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Wow, absolute zero is possible even on Sea Ice!  What did you do about mechanoids?

So far I've either lucked out, or my abysmal wealth level has kept them away. I'm trying to build a collection of plasteel turrets that can be strategically deployed to fight off a mechanoid attack for me, since I can't keep my people outside long enough to even fire enough rounds off. I'll probably need to wall off an area such that they have to go through a choke point, forcing them into range of all turrets at once.

Excellent analysis, dkmoo! Can't wait to hear what you find out about boomalopes, that one's a real point of curiosity since presumably milking a boomalope will be less labor intensive than operating the refinery. Plus in a pinch I think of them as a poor man's cruise missile.

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words! This scenario honestly placates the control freak in me. If I were playing in grasslands, I'd be preoccupied with keeping trees from growing out of control, eliminating every last boulder from every meadow to maximize grass growth for a herd of combat rhinoceroses, walling off the entire map so that literally every land assault goes through the killbox without disturbing anything, and so on. It's all a bit much. Nothing really happens in the cold without my say-so. In real life, I'm signed up to be cryopreserved at -196C post-mortem, so you might say this is a theme for me.

Thanks pekt99, I read your post and decided to share the latest. This scenario is really simple to set up, just copy The Rich Explorer and add permanent Volcanic Winter, Solar Eclipse, cold snaps every 0.18 days (repeating), and play it on the coldest tile of sea ice you can find on the coldest world you can generate.

With that said, I don't think it's possible to survive here for long without save scumming. My whole starting strategy revolved around having an awesome artist, buying raw mats from orbital traders, and adding value by making sculptures.

I won't mince words. This plan did not work. I couldn't really make enough profit to buy food and replacement components, let alone expand the base. I save scummed to get some high value sculptures, and expanded the base using the proceeds. Orbital trade deals are just too lossy, and art doesn't add enough value to overcome the inefficiency of both buying materials at a premium, and selling the finished goods at a discount, not even with 20 art and 10 social (no way to practice social..). I'd really welcome suggestions for an alternative starter strategy.

Anyway here's the album:

https://imgur.com/a/t7UW6

@Androsynth
Wish you recorded that playthrough so i could watch it during long nights in work.
I thought about doing same with constant meteorites and tornadoes maybe flash storms but it turned out to be boring.

It'd be a slow watch because I have to micromanage almost everything that's going on. Every construction project is a major risk to all involved, and if I don't keep peoples' zones constantly updated and keep an eye on their hypothermia level, someone will find a way to die within a few minutes. And I really can't afford to lose anyone - 2 years in, and not a single escape pod has crashed close enough to a base entrance that I could even dream about rescuing them, even if I had people right at that entrance waiting to go, which I most often don't.

Thank you so much for sharing the numbers with everyone. I did a brief experiment last night and was shocked with the efficiency. Refining 4 simple meals yielded 35 chemfuel, filled a generator with 25 of that and it said it was good to go for 150 hours. So 70 raw food vs 4 simple meals, it looks like there's definitely a benefit to cooking the food first, which makes the closed cycle even more nuts. It's a lot of work growing, hauling, cooking, and loading, so it remains to be seen how practical it will be for a population that has a VERY hard time expanding, but still very good to know, in light of power production issues!

Pluto indeed. I mean it makes sense that the Rimworld you happen to crashland on isn't necessarily hospitable.

Have you actually experimented with using chemfuel produced directly from food to run generators and grow more food? That idea never occurred to me, just the boomalope thing. And there's actually surplus? Is it enough surplus to be worthwhile? Is it more worthwhile to use cooked or uncooked food?

Running outside to collect what the orbital trader sends down is a harrowing experience, let me tell you. I always keep a colonist on standby to run out and rescue whoever attempts it, and the corridor to the outside is so cold that the rescue dude is also suffering from hypothermia before he's even deployed. You almost need a second tier of rescuers in a warmer area - one guy to haul in the initial victim and one to haul the one that rescued him.

