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Even when I have separate buildings, I tend to have a perimeter wall set up to avoid enemies being able to just walk up to the colony from any direction. Had one really cool colony that was set on a coast, and there were two spurs of rock that stuck out into deep water, that let me create a nice big wall around the colony that protected it from every direction, and forced invaders to come at it only from one way.

Yeah, it's definitely annoying. I picked up a mod that allows you to lock doors (can set them to "fully locked", "no visitors can use", or "unlocked"), so you can have the door to the foyer/dining area of the colony be unlocked, but the storage areas and bedrooms locked to only colonists, etc.

ergh. C'mon, game, don't be creepy.

You mean like my 14 year old "Rich Explorer" who ran away to a rim world because he was sick of all the free orgies?

I had a 14 year old rich explorer genius who went to the rim to prove that all her theories about building a sustainable colony from nothing were easily accomplished. Was pretty fun. Using Prepare Carefully, I sold off a lot of the stuff that the rich explorer usually starts with (charge rifle, glitterworld meds, pet, etc) and replaced them with lower-tech stuff, then used all those points to bump her skills and traits up. She ended up with 20 in every skill except melee, awesome traits, and enough stuff to start her colony out with ease. Was pretty fun.

I haven't noticed that pop up yet. Then again, it seems like my colonies end up being mostly women for some reason, even though I'm not trying to make them that way.

Though I did get an odd escape pod popup the other day. I use Prepare Carefully, so I can set up my initial colonist(s) how I want, and I usually start them at 14, so I can avoid relationship stuff initially (focus on survival early on, don't worry about screwing, etc). About two years into the colony, an escape pod crashed down and it said the person inside was "ex-husband" of one of the colonists.

Who had started at 14 years old. And he was in his 30's.

Meaning he was married to her when she was 13... ergh. C'mon, game, don't be creepy.

Okay, now do it on ice sheet. 

I've actually found ice sheet to be easier than extreme desert. -100C? Pfft, that's nothing.

Try an extreme desert during a permanent heatwave (got a mod that allows that and permanent cold snaps), where the temperature outside the base is hovering around 120C. Even people in camel hair dusters and cowboy hats have to limit their time outdoors or they start suffering. And people without them? Yeah, don't even LOOK at the door to outside, or you'll catch fire and die. Had one person that I forgot to set to "stay the hell inside" walk out to repair a busted geothermal generator that was a short walk away. About 10s later, "colonist needs rescue!"

I've been enjoying the super-extremes lately. The permanent heatwave/cold snap mod is a lot of fun. For added fun, try an extreme desert, permanent heatwave, permanent toxic fallout, on a flat map where you can't just dig into a mountain. Trying to keep your buildings livable is rough.

About the medical concept, surgeons are modern era more or less, back then people resorted to other types of practitioners and you should include some sort of witchcraft. Instead of the traditional 3 clothes, 1 herb and 1 neutroamine...replace with chicken blood, Warg leg and monkey head maybe?

-facepalm-

Yoshida, people born before 1950 weren't morons, they were just uneducated. Medicine has been practiced for as long as humans have been human, or around 200,000 years or so.

They found all sorts of evidence of the ancient Egyptians practicing brain surgery, dentistry, etc. There was one particular one I remember where they found a skeleton that had had a hole cut into his skull to relieve some pressure from a brain hemorrhage or something, and the wound indicated that the guy had lived another good 15-20 years past that, so it clearly worked. They identified where the problem was, and fixed it. In like 1500 BC.

I've been playing around with various defense setups lately. Killboxes, trap halls, switchbacks for kiting, etc. The "easiest" is probably the trapped hallway, as it doesn't require power and funnels the enemies down a narrow passage into the base, forcing them to march over traps while being shot at. The switchback kiting setup works really well early on, but later in the game it becomes useless, as there are simply too many raiders to deal with. Then of course there's the standard killbox, which I used for ages, creating a large box with turrets on 2-3 sides, just blasting anything that entered it. The downside to that of course is the sheer amount of power required to run 15-20 turrets, and the fact that they can still be blown to hell by late-game tech raiders with grenades and doom launchers.

My current game(s) are trying out a "tribal only" world where a bunch of colonists have crash landed onto a primitive backwater, and have to try and survive. I start them at the "tribal" level so that research takes a long time, to simulate that they're having to scrape together tech knowledge from incomplete records, just what they remember, etc. It's kind of fun to try to fight off hordes of angry savages with the tiny group of heroic "high tech" people, though early on they're typically armed with bolt-action rifles.

Sadly, I found out that a desert world doesn't really "work", as the tribals refuse to raid due to the extreme temperature. Since they can't use dusters or cowboy hats, they simply won't raid at all, as the planet averages about 150F, with summer spiking up to 230F. Haven't had any mad animal attacks either. So I guess I'm going to have to abandon that game, which is unfortunate.

I tend to play on the largest map size, as I enjoy having tons of space to work with, and the game doesn't lag until I get a TON of people on the map at once (late-game raids with 100+ members), or there's a huge fire. Lately I've been playing with ice sheet/extreme desert maps though, so no fires to be had.

My current extreme desert is pretty fun, though it's definitely a challenge to keep the colony from overheating when the temp outside the door is pushing 230F.

I have no favority site, I want something new every time I play.

Same here. I just started a new little colony on a mountainous ice sheet, and there are 3 steam geysers in the valley I chose, and another 3-4 vents within easy reach, so we'll have TONS of power to fuel all the hydroponics.

I'm curious how some of these defenses would stack up against some of the massive raids my colony has been seeing. We've been there for 5 years at this point (because I planned to have the colony stick around, not leave), and have over time accumulated a LOT of wealth, grown in size, etc. 15 colonists, around 50k silver lying around, thousands of other resources, etc.

