Hauling is broken & A few relatively minor tweaks that would be a big deal to me

[entelin]

1. I really dislike the fact that random events just automatically add to map wealth. If you aren't going around putting these resources to use (like spaceship chunks, gold, silver, blocks, etc) it just keeps contributing to map wealth and really can build up over time. This is relevant when you are in merciless, and intentionally trying to stay small while researching. So I really think that all items that add to wealth should need to be claimed first.

2. This actually opens up a new possibility for an event as well, scavengers and thieves. You could have neutral characters come and try to take unclaimed items from the map, or mine ore, they would become hostile or run away when attacked. Do do you want that item or not? Another variant of the "a few travelers visit" would be some that would come in your base and try to run away with something, but be neutral until attacked.

3. Hauling in rimworld is a pain in the ass, somewhat broken, and it's not fun. Pawns should be able to haul multiple types of things at once, they should be able to haul as much as they can in a caravan, and they should use assigned animals to help haul just as they do when packing a caravan. Why is hauling broken? The player is strongly incentivized to: put down a packing zone, draw an itemless stockpile zone around items you want in an area, create a caravan including those items, let them pack it, cancel the caravan, assign the animals to an inside stockpile location or wherever you want the items, then either let them be unpacked, or drop the items out manually. For cases where you need to haul multiple types of items (spaceship chunk, psychic/poison ship, etc) or especially harvesting a crop you can get everything hauled nearly instantly at the cost of craploads of fiddling around. Pawns should just do this automatically with animals assigned to accompany on field work. Want to move a bunch of chunks from one part of the map to your stoneworking table? Yup caravan. All the core tools for this are in the game already, it just needs to be polished up.

4. I would like caravan's to have a "camp" option where you are able to generate and enter a small temporary map identical to what you get in an ambush event. This would be useful for hunting & foraging / cooking meals / healing pawns / gathering chucks / mining etc. Without creating a settlement (which then cannot be reclaimed).

[Electroid]

I think events that give you wealth and you have to use those in some way to minimize it should be more interesting then just removing them. You are already playing this game at an extremel challenge, if you want less of one you have multiple ways of making it easier.

[AileTheAlien]

Pick Up and Haul is a mod that makes pawns carry to their caravan-capacity weight (a lot more, usually), instead of just stacks of 75. Personally, I think it should be in the base game.

[Modinstaller]

I'm sorta hijacking this because I've also found hauling broken, but lemme respond to the other points

1. I don't know how the wealth system works, actively trying to stay poor for easier events and more morale seems a bit cheesy but then again for a normal player actually being a bit slow at harvesting stuff it'd make sense

2. How would doors work with this ? How do doors actually work in the first place ? Raiders and wild animals can't open them, so I assume your colonists have keys, but uuh ... your animals too. And the visitors and merchants. Anyway if doors wouldn't open as soon as the "visitors" steal your stuff, it wouldn't be much of a challenge, unless they were saboteurs : infiltrate your base in disguise and attack.

4. Thought about this too, but how would this work ? If you can camp like this, what's to stop the player from sending an expedition 1 tile away from the settlement to mine, hunt and forage ? And when you leave, does the game have to store its state in memory ? If so it's going to be hard to implement and resource-intensive. If not then the player can just keep coming back to that specific tile and generate a new area each time. Also if you can mine like this, long range mineral scanners are now useless. It would also make events such as toxic fallout way easier : just relocate everyone or send out hunters to gather food. And when you think about it, you wouldn't have any wood, mineral, stone, meat or foraged food shortage until you've cleared all the tiles in a radius around your settlement.

As for 3, I completely agree and I want to add a few points but also discuss balance.

Yes it doesn't make sense that colonists can only carry 75 of one type of item, while they can carry way more on caravans, so a fix would be nice, but there are a few problems. How does a colonist carry a big animal if he's limited to 35 kg ? How does he carry an uninstalled bed (which is like 80kg) or any other heavy item ? Keep in mind you usually don't have muffalos early on to carry big loads, too. It could be possible to make it so items heavier than a set amount (say 20kg) can be carried regardless of weight.

Another problem is that some items that can be hauled around easily are actually pretty heavy. 75 steel now would be like 20 steel with this change (is it 1kg per steel ?). And right now if someone loses manipulation, he loses item capacity (my frail colonist can carry around 40 items instead of 75), which by the way doesn't work in reverse : my augmented colonist still only hauls 75, but in any case since manipulation doesn't influence caravan carry weight, this would have to disappear or be reworked too.

