A technology overhaul for RimWorld
So, the brainiac in your colony spent a whole week locked up in his lab and discovered solar power. Great! Now, how exactly do the builder figures out how to actually build the damn solar panels? Or else: your hunter has been using only bow and arrow for his whole life, so how the heck is he going to operate the space-age pulse charger you just gave him? How can someone grow peaches if he's never seen a peach tree before? Craft a full armor set without knowing how to smith? What if your pawns had to actually learn their stuff before putting a new technology to use?
This experimental mod with far-reaching consequences completely changes the way research plays out in the game. No longer some abstract concept, technologies become actual knowledge your pawns need to learn from methodical research, by studying the proper books (yes, you get to build a library!) or, when it comes to weapons skills, to be acquired by arduous training (yes, you get to build a dojo!). Proper knowledge of what they're doing will be mandatory for them to build and repair structures, follow recipes, grow crops and equip weapons. This will make you care a lot more for your colonists and give you a whole new perspective on recruiting. It will also raise new obstacles to developing your colony, making the game harder while adding gameplay depth. We hope you're up for the challenge!
Please, start a new one.
Warning #2: This mod relies on ResearchTree (or its branch, ResearchPal).
If you don't use one of them yet, what are you doing with your life? They're pretty much mandatory mods. Please, choose one and install it. We could have incorporated Fluffy's code into ours, but we'd rather mantain a lean mod and give you an incentive to get to know and support his work.
Expect many issues and incompatibilities. We're counting on your collaboration to identify them and suggest improvements. Bear in mind the final product might be very different, and changes made during this process might break your game. If you're planning on starting a long-term playthrough (and we encourage you to do so, so we can test long-term effects), be prepared to make a local copy to avoid game-breaking updates.
This is how it works:
Every pawn gets a new inspector tab: Tech. It displays everything he or she knows: technological expertise on one side and weapons proficiency on the other. Both lists are derived from the current game database, so all modded research projects and weapons are automatically included. Newly generated pawns, including NPCs, are assigned a number of techs based on his faction tech level and his background. That number depends on a pawn's age and faction level: tribals get more and cheaper techs, and the more advanced their starting level is the more specialized they tend to be. This list limits what a pawn can build, repair, grow or craft. To acquire new knowledge, he or she will need to study! That's one of the uses of the new study desk.
The weapon proficiency works similarly, limiting what weapons the pawn can equip. Any weapon that's linked to a research project will require the pawn to learn how to use it before equipping. Some simple weapons are exempted, and specially good shooters and brawlers start with better weapon knowledge, as do pawns who know how to craft their own. But all pawns will have to spend some time training at the training dummy or the target stand if they want to wield the latest weapons and stay on top of their game.
Yes, books! This is how humanity stores and shares knowledge and this is how you're going to store and share your technology now. There's a book for every research project on the game (even modded ones), and you can only unlock a technology when you add that book to your library. Of course, this is RimWorld, so finding useful books is not so easy. You can eventually buy them from the new specialized traders, but that's expensive and they rarely visit. You can maybe get them as a quest reward too. But mostly you'll have to write them yourself, by assinging a colonist to a document technology task on the study desk. He will only be able to write about what he knows, of course! This means in order to expand your horizons you'll need to either recruit more talents or do some research!
Researching with Human Resources is a little different from the base game. Selecting a technology on the research tab will accomplish nothing. Instead, the research benches now function like the other work stations: you set up a bill with the subject to be researched and you can restrict skill levels or even assign individual pawns for the task. Your pawns will come to work if they're assigned to researching, as usual. However, their work no longer outputs to the research project on the main research tab, but to their own individual expertise instead. And it takes a little longer. If the tech you're researching has any pre-requisites, your pawns will only be able to proceed if they already mastered those. On the other hand, if what they are researching is itself a pre-requisite to something they already know, their research speed is doubled.
As you can see, technology improvement for your colony will become it's own production chain:
| research tech > | document it into a book > | add book to library > | study tech > | do stuff with it. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (research bench) | (study bench) | (book shelf) | (study bench) | (build/repair/grow/craft) |
This was not designed to be added to an ongoing game, please only enable it if you're planning on starting a new one. About other mods, we simply cannot test it with every one out there. All we can do is design for maximum compatibility and hope for the best. If you're unsure, please give it a shot. If you stumble on any problem, let us know and we'll do what we can to fix it.
- ResearchTree or its branch, ResearchPal. Please pick one.
- HugsLib
- Go Explore: When a pawn succeds on a Research Request event, instead of your faction progressing toward the discovered tech, that is added to the pawns individual expertise. In order for the colony to benefit as a whole, he will have to write a book about it!
- more to come, depending on what's requested by the players during this alpha phase.
Borrowed code from Fluffy's Research Tree, Jecrell's RimWriter & notfood's ThingDef injection for Psychology.
Training Dummy and Target Stand originally designed by Shinzy for Practise Target.
Some textures based on designs by Freepik.
Code contributions by MinerSebas.
Translated into chinese by leafzxg.
Made possible thanks to the help of Brrains and erdelf on the Harmony Discord channel.
Many thanks to all these awesome people!