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Another thing to note about devil strand is the heat resistance. This can mean the difference between a standing pawn and a downed pawn during a raid if even 1 person is able to burn them. So in this case I see huge benefit for this material. For torso protection and burn protection. Benefits for protecting legs and arms seem to hold less value for me.

@ahafee
There is no fun in journey. If you like encounters you can do quests. If you like traveling you better play Fallout)

Regarding drugs. Just control mood well and you won't need hard drugs.
My current run is with one pawn so even one usage of hard drug can be lethal. If you have several good doctors this offsets risks. But that only means that you should have reserve of go-juice for hard fights. If you are using other drugs then you can't safely use go-juice when needed (because of overdose).
So no matter how you play you shouldn't use hard drugs except go-juice.

I'm doing a run right now where I've used flake and yayo twice. Event that caused dead father (failed mission) during an injury and another time for a colonist with hypersensitivity during drone event. I do this mainly in the event of a huge raid arriving or other bad moments. In a perfect world it isn't needed. As for original topic. I see no downside to psychite tea if used for mood and not recreation.

@ashafee
Actually no, wealth management is enough for merciless, you don't need any other skill. I know finishing my Really Merciless Naked Brutality run and I don't use any wealth management techniques except "don't own useless stuff" and it's enough to keep wealth below 20k before making the ship. If I was fully using all the mechanics, I could make and launch ship while keeping raids at starting minimum (when there is one melee raider only). While keeping 2-years worth of food in storage, and all goodies that I want.

My statement gave more so options on all the things you can do to make it easier by the level of skill they are. I did say I don't min max (as in wealth management to extremes) in my games. I do a little but not by much. Overall it is just having a plan.

@ashafee
Why caravan when you can make drop pods and then launch yourself to the final destination?
Also I think that friendly AI quest makes it too easy.

Regarding managing your mood. Every drug except tea and beer has risk of disaster from every dose. And Murphy law says that if something bad can happen it will happen. Considering that you can have zero mental breaks by other means all other drugs seems unnecessary.

I don't like drop pods personally. I find the journey more fun. I didn't want to turn my response into a guide about how to use drugs but every person is on a drug policy. Risky drugs at the lowest level of options. Some colonist are amazing additions but might be depressive. My point is that people really shouldn't fear drugs but utilize them sparingly (basically like it is in real life) . I never let pawns use it for recreation but they are all set on mood %s.

Every time my pawns get injured I pull 1 back at a time and heal them. I have an outpost hospital. I know that if my pawn has a arm injury they are lower priority because they won't die, vitals get first priority.  With my current strategy vitals protection is more important.

Your base looks massive. I bet there isn't much available space on that quad of the map. Seems like they pick a corner of the map to travel to based on random. Also a tendency to be far from you if it is possible.

That would be such a huge over hall to everything balance in the game I would cry for Tyran. The system works pretty well right now. Changing it would cause a cascade of work that would never end. Plus the reasons mentioned above.

Torso breaks colonist dies. Feet/hands break the colonist can keep fighting. I'd say early on protect all things and later on the vitals because hands and feet are replaceable.

Information is needed to give you any advice.

Difficulty level
-Effects advice on your horrible defense (or could be overkill defense depending on difficulty)

End goal (do you plan on doing the ship mission or just a predetermined goal for "winning")
- This effects advice on telling you if you should ditch the base all together and go caravanning

Play style
- Do you actually care about astetics or do you just want to min max for efficency.

Most importantly. No one should really tell you how to play this game. It is suppose to be a custom story for you. The game is designed to hurt you and help you over and over. Every time a colonist dies the game in some ways becomes easier.

Small tips to just improve your next base design. (just so I add value to the reply)
-Even small bedrooms are better than barracks. (They make huge difference with mood)
-Kitchen being a small separate room in a location no one but the cook has a reason to travel to helps keep it clean. Butchering creatures the next room over connected by doors that never close.
-Smoothing/making stone/floors improves beauty of a room way better than using wood (plus doesn't burn down or break as easy).

-Corn is best crop for produing the most food for least amount of labor.
-You can plant crops infront of your windturbines and also use that space to place solar panels.
-Check out the range of a orbital trade beacon and design a room to those specs for your storage area.
-Research can be a seperate small sterile room as well (no reason for anyone else to go in there and make a mess)

-Walls provide higher cover than sandbags and also contains explosions. Building a little wall room for each turret and sandbag in front doesn't hurt. Best cover for a pawn to fight from is standing behind a wall shooting over a sandbag (doesn't stack cover but helps).
- Put turrets on a switch ( means you need less power 95% of the time). Charge a few batteries put them near the turret as well. Turret >> Switch >>> Battery >> Switch >>> main power. This gives more reliable power to defenses when needed with also turning off switches when not needed means you need less over all power.

