I have been waiting for someone to do something like this in forever, but I’m especially impressed with how you plan to handle dynamic sizes.
I don’t know if this is just personal preference speaking, but considering the wacky nature of how advanced archotech science can get (Ideology implies some archotechs or embodied theists are just modified humans that have become practically omnipotent) your upper weight limit still seems a little low. Take megaspiders for example- it’s an insect modified to be the size of a bear- 3,000lbs is only double the weight of the fattest people in the real world. I’m not saying we need pawns the size of the whole map (but I, for one would love that) but the nature of this mod allows for an extremely interesting potential colony goal. It’s okay if you’re “unlikely to reach” that goal, but even in my pre-ideology playthroughs I’ve had colonies that were completely untouchable, with several colonists in full archotech limbs and unbelievably impressive bedrooms. With Ideology’s age reversal technology, you could in theory have a colonist live forever. If you think going higher than 3,000 is a bit much, there’s an implant added in the Royalty DLC called the Armorskin gland, that modifies the skin of the patient to be highly resistant to bullets. Toss that in with a Tough trait, and they’re pretty much impervious to small arms fire. So technology to modify the body does exist in many forms outside of bionics. You could have 3,000 be the hard cap for baseline, unmodified humans, but perhaps an archotech techprint (for those really super advanced spacer tech research) is lying around in the world that has plans for a gland that increases the elasticity of the patient’s body, allowing them to reach higher weights than should normally be possible? It could be quite the expensive research. Maybe there could be stomach implants like the bionic stomach that help with metabolism and whatnot.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been chomping at the bit for a mod like this. I’d honestly prefer if there wasn’t a hard cap at all, but I understand that it’s a lot of extra work for something that might not satisfy everyone. Maybe for the people like me that really, really want to overdo it, bare minimum could be a maximum visual size where the sprite stops updating but the weight and stats don’t, at least for a while. Immobility shouldn’t be an issue if the goal of the ideology is, for example, to make one of your pawns as fat as possible. Extra challenge comes from keeping them safe when they can’t move or defend themselves- but maybe they could still use psychic powers.
It seems like you’ve got this pretty much fleshed out (heh) and I’ll admit that I was a bit intimidated by Rimworld modding when I tried to do this myself, so I can’t thank you enough for this mod, honestly. I apologise if it seems like I’m coming off a bit ungrateful because the max size isn’t “big enough” for my tastes, but it’s always something you could set a limit for in the mod settings- maybe let players set the maximum weight themselves- there must be a few people out there that don’t want to micromanage the possibility of pawns going over their preferred weight, and people like myself that looked at the weight limit and thought “Well, how am I supposed to make a religion based around fatties if their leader can still fit inside buildings?”
One additional note, I’d like the option to turn off the Hard Limit on stuffing if possible. The idea of death via overeating is a pretty major turn-off (for me, I can’t speak for anyone else), and would no doubt kill the vibe intensely if I did it even by accident in a playthrough. That’s not to say you should remove it, especially because it opens up an interesting way to kill prisoners, and horrific war crimes are what Rimworld is all about.
You asked if there any other ways you’d like to see their weight expressed, outside of the health tab. I imagine it would have a kilogram indicator there, but one thing about the way Rimworld handles body sizes is that generally the larger the pawn (colonist, Thrumbo, etc.) the more food they require. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult a dynamic “body size” would be, but custom races like Ratkin and Nyaron have shown me that it IS possible to have a pawn have a smaller body size and require less food, although I don’t know if there’s evidence those two are fundamentally connected outside of the implication they are. It would be neat if weight was linked to body size and thus controlled how much food they required. I’m in love with the thought of needing several cooks working around the clock with the sole purpose of keeping one pawn satiated. And as that pawn’s size increases, they need more and more food just to keep their weight up.
Finally on the topic of traits I know some of them have dynamic severity. Masochist for example has qualifiers for minor, moderate, severe, and mind-shattering pain, which give intensifying levels of happiness based on their pain. Since weight would also be a Hediff and in the Health tab, it should be feasible to link a trait, (let’s call it Gainer as a hypothetical) to this weight and have the mood buff it provides from weight be linked directly to the severity of the pawn’s weight- +1 for a bit of chub, and depending on how far you really want to go, the maximum could be anywhere from +10 or even +40 (like from Catharsis.)
I want to be the first to play this mod when it releases. I’d love to help however I can (I’m not a coder nor a spriter, so I don’t think I can, unfortunately, I might be able to whip up a custom music theme for an ideology though, you know how they have that ambient-style music in the ideologies menu, like Techist? Something like that.)
Sorry, this post went on forever. I got a bit excited.