The -270C playthrough has been proceeding nicely. I've totally given up on farming in gravel, which had been a staple in past ice sheet games. It's completely infeasible to warm a room that isn't under an overhead mountain - half the room's space winds up being used for heaters, and good luck powering them all. Using the awesome insulating properties of overhead mountain is the only way to create any kind of useful heated space. That, plus 4 layers of wall 1-block thick each, all air gapped 1 block from each other, and the heating situation is downright manageable indoors. Temperatures go from 10C indoors, to -80C, -170C, and -230C in the air gapped layers, and finally -270C outdoors. Those layers are totally uninhabitable, but it's better to share a wall with a -80C room than -270C, and it's just trapping waste heat so there is no ongoing cost.

Power production is the big challenge, because without it there is no heat and no food. I'm really limited to wind power, geothermal, and starship reactors. Geothermal would be great, if I could access the thermal vents... but I can't. They're too far away outdoors. There are like ten vents on the map, and only 1 is even remotely accessible by digging my way through a mountain and heating the corridors as I go. This takes way more heaters than you'd imagine. Starship reactors cost a fortune just for 1000w output, so basically it's all wind turbines + batteries to cover the unreliable production.

There have been points where the wind died, the batteries drained, and most of the base shut down. We had to retreat to the smallest, most central rooms, and direct all power to those heaters just to keep colonists alive. Orbital traders are showing up and I'm sending them meals made from hydroponically grown rice. If I see some for sale, I would very seriously consider buying boomalopes to let me convert rice into chemfuel and therefore produce my own fuel for use as an emergency power source. That makes me wonder whether that'd be a sustainable cycle.. boomalopes -> chemfuel -> power -> heat & hydroponic rice -> meals -> boomalopes. If there's any profit in it, that could be a model for future growth.

Best thing that happened so far is orbital traders selling me a breeding pair of alpacas. The guy with the alpaca wool parka, tribalwear and tuque is comfortable in -160C, which means he can travel long distances through tunnels that are barely heated at all. Tunnel heating was a huge burden, so even though it's still dangerous to travel even 15 tiles outside in the heavy snow, the cold weather gear still makes a huge difference indoors.

How do you see these "hidden" temperatures?

Mouse-over the solid portion of a mountain. The temperature displayed can be substantially lower than -270, while the outside appears locked at -270.

Playing standard unmodded crashlanded/tribe is irrelevant unless you want to see how many days you can survive.
There actually is one feature in vanilla that could carry you pretty long and that is molotov and incendiary launcher. You don't need any fuel to keep up fire except large enough empty room or small cave.

I attempt to mod my coldsnaps to be far more powerfull and far more frequent so i don't have to stack them in scenario. This would allow raids and all other sh*it that game offers with possibility to wait out human raid or manhunter pack, except mechanoids.

SzQ

I am definitely interested in seeing how long the colony can survive, as unmodded as possible. In my latest attempt, we actually made it to hydroponics, so pretty sure it's sustainable with the only beneficial mods being "no Zzzt" and "no solar flare". Even those are theoretically survivable by keeping a stockpile of wood, and growing trees in gravel.

I experimented with the grenade launcher for heat in one game. It would be tough to distribute the heat, and a pain to micromanage constantly firing the weapon, but you're right that it could be a life saver. How were you able to mod cold snaps if you don't mind my asking?

You'd probably be immune to Raids though, since even Mechanoids have a minimum operating temperature.  Drop pods could still get you though, and you'd never be able to increase your population since wanderers cannot survive.

Insectoids and drop pods! Although in both cases, as long as they're not scythers, I can sort of evacuate the area and turn off the heaters. They won't last too long like that. There are so many doors everywhere to keep the various heat pockets contained that a raid would have a really tough time getting very far before the long, cold slumber sets in.

And I just realized, I can build an orbital trade console and buy slaves from the pirate ships! If they aren't useful as workers, they're at least a good source or organs, and protein.

Maybe for flavor, there should also be a permanent Eclipse, to represent the loss of the sun.  And without the sun, there will be no more solar flares!  Prrrrroblem solved!

Funny you should mention that! I actually do have permanent volcanic winter and solar eclipse enabled already, as I was hoping they'd help reduce the temperature further. Should probably add some more outdoor perils.. will toxic fallout kill Scythers I wonder? or maybe constant flash storms..

