Messages

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Savage
Biome/hilliness: Boreal Forest/Large Hills
Commitment mode: No
Current colony age (days): 56
Hours played in the last 2 days: 6
Complete mod list: Progress Renderer, P-Music, and Numbers.


Uhm... something might be weird with my game. 4 raids and one manhunter pack in the span of five days. They have been fairly proportional, 3 - 4 pirates and 5 tribalists, and the manhunter pack was just one warg. I don't know if Randy got high on flake or if it has something to do with the latest build, but it's odd to me. I'll attach graphs.

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After a few raids using heavy turrets, I feel like their propensity for friendly fire is way too high. I've lost one colonist (after he was hit in the heart), 4 huskies, a rhino, a muffulo and a camel to my auto cannons alone and the cleaning lady got her arm blown off by my uranium slug turret during a megaspider raid.

I love watching the turrets smack mechs into oblivion, but more often than not, they do more damage to my own colony

I have similar experiences. The new turrets are awesome but they're really uncomfortable to use. The range limit suggests to me that they should not be used in the front, however, if I try to place them in the back, then friendly fire is bound to happen. The uranium slug can literally one-shot a pawn with armor. Having your colonist die because the turret targeted a scyther that reached your frontlines or because you simply forgot to command it to hold fire is not compelling. I see myself engaging less with my colonists because I'm scared that a turret is going to get some weird angle and kill them instead of the enemies, I try to counter it by micromanaging the turrets to hold fire when it doesn't seem safe. I'll even admit that I save-scummed the first couple of times it happened because I didn't expect it to be such a problem, I kind of just assumed that the turrets were more advanced (at least in contrast with the mini-turrets description) and accurate, and had less chance of friendly fire because of it.

I see myself in the future making more turrets and giving my colonists only charge lances (which I love btw, I like how they are a direct upgrade to the bolt-action rifle, balanced but not overly specialized) and sniper rifles.

The 'Caravan ambushed (manhunters)' event does not pause the game when the 'Pause on urgent letter' option is on.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Savage
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest/Mountainous
Commitment mode: Nope
Current colony age (days):  374
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10
Complete mod list: Progress Renderer.


IEDs are fun.


I'm still waiting for a sapper raid to see how they react to my defenses, but no luck so far.



I'm afraid they might be too easily accessible though, perhaps increasing a tiny bit the chemfuel cost of the shells would be fair? The chemfuel has not been a limiting factor for me since it's easy to get and not used in many things. And speaking of chemfuel, I was thinking it would be cool if maybe the biofuel refinery, the crematorium, and the infinite chemreactor produced heat, like a torch lamp.

I'm wondering if there should be some function/memory to keep room assignments to various colonists when they're out in a caravan. Currently all rooms gets unoccupied the moment they leave, and when they come back they just pick whatever gets handed out to them when they look for a bed.

It's a little nitpicky, but I find it annoying to try and remember who had what room, and continuously emptying the barracks every time a caravan returns to the base.

Counterpoint, but unless you have Greedy, Jealous, or Ascetic colonists to worry about, why do the room assignments matter?

I have a colony with four couples, two colonists with the jealous trait, one with greedy and another one with the ascetic. I don't want to micromanage where they sleep whenever one of them arrive from a caravan trip.

As a hoarder, I usually have too much stuff laying around doing nothing for me. Like I still keep cotton plantations the same size after creating a healthy field of devilstrand. So I'll perpetually have 3k+ of cloth sitting in my storage waiting for me to use them (which, to be fair, it does happen with caravan requests). I can understand if someone wants to steal my cloth, but that storage is not going to help me defend it. Same happens with most of my production. Wealth doesn't really captures my ability to fend off raids, so... the solution is to not be wealthy   

For me, the thing with animals, at least for me, is that they have a certain level of maintenance attached to them. If Randy gives me a cow, I could keep it and milk it, but then I'll have to make a barn, assign allowed areas, assign an animal handler, plant hay for the inevitable winter/toxic fallout/wildfire, regulate the temperature of the barn for seasonal changes and cold snaps/heat waves, tend it when it gets the plague, make sure its safe during events, tend it when I forget to do that, feed it by hand because a warg bit its legs off, euthanize it because I don't have animal prosthetics to replace its limbs, and so on; or I could butcher it, get some meat now and plant a field of rice instead of hay. If I'm going to go that far out my way to keep an animal, it better contributes in a meaningful way, hence defense, hauling, and caravanning.