Last problem with this is balance. Thinking back the game would've been much, much faster if this change had been in, and it's the main reason why I don't use pick up and haul. Hauling is like half of the game, at least for my inefficient colony, and faster hauling would mean more time for everything else and the game would've progressed way faster. Is that good or bad ? I don't know. All I know is that balance would change.

Anyway here are more hauling suggestions, which would also affect balance :

- Allow colonists to carry stuff on them. More than 1 meal. Another weapon to switch between long and short range.

- Allow us to decide what handlers carry around for taming and training. Make it so doctors carry medicine around so that they stop running around the place to treat patients and animals. Side-note : treating wounds without a bed.

- Fix situations where 5 different colonists assign themselves to haul 5 stacks of items close together which could've been hauled by only 1 colonist. Maybe when a colonist assigns himself, he also looks for similar items close-by to chain-haul and also reserves those. Goes for blueprints too (when 5 builders haul 1 steel each to your 5 power conduit blueprints).

- Fix situations where a colonist will walk 100 tiles away to gather 10 wood, and leave another stack of 10 wood 12 tiles away because it's slightly too far to chain-haul it even though it would save enormous amounts of time.

- Would seriously affect balance but let colonists plan their jobs ahead and haul more items, so instead of the cook going back and forth for each meal he prepares, let him take 70 rice, make 7 simple meals, and haul everything in one go.

- Let builders also plan ahead. Instead of the builder hauling 7 steel to 7 power conduit blueprints and then going back to fill the 43 remaining others, let him take 50 steel instead in one go and fill everything.

- Let several colonists haul items to a single blueprint at the same time.

- Make it so colonists haul items to blueprints before hauling items to storage. Usually, building is more important than getting stuff to their storage.

- Refine the AI so a colonist will haul the items closest to their blueprint. Say I'm building a geothermal generator next to some steel I just mined. Make the colonists haul the steel directly next to the blueprint so they don't waste time.

- Maybe allow animals to haul items to blueprints unless it's intentional for them not to ?

- Forbid colonists from hauling resources to blueprints if there aren't enough resources to complete it right now. Why let resources sit there wasted ? (though the player can just forbid the blueprint so it's not such a big deal)

- Prioritise hauling perishable items (metals and stone go last, wood goes before those but after everything else) especially during bad weather. Prioritise by a combination of value and hit points (don't let that legendary sniper sit outside ! stop hauling the silver ! haul that rice with 5 hit points !)

[entelin]

1. I don't know how the wealth system works, actively trying to stay poor for easier events and more morale seems a bit cheesy

Regardless of how you think of the way the game handles event scaling (I happen to think it works reasonably well actually), it's just a matter of gameplay. Surviving extreme difficulty's are hard regardless, and being successful at that means making sure that everything you do is in fact helping you. Stockpiling things for no reason, harvesting tons of food for no reason, etc will kill you. I think it works fine for the most part, but random event's just accumulating wealth all over your map is annoying. Simply having them land unclaimed is a simple fix and opens up some additional gameplay options as well, like neutrals just walking in and taking unclaimed stuff, that's much more interesting imo.

2. How would doors work with this ? How do doors actually work in the first place ? Raiders and wild animals can't open them, so I assume your colonists have keys, but uuh ... your animals too. And the visitors and merchants. Anyway if doors wouldn't open as soon as the "visitors" steal your stuff, it wouldn't be much of a challenge, unless they were saboteurs : infiltrate your base in disguise and attack.

Yeah there are some fun things and variety you could add here. A single neutral thief comes in, they steal something, but they are still neutral (and therefore doors work) until you attack. Scavengers would be after unclaimed items outside your base, so they don't care about doors.

4. Thought about this too, but how would this work ? If you can camp like this, what's to stop the player from sending an expedition 1 tile away from the settlement to mine, hunt and forage ? And when you leave, does the game have to store its state in memory ? If so it's going to be hard to implement and resource-intensive. If not then the player can just keep coming back to that specific tile and generate a new area each time. Also if you can mine like this, long range mineral scanners are now useless. It would also make events such as toxic fallout way easier : just relocate everyone or send out hunters to gather food. And when you think about it, you wouldn't have any wood, mineral, stone, meat or foraged food shortage until you've cleared all the tiles in a radius around your settlement.

