My Personal List of Quality of Life Ideas

[LothÍ]

Hello everyone! I have just signed up to the forums for the first time. Having played Rimworld since I think about Alpha 14, I feel like it is a little overdue

I wanted to make this thread as a place to post some of my ideas for QoL improvements to the game. Not all of my ideas may suit every kind of player. Because as we know, Rimworld is a very powerful tool for storytelling, and I personally have my own style of storytelling I like to tell.

So I'd like to start this thread off with a few basics. I will add more as they come to my mind..

Visual Family Trees
As a longtime Sims player/turned Rimworld player, visual family trees are something I miss. They could be a great way for a player to see a pawns family relations with other pawns at a glance, and would be a great way to be able to look back on a pawns family history. This would be particularly useful in genealogy in the biotech expansion. Here is an image of what the family tree screen looks like in The Sims 4.

[LothÍ]

More Storyteller Custom Options
I'm going to make a harsh criticism of the 3 storytellers currently in the game. But please don't take it the wrong way.

I feel like they have overstayed their welcome a bit. Rimworld is close to 10 years old and I feel like the game has outgrown the original 3 iterations of the AI storyteller by a wide margin, especially for those of us who have been playing the game a few years now and have already experienced everything they had to offer.

I'm not a modder, but one of the only mods I am using is to disable random events such as eclipses and solar flares. Why? Because I've seen these events 1000 times already and they don't actually add anything meaningful to the story I'm trying to tell with my colony. And at worst they are just a hindrance. And I'm still trying to find a mod that suppresses the rate of Inspired events and quest offers. The Sims 3 had an option in gameplay settings called "Suppress Opportunities" to slow that kind of RNG content down because you might not want or need those opportunities in the kind of story you've immersed yourself in. Sometimes, it just feels like the game is trying to throw the same things at me over and over again in an effort to create a story for my colony out of it. But the thing is, I see Rimworld more as a dynamic sandbox these days and a tool for storytelling of my own. And so I don't find a lot of these things as necessary to the core of my storytelling anymore.

In my Rimworld, I want to be the Storyteller Please give us more control tools to be our own storyteller with less reliance on an AI storyteller that throws repetitive events at us. This would be a Qol improvement for the basegame and beyond that would improve the game for a lot of different players. At minimum we should be able to toggle or configure most of the events in the game. But we should also be allowed to turn off the Storyteller completely if we don't want that feature and prefer more total control over our narrative.

Turning off the storyteller will not affect my game negatively by making it an easy mode. There are still many threats in the game to concern myself with. My pawns are still mortal, after all. And the new Anomaly expansion has already killed a lot of them. But I am enjoying this expansion quite I lot because I feel like it's giving me, the storyteller, much more control over how the threats unfold. Being able to choose when I'm ready to Attune the monolith to increase the threat, for example, is a really nice thing. And is a refreshing change from Randy Random just randomly sending another raid at me. Rimworld has come a long way with this kind of content and I feel like the game is on the right track! We just need some more custom options so we can fine tune things to our playstyle a little more.

[LothÍ]

Xenotype Specified in Injuries List
Currently if a pawn receives damage from any Xenotype, the injuries will be listed as human related in the health panel.

For example, I have attached a picture from one of my pawns who got into a social fight with one of my Xenotypes called a "Softkind". To my surprise, the injuries they sustained were from a Human Fist instead of a Softkind fist. It's a small detail that may have been overlooked.

[LothÍ]

Separate Tree Felling into it's own work category
Currently you cannot have pawns who's responsibility is tending to a hydroponic indoor garden, while another is to cut and fell trees outside with their own defined skill (unless you separate the pawns using zones. but that doesn't resolve the skill issue).

I feel like there could be a larger disparity between these 2 tasks, as planting can be a very nurturing and delicate job for a pawn with that talent, and can be done indoors where it is relatively safe, where as tree felling requires a pawn to do hard labor, and often times outdoors where the risk is greater to be attacked by wildlife, hostile creatures, and the environment.

I think tree felling can benefit being in it's own category of skill similar to how crafting and smithing are their own defined skills. We can have pawns who are gardeners and who are lumberjacks.

[LothÍ]

More Customization of the Colonist Bar
Currently there is very little we can do with the colonist bar. We can move specific colonists left or right across the bar by clicking and holding right click and dragging. But this is not very helpful for colonies with larger populations.

Allow us to divide colonists on the bar into their own subsections. This will allow us to divide them up however we like. For example; we could have our soldier pawns in their own section - making it far easier to see them at a glance when needing to draft them.

I have included a screenshot to demonstrate what this might look like.. this element already exists in the game but it happens automatically when you have colonists on different maps. We just need to be able to do this for ourselves.

