New disasters

[harvald]

Post your ideas for new disasters.
Mine:
- flood (when rivers burst its banks)
- earthquake

[Limdood]

Overgrowth...Suddenly NATURAL plants start growing at an alarming rate, covering the mass in slowing grass, trees, and even having grass grow up on soil tiles covered with flooring, breaking the flooring.  Would be an interesting mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks.

[SpaceDorf]

Meteors.

Overgrowth...

Damn .. thats a scary and good one ..
how I learned to stop worrying and love the pyromaniac.

[Bolgfred]

Some ideas, ordered from common to weird

strong wind
Having a strength and and direction, that reduces speed against and buffs speed within its direction. Above strength 50% or bft 6, if you want, objects outside can be moved.

dust storm
Reducing sight

Hail
Damaging heads outside

Steel eating termites
eating steel walls, buildings or objects, like weapons. could be spawned like animals or they spawn like blight on several steel tiles, reducing hp until they get cleaned like blood.

Spooking ghosts
Not be a ghost for real, but colonists who have the "seen a corpse" debuff might get nightmares or panic attacks by day with no reason. Could be addad as hediff 'paranoia' and spread with others by chatting.

Pyromanics on the run
Some Raiders or tribals enter the map and start igniting everything they see(trees, items, animals or colonists).
They keep going until they kill themselves, or after 8 hours of visiting.

Artillery strike
Some long mortar has focused your colony. Causing 5-20 mortar shells dropping in a row on the map. focusing buildings(player or tombs), living things or random landscape.

Fire Wave
This is a wave and it burns!!
Caused by an explosion or some filthy magic or whatever.
This spawns at the end of the map, rolling across a line, igniting everything on its path depending on its flamability (could be compared with 3 seconds of standin in a fire or something).
When hitting an obstacle like a wall or house, it causes an additional explosion.
Mothers!
(if this sounds ridiculous to you, you're right)
Some colonists mother appears on the map, trying to persuade her child to leave (recruit attempt) and if this fails, taking him/her by force

[Limdood]

Keep in mind, most events should allow prevention of death/serious injury. 
If an event has an impact on the game but that impact can be mitigated or dealt with in a way that makes sense, and can be implemented AS the event fires, or right after, then it is a good gameplay event.

Examples of "Good" events:
Toxic fallout (injury or death is slow, transparent, and avoidable, even if preparations are not undertaken until the fallout hits)
Blight (except in extreme circumstances, starvation takes some time to hit following a blight, allowing the player time to adjust)
Pretty much any raid EXCEPT drop pods on your head
My overgrowth idea in above posts (inflicts a hardship...something that COULD hurt the colony, but able to be mitigated)
Poison or psychic ships are great examples...the event is there, steadily inflicting hardship, but YOU decide when the danger triggers
Extreme mood breaks (despite the unavoidable risk of death once berserk happens, there is plenty of warning and ways to counter the mood loss that precedes it)

Then there are events where injury or death could be prevented, but only if you'd acted a certain way to prepare before the event fires at all.  These are DUBIOUS events.  In all honesty, they could use some tweaking...they have the potential to make people completely ragequit, but technically they ARE avoidable.

some examples of "dubious" events are:
Mass animal insanity waves (sometimes a pawn was so far from base that there is literally NOTHING you could do to save him once the event triggers - you could have avoided sending the pawn out that far, but thats cold comfort once the event hits and you're toast already)
Herd hunting revenge (like mass insanity, when your first shot at a deer in a herd of 11 triggers all of them manhunter, there is likely nothing that will save that hunter.  Sure you could have drafted a bunch of pawns and mass-fired the herd down, but when the game's DEFAULT hunting mechanic can "often" trigger hunter death at the hands of DEER, it feels like a dubious event).
Zzzzt events - These can often cost people entire colonies until the player learns the exact ins & outs of every aspect of both batteries and the event itself.  technically avoidable with "offline" batteries, all stone structures, and minimal power reserves, this event gets a "dubious" due to its inevitability, ragequit potential, and the insane and counterintuitive hoops you have to jump through to prevent it, especially early game.
Most of the events in-game that, even if the game pauses the instant that they trigger, if you look over the map and there is NOTHING you could possibly do to save a pawn other than reload the game, thats a dubious event (i'm not talking a lucky shot in a raid...which is still frustrating, but just simple math).

