Quick thought on wish denials. For example, if you want to create a colony in which there is a central “feasting” area, where everybody gathers to eat, you have to deal with the fact that everybody wants to have at least all three of the big “food shelf” items in their homes, and so will always just use the one that’s closest and kill your dreams. (I had a beautiful little tavern in my first colony that I spent lots of time perfecting and then nobody ever used except to grab a beer through the wall and leave, haha.) You can deny the wish, but it’ll keep coming back up again and again, so you’ll have to keep denying it over and over again.
This led me to a thought. What if we could either “put off” or “deny permanently” any given wish? So, if you put it off, it gives the current -15 mood penalty, but it’ll come up again later. On the other hand, you could choose to deny it forever at a much heftier penalty (say, -30) but then that wish never comes up again for that particular colonist.
I suspect that this would be complicated to program on the back end, as it would require a running list in the save file of what colonists have been denied what wishes. But it would be a neat mechanic if it were possible.
Biggest complication I forsee, beyond actually programming it, is that If you deny every single wish except for, say, “relax,” “talk to…” and “sit in chair,” then you could eventually just spam those over and over and over and eventually get massive lifetime satisfaction*. But I doubt you’d ever get there, if denying a wish permanently gave a significant enough mood drop. Your colonists would all riot and destroy everything long before you got rid of every wish type except the easy ones. So it’s not much of an exploit.
Just spit-balling ideas here.
*Incidentally, if it is possible, those three particular wishes would be a lot less exploitable if the lifetime satisfaction points only dropped at the end of the interaction, not the beginning.