Glad I'm the first. So here goes:

Pumps: I have no idea how they work. No matter where I build them, they do not "produce" water?

Flooding: It'd be nice if one can build something that can prevent water from "spreading" further.
If I build close to a river it will always go through/below my wall and flood everything behind it (fields for example). So having walls stop the water would be really nice. Or maybe add a new stuffed "deep wall" that can do that but requires 1/3 more materials and more work because its... deeper?


Hope this helps. If I come up with more, I'll reply here again and not edit this comment.

Thanks for the mod!

Hi. I love the mod and I'm glad that it has finally been updated!

My only complaints are that farming takes far too long and the moisture/fertility system is too hard to get in that perfect zone to be able to farm with even moderate efficiency. Also I can't figure out how to get pumps and wells to work.

Thanks.

About water. Not sure where are bugs and where are features, but:
1) water on ground from rains and stuff. It is damaging my items and buildings, but the only way to destroy it is an order "clean water". But it is buggy though: if it became too much water there or water dissapears by itself my colonists just stops doing anything as they cannot get the water out of place.
What to do: of course you can make more conditions on that to destroy that order, but, I think, you should make a "water cleaning zone" instead, as water (same as snow) is dynamic feature and using orders for that is not very good. May be even use "clean snow" zone, as it is logical.
2) Oasis and water levels. They are moving really enjoyable, I like that feature a lot, but you should make some places like oasises a lot deeper, as, otherwise, they became dry after 25-35 days. Also rain season in Marimay isn't doing it's work as for me it was only two little rains. It is normal in deserts, as I think, but then it should have some other source of water (like underground water source)

To sum up:
a) Water cleaning zone, remove water cleaning order
b) Make oasis deeper
c) Make an alternative way to produce water at places, where rains are not the proper way

Also, russian translation: https://yadi.sk/d/J50IgxfqwZtgNQ

I really like how farming takes more work from pawns - weeding and watering. I like having two or three tribal farmers working full-time on their crops. It feels more realistic.

However, my colonies always basically starved and most of their crops died. It would rain for a couple of days and half of my crops would die to excessive moisture. Heat waves were horrible too, with sun damage killing vast swathes of crops. I abandoned one colony when a long heat wave killed pretty much everything. All of my colonies only survived by fishing and hunting - a river or ocean is mandatory. It also felt like forage was extremely rare, but perhaps that was also just playing with the newer biomes.

I don't think I ever had a harvest that was even 50% successful.

The greatly lengthened growing cycle meant usually only one harvest a year before winter set in. Perhaps the times were planned as balance for when you can get your crops fertilized + tilled + pollinated + mulched, but early on it is brutal, especially for a tribal start where you can't do any of that.

I found farming took a LOT of micromanagement. Trying to micromanage soil fertility and moisture levels necessitated looking at basically every square of my crops once or twice a day. It was kind of tedious and frustrating.

I love the new biomes, the spike mountains in particular. I liked the volcanic island too. I briefly tried an atoll and a mangrove forest and abandoned both.

My preference would be to eliminate damage from sun scorching and moisture levels, replaced with larger growth penalties. I'd reduce the amount of water needed by crops (and dropped by rain) to reduce micromanagement. I'd balance that by increasing the amount of work it takes to clear weeds. I think there's a good opportunity there to add in some balance that vanilla lacked... what if you multiplied the weed spawn rate by the soil fertility? That way you could plant some potatoes on mediocre soil and basically ignore them, but your tilled mulched rich soil would take quite a lot of work to clear them. Perhaps keep weeds from inhibiting growth for a day or so, both for realism and to give pawns a chance to keep up with work.

@Byter: I will look at pumps next. I didn't see any obvious bugs on a small test, but in any case they don't communicate their stuff well enough. Can you provide more information on this in the bugs discussion? Like a screenshot of where the pumps are placed, biome info and such.
Water can be blocked with walls and sandbags. Doors don't block water, so you need to place the doors on higher elevation or place a few sandbags in front of them. But this should indeed get a tutorial or explanation in some form.

@MurMax: The water cleaning zone is a good idea. For the oasis: In most biomes the "water-balance" on the map is not stable and needs improvements. Not sure yet where to put the balance between realism, stability and controllability/gameplay. This needs a lot of testing.

Re:Farming: Some good points on this. I noticed currently choosing the right crop to the environment is essential to get it grown. Everything is a more or less too extreme at the moment. Like I think there should be situations where heat or rain can coll your crops, but like only in really intense situations and only to some crops. The current crops use somewhat realistic values while rimworlds environment is more extreme then irl, so the crops need to be more adapted to it.

Ah very nice. Well then it was probably a door that let water through by base wall :)
And about the pumps: I tried several biomes, placed them on wet soil (that sadly floods and can destroy the pump), next to river beds and even tried the groundwater one once. All of them said "water pumped: 0" or something. There's no explanation on how to get water out of them. I have not played RimWorld for some time but will look into it again. Do they have a bill requirement or something? I'd be nicer if they simply output the water in the same form as the scooping spot did but automatically. Combining this with Industrial Rollers in my savegame was my actual plan but it never worked out :(

But thank you for listening and hearing our feedback on the lack of explanation and clearity.