Finally there are the BAD events.  Those are completely, unavoidably troll events....there's nothing you could have done to stop it, or if there were, the hoops you had to jump through were so ludicrous as to just feel like a giant "screw you" from the game.

Examples of "Bad" events:
The "traitor" event that used to exist (there used to be an event which would randomly pick a pawn and declare that they were a double agent working for a hostile faction.  The pawn would instantly turn irrevocably hostile...technically they could still be incapacitated, imprisoned, and recruited, but the game's "chance for instant death upon downing" means that depending on a die roll, the game could literally just "pick and kill" a pawn.
Any variation on "meteor," "cave-in," or anything resembling a sudden damaging effect on a part of the map with no answer (technically lightning falls into this category, and despite it's rarity, having a fluke lightning strike burn out a colonist's eye is frustrating to the extreme).  Events like that, where a rock (or ceiling, or "off-map mortar shell) could just fall on and kill a colonist and too-bad-nothing-you-could-have-done are terrible game design and make games LESS fun.
I'd argue that the pyromaniac traits, and to a degree, social fights fall into this category as well....there is NO way to prevent them, and pyromaniac could easily spell the death of (at least) the pyro himself, since he wanders aimlessly and breaks with no actual preventable stimulus.  The social fights can and have resulted in pawn permanent disfigurement and death, even on the "first fight" or with passing guests.  Technically schedules could be adjusted for pawns that hate each other, but it often can't prevent any problems from the first fight that 2 pawns have, or visitors from friendly factions.


I bother typing out all of this, because any new events should strive VERY VERY VERY hard to fall into the "good" category.  It is important to remember that this is a game, played by a real human, and with any game, the player wants to feel like they have some agency.  Player decisions should matter and be meaningful.

[Crow_T]

I think on Rough difficulty and higher having the chance of a severe disaster, eg. earthquake or tornado, happen is fine. Some people want the experience of building big beautiful bases, but others want the challenge of rebuilding after disaster.        Anyhow, adding a contagious element to some diseases could be interesting.
   Not sure about the implementation of it, but having earthquakes or even slow destructive lava flows that happen near geysers could be cool, plus it would balance them out a bit. Having a more extreme volcanic winter could be interesting, have it hit slower but be more extreme in temperature.
   Raiders could attack from multiple directions, or set up multiple siege locations in late game.  I like the idea of burners, siege type raids that just set fires and harass. I also think raiders could continue to attack while kidnapping downed colonists.

[dodo2]

Overgrowth...Suddenly NATURAL plants start growing at an alarming rate, covering the mass in slowing grass, trees, and even having grass grow up on soil tiles covered with flooring, breaking the flooring.  Would be an interesting mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks.

that would be a cool idea, and depending on biome it would hit you in different ways automatically. in a desert this is a welcome increase of cacti, but in a tropical forest the decrease in movement speed and risk of terrifying fire could hit really hard.

[SpaceDorf]

I bother typing out all of this, because any new events should strive VERY VERY VERY hard to fall into the "good" category. 

True, all of it.
I only beg to differ about the Social Fights.
Humans are unpredictable and Stupid. And if you apply this filter to any movie or story you know it boils down to
" someone did something really really stupid and/or someone was acting like an asshole. " the outside elements of the story are just a catalyst for the mentioned behavior.

What I wished for in Social behavior would be an interface that would help me predict such situations better.

I think on Rough difficulty and higher having the chance of a severe disaster, eg. earthquake or tornado, happen is fine.

You can also enable/disable some events in the Scenario editor. But giving a Difficulty Factor and a Category to events would help in configuring the Macho/Masochist Settings.

@Limdood again.
What you said about Asteroids and Stuff coming from the sky is actually not as bad as you describe it.
Lighntning being the most dangerous event of all, because you really have no warning at all before it strikes.
Which sound absolutely correct to everybody who has seen a thunderstorm just once.

For this I would like to see more weather prediction messages .. clouds are gathering, it's going to rain soon,
clear skys this day is going to get really hot or cold, dark clouds are gathering real quick .. looks like a storm is coming. Instead of the boring "let's dial it to ELEVEN !!! " weather events

Losing Track here.
What I wanted to say is : the Skyfall events are actually all alike.

Droppods with Goods, Droppods with Enemies .. you get a small time warning, you get a rough location, and if you look at the shadows of the pods you have a very exact location with some seconds to spare ..

