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a Nietzsche-esque "MOD IS DEAD" message

This made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

I mean, where did the thrumbo get shot?

Okay, valid point, but there's still the playability side of things to consider. Regardless of whether it's realistic, if there's some aspect of the game that boils down to "Do this simple thing and you will never lose" then that's an area in which the game can stand to be improved a little. It's less about making the game challenging (i.e., harder) than it is about making it interesting, i.e. not exactly the same in every situation.

Take hunting more generally for example. One way in which hunting is made interesting is the fact that you don't always have something to hunt! Wildlife comes and goes with the season. But one opportunity for improvement lies, in my opinion, in the fact that your pawns can walk right up to an elk and blast it at point-blank range right between the eyes. Hunting would be more interesting if animals avoided pawns. Maybe tie it to the animal skill; the higher a pawn's animal skill the closer it can get to wildlife before they bolt. A pawn with high animal skill and high melee skill can be an effective hunter by clubbing wildlife to death. Contrariwise, a hunter with high shooting skill can kill wildlife from range ... though the first shot will cause all the surviving critters to scatter, meaning you can't just wipe out whole herds in one go.

This is all pretty far off topic for the thread, but I'm just trying to illustrate my point: I think realism is awesome, I really do. But I think it has to be balanced against an interesting and fun game. "This is realistic" isn't a trump card. If it's realistic and tedious or whatever, then I think tedious outweighs realistic.

Just my two cents, obviously. I'm just a player.

1) The one thing I like most about Combat Realism is that, with CR installed, people actually die when shot.

That's what makes it worth the price of admission for me, too. I like it when gun fights are terrifying. I like the fact that a single stray bullet can radically change the entire game. I was just playing a little last night with CR and a whole set of other mods (despite the occasional glitch) and my best shooter, a retired soldier who was the sort of big guy of few words who was the universally loved protector of my camp, took a pistol wound to the spine. I was on the edge of my seat, unsure whether he'd ever walk again.

I love the fact that this mod makes guns scary. Playing without it is much less fun to me.

Yes, there are absolutely balance issues. When a 72-year-old grandmother with dementia and a bad back can execute a thrumbo with a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot, that's a balance issue. But overall I think CR is an improvement on the vanilla game's gun combat, while still remaining very much imperfect (even absent the bugs).

As for the other stuff, somebody said recently, I can't remember where, that the vanilla game too easily devolves into tower defense. I agree very much with that sentiment. Not to be overly critical of the vanilla game; it's obviously really good. But if we're being honest, in the absence of CR I find the player-versus-opponent part of the game a lot less interesting, personally, than the player-versus-environment part of the game.

I've played a couple of games with the latest version of the mod, and I've found it to be working well. No real bugs or glitches or anything that I've discovered. I've only stressed the mod moderately, though, by crafting some eyes, arms and legs. I haven't deliberately tried every feature out yet.

One thing I'd offer up though is that the crafting sound is really, really loud. That's such a minor complaint I hesitate even to mention it, but I thought you might appreciate the feedback. No matter where my camera happens to be focused, I always know exactly when a bionic-crafting job has been done.

The industrial cooler is more efficient than the smaller cooler. Infinitely more efficient!

Ahahaha here's a funny bug for you: I switched off my industrial coolers but they keep cooling.

I think I had the same thing happen to me when I was playing last night. I had a brown-out due to a lightning strike on a geothermal generator and power was cut to my industrial cooler but stayed on to the attached exhausts. My freezer stayed at -20 the whole time.

Thanks for the update. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I will as soon as I can. I'll report back with any findings.

Meanwhile, I've skimmed through the thread but if this is in there I've missed it: What exactly is the break-even point between the small heaters and coolers in the core game and your industrial ones? I've been trying to figure out the correct uses for each since alpha 9 and I'm just getting more confused.

