[Outdated] Marvin's Hot and Cold Pack IV

[Kaballah]

A couple more suggestions:
- You might want to make the Cold Snap more frequent.  As it is I get it once in 3-4 years.  A couple of times a year would be good.
- Might make animals a tiny bit more frequent in Ice Sheet.  As it stands I get zero, which I don't think is what you intended.  Whatever frequency of animals you allow there, you should restrict the type to the hardiest stuff like snorks and muffalo.
- Also might make animals a tiny bit more frequent in Tundra.  Sometimes I get zero, sometimes I get very very few.  I'm OK with sometimes having zero though, because hey Tundra is really nasty, so maybe don't change this.
- Now that I actually look at it, patches of marginal soil can be bloody enormous, as in 5,000 contiguous tiles.  I think this should be curbed somewhat. 
- Possibly consider restricting what can be farmed on these tiles, e.g. I don't know if it's reasonable to allow tree farming - while okay, maybe you can heat the ground and thaw the permafrost down to a foot or so, I don't know about 10 feet or 15 feet to allow trees to have roots.  In A10 I think Tynan is taking farmable trees out anyway so maybe don't bother about trees.
- Power Armor is still the blatant choice for stuff to wear, don't forget about that

[Kaballah]

Actually I take that back about animal frequency in Tundra, it's perfect.

e: I think overall, animal frequency is influenced by both average temperature and rainfall?

[RemingtonRyder]

I think I will adjust the frequency (chance) upward a little where needed, because there's another tag which affects the overall density of animals and plants.

As things stand, marginal soil isn't a patch in the tundra biome, so I'll try it as one and see how that goes.

Not sure what the effect of temperature&rainfall on animal frequency is. You could well be right there.

[Kaballah]

I mean I don't have a really big sample, but it seems really consistent that when I play in super cold/low precipitation maps I have no animals at all, but when I play in warmer tundra/high precip I get a lot more.  This is probably perfect with your current setting for tundra I think.  I'll see if I can find an ice sheet tile somewhere that has high precip (presumably it would be snow), I think that's very uncommon but I'll tinker with it a bit anyhow.

The reason I mentioned cold snap: for a while I was trying starting colonists with really minimal equipment (t-shirt and pants, no outerwear) and even on ice sheet maps, it's fine (surprisingly).  But one time out of about 30-35 games, I happened to get the cold snap my first year before everyone had some kind of outerwear and before I had power/heaters constructed and, welp, that was a short game.  Didn't even have time to build a campfire before I realized how bad it was.

[Kaballah]

The seed 'avalanche' has a patch of ice sheet with precip of up to 500ish, if anyone's interested.

[Kaballah]

Yeah I'm not getting any animals so far in ice sheet even with high precip/high temperature (for ice sheet) but I'll go on with this colony anyhow just to see.  Am I reading this correctly, you only have muffalo appearing in ice sheet and no other animals, and that only with 0.05 commonality?

[RemingtonRyder]

That's right. Well, unless I added some in the Biodiversity patch.

If you like, increase the chance a little bit and lower AnimalDensity at the top of the biome definition. Muffalo will then still be few in number, but not super rare! I've honestly never seen a muffalo in the ice sheet biome so the chance may simply be too low when other factors are considered.

I think cold snaps or heat waves don't last long enough. If those have changed in A10, I can't discuss it at the moment because it's still in testing. Spoilers!

Besides (clarification) event durations aren't in XML, so how long events last is entirely subjective. In other words, I wasn't looking at the clock.

Bug
I discovered a problem with the Expanded Mining addon. Selecting a kit table made from something other than steel in Prepare Carefully gives a stuff=null error. Also, deconstructing a table made from a stuffed kit gives a similar error.

I'll investigate a solution to this bug and hopefully have a fix later tonight.

Update: Alas, it seems that it's not possible to make the Expanded Mining add-on work the way I wanted to. I'll have to make some adjustments.

[RemingtonRyder]

I've fixed the bug noted above. You'll need to get the updated Expanded Mining addon from Dropbox.

The fix isn't great. I've dropped support for freely making kits using any kind of Expanded Mining stuff, and specified particular resources instead.

I'll have to investigate in A10 to see if custom stuffs still have this problem.

e: On the bright side, I have this non-spoilery screenshot of the new Harsher Desert for Alpha 9. Click to zoom.

[Kaballah]

Because this is oddly super specific it might be easy to fix: sometimes I get invaders that are naked.  When this happens, they are always equipped with a personal shield.  I don't have any other shield or equipment mods installed.

Also, whenever I get a crashlander they seem to be always naked.  This is a pretty rare event so they might not be naked 100% of the time.  It's also OK if you don't want to bother changing this, crashlanders are otherwise a free colonist so I think it's all right to have to have to hustle a little bit to keep them alive.

[RemingtonRyder]

Yeah, first thing is a bug in the faction def and I just fixed it.

The second thing, hmm, I think that's because the game either picks a specific def to use as the template for how to dress and equip refugees, or because it picks at random from one of the valid possibilities. The spacers faction is not like the others, it has no spawngroups.

e: New version of the pack is available.

[Kaballah]

What's different?  Asking because I don't see any changelog info.

e: Oh dang you added a whole bunch of biome stuff didn't you.

[Kaballah]

Right off the bat I'll say I like Desert very much.  Did you take out tarantulas?  They actually make a lot of sense in desert, probably mosquitoes as well.

e: actually I take it back about mosquitoes, but yeah tarantulas make a lot of sense

[Kaballah]

Little problem: "Summer has begun!  You should make some parkas blah blah blah"

[RemingtonRyder]

Sorry, didn't get around to patching for Biodiversity yet.

The message about parkas is a Rimworld thing. Your chosen location must be cold in the winter.

[Kaballah]

But it appeared at the beginning of Summer...  ?