EdB Prepare Carefully

Customize your RimWorld colonists, choose your gear and prepare carefully for your crash landing.  The mod's point-based system tries to balance things out so that you don't overdo it, but spend your available points on additional colonists, skill points, passions, resources, weapons and apparel.  Or disable the point system and gear up your starting colonists however you like.  Save your setup as a preset so that you can start your game the same way later.

About the Latest Release(s)

Version 1.10.1 is the first release for Alpha 12.  Please report any bugs that you may run into on the mod's forum topic in the Ludeon Mod Releases Forum.

New features for the latest version:

• You can now choose which animals are included in your starting colony.
• I added a "No Extra Points" option that sets the number of available points to match the value of your initial three randomly generated colonists.  This provides a little less flexibility for those of you who feel that extra points that you get are too "cheat-y".  I'm not entirely convinced that I like it--but try it out and give me some feedback.
  

Known Issues with Alpha 12

• You can't name your pets.  This is an obvious missing feature that I'll try to figure out how to fit in at a later date.
• Presets and Colonists saved in Alpha 11may not fully load in Alpha 11.  If the preset is missing resources or doesn't look right after loading it, you can check the warnings in the console to get an idea of what went wrong.
• Prepare Carefully modifies the map generation sequence so that it can deploy your colonists with the gear that you selected.  Therefore, it may not work with mods that change the default map generation sequence.  If you are a mod-maker and need more information, let me know.
  

How to Use

Extract the contents of the zip file into your mods folder.  Enable the mod from the mods menu.

Once you enable the mod, start a game normally, but click the "Prepare Carefully" button to get started:



Customize your colonists:



Choose your starting resources and gear:




The most common problem that people run into is that they double-extract the mod folder from the zip file.  If the "Prepare Carefully" button is not appearing for you, make sure that you have not ended up with an extra directory inside your mod folder.  The mod contents should be in the "Mods/EdBPrepareCarefully" directory, NOT in a "Mods/EdBPrepareCarefully/EdBPrepareCarefully" directory.

If you have other trouble installing the mod, please look for advice in this thread:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=6223.0

Other thoughts

• Thanks to everyone who has contributed a translation to the mod.
• I need to give lots of credit to Argain for his CCM mod, of course. When I saw that CCM was no longer going to be updated, trying something similar felt like a good fit for me, considering the UI-focused mod work that I've been doing.  It's a different implementation and provides some different features, but it's the same idea.
• I decided to go with an overall point-based system (as opposed to a fixed set of available skill points for each colonist, for example) so that you can trade-off resources and equipment for additional or fewer colonists.
• The point cost of items and colonists mostly comes from their defined market values with some adjustments for balance.  If an item has no market value defined, you cannot add it to your starting equipment.
• You can disable the point system.  This gives you the freedom to set up your colonists however you want.
• Why can't you change a colonist's body type?  This is something that you may notice--you can change the head type and the hair, but not the body type.  It turns out that a colonist's body type is directly tied to the colonist's adult backstory.  You cannot change them independently--this is a limitation of the game for which I could not find an acceptable workaround.  Change your colonist's backstory to change their body type.
  

Here's a log of the changes that you can find in recent releases:

 _____________________________________________________________________________
 
   Version 1.10.1 (2015-08-22) 
 _____________________________________________________________________________
   
 - Added support for Alpha 12.
 - Added an Animals tab on the Equipment page.
 - Added "No Extra Points" option.
 - Rebalanced point costs.