The Rim is inherently hostile for domestic animals. It's hard for me to justify investing resources into them when I'm constantly being assaulted and always desperate for more defense, productivity, and quality of life. It's the same reason I avoid long caravan trips.

Nah this was changed in the defs to those amounts.  I'm guessing it was in response to bbq's gigantic uranium piles and xeonovadan suggesting plasteel still felt abundant.  Which might even be correct for people with extreme levels of experience.  But that looks way too harsh for a normal player.

I see. Thank you.

Edit: I mean... by the time I need uranium to maintain turrets I usually have a strong enough economy that I can just do this: . I'll have my miners go into caravans instead, it's just not ideal to have colonists away. The change would probably affect more during the mid-game where I'd accept the few scraps of material; late-game is a matter of convenience.

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Savage
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest/mountainous
Commitment mode: Nope
Current colony age (days):  305
Hours played in the last 2 days: 8
Complete mod list: Progress renderer


Is there something going on with the number of resources mined by drill? Like with the chemfuel a few builds ago? I'm getting a ridiculously low amount of uranium and plasteel. It already killed my uranium supplies. If that's intended, it's too little to maintain uranium slugs. I already invested research into the tech, materials into the scanner and drills, spending time drilling, fighting the occasional infestations (which also consumes the durability of the turrets), and presumably getting stronger events for possessing the resources  I don't feel like this amount it's worth all of that.

Edit: Oh, do I have to start a new game too? I think I started this game after chemfuel became unobtainable by deep drill.

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Storyteller: I switched from Cass to Randy.
Difficulty: Savage (on my last post I said 'Rough', actually meant 'Savage', the renaming confused me)
Scenario: Crash landed
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest, mountainous.
Commitment mode: Nope.
Current colony age (days): 227
Hours played in the last 2 days: 15?
Complete mod list: Progress renderer.


I never used IEDs before 1.0 (0.19?). Since I used to get the occasional colonist activating spike traps, so I thought that maybe having automatic explosives all around my base wasn't in the best interest for my colonist's well-being. But with the latest changes, I have bit more trust in traps, and since they seemed cheap I tried them. I am in a mountainous region so there are a lot of natural chokepoints in my area that I can take advantage.

What I've seen with IEDs is that they are inconsistently decent but situationally strong. Because of the way enemies move (out of formation, getting ahead or behind the group, separating into several smaller groups), IEDs more often than not are only going to trigger to one, two, maybe three enemies, which can be significant or not depending on the type of threat and the stage of the game, unless you have a very good placement, that is going to be an inconsistent but decent value; and there is the more rare situation when you get a whole group in an explosion, that's really powerful. It's not going to do much against big bugs, centipedes or big animals (such as elephants), but it will kill or severely damage humans and human-sized animals. That's good enough reason to use them. At the cost of two shells per unit, they're still cheap to produce in the midgame, and if you're willing to butcher human corpses, they can mostly pay for themselves using the biofuel refinery to get the fuel to produce more shells and exchange the leather for steel.

I don't think that the use of IEDs is limited to enclosed spaces, though they do benefit from them. Artificially creating chokepoints outside the main defenses is not a difficult thing to do, even in flat regions. Using them in open areas it not terrible either, there are areas that are bound to get frequented by enemies, like in front of a turret line.

