Hidden Traits & Skills

[Morbo513]

Simply enough this would be an option which, if enabled, would only reveal a pawn's traits and skills once they complete or perform an action that it interacts with - or until certain positive relationship milestones are met with your colonists. This would only be the case outside your starting colonists of course. A random selection of them could be revealed by default in the case of joining wanderers.
This would throw selectiveness about which prisoners to capture, which spacefugees to rescue etc out the window - You'd have to invest resources (Food, medical supplies, living space) in finding out whether they're someone you want to keep, or if they're of no use to you. It would lead to less predictable behaviour like a relatively new colonist suddenly setting the place on fire when it all gets to be too much - only then do you know they're a pyromaniac. It abstracts pawns getting to know one another and integrating into the colony.

[vzoxz0]

I like this idea. It could be active for normal and above difficulties. I don't think all traits or skills should be hidden, but there's no reason every single skill should be instantly known unless you start with the colonists. Even then it'd be cool to be able to have them be total strangers with unknown talents and skills.