I can't help but feel that celsius would be the dumbest of the options. A uint for Kelvin would be nice (or a float, or uint for 10ths of a kelvin or whatever). Or Farenheit, which is more familiar to most Americans. As the game is in English, there's more potential players familiar with that scale. Plus, I'm selfish and don't like Celsius for anything except talking about water.
BAD BAD BAD! The US's denial of the SI system to cling to the obsolete English system is one reason most of the world thinks the US is stupid. America must abandon the English system, lest it fall into being a minor country of little importance. And really, English is taught everwhere. Making the game use Fahrenheit for modding would hurt more people than it would help.
@Appelgren: We're talking about modding here and the actual values. The game interface can continue the way it is.
Uh ohhhh... Don't forget...
MANY people in the USA use SI measurement for everything when it's important or official, and even among those who use the imperial system there are some things that metric\SI is just better for, and even rednecks will use it. The problem is that our official federal position is to use and teach the imperial system. The last time they tried to switch us all over to SI, there was too much ignorant fear that switching to the metric system would promote communism or something. People literally shot at the road signs which listed distances in KM. Between that, and laziness, and stubbornness, and the cost that would be involved for our millions of machine tool workers and other related jobs, the point is that most people alive today had nothing to do with any of it and use the SI system if they know what's good for them.
I want to remind you: "The US" is not a person. 350,000,000 or more live in this country and we don't like each other, work together very often, or agree about much of anything, please don't generalize about the population of this mongrel country thxu
As for the display of temperature? The game never displays temperature at all, the choice of units only matters to modders and to Toady, and honestly the small conversion required when adding a single new temperature value isn't a big deal compared to the work of changing all the stored values in the raws over to a new system (though this would be a 1-time deal) because it doesn't affect gameplay or presentation at all. If Toady decided to do so anyway, I would hope he would use kelvin, as it's the only absolute scale which would prevent modders from having to use negative temperature values. Negative values could and should be used for magic and other related temperature-sapping things imho.