the ancient roads and the isolated ruin but a fleshed out mini-biomes featuring the ruins of an ancient metropolis where you can settle with easy shelter but unfertile ground is something I've dreamed of since alpha 1.

5. More ways to utilize the 'artistic' skill than just sculptures.

[NiftyAxolotl]

- I haven't played with ambrosia, but there are otherwise no wild plants worth getting. You can just farm everything.
- the only way your colony can truly die is raids. Everything else is manageable, and you can pre-plan for it.

Farming seems to be labor-efficient and scalable in most biomes. Food scarcity just stops being a thing once you realize you can ignore fertility and plant huge fields of potatoes.
If I knew how to mod, I'd make a biome where farming becomes harder over time. Maybe fertility drops or invasive weeds take over. That way, your colony must either move or find alternate food sources.

[b0rsuk]

I'm not just talking food. Cotton, healroot, devilstrand, hops, smokeleaf... every kind of plant you need is farmable, and farmable easily. No need to forage even in the early game. Sometimes for berries if you didn't have time to plant for some reason, or your food supply runs out because of new recruits or prisoners. You can even plant trees within your colony walls if you wish.

- no wall maintenance
This makes mid-late game Constructors quite pointless. Everything you need is mostly done, unless you want to establish a new colony. No wall maintenance allows players to build very large castles and paths loaded with deadfall traps, into which enemies walk in a predictable manner. I think this is the largest enabler of Tower Defense in Rimworld as opposed to more organic looking bases, or even open bases.

[Kirby23590]

1-I think Fishing should exist and if there should be another way to get food easily, it would be fishing and depending on the biome different types of fishes will appear that are either tasty or gross.

2-Some tamed animals, if they spot an hostile enemy. They will either flee if they are a hare or attack if they are a dog. ( If they are trained you change it to flee or attack just like with colonists. )

3-Something with Non-Playable Factions with other factions. An outlander faction are hostile to an tribe or to a another outlander faction but it changes in curtain events where they are friendly or hostile again from time to time. Some would be unhappy and lose goodwill if you buy or call in a rival faction's traders that they are hostile with, like in Civilization or 4X Games.

4-Since traps don't work with animals 90% of the time. Maybe it should trigger 80% when they are in manhunter mode or if they are larger animals like elephants or are insectoids from an hive...

5-The Research skill becomes useless when everything is researched. Maybe research will benefit with ancient ruins if it doesn't have mechanoids or hostile spacers in cyrosleep caskets to know if it's safe or not. Or it's effectiveness with artifacts ( example. Shocklances will have a chance to kill or non-lethally incapacitate the target. higher Research skill lowers the chance to kill the target. ) And maybe it effects learning other skills quicker.

6-No Tribal Sieges. In Tribal sieges they would bring pawns hauling resources and ammunition for building the siege equipment. They would build catapults or trebuchets (Neolithic variant of mortars.) and fire/throw rocks or explosive boulders to the colony. Unlike pirates or modern sieges if they run out of ammo they would immediately attack the colony.

7-Adjustable amount of days to the next season/year. Since i think 15 days is too short IMHO. It means preparing for the next season is easier but it makes the season of winter longer.

8-In Caravan-ing i think running out of supplies and food. There should be something like camping or a button for hunting/scavenging/forging for food.

9-Options for non-lethal or lethal. Non-lethal means for pawns using melee weapon like blades or spears, they will mostly attack with blunt attacks only. They would use the weakest attack at times and avoid attacking vital points or destroying the limb to avoid killing the target. Good for capturing prisoners and putting down colonists that are going berserk.

10-No ruined cities or other interesting structures in the world map(Farms, Military outposts/bases, Research stations or abandoned Vaults etc.) i think this would help add points of interests in game.

11-Never using luciferium or touching it. Just selling it. Maybe if there were a cure for it would been very, very rare and expensive. Otherwise it's not worth it even for curing scars or getting regeneration.

12-I think Pyromaniacs should have a command to start a fire when drafted (similar to raiders having the ability to start fires).

I think that's i got. I know some mods exist for some but still there some points i made or others I'm missing.

[Third_Of_Five]

11-Never using luciferium or touching it. Just selling it. Maybe if there were a cure for it would been very, very rare and expensive. Otherwise it's not worth it even for curing scars or getting regeneration.

This. Perhaps the 'cure' could be using a healer mech serum? It would be easy to implement, just change the behavior of the mech serum so that it considers a luciferium addiction to be the highest priority injury to cure.

[Kirby23590]

This. Perhaps the 'cure' could be using a healer mech serum? It would be easy to implement, just change the behavior of the mech serum so that it considers a luciferium addiction to be the highest priority injury to cure.

That's something that i think would work and heavily agree on. I like it!

[carewolf]

More events. Not only have I seen them all, in an standard playthrough you get to see everything 10+ times. So even for a complete newbee, more events are needed.

[Call me Arty]

More events. Not only have I seen them all, in an standard playthrough you get to see everything 10+ times. So even for a complete newbee, more events are needed.

I might've considered buying some eclipse goggles a couple months back if I needed them a couple times a year, like in Rimworld.

[Bozobub]

Actually, besides the bizarre class crossovers in A18 (stonecutting being worthless for XP, mainly), eclipses are my greatest disappointment.  They simply *can not* occur the way they do in RimWorld, on a planet that also has a regular enough orbit to sustain life, much less have predictable seasons.  Constructing a decent fake ephemeris (table of eclipses) wouldn't be terribly difficult.  As it is now, eclipses always completely break immersion for me .

It's no "deal-breaker", mind you, but this thread DID ask...

[Tynan]

Quite a diversity of responses!

I definitely appreciate the feedback everyone.

[Call me Arty]

Quite a diversity of responses!

I definitely appreciate the feedback everyone.

Thanks for the comment, Tynan. I'm sure you've probably heard it before (possibly from me), but a dev dropping by the forums every once and a while and leaving a comment is really cool and appreciated.

Now could you finally tell the same to Firaxis and Red Hook? They haven't responded to my letters about why Darkest Dungeon and XCOM 2 would be the perfect crossover, and I'm starting to feel a little neglected.

[cultist]

Probably pawn AI in general. It's not a huge issue with my pawns, as there are mods or I can micro them. But factions constantly get themselves killed or hurt by being idiots, and it's always considered the player's fault. Random visiting pawn has a mental break and kills his friend because he's a brawler with a ranged weapon glued to his hands? YOUR FAULT! And we now all hate you.

I find that incredibly annoying.