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It might take years to get a quest with a ress serum, since it's random.  The best way is to start exploring every single tile near your base, by settling, searching the ancient dangers, and repeating until you find one.

The absolute fastest way is to send several parties to different tiles at once.  Build a steel door next to the wall of the danger, then deconstruct it and run. You'll see inside and if there is no mech serum just leave the map and abandon the tile.  If there is one, leave the map but don't abandon the tile.  You can come back in force and deal with the mechs or bugs.  This of course sacrifices the other valuables you might find, but it's faster.

You're trading a large variety of potential threats for one specific threat. Instead of having to prepare for pod drops, sieges, sappers (possibly, depending how deep in you are), toxic fallout, etc, you only have to really worry about infestations.  So you can focus your preparations on that.  Get tanky animals, build chokes, load up on chain shotguns and grenades. 

The worst part for me is generally they destroy stuff before you can mobilize and lure them into a choke, since they can pop up right next to say, your your fabricator bench. That really sucks. But losing the colony to them generally isn't a problem for me.

Assuming we're talking a standard Crash Landed in a non-extreme biome:

Gourmand definitely isn't in a top 6 of the worst traits.  Eating extra food shouldn't really make a difference for most colonies, and it does have the upside of +4 cooking.  Food binges are really only bad due to losing control of the colonist, which means you really can't use them for direct combat safely. Beyond that, it's fine.  There are a lot of worse traits. 

Chemical interest and Chemical fascination definitely take the top 2 worst spots, though. I don't think I'd put Pyro as the 3rd worst, though, since it's generally not much worse than Gourmand.  Maybe depressive.

Since you can turn 0.5 nutrition into 0.9 nutrition via cooking it into meals, you'll need to grow a lot more corn, which will reduce the amount of labor and time you're actually saving.  If you aren't hauling it, it will decay due to not being roofed, making it impossible for you to stockpile any meaningful amount of food.  Since corn takes a long time to grow, one lost harvest from a cold snap or blight might be the end of your colony.  I also hope you enjoy food poisoning because you'll have a nice 2% chance every single time a colonist eats.

Even if that doesn't happen, you're taking a -7 mood penalty when you could easily just cook fine meals for +5, a swing of 12 mood. 

This is the part where inexperienced players say something like "But I have no problem with mood so it's okay."

When things are going well, you have no problem with mood.  But someone's wife will get storytold, you'll get psychic drones, you'll get psychic ships, you'll get someone's mom joining the enemy raider group, and of course someone has to haul all those corpses after a tribal raid and take the penalites. Are you going to be caravaning? Do you want your people on the caravan to have a -7 mood penalty and 2% food poisoning chance?

Even if shit doesn't happen, high mood is a good thing.  It's a great thing.  It gives you inspirations.  Do you like making Masterwork and Legendary stuff? Because you won't if you're managing mood to stay just above breaking.

But okay, let's say you somehow NEVER run into ANY of those problems and NO ONE ever mental breaks EVER and you don't care at all about inspirations....  Okay.  Why aren't you using your mood as a resource? Why aren't you wearing more dead man's clothes and armor, why aren't you butchering more humanlike for hats, why aren't you selling more tribals into slavery? 

Without the impressive rec room/dining room and beautiful environment mood buffs, it would be pretty much impossible to keep that pawn happy in high wealth colonies.

Shot by: Is the final percentage.  In this case, a 48% chance to hit.

Shooter is the contribution based on the shooter's skill and physical abilities.  In this case, a 98% chance.

Then modifiers come into play. You multiply the modifiers by your base chance.

Weapon is the contribution based on the weapon being used.  In this case, a 80% chance
Target size is the chance to hit bonus or penalty based on the size of the target.  In this case, 68%.
Cover is the chance based on the amount of cover.  In this case, a 90% chance.

So .98 x .80 x .68 x .90 = 0.479808 or a 48% chance to hit.

Keep in mind this is based of where your pawn is standing, so if you want to know the chance an attacker would actually have, you want to move them to where the attacker would be, rather than checking the stats from right next to the turret.

I'm interested in how much an extra layer of sandbags helps...do you have any data on how much more protection each layer adds? Does it max out at some point?

You can check by putting a colonist into position, drafting them, then scrolling over the turret. It'll tell you the chance to hit and cover bonuses, so you can experiment with different set ups and see what works.  That said, I am fairly certain an extra layer of sandbags won't give an additional cover bonus, though it would slow down advancing melee.

You have forget the chemical recreation. Bring psychoid tea, beer, chocolate or smokeleaf along with the appropriate drug schedule to ensure a fun trip for your colonist holidays 

That's actually a really good idea, although I wouldn't use smokeleaf and it would slow the caravan down.  The rest of it would work, though.

