Topics

My steam copy of rimworld is insisting it cant make steam work, then turning itself off. Im sorry, but no, thats not a thing. Steam is running. Steam is always running.

More importantly, this is the only game ive ever come across that A) decides that since IT cant make steam work, i have to fix it :\

an B) has ever done this

So can we instead have it not turn itself off just because its having a fit at a minimum. As is, i have no idea what the issue is anyway :\ It worked fine yesterday...

Because there is far to much talk of insane cannibal colonies, lets try to celebrate some of the nice things you can do in this game O.o

for me, im a big fan of releasing tribals. I know i could butcher them, or sell them, or attempt to slowly convince them to join me. The reality though is that if i release them, they go off an tell all their bros about how rad my colony is, an then i dont have to shoot anymore tribals. Its just one of those rad perks of not being a sadistic dick

An as an extra bonus, sometimes the tribals roll up when im in trouble an try to save my ass. Like one time, i ended having a colony destroying infestation, and the tribals rolled up with like 20 dudes an went ape on the bugs. I mean, it was hopeless, but some of my colonists managed to escape as a result an im sure they went on to live with the tribals and help uplift them lol

Im sorry, i know they are sort of helpful, but the expectations buffs are driving me bananas. They suck, so much.

in what world is it a good idea for my pawns to get more miserable AFTER they achieve stuff. legit, they start out super happy, an as the colony gets BETTER they GET WORSE!!! an considering how important happiness is to a colonists work speed, this is even more bizarre. I would 100% rather my colonists not get the buff an in return never get the debuff than what it currently stands as. Yeah, itll be harder at first, but at least i wont have to deal with sudden vaguely inconsistent changes in productivity due to having too many chickens or because of ai mainframes... PARTICULARLY CHICKENS. its the worst, because they make MORE WORK an yet my colonists suddenly say "fuck it, im too good for this" :\

so uh... turrets an heaters an such that ive turned off keep breaking down.. how.. what.. why?

follow up, animals can still outrun my colonists, which means hungry bears in winter will probably attack an eat a person.. an i wont know about it till i get a notification that someone needs treatment.. not sure how to fix that as bears will often change targets, but id really like some form of update about it before it becomes a problem rather than after

It just occurred to me, as i looked at my plan for my big old fridge, why i keep digging holes. i mean, at this point, sieges dont worry me. attacks dont worry me. i can make big old walls to do the same thing as holes in mountains, an sappers will still dig through to get me... an now theres hives. the biggest finger to cheyenne mountain around. Like, one my cost versus benefits, mountains just dont cut it nowadays(for me, maybe you are different). legit, a cooler home doesnt give me that much, an digging can be SLLLOOOOWWWW... so why.

an i realised, its because its literally THE ONLY PART OF THE MAP I CANT SEEEEE O.o

its the only part of the map where i can actually satisfy my curiosity. maybe ill find a big mountain prairie in there (i have before). maybe ill find ore, gold, jewels.. i dunno. maybe i could find other treasures, an actual caves someday. an thats it. its that need to find something i didnt know was there. its why i still build holes. an i think it will always be the thing making us build holes until its not the only place we cant see(or i guess until we can see it all).

point is, you cant balance this away for me, an i think it may be the same for everyone else. no equation will sate my curiosity O.o

So, that was pretty rad. i just lost my first permadeath colony, an it felt alright. i lost it to a hive, an i had a few parting thoughts about the whole ordeal.

first, an its the biggest thing. predators an bugs an such need to actually kill colonists at some point. im all for the opportunity to save them, but if i dont have that capacity(like at colony collapse) then its just sort of annoying an drags their death out alot, as they lay there slowly bleeding to death or dying from infections over the course of days. not moments, but days.. an it isnt like the lucky few that do this, they all do, in this case six or seven colonists alive for 3 days while the bugs ate everything but the colonists. seems a bit peculiar.

second, i really like the hives, an by the time this one killed my colony i had left it for yonks. i was trying to boil them to death. but thats sort of the problem too. the moment the hive turned up, i had no way of actually dealing with it, an it snowballed from there. i couldnt kill the bugs because i didnt have the equipment too, so all i could do was build heaters when they were asleep. which meant the hive got bigger an bigger until it was able to randomly tunnel out causing the whole boil them to death plan to fail repeatedly because of the length of time it takes a pawn to die from heat exhaustion an how quickly the temp in a room equalizes. basically, id like to feel like at some point i made a stupid decision an thats why my colony died, but atm the truth is i made the best choice i could, an it was really ineffective, an i had no other real options. hell, at one point a bunch of randos from a different colony turned up to help, an they barely scratched the bugs.

