This is a mod for Rimworld 1.0. It improves the behavior of colonists and animals during the caravan formation process, with the goal of avoiding situations where your colonists are stuck wandering around doing nothing. With this mod, even large and complex caravans should eventually form.
Note that this is both the first mod I've made and the first mod I've used. The intent of this mod is to change the base game as little as possible. I've tried to stick with what I percieve as the original intent of the Rimworld designers while fixing some fundamental flaws in the caravan formation process. Large caravans should still take some time and effort to form, but they should eventually form, and the colonists and animals will try to use their best abilities to form as quickly as possible without the need for frustrating manual tinkering.
UPDATE FOR 1.0: Most of the caravan formation bugs have been fixed in the base game. The only thing this mod now changes is to prevent the caravan from being held up by hungry pawns wandering off. Also, this mod used to allow animals to move to the meeting spot on their own, but let's face it, it was kind of ridiculous to add 70+ boars to your caravan essentially for free, so I decided to disable that. However, if that really what you want out of this mod, you can re-enable it in the mod options.
Changes:
- Animals will now go to the caravan spot on their own, without a colonist needing to tag them. (Only if you enable this option)
- Colonists will not wait for the entire caravan to meet before gathering supplies. (Only if you enable this option)
- The caravan will not be held up indefinitely by hungry pawns that wander off for food during caravan formation.
Issues that remain:
- A caravan may be significantly delayed by pauses due to mental states. Please try to keep your colonists sane when forming a caravan.
- Animals assigned to the caravan do not obey area restrictions. They may eat all your food.
- When selecting animals for a caravan, the caravan formation dialog is ... unhelpful. Improvements could be made.
- It would be nice if you could change the caravan meeting spot while the caravan is forming.
- The process of loading transport pods could use some work as well.
This mod includes a compiled version of the Harmony library made by Andreas Pardeike (MIT license).