I've been doing a lot of caravaning in 1.0, and I think a large part of the problem with caravans and mood breaks is the way recreation is handled.

You can get a pawn from 0 to 30% recreation in less than a hour just on a horseshoe pin when they're on a map. Even a dirt poor colony can have 4 recreation types from solitary, social, dexterity and cerebral with just a table, horseshoe pin, and chess table.  So if you settle and make a brand new map you can easily max any pawns recreation in an hour or two, tops.

When they're in a caravan it's hard locked to 8% recreation gain per hour when the caravan is not moving, and no gain when it is. It takes around 6 hours to get a pawn in a caravan at 0 tolerance back up to 30% recreation while the caravan is paused. On paper it should only take 4 hours since you gain 8%, but you don't actually gain 8% per hour. Even when the caravan is not moving, pawns recreation still drains at a constant rate.  So that 8% gain is not an 8% gain because you're losing recreation over time.  If you gain 8% an hour but lose 1% an hour, then you're gaining 7% per hour, not 8. 

On top of that, the only recreation type pawns can get in a caravan is Solitary if they're alone or and social and solitary if they're not.   This means pawns quickly gain tolerance to those recreation types, very quickly reducing the hourly gain. If the pawn is alone it's pretty much impossible to keep recreation levels high.  With two or more you get 2 recreation types and it's more manageable but still much slower than on a map.

All of these problems are manageable... but extremely tedious to deal with and involve a lot of micromanagement. Two things that would help would be to make recreation gain on paused caravans good enough to actually hit high levels of recreation if the caravan is paused long enough, and add an option to travel to the edge of a map and then rest, so that players can have their pawns can enter the map rested and without recreation penalties.

Repairable weapons and clothing kind if breaks the quality system.  Masterwork and legionaries can stay around forever and just accumulate until you have en entire colony decked out in them.

Maybe if things were repairable but quality degraded the more it was repaired, that would work.  I imagine most people wouldn't want that though, because an entire colony decked out in Masterwork gear is what they're going for in the first place.

Other faction towns always have advanced components, as do several types of traders. There's no randomness in it.

There are some other more random bonus ways to get them, but it's impossible to get stuck waiting.

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Quick new build is going up. This one should re-adjust the expectations boundaries to count floor wealth, and the LRMS now is guaranteed to find lumps at at least a certain minimum frequency. And various other changes.

I have sent caravans to get advanced components in neutral outlander towns on my last two playthroughs.  The first time the first settlement didn't have them, so I had to go to a second one.  On the current playthrough I'm on an island and the settlement on the island with me didn't have any.  I had to wait for a passing trade ship.  If they are meant to always have them that doesn't seem to be working at present.  Current playthrough was on 0.19.1996

If you needed benches to refine wood and steel into usable forms then NB becomes basically impossible, and even in regular play you can't just move to a new area  and start building without bringing along refined materials or the refining benches.  I think that would take more away from the game then throwing in additional steps would add.

This actually kinda pissed me off, because I just lost both my best builder and miner to something that could of been salvageable, but the game decided that scenario was done and therefore they're lost forever.

I agree with everything you said, but for the record, they aren't lost forever.  Since they never actually 'died' the game considers them alive and out there somewhere.  I had this same thing happen to me and I got both pawns back eventually via prisoner rescue events.  This is despite their friends having negative mood buffs saying they died.

The more I play and understand the wealth based raid system (And adaption) the more I dislike it.  There is really no reward for good management and efficiency.  If it takes me 60 days or 10 years to get to 75k wealth it's all the same to the game.  If you're a good manager and your colony expands and progresses quickly you're generally punished for it.  On the other hand, you can sit at 18k wealth forever and wait for your colonists to research the entire tech tree with no punishment.  Likewise if you defend raids perfectly they get harder and harder, until eventually you can get a raid that's powerful enough to destroy the entire colony.  On the other hand, if you did less well and were taking small losses, you get adapted into easier raids.   Success is punishment.

It's to the point where I don't really want to play on Merciless anymore.  Not because I can't survive on Merciless, but because playing on Merciless involves you going against what I feel should be the actual point of the game: Making the best colony you can.

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Merciless
Scenario: Crash landed
Biome/hilliness: Extreme Desert, Flat
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 72
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20ish
Complete mod list: Prepare Carefully (but not used in this run)

Started up a merciless run in an Extreme Desert for a change of pace.  I rolled a decent starting set of pawns.  No one with medical passion, but all pawns were capable of it and my highest was a 5 which is acceptable. Also no one with intellectual but I did have a Too Smart pawn that wasn't restricted from it, so I figured worst case I'd be okay.

