Hi! This is what we're doing right now:
DEMOCRACY. TECH TIERS
The people in your colony have freedom to leave if they're discontent, but just like in real life, they will also have the possibility of improving conditions by voting. We're now setting up the feature where unhappy colony members will vote for raising the 'tech tier'. For example, if a person is unhappy about the 'Food' condition in the colony (because the colony's conditions are below the person's principles) you will see that person supporting a proposal to raise the 'Food tech tier' to unlock more advanced food-producing items and structures.
These votes are needed for you to advance your settlement from a bushcraft camp to a comfortable town. If all of your people are happy with a simple life as hunter-gatherers, you will not be able to establish farm plots and build nice houses. If you want to improve such a colony, you will have to attract or invite more ambitious people.
The voting screen will look something like this:
AUTOMATION
We want to minimize the amount of micromanagement and make your colony more autonomous. These are the ways we're doing that:
Standing/automated orders
We're now developing a feature where you can set a target amount of items to keep in stock. For example, you can target a stock of 20 smoked fish, and whenever your stock goes below this number, the colonists will automatically produce a new batch (provided they have the needed ingredients/tools).
Mines/quarries/pits
These are sites where colonists can extract a continuous supply of clay, stones, ore, rock salt, guano, sulfur etc. When you find such a location, you will not need to scour the landscape for scattered resources. You just have to setup the proper facility and then your colonists will continually extract the resources.
Some deposits can be exploited by just digging a hole in the ground while sites such as gold deposits require a gold dredge machine which needs fuel to run.