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[Vivalas]

Except...the bit talking about children specifically mentioned them making their parents (and probably other colonists) quite happy. So having some healthy children around could be functionally useful as a constant morale boost even if the child isn't going to be meaningfully contributing in any other fashion.

I'd still expect that the game will do something to give them some sped-up path to reaching adulthood, other than just the vats, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something you could configure. Some people do just enjoy a realistic challenge.

Well first, if you're in a situation where morale is a serious concern you are not in a situation where "raise a kid" is a viable option especially not when the logical negative outcome is "colony is not super jazzed the kid died."

Second, "I need slightly more food than I thought I did" is not an interesting challenge. The post talks about raising and teaching kids, without vat growth that's just not going to be a thing anybody does because the time scale just isn't something you're likely to encounter. If only 6 year old forts ever need to worry about educating kids almost nobody will ever deal with that unless they're accelerating them specifically to do it. If some folk getting pregnant means that within a few quadrums you need to be ready to set up a schoolhouse- that's a challenge it's something to engage with.

Either we have horse years or natural kids are mostly irrelevant.

I mean, if your stance towards games is total min-max, then yeah, I guess? Nothing wrong with that, but at least for myself, most of the reason I play these games is for the roleplay value. I'd be completely happy even without any meaningful gameplay around children, but we'll probably get lots of that anyways.

On the other hand, from a pure gameplay design standpoint, trading food for morale boost isn't bad game design. At the most basic level, as encapsulated by Sid Meier and loosely summarized by me, "the most important aspect of a game is decisions, and making meaningful ones". Or something like that. So deciding if you want to risk a bit more food consumption for extra labor and a morale boost (morale often can be hard to manage sometimes, in my experience, even with things going well. Especially once wealthy starts going up and your colonists start getting unreasonably needy. Now you can balance that extra morale requirement of wealth with the wealth to sustain children, etc.) seems like a pretty good decision to rack your brain with.

[Mephansteras]

Well put.

[Broseph Stalin]

I mean, if your stance towards games is total min-max, then yeah, I guess? Nothing wrong with that, but at least for myself, most of the reason I play these games is for the roleplay value. I'd be completely happy even without any meaningful gameplay around children, but we'll probably get lots of that anyways.

On the other hand, from a pure gameplay design standpoint, trading food for morale boost isn't bad game design. At the most basic level, as encapsulated by Sid Meier and loosely summarized by me, "the most important aspect of a game is decisions, and making meaningful ones". Or something like that. So deciding if you want to risk a bit more food consumption for extra labor and a morale boost (morale often can be hard to manage sometimes, in my experience, even with things going well. Especially once wealthy starts going up and your colonists start getting unreasonably needy. Now you can balance that extra morale requirement of wealth with the wealth to sustain children, etc.) seems like a pretty good decision to rack your brain with.

There's nothing min/max about it, the roleplay aspect of having children in a colony is dealing with children in a colony. Decisions are the most important thing about a game but I disagree "new statue in the dining room v. baby" is an interesting one. It's also rather lonesome. What do you teach kids on the Rim? Who will do it? Where will they learn? How will they learn? Are they being pampered or being raised like Spartans? How do you handle a tantrum in the middle of a raid or a blizzard? Are you going to helicopter them with area restrictions or let them explore? Those are all decisions but you dont make them for babies. Children are interesting but not because they can make one number go up at the cost of making another go down.

[Micro102]

I've been thinking of trying Rimworld again, and was wondering if there are any god-tier, must try mod packs out there (I've not used any mods yet). Age/version requirements don't really matter.

[heydude6]

Last time I looked into mods, the Vanilla Expanded Series seemed genuinely great. Later installments started to deviate from the series' mission of adding features to the game without compromising the original feel of vanilla, but early mods like "Vanilla expanded core" are still classics. You can browse the collection on steam workshop and choose the mods that appeal to you. The creator specifically made sure to create versions that were compatible with every DLC.

Combat Extended is also a big name, but I would let those who actually played it speak about its merits.

[Chiefwaffles]

Yeaaah. The name “vanilla expanded” is just silly now. It’s anything but.

[MCreeper]

Only modpack i know of is HardcoreSK. What exactly it contains seems to vary heavily version by version. Never played it properly, though, and developers killed what little desire i had to do so by replacing ratkin stroyteller's face with some memey shit.

And VE is actually very much in spirit of Ideology. Everything is ridicoulous, everything is obnoxcious.

[Dostoevsky]

While the later VE entries do indeed deviate significantly from vanilla, I still think most of them make for good gameplay additions.

- The various equipment mods are good.

- The food mods are quite optional, but may provide some interesting depth if that interests you. Less bloat/messiness than other cooking mods.

