Original Post — Direct link

After 810 hours on this game, I only have two complaints.

1) Doctors will attempt to eat or sleep if they need to even if you have bleeding patients. This forces you to micro-manage it.

2) Dogs don't act like dogs.

While the first is a minor annoyance, the second one bothers me a lot and needs to be changed in the base game. Nearly all of us have interacted with a dog, and they don't just wander around aimlessly. They have social needs, and love interfacing with people and being pet. The dogs in this game just nuzzle people randomly, and then wander and eat food.

Here is a potential solution to this horrible problem. Dogs have a social need tab. When a dog wants to fill its social needs, it will look for a colonist that is currently scheduled for joy. It will run up to them, and ask for pets. Petting gives mood boosts to the colonist, as well as bonding potential for unbonded animals. Dogs will favor interacting with bonded pawns, and pawns can play fetch with the dogs during scheduled joy time. (This recreation type never builds tolerance, any pet owner never gets tired of being an owner.) Of course fetch would fulfill both the colonist recreation need, and the dog's social need.

Other quirks of this system:

1) When a dog's social need is too low, they will ask for pets from pawns that currently working. The dog will try to interrupt a colonist's work to be pet. Note petting takes work equal to moving furniture around. (So there is some work cost to having a 100 dogs that need attention.) A colonist will always pet his/her interrupting bonding animal, and will pet if his/her recreation is low. Otherwise: A) The pawn will attempt to ignore the dog if not assigned to handling OR B) If the pawn is assigned to handling, then he/she will interrupt all non medical work to pet the dog. The needy dog will either to continue to pester the working colonist, or find a another pawn to try to fulfill the social need. Needy dogs will whine, and annoy nearby colonists with a -1 mood debuff.

2) If a dog's social need is unfulfilled long enough, the dog will attempt to eat a meal, make dirt on nearby titles, or find a colonist to bark at a specific colonist until the need is fulfilled.

This system would make having dogs more interesting. It would also be fun to see the colonists pet the doggies.

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about 4 years ago - /u/TynanSylvester - Direct link

> Doctors will attempt to eat or sleep if they need to even if you have bleeding patients. This forces you to micro-manage it.

We've heard reports about this kind of thing for years actually but even through several efforts at investigating, we've never actually found a bug like that. They're coded to ignore their own sleep/food needs if a patient needs urgent care to avoid death. The persistence of these reports, combined with the inability to actually ever reproduce the issue, has puzzled me for a long time.

I'd love to see a savegame where a doctor is doing this incorrectly! If anyone has one please let me know.

about 4 years ago - /u/TynanSylvester - Direct link

Originally posted by ZacharyDK

Interesting. I'll spend sometime later to reproduce the issue. I think it might be related to having multiple doctors, and a far away doctor trying to take over medical care for the current nearby doctor. The action of reserving the patient for medical care - even if the new doctor is far away - would free up the nearby doctor and allow them to rest/eat. The best solution would be to allow far away doctors to reserve a tile near the patient and queue moving if over X tiles away.

Yeah, if there were multiple doctors it could create that perception potentially. The issue with not reserving the target is that every doctor on the map rushes to him the moment he's hurt, even though only the nearest one is needed.

Another possibility is patients going critical after a doctor has already started eating/sleeping.

about 4 years ago - /u/TynanSylvester - Direct link

Originally posted by AlasdairSc

This happens to my colonists so much that what you consider a bug I'd consider normal in Rimworld - I have masses of evidence of it in various VODs on Twitch that I could potentially find if you really wanted. The discrepancy is large enough that I'd ask if you can please clarify what you and the game consider 'critically ill'.

As an additional question, can you please clarify whether the priority numbers 1-4 have no weight other than their numerical value? For example, I use 2 as my highest priority so that 1 is free as an override, but some players in my community mentioned they thought that some skills on 1 like firefighting override things like recreation.

I would be delighted if you'd send me any repro cases of these issues! Savegames would be ideal but even videos are worth looking at.

The numbers are just numbers relative to each other. Firefighting can override recreation at any priority level since it's emergency work.

about 4 years ago - /u/TynanSylvester - Direct link

Originally posted by AlasdairSc

What does the game consider critical illness compared to just needing treatment?

If death by blood loss will occur in the next 18 hours (assuming no healing in the meantime).

Inspecting the code, it does occur to me there could be cases with diseases which wouldn't trigger this, but the intent is that the tending grace period would cover that. And the OP specifically mentioned bleeding.

about 4 years ago - /u/TynanSylvester - Direct link

Originally posted by AlasdairSc

Okay, thanks. As a sidenote, is it okay if I DM you a link to an unlisted YouTube recording I made of a bug I've been encountering for a long time in Rimworld?

Sure, or join the discord server: https://discord.gg/JxYnqA