Some UI suggestions

[Khrak]

Priority-modifier on actions:

Let players set a priority on all actions at the time of clicking the mouse by holding modifier keys when clicking the mouse.

e.g. shift-click gives a priority of 3 and ctrl-click gives a priority of 7.

Bonus 1: Let the user select the level of priority that each modifier provides. (Extra points for convenience (modifier + # while in the priority view to set value?))

Bonus 2: Use all the modifier keys. You have 3 modifiers (ctrl/alt/shift), that lets you assign one value to each combination! 

 

Alerts:

I personally like to play the game at maximum speed, pausing it each time I choose to take an action. This sometimes leads to a situation going from bad-to-worse in the time between the warning and the reaction (e.g. starving, suffocating cause a quick death if you're slow reacting). Perhaps allow us to attach speed settings to each type of message so we can allow the game to run quickly without the risks of missing a message until it's too later?

(e.g. Suffication, starvation, -> slow speed, Low food -> medium)

 

 

[Qarnage]

The alerts point is something I would find very nice to have as a quality of life tool. Often when you run 3x speed is when you've planned tasks ahead and don't need the overhead of micromanaging, so automatically changing the speed for events would be great.

[Khrak]

A few other things that have come to mind...

 

Calorie-count limits on food producers:

I want my food-pooper at priority 9 to make sure it's used, but I don't want to produce 70,000 calories of rot-to-be because I forgot to cut it off. It would be nice to be able to set continuous mush bars at priority 9 with a 10,000 Cal and use it as a fail-safe if some ingredient run out.  

Really, it would be nice to do this with harvest also, It would be nice to leave food "on-the-vine" unless your Calorie (maybe output edible would be a better metric for plants?) count drops too low. These would make it easier to set up a food production chain that has both reliability and doesn't produce endless rot.

 

Production/Task ordering:

Rather than select a single food to produce endlessly, it would be nice to set a priority queue for things like food production, rather than just constantly producing the same thing.

 

With the above 2 suggestions you can easily create a stable food chain... enough farms to maintain inventory, harvesting as-required, production as-required of the highest-priority food for which you have ingredients.