an third, final point. the behaviour on a big bug colony is daft. they dig an dig an dig until they cause cave ins, then they dig out the cave ins causing more cave ins. the most damage that happened to this bug hive came from itself. Ants dont kill themselves with cave ins, they worked out how not to. the bugs should too, because if ive got to wait for 15 minutes for my colonists to die, i at least want to see that i lost to a clearly interesting an not just random annoying enemy.

i am currently very frustrated with the storytellers. which makes it hard to write objectively about them.
However, i think we need to have a chat about them, because they are always making me frustrated, regardless of what day it is or how long or short i play with them or which ones i play with. An if that isnt an indicator to me of a problem, i dont know what is.

An i see my constant frustration as a problem because A) I cannot be the only one and B) no good story was ever told that involved the teller being furious. We arent talking about Dark Souls here. RW isnt a specifically hard game to grasp, and difficulty is created by the way enemies interract and the number of them and the way the actual world behaves. However, if thats true, then the AI Storytellers shouldnt change the way they create challenge depending on what difficulty they are on, and my frustration isnt caused by how difficult the challenges are. Its caused by the way they appear, the frequency with which the more infuriating ones are thrown, and the way in which they are thrown at the colony.

For instance. I get that the ship piece is a difficult challenge. its supposed to hurt a colony... but it isnt actually able to kill one. Since colonists dont leave colonies they are unhappy at, it just sits there being a constant annoyance(making them shittier an shittier until they break, fall unconscious, rinse repeat. not actually fun though). An so you go out to kill it... except it just so happens to be loaded with the most powerful enemies vanilla has to offer. Thats sort of shitty, considering the ship itself cant actually kill a colony, it only makes the damn things a pain in the arse to try and run, an it makes the annoyance a pain to get rid of. Of course, it gets better though, because if you kill the damn thing after all that teeth grinding pain.... its very possible the story teller will just drop another one on you five minutes later.. which sort of takes the novelty out and highlights the problem with the event itself. An the thing is, you could just cheese the ship. Build a stronghold around it to give yourself an advantage, but is that really the story you want to tell. The rad colony pissed itself when a chunk of metal fell out of the sky. Built a bunch of walls and all sorts of ridiculous stuff around it, an then they poked it with a stick. Not before though, An they did all this while also trying to kill each other because they walked to the other side of the map to do it. Thats not really that interesting a story though is it :\

Its the same premise as if a solar flare happens when you are trying to grow long form crops, or if many sieges are spawned in a row. The Storyteller has no idea of arcs in its challenges, an it certainly doesnt care about giving the player breathing room. An that could be interesting, if it was a specific type of event that dumped a bunch of painful stuff on the player in quick succession. Its not though, its the status quo. Its how they behave all the time.

An thats a  problem. I think its a larger problem than the combat ai. I think its an actual serious mechanical flaw. The Storytellers in some ways are the selling point of the game, an yet atm their design makes them an infuriating mess. They need more nuance in their decision making than "is the colony rich an is it currently in a bind, if no launch problems". An yes, i am including Randy in this. I know hes the random guy, but hes also apparenly the way the game is meant to be played, an hes possibly the most obnoxious one of the lot. I mean, its great that he lets you have lots of colonists, but otherwise hes a shitlord. Its not interesting to just have the random guy be all "lol random jk hahaha". He still needs to actually make some decisions about the challenge hes about to throw at a colony an whether its actually appropriate and/or interesting to do it.

Which brings us to the other side of this coin. The events need a pass. There isnt enough variance, and that exacerbates the problem. On top of that, the "good" events just arent that interesting.. or that good. Im sure there is situational goodness to them "oh thankgoodness, i was starving and food fell out of the sky" but lets be honest, does anyone actually get excited about the fifteenth time stone falls off a ship in your backyard.

ATM id say that events come too fast an too furious, and that they as a rule arent all that interesting. I dont mean this to be rude, but it needs to be said.

An since id be a jerk for saying this an not adding something constructive to it, ill provide some basic solutions i can see fixing the issues.

The storytellers obviously differentiate between very bad events and bad events, but that isnt nuanced enough. They need a grade, and they need some events that scale up by grade(so if its a nice mild event, it drops a few berries, a medium event drops a bunch of different berries, and a super great one drops a boatload of food types as well as meals). This extends then to the bad ones as well, and id want the scaleable version too. So a ship event thats mild is just the ship, no guards. Maybe it drops multiple pieces of itself or some such. A medium one is the ship plus guards, but for the love of jebus give them behaviour that makes them attack a colony if its only down to a few members(put us out of our misery or force a confrontation) an then with the final stage dump a bunch of parts, set the scream to superduper and have a boatload of mechs charge. An i would then apply difficulty scaling after this stage scaling. It means your events go a bit farther. you could even use five stages instead of 3. Point is, variance via code rather than having to create each individual event.