About watering crops - I like the feature itself, but as for me I would like an improvement for the interface: make some kind of gap between the water level I want and water level, at wich my colonists will start watering crops. Now I should micromanage it every second and it is annoying
e.g. my plants can live and grow in water level between 40 and 80. I want my colonists to start watering soil at about 45 water (for have some time for that process) and get that to 75 (as it could be rainy and I don't want it to become overwatered. As for now I should prepare enough water and then activate 75 barrier, and then, after all crops being watered, deactivate it to 45 and wait for time, checking it.
this feature is simple and really usefull (as I think)

I've been having a lot of the same experiences with farming as well. Extreme conditions such as high / low temperature, low / high ground moisture occur too frequently and kill plants before they reach maturity far more often than not. That being said, I think the additional complexity and difficulty in farming will be good in the long run, it just needs to be balanced out in some way.

As you already know, water pumps don't seem to be working, but a large number of rainwater collectors and resevoirs can satisy the water needs of a small colony. However, one thing I've noticed is that hauling water takes a large amount of my hauler's time. At higher tech levels there are items like the irrigation plant which might alleviate some of the work haulers need to do (they are bugged in the same way water pumps are, so I can't be sure), however given that they can only hold 10 water at a time and that 10 water doesn't go very far when watering plants, it still seems like haulers would need to do a lot of work to keep things watered. Do you think that at higher tech levels we could get a water pipe system similar to power? Water pumps would be the water analog to power generators, water towers could be the water analog to bateries, and water pipes could be the water analog to wires.

I've also had some issues with rainwater buildup on the ground like some other people have. I have two primary issues. The first is that even fairly low water levels can damage and destroy buildings and items (a water clearing zone as mentioned by others would go a long way to help this). The second issue is that water puddles build up inside roofed buildings. This is mostly an issue in places with a stone ground, such as caves, since excess water doesn't go into the ground. It would be nice if roofs could prevent that sort of rainwater buildup.

Another thing I've noticed (when playing on a volcanic island) is that water updates for the sea waves and tides slow down the game quite a bit for me, down to about 1x speed for a second or so every 5 seconds or so. While it's a low priority issue, it'd be nice if that could be alleviated in some way. I don't know much about Rimworld modding, but perhaps water calculations could be offloaded to another thread?


Issues aside though, I've been having a lot of fun. The world generation and biomes in particular are absolutely top notch.

@Byter: There is a bug with pumps where they don't work at all and that's certainly what the problem is on your side. I guess it's some compatibility problem, but haven't tested much on this.
I just wrote some background about them in the questions discussion. For the other part: If they work, they have an internal storage and can output that in a cistern. The cistern acts like a shelf, so I guess the rollers should be able to grab that water from there. (I don't remember how that mod worked exactly.)

@MurMax: There is a gap of 10 at the moment. Customizable would be better, it would just be more extra work to add this setting in a nice way. Definitely something to improve in the future, but there are other more breaking problems to fix first.

@thepackett: I thought about adding water pipes and a water grid, but simplified it for now, to save dozens of work hours. We will see if how this works and if there are simple ways to improve this well enough without adding a new water grid. If there are none, I will probably add pipes and a grid.

The irrigation plant can consume water from a cistern, so you can place some next to the irrigation plant and let haulers carry more water once in a while.

The slowdown on volcanic island is probably the recalculation of the path grid when water changes from passable to impassable. I have an idea to cut this down by a large enough amount that it won't be noticable, but this needs some hours of coding work.

Re:Pumps:
I just found the bug in the pumps which indeed made them not working for anyone. They probably still need lots of improvements as written in the questions discussion, but at least they should work now, so people can test the current state. (I will push an update with the fix in the next hour or so.)

Awesome! Thank you so much. I'm gonna automate the ♥♥♥♥ out of it and suck my biome dry.
EDIT: Thank you steam for censoring "poop".

I haven't used pumps yet since I've only played tribal starts with this mod. If they require electricity it would be great to create a hand-pump that requires a pawn to work at them. Although that would either require bills or a new work type, and those require more code and it's difficult to find a balance where a pawn isn't working continuously or running over to do the work every 2 seconds, so perhaps it could just work autonomously 10x slower? Manual pumps would also be something an industrial colony could build quickly in an emergency or use during a solar flare.

There is a well which slowly collects groundwater that can be "pumped" manually and the water sweeping spot, to quickly collect water from existing water bodies on the map. I though about adding a real manual pump for the "work to water conversion", but as you said, it's extra work and might not be needed or even too much and confusing to have like 10 ways to get water.

Though the current system is not fixed at all. I'm not even sure if I want to do a larger overhaul of this. We'll see how it turns out now with many people actively using it.

I also find the new farming system to be unsustainable; crops grow too slowly, too much micromanagement is required to get them to grow at optimal speed, so most of the time they're just growing slowly.

If they grow at all. Heat wave? Cold snap? Yeah, forget about crops - and the colony if you depended on farming.

Fishing doesn't seem to help much, either; it barely feeds one person. It is pointless to produce food if it can't feed other people. Or the fisherman is too unskilled; I could not figure out which skill affects fishing.

So, my early colony seems to be kept alive by two things alone: foraging and hunting. All those big plots of farm? Fishing spots? Better off just removing them and focusing on foraging/hunting.

That's how my experience has been so far. I must be missing something here...