It's similar to mortars in that rating, though I'd say mortars are inconsistently weak, their explosions are less potent than that of an explosive IED, it may not even kill a single human with okay-ish armor. They still are situationally strong when you hit a big group, which actually happened to me recently. A tribal raid with 35 enemies, where two mortars damage enough of them that the rest of the battle was a complete slaughter (figuratively and literally). Only four or five escaped. I got this message the next day:


Overall, I'd say IEDs are in a good place right now. For me, they provide a decent amount of value without trivializing raids.

Edit: I forgot a couple of things I wanted to mention.

1.- Can we have a 'allow human leather apparel' check, like the 'allow tainted apparel' in the outfit assignments? I want to give my bloodlusted colonists human leather clothing, but also don't want to force them into clothing.

2.- It would be nice to be able to smelt plate armor.

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Merciless for most of the game, recently switched to rough.
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest and mountainous.
Commitment mode: Nope.
Current colony age (days): 163.
Hours played in the last 2 days: Idk, 9?
Complete mod list: Just the progress renderer mod.

So, new colony! I went mostly with what the game offered me, luckily my starting colonists weren't god-awful, but actually kind of decent, just on the low-end side in terms of passion and experience. I did hand-picked a landing location near a road and in a no flat area. I had a veeery slow start. I didn't have a good builder, doctor, miner or cooker. They spend their sweet botching their jobs for a while, suffering from food poisoning every other day. Pan Sunbin changed that, bringing to the colony an interest for construction, medical and intellectual activities, as well as a burning desire to craft for the colony. From that point, I've been playing catch-up with the difficulty curve, just providing enough defense to be able to survive.

Turns out, mountainous regions are actually bad when you don't mine inside them. The starvation for steel and mechanical components has been tough, forcing me to form caravans and trade with nearby factions. I simply didn't have enough time or manpower to mine the mountains (I still don't even have a good cook). Eventually, raids grew too big, even when I barely had a couple of steel mini-turrets. It was too much. I switched to 'rough'. I think it is my sweet spot. It was a nice experiment, merciless is indeed merciless. Though it seems like the difficulty just suddenly explodes.

Anyway. I have a couple of things in mind:

- Since now we have a wild-life tab, I think it would be a good QoL addition to add an icon to distinguish animals that are in a manhunter state. It's a bit cumbersome to look through the map to find the 5 hares that suddenly went mad.

- Crops die way too quick when cold snaps happen. I waked up my three experienced gardeners in the middle of the night, changed their schedule and priority, and they could not even save 15 % of the crops. Sure, the temperature went from like 6 to -20 in a couple of hours, but they barely last a few hours. Are plants that fragile irl? I have no idea, but in RimWorld, cold snaps are the real blights.

- I have an inland sea near my outpost. I've been getting caravan requests from the other side of the sea. You have to go around it on a trip that takes almost an entire quadrum. It's a shame because the requests had pretty good rewards, but... yeah, it's too far. I don't mind getting missions from far away places, I bet some people would try them, but this seems like the game not taking into consideration impassable tiles. ^{You could also give us boats...}

- It's hard to visually determine the level of growth of healroot.

Some graphs!

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Storyteller: Randy.
Difficulty: Survival Struggle.
Biome/hilliness:  Tropical Rainforest with Large Hills.
Commitment mode: Nope.
Current colony age: 209
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10, maybe? I don't keep track of time.
Complete mod list: None.



Okay. Uranium slug cannons are terrifying. I found a deep deposit and several veins of uranium throughout the map, so I could actually maintain a couple of them. And... yeah, they go BOOM real nice. The rate of fire is slower than I expected when I saw that the barrel must be changed every 40 shots, so it's fairly expensive but also fairly efficient. There only have been a couple of raids since I have them and so far they seem like a worthy investment, though it's definitely not a turret I would spam.

One of the raids I had was really a poison ship. It was my first encounter with a big group of mechanoids. Lancers are certainly okay if they have support from centipedes and scythers, it's just by themselves that they feel underwhelming, but it seems like a good compromise to me.