- The 'normal' animal mods don't really add that much, and my understanding is that there is still a core game issue wherein if you have too many different animals in the defs you get slowdown. So I'd avoid most of those in favor of animal mods with more interesting creatures like Bastyon, Alpha Animals, Megafauna, etc. Note that the VE Animal Cave and Royal packs do feature more unusual creatures.

- Settlers and Medieval both feel pretty vanilla.

- Insectoids I honestly haven't interacted with enough to get a good feeling for, so no comment on that one.

- Vikings is fine? It kind of straddles between vanilla and extra, and the cryotech weaponry is kind of busted against anything organic, but it's not altogether out of place.

- Pirates is fine too, I guess? I don't play high tech enough to interact much with warcaskets, but otherwise seems okay enough.

- Classical provides a good mix of lower tech variety alongside a steady set of goals that provide rewards into later-game. I like this one quite a bit.

- Ancients provides new useful loot-only tools and raiding sealed vaults is a pretty different experience than the usual expedition. The whole super soldier thing is kind of dumb, in my opinion, yet gets more attention than the other components.

- Mechanoids... its version of labor robots is less of a bug and compatibility problem-child than Misc. Robots, but the mechanoid faction system and the factory stuff is more for high-tech colonies. (Thankfully the faction system can be disabled with a button click.) But the labor robot system may well get obsoleted by the upcoming DLC. I'd probably call this one the weakest of the faction VE mods.

- Psycasts is pretty love it or hate it. Lots of neat features, but much more Rimworld of Magic than Vanilla.

- Genetics is neat, but I'd probably only activate it if I was planning on doing a genetics-focused colony. It demands some amount focus on it to get much out of it and its rewards are kind of inward-facing, up to adding a new victory condition.

[MCreeper]

I remember how everyone was excited near Ideology release about what modders will do with the system. Either something in my mod list messes with it really hard, or the answer is "barely anything that works". In my two games with Ideology Expanded and Alpha memes i have seen those break:
Party start plain didn't work.
Sweet tooth adds an addiction-like bar, but colonists, like dwarves until last patches, didn't seek out sweets by themselves. Also, chocolate, of all things, refills the bar slower than one can eat it. And  i picked this one because in my previous colony i had a hoard of chocolate that nobody has touched in years. 
Bushido was broken horribly, but i don't remember how exactly.
Mood buff from trade has no timer and is active even on faction members that just enter the map.
Exalted clergy... Well, probably expecting it to merge leader and priest instead of giving powers of one to another was on me.

Dafuq.

[scriver]

I use a lot of Vanilla Expanded modules. Mainly out of laziness or because they were the first to update after some patch release or something, but I find most of them are pretty good. I know I liked another set of expanded plants/farming/cooking mod better, but the VE ones are adequate.

Mods I don't think I could go back to not using:
Smart Farming -- Don't you just hate that you can't control if your food fields should be sown or just harvested and then not resown because it's almost winter and the plants will die anyway, so your colonists are constantly wasting time on the fields that would be better if they didn't? Well, with this mod, you have a little more control over that. And that helps a lot if you don't mind managing it.

Deep Storage -- If you think quantum stockpiles is the best feature of DF's, use this. It's still got limits, just allows you to stack more things in the same place. The link seems to be no longer maintained, so you might have to dig around to get a useable one, but last I searched there was a whole bunch of Deep Storage mods for you to choose between.

Hospitality -- Poach your colonists' relatives and other great random NPC's from other factions. Also run a hotel, if you want.

Work Tab -- Just simply more detailed control over colonists' work assignments.

Awesome Inventory -- My favourite feature of Combat Extended, back when I still used it, was the ability to carry both melee and ranged weapons at the same time. This mod allows you to do that (I think, unless I'm mixing it up with another mod in my 14 pages long list)

Simple Sidearms -- actually it might just be this one

Prepare Carefully and Character Editor -- Because I am a cheating bastard, and sometimes I just want to edit my starting colonists or people who show up myself.

Quality Builder -- Allows you to set a quality that you want your furniture to be made to, and your colonists will keep trying and retrying until it gets done.

Set Up Camp -- Set up camp while travelling the world map. Very useful.

Mods that aren't must haves but that I like a lot:

Fortifications -- there are several series of this mod for different time eras. It makes the game easier but it makes logical sense.

Save Our Ship 2 -- SPACE SHIPS

Android Tiers -- My favourite android mod of the ones I've tried. Aside from having androids, it also allows you to upload colonists to a database and download them into robot bodies.

Combine Face and Hat Items -- because it makes them look cooler

And lastly, I have a whole bunch of recycling mods in my mod list, because I was trying several of them out and I no longer remember which one I preferred. But there are quite a few options to choose between, makes resources a bit less scarce but not overwhelmingly so. And gives you a use for all these items you get with 3% condition left that you'll never use.