Stacking cold-snaps that gradually plunge your world into freezing is a cool way to do an "A Pail of Air" scenario.

Desperately try to gather supplies for a survival bunker as the world slowly turns into a desolate frozen wasteland around you.  Maybe start with geothermal tech.

Your last line describes the scenario really nicely! Those first 3 days are a mad scramble to gather what you can. I threw up a little hut with some fires in it to get through the first day, but the range you can travel from the hut starts out very low (max precipitation = heavy snow everywhere, slow travel) and your effective range decreases by the hour. Protip: You can extend your range further by letting one pawn go so far that he falls unconscious on the trip back, and have a second pawn lined up to carry him home before he dies.

Geothermal would've been great to have at the start, although the distance from spawn that you'd have to run to reach it could be a deal breaker. I guess that's when you try a few maps until you find one nice and close. Then again, the amount of steel you start with would barely get you 1 geotherm and a couple of heaters. If you weren't mining iron almost immediately for more heaters, you'd freeze.

I edited the scenario to eliminate Zzzt events and solar flares, because those are both game enders in this environment. I'm not a fan of Zzzt in general because it means you can't count on batteries to be there when you need them. Why spend the time, space and resources on batteries, plus the resources to generate a power surplus to charge them, if they may dump their full charge when you need it most? If it only dumped half a charge, that would be survivable. You could just budget for the loss and avoid a full blown outage. I could live with that.

I left solar flares on for an early game where the lowest temp I saw was -125C. You can save your crops with enough camp fires, but where do you get the wood? You have to grow trees indoors for warmth, and I grow them in gravel because there's no dirt on ice sheet. Just getting 8 to 10 Cecropias to maturity is a logistical nightmare.

Wow, that's pretty cold!  Dead in 10 seconds of exposure...

It's sort of funny that despite how energy-efficient heaters are, even that's not enough to save you from absolute zero.

You'd probably be immune to Raids though, since even Mechanoids have a minimum operating temperature.  Drop pods could still get you though, and you'd never be able to increase your population since wanderers cannot survive.

Incidentally, Mechanoids show a minimum operating temperature of -100C, but they suffer no ill effects of going all the way down to -270C. They could totally wreck my base by destroying a couple of doors, and I can't go outside to fight them. Best I could do would be install turrets just outside the base entrance. I'm considering turning Mechanoid spawn frequency to 0 just because they aren't obeying their temperature limit like I had hoped.

Another interesting thing I've found is that, although -270C is the lowest temperature the game will display for a room or the outdoors, it is not actually the lowest possible temperature in the game. Behind the scenes, it appears able to descend considerably below -270C. When I mouse over a mountain, it'll show -350C and lower, and I believe this may be the actual uncapped temperature.

What's even more interesting to me is that the uncapped temperature is actually affecting the game when doing heat transfer calculations. This effect is not just happening in mountains, where I can see the uncapped temperature, but also affects free standing buildings. Here's how that test went:

A free standing building with a 7x7 room and 1 heater and a single door in -270C outdoor weather (-290C uncapped) was stabilizing at -239C interior temperature. Nice and toasty!

The same exact building in -270C outdoor weather (-350C uncapped) was stabilizing at -269C interior temperature.

In other words, Winter is still a serious threat, even if you've already hit -270C outside and you think it can't get any worse.

Thanks for the cold snap stacking tip! I just concluded my first game on a world tile with -55C average temperature, plus permanent volcanic winter + solar eclipse, and a cold snap every 0.183 days. Day 1 starts around -40C, by day 2 it's -150C or so, by day 3 it's -270C outside.

It ended poorly on day 4. Things had been going well up till then; I actually had potatoes growing in a large enough tract of gravel to support all 3 colonists, and enough heaters to keep the whole 11x11 room warmed up to 13C, but I didn't budget enough iron + components. 5 wind turbines + 2 batteries just couldn't keep 28 heaters and a sun lamp going. There's literally no way to cross the 20 tile outdoor run to a nearby hill to claim its iron.

The only abundant building material is stone blocks, and they just take so damn long to construct outside. I'd estimate fatal outdoor exposure is somewhere between 8 and 10 seconds wearing a starter jacket in -270C.