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[Dostoevsky]

Though you've probably heard it already, canonically (with what little canon there is) humans are the only intelligent species in the universe. Them and AI, I guess.

That said, I do agree and usually run with a bunch of additional species. Many of the species mods out there are more of the star trek approach (i.e. functionally human with different aesthetics). Nothing really wrong with that (see: Vulpine, Ikquan, Slither, Klickmala, Racc), but can be nice to have some mechanical differences as well.

A few that are a bit more different mechanically:

• Outpost 21 Goblin and Kobold races, basically a little more productive / less stressed, but more fragile
• Yabils are an alternative/addition to the above if you want something a little less 'fantasy'
• Android Tiers adds a fair bit of extra research/production, but handles androids well. Generally don't require sleep, but other limitations (e.g. very dumb & slow... or vastly superior but, uh, misanthropic)
  
• Geth is similar advantage, but different problems - no clothing/armor and very limited diet
• Dragonkin, several different varieties and advantages, but their temperature preferences and mental stress can be a little tricky/troublesome
• Gerzee, an interesting take on a 'gentle giant' species, with a good set of bonuses and maluses
• Skaven and Ungor, mainly interesting as a different set of hostiles
• Equium, can't eat meat which depending on one's normal setup/biome can be rather challenging

Most of the above are fairly 'light' mods, too. One issue with some of the species mods out there is that they add a pile of new clothing and/or equipment that isn't always well implemented or balanced. Can lead to overly-cluttered workshops, or pretty overpowered weapons being readily available.

While not playable pawns, there are also some excellent mods that make the world a little more alien. Alpha Biomes & Alpha Animals, Fantastic Flora, RimFortress (adds some of DF's plants). Or, for a more vanilla-friendly take, "The Grass is Redder on the Other Side" is a simple recolor mod that's surprisingly effective at changing up the feel. Dinosauria and Megafauna take from Earth's past instead of going full alien for their additional creatures.

Finally, of course, there's always Genetic Rim and the various compatibility patches for other creature mods, to make your own horrific menagerie of weird monsters. Adds a bunch of research and buildings and you won't generally find the new creatures in the wild, though, so may not be worth installing if you don't want to spend a lot of time gene-splicing.

[A Thing]

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, another one worth looking at that adds a couple new races is Xenohumans. They're definitely more on the "a bit different from humans but not that much" side of things though. It makes a bit of sense considering the mod seems to be trying to add races fitting in with the mutants mentioned in the lore primer that somehow never show up in game.

I haven't used them much as colonists, but I kind of just enjoy having them around since it always felt weird that the lore primer mentions xenohumans and they never show up in game.

[Grim Portent]

*Sigh* my colony kids are being little nuisances. Apparently sacrificing one of their siblings to Shub-Niggurath for a fertility idol upsets them. 

It was her own bloody fault, she was trying to abandon us and it was going to take ages to recruit her back.



In other news I'm rather enjoying the Cults of the Rim mod.

[Yoink]

I've gotten back into this, big-time. Despite my gripes with the game and not knowing how to mod them away, I bunged a few new mods in there, archived and cleared up all my defunct save games (as someone mentioned in here, they were really slowing things down as it turns out) and jumped into a new game, with the first three twerps the game generated for me, no less.   

Somehow, despite having more stuff to deal with (mainly Dub's hygiene mod), this has quickly become one of my most successful forts. There have been a few massively irritating moments (I really need to add CE back into the mix, but I don't know how many of my new mods are compatible) and for a moment there we were clinging on by a thread, but so far we're still going and our predominantly-wooden base hasn't burnt down. Originally I thought all my mods had bugged the game and I was never gonna get any raids, then I had three or four (small and poorly equipped, thankfully) in a row which we made it through by the skin of our teeth.   
Having my colonists need to poop and be constantly running off to compulsively wash their hands hasn't been a big a problem as I expected.


Edit: just had a guy decide to watch the sunrise and wander over to a nice, scenic spot next to a pile of dead enemies to nicely cancel out any good thoughts he might have had about it. (Shouldn't skeletons give at least slightly less of a mood debuff than corpses that are still, y'know, rotting?)       

Edit:   
Ooh, I'm not sure which mod added this, but apparently there's a cultural expo coming up that we've been invited to!
Unfortunately, this year's host is our closest neighbour, who I've been getting relationship hits with for being too close to them... hmm. If we do attend I suppose we'll have to be packin' some serious heat.   