[Dostoevsky]

I remember how everyone was excited near Ideology release about what modders will do with the system. Either something in my mod list messes with it really hard, or the answer is "barely anything that works". In my two games with Ideology Expanded and Alpha memes i have seen those break:
Party start plain didn't work.
Sweet tooth adds an addiction-like bar, but colonists, like dwarves until last patches, didn't seek out sweets by themselves. Also, chocolate, of all things, refills the bar slower than one can eat it. And  i picked this one because in my previous colony i had a hoard of chocolate that nobody has touched in years. 
Bushido was broken horribly, but i don't remember how exactly.
Mood buff from trade has no timer and is active even on faction members that just enter the map.
Exalted clergy... Well, probably expecting it to merge leader and priest instead of giving powers of one to another was on me.

Dafuq.

I haven't tried any of those, but the ones I have tried - astrology, healthcare, scrapper, and insectoid supremacy - have all worked fine.


Some other mods that I consider pretty impactful while not changing vanilla too much (in addition to Scriver's, which I largely agree with):

- Suppression - in practice slows down lethality a bit, and makes combat a bit less of a focus fire fest.
- Fluffy Breakdowns - replaces constant component drain with more labor required for maintenance.
- Water Freezes - more dynamic map by season, at least for those maps where it gets cold enough.
- PawnsChooseResearch - a variant of the random research mods floating about; functionally slows down tech progression significantly, which I personally think makes for more interesting choices. But really a matter of personal preference.
- Better Pyromania, Bad Can be Good, and Well Met - all three combined make for a good suite. The first two make the worst traits less frustrating, while the last of the three hides what traits a pawn has until you've had them around for a while. Ultimately makes for a greater variety of pawns and less incentive to vigorously cull potential recruits.
- No One Left Behind, and Enemy Self Preservation - Latter makes it so that enemies no longer fight to the bitter end 100% of the time, instead individually fleeing when above a given pain threshold. Former makes it so that enemies will sometimes try to rescue downed allies once they retreat. Combined definitely reduces the difficulty of raids, but makes them a bit less silly in my opinion. Also can require a bit more initiative to get prisoners post-raid.
- Silent Raids - adds a new variant of raids / manhunter packs that doesn't pause the game or give a pop-pup, i.e. sneak attacks.
- Mass Graves - what it says on the tin. Makes incinerators less of a rush-tech by providing an alternate method of less space-intensive way of dealing with all those dead raiders.
- Allow Tool - a variety of convenience tools for mass-selecting in certain ways, e.g. allowing all the crud dropped from a raid all at once.
- Brr and Phew - colonists act a little more reasonably in addressing cold, heat, toxins, and cabin fever.
- Common Sense - a slew of minor behavioral tweaks such as not clearing snow during a blizzard.
- Everybody Gets One - New production bill conditions based either on # of colonists or having surplus materials. Especially handy for adjusting meal production on the fly as you gain & lose colonists, though it has other uses too.

[Great Order]

Combat Extended is also a big name, but I would let those who actually played it speak about its merits.

I like CE myself, it makes combat more intense. If you don't like dealing with ammo (or the multitudes the game adds) they're both able to be disabled.

Clusters require some tactics to deal with, shrapnel's a thing (So mortars might miss but still do some shredding), if you keep it on (I turn it off because it doesn't work with SoS2) smoke adds another hazard to indoor fires, and there's something fun about slaughtering a massive tribal raid with an automatic belt-fed mounted grenade launcher.

[MCreeper]

Oh, "Brrr and Phew" might come in handy for me. My colonists manage to get "entombed underground" while running around a house with an inner yard. 

Android tiers is okay, but makes too much of itself. Adds two undisablable andoid factions and then adds andoids to every vanilla faction on top of it.

On unrelated note, i'm sure i have seen pawns nicknamed Mokotan many times before, but only now noticed that they are indeed named Mokou Fujiwara.

[Broseph Stalin]

Combat Extended is also a big name, but I would let those who actually played it speak about its merits.

Can't play without it. Guns are vastly more dangerous and between the different aiming and firing options and the suppression mechanic allows much more room for strategy. I like to set up fire teams with a machine gun laying down suppressive fire to drive enemies into cover, a grenadier to hurt them in cover, and a rifleman to take accurate three round burst shots while flanking.

[Great Order]

Personally I rarely bother with three round bursts unless there's a number of people needing suppressing and I don't want to waste ammo.

If it's big (such as a thrumbo) a full auto burst will generally hit all or almost all shots even at long range, if not then single shots are better because it maintains accuracy and cuts down on the reloads.

On the topic of the new update that's coming out, I seem to recall it mentioning there being a new polluted biome. Makes me want to give that a go, making a small area of cleanliness in a map of pollution appeals to me.