- Still annoyed at the amount of overhead mountain needed to trigger infestations. I expanded a little bit to have a second freezer and I accidentally left two tiles with an overhead mountain. It took less than a week to spawn one. It feels like I'm being punished for a really minor thing.

- I'm noticing that colonists do not rearm the full durability of the barrel of turrets, they just put whichever amount of stuff they carry.  I'm not a fan of that. I do wish they would fill them up completely, even if it takes them several trips.

- The long-range mineral scanner has been a complete waste of time so far. It hasn't done anything since I build it (three quadrums more or less, It's hard to keep track of time when it's permanent summer and I don't get notices for changing seasons). I think it wasn't being used too much due to research being prioritized. Now that I don't need any more research it should be used more, but half a quadrum has passed and still nothing. I really wish the scanner would give me some feedback, like a percentage of completion until it finds something, or an estimated time remaining. Something.

- Since you're talking about flagstone. There's literally no reason to use it over stone tiles, like... ever. It cost the same, it doesn't yield when deconstructing and it doesn't provide beauty. It's just slightly faster to build. So by building them 1) I'm not saving any resources. 2) I'm wasting the resources if I decide to expand in that direction. 3) I don't get the beauty in areas that colonists will probably frequent. If it can slow or avoid a mood debuff for the unsightly environment then it is useful. 4) The extra time needed to build stone tiles also trains construction skill, so the waiting is actually better long-term.

If I get into a situation where I need to build floor fast regardless of its beauty, then I'm going to use wood. If I don't have wood or flammability is a problem, then it's concrete. If I don't have steel, then I rather build half of the place out of stone tiles, or directly save the blocks for other stuff.

Can we get several arrows pointing to each transport pod in this event? The description is very clear, which I appreciate, but the one arrow draws attention away from the other pods, someone could potentially get tunnel vision and miss the other ones. That almost happened to me before I started scanning the map.

Also, I'm seeing a few visual glitches. The corpses under the elephants freak out a bit when I zoom in and out.

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Storyteller: Randy Random
Difficulty: Survival Struggle
Biome/hilliness: Tropical Rainforest, Large Hills.
Commitment mode: No.
Current colony age (days): 202.
Hours played in the last 2 days: Like... 16 hours... probably a bit more. Don't judge me
Complete mod list: No mods.
Scenario: Crashland.
I decided to try a bit of randomness. I picked Randy and the first random location that wasn't flat. I ended up in a rainforest adjacent to a stone road near two outposts, a tribal and an outlander one.

The difficulty curve in the early game felt really nice, it was just enough pressure to feel the struggle, but it gave me enough breathing room to grow. Of course, with Randy being random, there were hectics moments of action. Raids combined with solar flares; herds of elephants suddenly going manhunter after being harmed; raids of two fronts forcing me to move around. Good stuff.

Some things stood out to me:

- Research feels a bit better paced now. Though I was able to beeline assault rifles by the half of the second year without consequences. Still, once I had the high-tech bench in a sterile environment, with the multi-analyzer and two researchers for day and night shift, it became a became a pretty casual thing. I'm already starting with the spaceship tech.

- Apparently, natural infestations can appear even if there is only one tile under overhead mountains (?). My base is pressing into a small hill, and I've been carefully avoiding digging overhead mountain. At one point I had a choice. Do I want a symmetrical butcher station or one tile of overhead mountain? Bah, it just one tile, it's probably too little for infestations. Nope. They appeared in the kitchen, and in the hospital that was adjacent to it. That just felt a bit cheesy.

- The butcher's table was destroyed (without giving back any resource, though that's one cheap anyway) when a hide appeared under it. The game didn't create a blueprint for the stations (presumingly because of the hide being a solid thing that's occupying the space) while the auto-rebuild thingy was on. It took me a solid five or so minutes to realize it was missing.