On the side of the storytellers, they just need a bunch more nuance. Atm they obviously decide what they are doing via looking at how many colonists are standing and how "wealthy" the colony is. The problem is that RW doesnt really lend itself to tiered play. So, the colony may be "wealthy" but it might also have no guns. Since wealth includes how much medicine the colony has an what its made of etc, the storyteller gets a false picture of how well the colony is doing and sends challenge that doesnt fit. As such, id create more variance in what the ai tracks and why it tracks it. It might look at wealth of a colony, and offensive power, and then decide it needs to send a raid that steals stuff. Setting the objectives of the raid after checking the numbers. It needs to track more, but it actually needs to use those numbers to monitor what its doing. It needs events that mess with beauty, so it needs to track that in order to make a decision about how much to mess with. It needs to actually look at a colony an decide if plague is appropriate( i mean actual plague that infects everyone, not the one shot cold). Thus, it should avoid sending siege after siege, because it should already note that it sent one five minutes ago. It needs to track what it does as well as what the players have, so that it not only varies things but actually gives room for a denoument.

Having said that, another thing i would look at creating are event 'groups' or 'series'. Basically, rather than one event, it creates a bunch that launch over time. So a raid might send scouts first. Thus, the numbers on your colony will change over time and the storyteller can adapt its strategy to compensate(so a low weapons colony might suddenly gain a bunch from the scout mission, making them able to deal with the follow up fight better). Then the storyteller sends a raid party, and another, an so on. The staggered approach to the events keeps it varied, while giving the player a little breathing time. an the storyteller, now knowing its sending multiple groups, wont necessarily send other ridiculous things at the player. Id also get the storyteller trying to send good an bad things at the same time everynow an then. since i assume a visit from neighbours is a good thing, itd go a long way to providing help if the storyteller goes to far.

Really though, at the end of the day, failure in this game needs to be fun. An atm its not. Too many of the events feel like a kick to the nuts insead of being a fun novelty. So failing stops being about the rad story and more about how you just got fucked by algorithms.

Heya, not sure if this has been posted before but i couldnt see it on the top of the page so ill post.

every now and then while playing the sound will cut out. The game continues to run with no issues, it just has no sound. At first i figured it was my comp, but the same thing happens on the laptop, with two completely different installed versions of the game, and has been happening for me since A9. Its not really a problem, in that restarting the game fixes the issue, its just a thing ive noticed. As yet i cant ascertain a specific thing that triggers it and i as yet havent been able to recreate the bug. it just happens lol

so, bodies are fun

buttttt, is there a way to actually make the individual parts increase the functioning of the overall body ala bionics without actually having bionics.

so say you have a genetically altered thingy with huge arms.. can you make the huge arms better(or worse) at manipulation without needing that body to have new parts strapped onto it??

youd think this was a thing that could be done, so i think im just missing something tbh, anyone know?

Hey all, can someone tell me what the connection is between the body tag in the races tag of the humanoid def is and the bodies def and the body parts def.

is there a connection at all, or are they all just not connected. i was curious to see if i can get pawns to just spawn with various parts(tentacles, bionics, mutations.. not fussed  ) on their bodies without needing to have them sown on or generated with random ones.

Hiya, so im a developer in an unknown indie down in aus, and ive been playing with unity and c# for the last year. an thats my experience with coding. All of it. I have none with modding or any such thing, i dont know the etiquette involved or anything. But Rimworld is pretty freaking cool and id like to get into Modding with it some day in the future.

Having said that, ive been looking through some of the stuff i can find here in the forum and on the wiki for code examples and i keep seeing really odd approaches to what i would think are problems already solved by unity the engine and c# within that engine. So im wondering, since Rimworld is a packaged product, do mods have to follow some form of behaviour thats not standard to the engine. Like, do basic MonoBehaviour functions just not work in the mod files(such as coroutines etc) and is update not called every frame in mods like it is in standard core code?

Basically, is there basic stuff about modding i should know that i just flat out dont. Also, to clarify. I am the designer of my team, not the programmer. I code because i have to, but my coder is the super wiz(an hes hard enough to motivate without me distracting him with random questions for coding things other than the task at hand)