Yes you definitely hit on all the main points here. The problem is all of this is true already. At high difficulty settings you should in fact be prepared to get up and leave if you get a bad combination of events, like you are low on food already and get hit by toxic fallout or something. You can already mine all you want, there's more resources nearby than you will ever use. Live in a desert? Just make another colony in a forest and ship the trees over. Mined out your home area? A colony in the shrublands will fix that for you no problem. Want tons of meat? Go over to your hunting colony and murder all the elephants that live there. So this is already a thing. Random events outside already generate small temporary maps that you can instantly load all the stone into your caravan with as well (kind of broken actually). So this is what the player is incentivized to do right now, but if all you want is some wood or something, should we really have to have a seperate colony instance running all the time? Instead just take the existing code that generates the small event maps, fix the caravan instant loading thing, and have an "encamp" option, useful for treating your wounded as well! Like the existing random event maps, they would not be saved. This doesn't change any existing gameplay, it just makes it work better and cost less system resources.

As for 3, I completely agree and I want to add a few points but also discuss balance.

Yeah, there are tons of improvements to the hauling system that could be done, many of which are pretty annoying. However for the most part, gameplay wise, it works ok. My issue with caravans specifically is that the game incentives us to go through this long convoluted process to use caravans to haul things locally. It's in the game, it's very powerful, and it makes sense that it is, we humans use pack animals for a reason after all. It makes sense that the solution to harvesting large crop fields and other things is to use pack animals, we do this in real life. But the procedure for doing this *sucks balls* and is not at all fun, it's tedious. But the gameplay choice here is either do this awful process and haul it all nearly instantly, or take days upon days of nothing but hauling to move your stuff and have much of it significantly deteriorated and devalued. Everything you pointed out are definitely areas that could use some work, but I see this as more critical because of how overtly unfun it is.

I think the solutions I provided above would polish some important rough areas in the gameplay for fairly minimal time investment.

[Kirby23590]

Pick Up and Haul

Just pointing out a link that AileTheAlien is showing... If you have any problems, try using this mod. I used it as well and found it very useful at times... Sure that Modinstaller is saying it changes how your colony works but that is his opinion... Even though i didn't read everything he said...

[Modinstaller]

Basically if I had to TL;DR my post : AI sucks in this game. Colonists are dumb as fuck, in many, many ways. It's a super fun game, has some troubles with balance imo, but otherwise really addictive to build your little colony and face the rimstruggles. But the fact that your pawns keep wasting time and that there is usually no way to adress structural flaws in your colony other than getting mods or micro-managing to extreme levels where it becomes unfun, well ... that just sucks.

Example : cleaning area = firefighting area but if you want to firefight around your power conduits that lead to a geothermal generator, you'll need to clean there as well, so instead you micromanage every time there's a fire there by adding and removing little home areas - nobody could call this proper gameplay.

Another one : your cook for some reason keeps walking into your freezer, hauling 10 meat, making a meal, and hauling the meal back. Stupid. So, you create 2 storage areas near your stove so that the cook can use meat directly next to the stove and place the product directly to the other side of the stove and transform into a super efficient cooking robot. But then you've got piles of meals and meat rotting next to the stove. So, you micro-manage the meat storage so that when your cook's not cookin', the meat goes back into the freezer. But your hauler's stoooopid and won't touch the damn meat that needs to be moved 3 feet from where it is, and would rather haul some clothes from low-storage to high-storage or re-stack some steel even though it doesn't matter at all, so you manually tell him to move the damn meat. But yet another problem arises : your hauling guy is still dumb as fuck and when your cook's cookin', he will keep restocking 10 meat to your meat pile and hauling 1 meal back to the freezer. Back to square one. Eventually, you have to de-assign re-assign your hauler all the time, or manually tell him to haul those damn components that have been sitting at the edge of the map for weeks, or restrict him to an area which includes everything except your cooking stove areas so that he can finally stop wasting time. I don't think anybody would call this proper gameplay either.

But coding good AI is annoying and difficult and I understand why you'd just let it be because "it works, kind of". And maybe you could even consider it "added flavor". Like "hey you not only have to face freak toxic fallout events and bands of half-naked mace-wielding psychopaths but you also need to do all this while managing a bunch of imbeciles that have no idea how to do their job !". The "bug or feature" question, basically.

In any case, I agree to the fact that pawns spending half their day just hauling stuff around terribly inefficiently is mind boggingly frustrating ... at least to me. I caved in and installed pick up and haul a while ago, because I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know about fairly minimal time investment but I agree that the game would benefit greatly. Another question is "if a mod already does it, does it really need to be added to the official version ?" and I'm not sure what the answer is.