- The strength of the insects feels good too. They don't spell DOOM but they can cause a lot of damage. Some of my colonists have lost limbs to them. They're still pretty menacing, especially in tight places.

- Lancers feel weak. Among all the mechanoids, they have been the least dangerous to me. Even at range, they seem to die rather quickly against assault rifles and mini-turrets. Not sure if they don't have much health or little armor, but because they don't look for cover they're easy to hit. I could see how they could be a problem in big numbers though, or grouped with scythers or centipedes, but so far I haven't seen scythers and lancers in the same composition, and lancers don't stay in formation with the centipedes, so... they get killed before those arrive.

- The new art for stuff looks great. The game is prettier than ever. I love how disgusting the insect meat looks, kind of captures why it's no fun to eat. So far, the only one I don't like is the incendiary shell, it kind of looks like wood because it doesn't have a pointy-bullety end. It just doesn't stand out as ammo.

- On the topic of ammo. The autocannon is awesome. It was disappointing at first because I expected it to go BOOM a hit several targets, like... a cannon would. But it didn't. Still, the cost seems very much worth it, its range makes it more viable and efficient to defend large open areas. I haven't tried the uranium slug turret yet, it's use of uranium seems very unappealing. It's probably a leftover from earlier versions when uranium was a lot rarer, now I can just set up a caravan and buy some. But I'll try it next.

- I expected more diseases in a tropical rainforest since I usually play in colder areas, but my god. The description of rainforest when referring to "constant sickness" wasn't a lie. It even came to a point when a colonist had malaria, the flu and gut worms (or fibrate mechanites, I don't recall) at the same time. It has been ruthless. I lost my starting pet in the first week due to plage. It feels overwhelming at times, but I wouldn't say is unbalanced.

- Infections feel good. They're still scary enough that I prioritize tending when my colonists are harmed during a caravan event.

- I like doing caravan quests a lot more now. The rewards feel a lot more tenting, though I still get occasional crappy one. "Kill these five pirates and their turrets and we'll give you this masterwork of a tribal wear!".

- Regarding caravans. There are a couple of things that are unclear, and could potentially be impactful to my decisions as a player.  1) Do colonists prioritize food that will spoil, or that is closer to spoil? 2) What's the ideal visibility for what I want to do? The percentage that appears doesn't convey very well to me how dangerous the mission will be. 3) Does the estimated time to arrive take into account the time a colonist will spend sleeping? 4) Do colonists earn experience towards plant work while foraging in caravans? 5) Does the game autoselect the colonists with the highest social skill to do the trading?
I just think these things could be a bit clearer.

- Lastly. This is from an earlier build, so you might have changed already, but I remember that in combat logs, actions from mini-turrets say something like "Mini-turret's mini-turret gun hit X". It was a bit jarring to read.

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Crashland/Temperate Forest/Large Hills/Cassandra Hard.
8th of Aprimay, 5502.

I had my first infestation. I'm just surprised it took this long, I built a bit too much into the mountain. Though I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a delay. My crafters were not doomed! So, a couple of thoughts:

- The sound-effect of the bugs digging their way up doesn't stop when the game is paused. It's not particularly enjoyable to hear it while you're drafting your pawns and evaluating the situation.
- A bench that was in the way of where a hive was going to spawn completely disappeared. It was a high-tech research bench, meaning 250 steel and 10 components. I don't mind losing the bench because it is my fault, but the materials can be hard to come by, especially components. A partial refund of the things that get destroyed by the appearance of the hives might be fairer and more consistent, considering that it happens in similar situations. The components I used for that bench came from a couple of mini-gun turrets that I destroyed while raiding an item stash, for example.

Oh and the Steam overlay that activates with shift+tab is not working in these and some previous builds, not sure if all of them. Already checked the properties of the game in the steam library and the overlay is activated...

Working fine here, and has throughout all of these builds.

It's working fine on my end as well.

Also:

Are these two supposed to appear together? I know it's a net positive, but it seems a bit contradictory.