[scriver]

I too use the poop and washhand mod

[Yoink]

Are the set up camp mods broken at the moment?
I have an incapacitated person (they're some weird alien race who usually lives in the freezer) in my caravan and I wanna either ditch them or stop for a moment to build a shelter and cool 'em down, but looking at the workshop comments on Set-up Camp it seems like it's pretty fucky these days.



Edit: things have gone downhill fast. We managed to rescue someone from this strange faction of high-tech mecha soldiers without losing anyone, but some wounds became infected - and we still couldn't really return home due to the toxic fallout. I "settled" in this desolate bit of land alongside the road in order to try and treat everyone. With no medicine that was a tall order, even for my best medic... his own brother, who'd been with us from the start, ended up dying to infection.
He was also our best cook and one of our only hunters... sure, we have food for now, but it's gonna be a pretty wretched existence. Everyone is struggling to cope. I'm surprised no fights have broken out, considering the number of insulting sprees. Oh yeah, the dying alien finished dying, too, but that's not much of a surprise. Kinda sad, she was alright despite her weirdness and the fact her only real skill was mining.   

The most recent development? Somebody's pet boomrat (they started with it) starved to death back home, in its animal box right in the middle of our common room... I should have foreseen that long ago, but now the whole place is being engulfed in flames. Sure, some of it's built from bonecrete and cinderblocks and what-have-you, but the bulk of it is wood.
I don't think we'll have much of a home left to return to even if the toxic fallout decides to lift.



At this rate it's looking like it'll be time for a new game with some new mods sooner rather than later...   

[Sirus]

I think I've discovered the joys of the nutrient paste dispenser. My pawns don't need to burn tons of fuel keeping multiple stoves or fireplaces going, they don't have to run around collecting ingredients that might rot away at any time without rushing a freezer, they don't have to spend all their time cooking meals. Since I can pour all my food collection efforts into farming, I don't need to constantly hunt herds of animals into extinction (which is good, because this biome is filled with nasty things that are almost guaranteed to turn on a hunter and tear them to shreds). All meat collected goes into pemmican production, so I can actually afford to run expeditions. The time saved goes into making the base more and more habitable to the point where nearly everyone is Content or better.

Sure, the pawns don't exactly care for the bland paste, but it vastly outweighs the negative moods gained from food poisoning or getting thrashed by angry elephants.

[Mephansteras]

Huh. Don't think I've tried making a dispenser in a long time. Maybe I should give it a go in my current base. It's more of a military installation than anything else, and the lack of trained cooks/crafters has been a big problem. Freeing up more time for other things might help us survive the winter a bit.

[Yoink]

Nutrient paste dispensers are godlike.   
There should be a mod that lets you worship them as gods.   

[Nighthawk]

Nutrient paste dispensers are godlike.   
There should be a mod that lets you worship them as gods.   

This... seems oddly feasible. I'm imagining a civilization that has survived so long in a hyper-advanced automatic self-sustaining megacity that their education stagnated, they forgot how to create the very technologies they rely on and they started to think that said technology was some kind of deity.

There's probably a hundred sci-fi novels about this very concept, but hey, still a cool concept.

[Sirus]

You just described the Adeptus Mechanicus from Warhammer 40k, for starters. That's easily a few dozen novels all by itself, possibly the whole hundred.

[Grim Portent]

Sometimes I don't get the Rimworld modding community. All the buildings from my various unpleasant mods, meat hooks, blood tubs, flesh heaps and heads on stakes for example, are all made massively unpleasant for pawns to use/see, which makes using them a bad idea even when trying to play as a group of cannibal tribals or modded in orcs.

I want to put the heads of my sacrifices on spikes in my temple, but each applies a -20 beauty modifier, which is just really damn annoying. Why does an item that essentially serves as a cosmetic skin for graves apply such a penalty? I'm supposed to be a band of evil lunatics, heads on spikes should be par for the course if I actually build them.

I guess I'll need to go in and poke around my mod files and see if I can tweak them to have no modifier or something.

[Yoink]

Yeah, that's a bit silly.
Did you look in the mod settings, though? Who knows, maybe there's an option.

[n9103]

I'd say the penalty shouldn't apply to those with the bloodlust and/or psychopath trait.
Otherwise, heads on spikes *should be* really disturbing. Even cannibals would have a sense of decorum and dignity for the dead.

[Cyroth]

Even cannibals would have a sense of decorum and dignity for the dead.

Or at least basic food handling knowledge. You don't let meat sit around in the open like that <.<
Would be very upsetting to me, too.