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Free Will

PLEASE NOTE: This mod requires the Ideology DLC.

Expand the story of RimWorld by imbuing your colonists with free will!

This mod adds a powerful AI for the work tab placed within a new Ideology precept called Free Will. The ability to control colonists (via the work tab) is now entirely dependent on their ideoligion.

Free Will is the result of: 1400 hours of gameplay, 100s of hours of development, and countless hours of testing by the amazing subscribers of my beta version, YouDoYou.

Setting up the work tab becomes a burden after hundreds of hours of gameplay. Starting a colony with free will allows you to create colonies much quicker and focus on story goals, rather than wasting time setting up work tasks.

Specifically:

• Players new to the game might find it nice to automate the priorities and focus on learning other game mechanics.
  
• Experienced players might be tired of setting up work tabs over and over.
  
• Hardcore players might enjoy the challenge of having to manage even more unruly colonists.
  
• Streamers might enjoy having a mod that skips the boring stuff and brings even more story into RimWorld.

The mod follows in the tradition of RimWorld being a story generator. It will not make the game easier to play, but it should help enrich the story that gets created.

Each ideoligion will now include the Free Will precept. There are a few options:

• Mandatory - free will is always on and cannot be toggled
  
• Preferred - free will can be disabled, but there is a mood penalty
  
• Flexible - free will can be toggled without penalty
  
• Disapproved - free will can be enabled, but there is a mood penalty
  
• Prohibited - free will cannot be enabled (this is essentially the Vanilla RimWorld experience)

Individualists will always have one of the first three options, while collectivists will always have one of the last three options. There is a preset ideoligion for Free Will that will always produce a colony with free will allowed (basically it just sets the colony to be individualists).

Depending on the choice, colonists may rely on the AI (their "free will") to set their work priorities. This is shown in the work tab with blue thought circles, to roughly indicate what the colonist wants to do.

Details for the AI calculations for each work type can be found in the Free Will tab for individual colonists.

If their ideoligion allows it, you can toggle free will on or off in the colonist's Free Will tab, but setting it to something they don't like may incure a mood penalty.

There are a wide range of mod settings available to help tweak Free Will to work with your mod collection, but the default settings are usually recommended for vanilla RimWorld.

Colonists with free will enabled will prioritize work on their own. You can inspect the calculations for each work type in the Free Will tab. Priorities will change in response to a number of game events.

Here is a rough guide to understanding the AI:

• Colonists want to do things they are good at doing.
  
• Colonists don't want to do things they are bad at doing.
  
• Colonists want to pursue their passions more if they are in a good mood.
  
• Colonists want to clean more if they find the environment messy.
  
• Colonists want to rest if their health is low.
  
• Colonists who are bored will eventually look for any work they are capable of doing.

If no one is doing a work type, someone will eventually give in and do it (unless no one can do it).

Each ideoligion will now include the Free Will precept. New recruits will have the same free will setting as the faction they come from. Some may have free will enabled, some may not. One or two colonists without free will can be a good thing, as they can be relied on to do the work that no one else wants to do. But if you don't like that, you can always recruit them to your ideology and enable free will.

Slaves never have free will.

You should be able to use this with most other mods. However, the AI is balanced for vanilla colonists and vanilla work types.

For proper balance, I recommend only using this mod with visual or item mods. Mods will likely disrupt the balance if they: add other pawn types, modifiy skills/passions, or add work types.

That being said, there is "fallback" logic for any work type it doesn't recognise and there are tons of balance settings available so you can customise the behaviour.

I don't really use any major mods, so I can't guarantee compatibility with them.

Check my GitHub releases[github.com].

There is an unstable version of the mod here.

This is the version I play and has all the stuff I'm working on - which could include new features and bug fixes. Completely a use at your own risk situation.

No. When you add it to a save game, it is not able to set the free will precept correctly for all the factions. Removing it is also difficult, because the lost precept seems to be unhandled by the game. Save yourself frustration and start a new game.

• Don't queue up too much work at one time.
  
• A dirty base usually means the colonists have too much to do.
  
• Idle colonists usually means there is not enough work to do.
  
• Make decisions based on what your colonists want to do - trust me!