Work tab
-Research should be turned off on every person except 1 to keep room clean (plus keeps best person doing the job). Unless you schedule two different people to sleep and work at different hours.
-Make Mo a dedicated miner (double passion) dig long tunnels into the mountains searching for your components.
-If you can afford it. Make your cook avoid all violence. Injuries increase food poisoning rates plus doesn't seem like you have a back up.
-Have a person on 1 for cleaning since so many things are effected by it.

Those are just a few things I noticed by looking at the information given. But please ingnore any and maybe all of it if it isn't fun for you. This game isn't designed to be played in any 1 way at all.

Merciless min maxing goes further than that. Here are a few things.

Never tame any creature unless you 100% need their materials. Like need fur because your map never spawns enough creatures. Creatures almost always produce a negative on food worth compared to labor/colonist wealth managements. Exception for animals that 100% graze and everyone that isn't part of the breeding stock shows value in every battle based on your strategy.

Haulers are worth it imo but either use them in the same strategy as above or keep a small ratio. I having fined tuned it but guessing 2 haulers for ever 6 colonist might be a nice number.

Stock piles should basically contain nothing (Although I say screw this part because micromanagement is boring). Everything you want to build you plan exactly how many resources to mine. Exceptions are medicine and food. Food is game by game basis but plan per season helps.

Keeping base small and minimizing amount of extra space given to colonist helps. Drugs if used properly can give the moods needed more efficiently than the wealth increase of 2 large statues in every ones bed room.

Minimize turret defenses used. I try to have 1 central fall back spot where turrets do work at. Everyone pot shots through doors and such and tries to retreat to that fall back spot. Enemy usually scatters around my defenses breaking into sections of my base at a time. Basically leads to small trickling to their deaths.

Last message. You don't really need to min max to win. I obey some of these things not all (some people do way more crazy things that require tons of micromanagement). The key is just have a plan when you land. Build a base around that plan. Key to all the plans is fall back spots. Places to heal in the middle of battle (3x2 hospitals) that act as buckers for firing back. Things like that.

The danger of psychite is tolerance more than addictiveness.   If you use it occasionally to manage a random bad mood it's ok.

Why would anyone use it not for the mood buff when mood-depriving events stack? You have to have big stock of it to use it regularly and that just adds more raiders. Not worth, you can improve pawns mood by other means.

@Crow_T
Role-playing is only good reason to go for beer)
Also no drug production is really good money-maker. Best money-maker is to kill some big animals (like muffalos or megasloths), store their corpses, butcher them when bulk trader comes and sell meat and leathers.

Money can buy you weapons or mats needed to progress faster. Drugs help  a lot when you caravan across the map. Managing bear, smoke, tea on every 3 days lowers break risks at extreme levels where those could be the primary way you loose. I also give them options for all other drugs besides lucifer every 5-10 days(depending on how the colony is doing). Sometimes it is better to keep a colonist a drug addict to prevent them from mentally breaking.


All of this is in extreme cases in merciless when caravanning to final destination. ( personally prefer to caravan instead of launch pads.

I tried something like this but there is a major flaw. The enemy loves just beating down random outpost buildings. Also it wasn't always viable to get my guys in that building if it was too far. Later on I just let them be destroyed because they would destroy those buildings before attacking my base.

I like doing more of an attack of titans design personally.Same concept but less spread out. Outer layer easy to break into low defense. Second layer designed to have traps and turrets. Then main base inside. Each with hide away rooms that lead into next area.


This type of base basically relies on me preplanning years of building ahead so sometimes I just say screw it and slowly build layers as I expand instead. Just depends on what difficulty I feel like playing on.

The trap method is a very obvious way to transfer safety into wealth. Those who don't wish to endanger their colonist have the option to buy/farm the material to support defenses that don't require hands on approach. It is possible to have a playthrough with basically all non-violence colonist.

The flip side is also true. You can succeed with never using traps in normal raids. There is also the happy middle ground where you have a primary fighting area with cheap defenses. Your colonist get injured or indanger of getting run over you can fall back to your expensive defense area.

Another cool idea that is on my to do list is survive every biome for 2 years. Every 2 years I will be forced to move to a different biome. After landing there I can only stay there for two years no matter the condition of my colony in that time. Although I can stay at my first base location for up to 3 years to get primary gear and food ready.

I had that mod installed for about 100 hours of playing the game of my 400 hours. Tbh it sounded great and is decent at a quick glance but I don't particularly miss it. I made a thread about mods that will be missed for 1.0 and a huge majority of the responses were mods that are 10 times more useful than this one.

This mod is nice and I probably will reinstall it but it won't make me upset to not have it.