The "vanilla" cooler consumes 200 watts (max). If I remember right, your industrial AC consumes 400 watts plus 100 watts per exhaust (again, max). So at one exhaust, the industrial AC is equal to two and a half small ACs.

What I haven't been able to figure out, though, is how much cooling the industrial cooler does relative to the small cooler. Like say I'm building a freezer that I plan to keep at -20°C and say it's 9 by 18 tiles, so 162 tiles in area. Is it better to stick one small cooler in the wall, or two small ones, or one of your industrial ones? I don't know, and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to make that decision other than going into god mode and doing a bunch of tests (which I'm not averse to doing, but it sounds tedious and not fun).

Same with the heaters. The small heater consumes 100 watts max, while the industrial heater consumes 360 watts max. How do they compare in terms of heat per watt? I assume the industrial heater produces more heat per watt (otherwise why does it exist?) but I also assume there's some point at which the industrial heater is overkill, where it's producing more heat than is needed to heat a given amount of space. How am I supposed to know where that break-even point is between the two heaters?

I hope my questions are making sense. I adore your mod. Please don't take anything I've written here as a complaint. To the contrary, what I'm basically saying here is that I feel like I'm not smart enough to use your mod wisely.

I didn't find any errors like that, but I did notice that my log is filling up with TONS of messages that look like this:

Code Select Expand

tempDiff: 1.474108 tempRated: 0.3685269

There's way more than one of those being printed to the log per second. Maybe one per frame, even. It looks like a debugging message to my untrained eye. Is it maybe coming from your mod? I tried doing a quick-and-dirty disable of your mod to see if the message stopped, but the game didn't like that at all, so I guess my next step is to start a new game without RedistHeat and see if the message appears.

That excites me tremendously. I'm really looking forward to your next release.

Wow, I wasn't expecting such a big mod to get an update so quickly. How does this version behave when added to an existing save game? I've just gotten one started over the weekend and I'd like to add EPOE to it, if that won't cause problems.

EDIT: Loading the mod (not using it, just starting the game with the mod installed) throws a couple of errors:

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Could not find a type named EPOE.Recipe_PatchScar

Exception parsing <specialAction>EPOE.UnlockResearch.CreateRibs</specialAction> to type System.Action: Exception parsing System.Action from "EPOE.UnlockResearch.CreateRibs"


I saw in the notes that you removed some functionality related to rib implants. Maybe there's a leftover reference in an XML? I'm not sure what the scar-patching error could mean, though.

Your preview screenshot confuses me a little. Does the mod do underground conveyor belts now? Cause if so that'd be amazing. I've wanted to use this mod in a game for a while now but I just haven't been able to figure out how to make it work for topological reasons. The teleporters are neat but they've struck me as a little too sci-fi-magic; if you have teleportation why do you need hauling and conveyor belts at all, I find myself thinking, which kinda takes me out of the game. But if conveyors can be run underground like power conduits are (and like heating ducts are in the RedistHeat mod) that'd be really terrific. I'd use the heck out of that, I think.

I seem to have an issue where my colonists aren't taking the last 2 skin colors on the right side, (brownish and black), their bodies are correct when they land, but their heads are default white

Are you using 1.8.2? I had that problem but it went away when I installed 1.8.2.

Are vented doors supposed to not actually separate rooms? I can't remember whether they worked this way in alpha nine or not, but in alpha ten make a room with a bed in it, then make another room with a bed, then separate the rooms with a vented door or autodoor. Designate one of the two beds for prisoner use and both beds will be so designated. The game doesn't seem to recognize the vented doors as actual doors, at least in my game. I may do a little more testing to see if I have a mod conflict or something, because I have a few mods installed, all of which are in "just ported this to alpha 10, there will be bugs" status.

Just a quick note to say that 1.8.2 definitely fixed that bug I reported about changing the head type. Which I'm sure you already knew, but I just wanted to say since I brought it up.

Thanks a million.

I will work on a fix.  Thanks for the bug report!

Sure thing. Let me know if I can be of any more help.