The last tribal raid we fended off (barely) was nearly 100 strong. It literally froze my computer for a good 20 seconds while they loaded onto the map. I've got a killbox set up with about 12 turrets firing at max range across a well-lit area (the turrets themselves are roofed, behind sandbags, and in darkness to provide better cover), the raiders had to walk a heavily-trapped switchback to enter the killbox, and the colonists are firing from behind sandbags and single-space walls for cover. Despite all that, we still took significant damage. One colonist lost an eye and had two ribs shattered, another colonist lost a hand, and two others were downed and nearly bled to death before we finally fended the raid off and made them run.

Weapons-wise, they're using primarily ARs, charge rifles, and incendiary launchers (to try and inflict damage when the enemies clump up, which they always do in these numbers).

It's fun, honestly, to see just how ridiculous the raids get. But without a killbox and all the traps, I don't see how we'd survive the raids.

I always leave one tile between beds and walls.

I don't generally run power through the bedrooms, just on the edge that lies along the hallway, so that there are lights in the hall. The bedrooms are typically kept dark. Though the other day I did have a kind of amusing Zzzt, it went up in the deep drill I had that was down a REALLY long series of mining tunnels I'd dug into the mountainside, while the colonists were all asleep. It was happily burning along the conduit by the time they woke up, walked over and went "oh hey, one little fire, I'll just put that out...hey, where'd that mile-long power line go...?"

Something I'd like to see added to storage filters for the apparel stuff: "allow dead pawn items" y/n.

Right now there's only "allow non-dead pawn items", meaning the default is to store items looted off corpses in the storage space, with the ability to add non-corpse-items as well. I'd much rather see "allow dead pawn items y/n" as the option, so that it would default to things you've crafted or stripped off still-living enemies, and then have the OPTION of adding corpse-looted items as well.

As it is right now, if you want to store all your crafted clothing in a storage space, you have to fiddle with the durability sliders, but even then there may be some corpse items that slip in there, due to the stuff on the corpse being high durability.

It seems odd that it's backwards.

[everything]

Same here, I always have so many crop fields that in the past I had to store it unrefrigerated. In the end 50% of my micromanagement was sorting out which bag of rice/ corn/ potatoes is going to rot soon so that I better process it next.
With Extended Storage all those immense masses of food are neatly frozen now and I could survive a 10 years long winter if I have to (in my last game I had about 70.000 milk and even I got the feeling that it's slowly getting a bit too much...).

It's really funny how many people tend to hoard everything in computer games with this "maybe I'll need this later" mentality.

Let me know when you found out which wall lights mod it is, there seem to be a few out there but none of them updated for A17 as far as I can see..

I've never had quite THAT much food stored up, though between various veggies and stuff, I've probably had 20-30k worth sitting in the freezer, along with 500ish prepped meals.

I don't really hoard everything, I just toss it into storage bins for when I can offload it on traders. The moment a weapons trader swings by, they end up walking away with like 50+ weapons and junk I don't need. Just like making tons of smokeweed joints and yayo to unload and make extra cash. Some of the yayo I save for making adrenaline rib replacements, but most of it I sell.

I just started a new colony last night in another little valley, which has two geothermal vents in it. Not quite the same "bwahaha, unlimited powah!" that the other one had, but eh, we'll make do. Had a distress call from a decent pawn early on, and then managed to recruit the leader of a raid that came after us shortly thereafter, so we're up to 5 people now. Soon we'll have all our buildings done and tech in place, so we can start up our organ-farming business!

I got REALLY lucky with the valley I ended up in. Not only is it locked away and nicely secure, but there were FOUR geothermal vents in the valley (and another one right beyond a narrow section of mountain, so I could easily tie it into the grid). So the moment we got to geothermal power our power problems were over forever.

Here's the base: https://imgur.com/a/bdKh5
And here's a longer shot of the valley: https://imgur.com/tWNSQYl

This valley is just perfect! You made good use of it with your base!
I also can't live without extended storage anymore and edited the cloth racks so they can be used for weapons as well. It makes such a difference and looks so much better when 70% of your base won't consist of huge stockpile zones anymore.
What are those wall lights you are using? I was looking for something like that.

Yeah, I was totally jazzed when I found it. "Ooh, there's two vents. Wait, three! FOUR! Oh my god!"

Extended storage is such a huge boon. I remember back before I found it, my freezers would be like 10x10 so they could store everything (I tend to make big crop fields, so I have TONS of food, both to sell and earn some silver as well as to ride out cold snaps, long winters, etc). Now I can get away with a little 6x6 freezer and have 3-4 racks for meals, holding a couple hundred. Plus the "Fridge" mod that allows for refridgerators, so I set them up out in the dining area, so the freezer becomes more of "long term storage".

The wall lights I think are a mod just called "wall lights", but I don't remember. I'll have to look it up when I get home from work. They're really handy, though. Not very bright, as they only illuminate out to about 3-4 squares from where they are, but 4 of them make a 5x7 room nicely lit, and they only require 5 steel to build, and cost 15 power. Some of my larger bases have 100+ of them.

It depends on the events. I start with a big room, getting everything set up. Then I move on with a nice 6 room bedroom box... and then go nuts making whatever I need at the time in a mess of rooms.

My usual style is to get the kitchen/dining area set up and arranged first, and just set up beds in there early on. Everyone can sleep next to the food prep, so they can just roll out of bed, get something to eat, and get to work.

Next typically comes the bedrooms, then the med lab (because they're starting to get noticed by raiders and such), and finally a construction building with the crafting tools. Early on I generally only have a stone block cutting table and a research bench, since that's all I need to get through the first couple quadrums, while the colonists are hollowing out the hillsides to make rooms in.