Near the middle of the map was some stone with stoney soil around a ruin, so I settled there and planted potatoes immediately, while my builder stripped down all the ruins for stone and my cook hauled everything in.  We get a wind turbine and AC up before any heat waves but I'm still concerned about what happens if we get one and then the wind refuses to blow, so I save all my starting wood in case I need a passive cooler.

Two of my pawns become lovers, which was helpful for saving space and for the mood boost. Unfortunately, i'm down to 2 days worth of food rations, no visitors or traders have come by with food, and the only wildlife on the map, 2 iguanas, were hunted awhile ago.  We're going to starve unless action is taken and so my cook, who has decent shooting skill, takes one of the remaining rations and heads west toward the milder part of the desert in hopes of getting food.

Meanwhile, I expand my base using stone from the ruins and begin cutting more.  I'm also trying to get batteries researched but it's slow going. 

My cook arrives at the location and there is a herd of Gazelle there who promptly get taken down by his bolt action.  I butcher them on the spot with a butcher spot and get about 200+ meat which is taken back to the colony.  This provides enough food to last the colony until the potatoes are ready to harvest, and now we're stable.  A thumbo wanders in and gets dispatched after a lot of door peeking and now I have enough thumbofur to craft a duster. My best crafter is only a 5, so I hold off on that for the moment.

As I'm working on getting a freezer built, the colony is raided.  The raiders are killed easily but one survives who is a Tough, Trigger Happy, Quick sleeper with 11 crafting, intellect passion, good shooting and construction and no major health issues.  I quickly convert my main room into a prison temporarily while building a cell for her, because this pawn rivals my starters.

Shortly thereafter I get an escape pod with a marginal pawn. They're okay at mining which I could kind of use to free up my starting pawn with mining, but they decide to leave after being patched up and I don't feel like adding an extra prisoner to feed so I let them go.

Base expansion continues as I build additional storage and get private bedrooms built using stone I'm now cutting from chunks on the map.  The raider, Engie, joins the colony and crafts the Thumbofur duster into good quality.  70% sharp resistance, pretty damn good for this early.

Shortly after that, I get a incap'd refugee quest.  I usually ignore these, but it's Engie's husband and I know if I don't do it I'm going to get hit with both the husband died and the didn't help mood debuffs which will make Engie useless.  Considering how good of a pawn she is I really want to avoid that.  The site is guarded by 2 turrets and 1 enemy.  With my bolt action the turrets are a non-issue, so 1 enemy should be doable.  I give Engie the duster and my starting Flak and advanced helmet and she goes off to save her husband.

She manages to take out the guard without being hit and saves him.  As a bonus, there were two batteries which I claim and uninstall to bring back with me, saving me from having to research them. Engine's Husband, Xaiver turns out to be not bad.  He has intellect passion and Too Smart, so I've found my researcher.  The only downside is Psychic Hypersensitivity, so I make a mental note to pick up a foil helmet. 

Engine gets hit with food poisoning from raw potatoes on her way back, and Xavier is still too hurt to walk so their caravan slows to a halt and they won't have enough food to make it.  I send another pawn out to meet up with them with more food, and the three of them make it back a few days later without any further incidents.

I decide to start doing research hard at this point while pausing expansion to keep my wealth low while I push research. Engine and Xavier are set up on alternative shifts on the research bench.  I get Solar Power, Smithing, Machining, Gunsmithing and Flak, and then push into Microelectronics and Multi-Analyzer.

Two of my pawns are sent out with my starting silver and the thumbo horn to the nearest neutral outlander to get Plasteel for the multi-analyzer (I had the gold already) and advanced components for fabrication.  The pasteel is easy enough but there's no advanced components for sale.  After dropping off the pasteel back at the colony they head out again to another base and trade the rest of my silver for 3 advanced components.

Meanwhile, we get another Thumbo but the duster only ends up being normal quality.  Still not too bad.  We got a trade offer for 4 dusters for an infinite chemreactor which was fullfilled.  Not a huge deal but not bad.  My two starting pawns got married then got divorced.  I'm currently half-way through researching fabrication.  Three of my pawns have come down with the plague and my best doctor is still a 5.  They got 70+ treats on all three though, and this is the first time I've touched my starting meds, so I'm not worried. I'm not sure exactly what my next move is.  Wealth is at 30k which is making me nervous, I'd prefer to be close to 25k or even 20k.  i'm not exactly sure why it seems higher than usual.  Maybe the thumbo dusters. I'm going to need to focus on increasing my combat power, although doing that will just raise my wealth even more.



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