If you would handle Asteroids the same way they would be "semi"-safe and quite fun.
Skullywags old RazorRain event was a good example for that .. "shit is going to fall from the sky .. better stay inside "

But I know this was your basic message all along. It is not about the content of the event, but about the implementation.

[Slimy_Slider]

Just a quick suggestion for the Artillery Strike idea. Maybe, to avoid the whole 'meaningful gameplay event' issue, it could work through a marker system. For example, the event might begin with several flares being shot into your base, these would mark areas that would be targeted. Sometime in the next 24 hours (there should probably be a notified period before the first shot is fired to allow for things to be moved), shots would be fired within a certain radius of these flares. There could be a random chance of the shells being explosive, incendiary or EMP. This would hopefully provide a situation in which the event creates some danger and disrupts your colony without being completely unavoidable.

This is just a casual suggestion, please treat it that way.

[Bolgfred]

This is just a casual suggestion, please treat it that way.

No, I take this one personally.

Just a quick suggestion for the Artillery Strike idea. Maybe, to avoid the whole 'meaningful gameplay event' issue, it could work through a marker system. For example, the event might begin with several flares being shot into your base, these would mark areas that would be targeted. Sometime in the next 24 hours (there should probably be a notified period before the first shot is fired to allow for things to be moved), shots would be fired within a certain radius of these flares. There could be a random chance of the shells being explosive, incendiary or EMP.

I was already thinking about a flare system as that some flares are thrown on the map, an if you're quick you can carry them wherevery you like, but then I thought the strikes are random as I thought more about an ancient artillery found by raiders or tribals, but there could be both. A cannon found by raiders shooting randomly on the map, which is just a cannonball, doing blunt damage and leaving a massive cannonball which can be recycled afterwards :-)
The other one could be a real artillery strike, firstly throwing flares then launching shells from different types.
For both I thought about a cannon noise 10-20 seconds before strike, so when you hear the sound you make all your pawns move, or(if the artillery focus was humans) they might get hit.
All-in-All these shouldn't hit anyone who is caring a little bit.

A more advanced and fancy thing I'd really like, would be, that every raid uses mortars.
This would happen whenever there is no clear target because of massive walls. Then some raiders will leave the map and 1-3 mortar shells per leaving raider will be shot at the base, to make a clear path.
That could be a workaround for raiders hitting random walls.

[SpaceDorf]

This is just a casual suggestion, please treat it that way.

No, I take this one personally.

Just a quick suggestion for the Artillery Strike idea. Maybe, to avoid the whole 'meaningful gameplay event' issue, it could work through a marker system. For example, the event might begin with several flares being shot into your base, these would mark areas that would be targeted. Sometime in the next 24 hours (there should probably be a notified period before the first shot is fired to allow for things to be moved), shots would be fired within a certain radius of these flares. There could be a random chance of the shells being explosive, incendiary or EMP.

I was already thinking about a flare system as that some flares are thrown on the map, an if you're quick you can carry them wherevery you like, but then I thought the strikes are random as I thought more about an ancient artillery found by raiders or tribals, but there could be both. A cannon found by raiders shooting randomly on the map, which is just a cannonball, doing blunt damage and leaving a massive cannonball which can be recycled afterwards :-)
The other one could be a real artillery strike, firstly throwing flares then launching shells from different types.
For both I thought about a cannon noise 10-20 seconds before strike, so when you hear the sound you make all your pawns move, or(if the artillery focus was humans) they might get hit.
All-in-All these shouldn't hit anyone who is caring a little bit.

A more advanced and fancy thing I'd really like, would be, that every raid uses mortars.
This would happen whenever there is no clear target because of massive walls. Then some raiders will leave the map and 1-3 mortar shells per leaving raider will be shot at the base, to make a clear path.
That could be a workaround for raiders hitting random walls.

I like the Idea of Raiders reinforcing themselves, instead of blindly charging and a Tribal Siege would be another likely Idea.

But I would prefer if those Ideas could be discussed in another Thread and keep this thread
with natural disasters.

As former Artillery Soldier myself .. you don't want your base under realistic Artillery Fire.
This would be an uncounterable TPK Event. The only thing worse would be the Message :
You detected an incoming ICBM, time to impact 2 hours.

After Limdoods description these are very Bad events.
You can only counter them if you are Batman levels of prepared and you know in advance that something like this can happen. If not, you are screwed.

[Bolgfred]

But I would prefer if those Ideas could be discussed in another Thread and keep this thread
with natural disasters.

>>>Done here(or is it 'Here Done'?)<<<