[LothÍ]

Fight or Flight
Currently in the game if a colonist encounters an enemy while undrafted they will flee and cower, even if they are wearing marine armor and are equipped with a weapon.

I think it would be great to have a "Fight or Flight" toggle option available on all undrafted pawns. Allow us to select which colonists should flee at the sight of trouble and which ones go into self defence mode where they will use whatever means they have to kill the threat before it kills them.

[LothÍ]

Guard Zones
A new zone which could coincide with a new "Guard" work priority option. Pawns that are given this work priority will spend their days patrolling designated guard zones. This could be a great way to give our combat pawns something to do other than wandering random areas aimlessly.

Allow us to give them patrol areas we set for them to help keep the colony safe, such as vulnerable work areas and entrances. This will combo greatly with the "Fight or Flight" toggle mentioned in my previous post.

[LothÍ]

Support for Rotational Colony Play (Pause Colonies)
This is a very big one. In the Gameplay setting we have the option to have more than one colony on a single save. This is a good thing for those of us who like to use the same save and the same world, while we populate it with our many colonies.

But the problem is it becomes very micromanaging to a fault. Especially when events will continue to pop up for your other colonies even when you are not trying to focus on those ones right now, which can be rather distracting from the colony you were trying to focus on at that moment.

The solution? Allow us to "Pause" colonies from the world map screen that we can unpause later. This way, we can have multiple colonies on one world in a single playthrough for those of us who like to build up our own worlds in this way, rather than spreading our colonies across multiple worlds and save files.

Even at the 30% planet coverage generation setting, the worlds in Rimworld are massive! So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to keep the game so narrowly focused on a single colony. There is more than enough space for us to fill it in with our own colonies that we can switch over to and play at our own leisure.

I understand that this has been suggested before in the past and it was shut down with the excuse being that it could be easily exploitable. If that's really the case, then why is there a development mode available in the game settings?

Something being able to be meta-gamed and exploited is not really a good reason not to add it to the game at all. Rimworld is a singleplayer game, so basically nobody loses. This addition would be for those us who want to manage multiple colonies on the same world at a slower, more manageable pace. Please allow us to pause and resume any of our colonies on our world map that we choose.

[LothÍ]

Per-Colony Ideologies, Faction Reputations, Royalty Etc
This is another big addition that would tie in with the rotational colony idea in my last post.

Allow each of our colonies on the world map the option of having their own individual ideologies, faction reputations, royalty status, and everything else that applies to a player colony. This way, on the same world and save a player could have a savage tribe of cannibals, and a transhumanist techno faction, both on the same world map that we can dive into and play with without the need to create a whole new save and world.

Let us fill our worlds with our own canon and lore surrounding our factions. Rimworld is already a fantastic tool for storytelling and worldbuilding from our own imaginations. Let us take it a big step further! There is so much potential here to add a whole new dimension to the game and it doesn't even require the development of a whole new expansion pack and all the work hours that go into it. It would be simply giving us, the players, new powerful capabilities for our own storytelling.

[Zeuesx1992]

Hey, I like your ideas, but I have a few things to say. You can already enable fight or flight in the game from the assign or schedule tab. You can also choose which colonist to fight on their own or who to run, like children or weak pawns who can't defend themselves.

But I don't agree with the colony-pausing idea.
The game is meant to be played with one colony, and having multiple colonies is an optional thing; you just enable it for the extra challenge.

Regarding the last part about having different ideologies and royals in each colony, you can already do that in the vanilla game.

[LothÍ]

But I don't agree with the colony-pausing idea.
The game is meant to be played with one colony, and having multiple colonies is an optional thing; you just enable it for the extra challenge.

Of all my ideas, colony-pausing is probably the feature I want the most lol. I always liked the rotational gameplay aspect of The Sims games and I just feel like Rimworld is the perfect game for this kind of thing.

In The Sims you have Neighborhoods which you fill in with Households and then you switch between them all at your own leisure and advance the overall story of your Neighborhood at your own pace. Rimworld could be the same, but instead of Neighborhoods and Households it would be Planets and Colonies.

Tynan has expressed that Rimworld is less of a game and is more of a storytelling tool. So what better way to give more storytelling potential to players than to give them an entire planet to populate with dozens of small inter-connected story-lines, rather than limiting our story focus on just one colony on said planet?

Each Colony could even have their own relationships with each other. I have had story ideas involving 2 of my own colonies that go to war against each other. It would be more dramatic on a personal level to me than warring against another CPU generated colony which I have no ties or personal stakes with. But I currently can't tell this type of story when my colonies are each separated into their own save game files.

I'm not suggesting we change the entire pace and gameplay of Rimworld. I'm simply suggesting giving the players the additional tools to allow us to create bigger and more epic stories that span across an entire planet, if we wish, instead of being limited to only a single colony on one little area of the planet. There's just so much potential for much more than that.