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I'm sure everyone has experienced this annoying situation: "a drop pod has landed with a pawn I want to save but he'll bleed out in 5 hours and it will take 6 to carry him back to base and treat him"

Or maybe it's someone at a mortar camp you shot, or whatever.  You know that you can't set up a prisoner sleeping spot there, so what to do?

Have some pawns run out there with a pile of wood and some medicine and construct a prisoner shack on site.  A small box will do, a campfire will warm it up to habitable almost instantly, and then you can drop a sleeping spot inside and designate it prisoner and capture him.

One additional trick: create a stockpile set to "critical" next to the planned shack site and then manually select the stuff you want your pawns to haul there.  (Don't rely on them to be intelligent enough to figure out what to bring, they'll always screw it up)

I just thought it would be fun to begin another rant about useless pawns.  My latest experience is Alisa Harper, a pyromaniac psychite addict.  This was quite an entertaining experience.  I started with my usual drug addict plan -- lock her in a tiny empty cold cell for a few seasons while waiting for her addiction to wear off.

Of course I have to leave some food in there for her (that's why the cell is cold, to keep it from rotting).  So of course she sets it on fire.  *facepalm*  And now she's banished, way more trouble than she's worth!

I'm trying to create a colony large enough that it can send out attackers to knock over enemy settlements but still have enough troops at home to defend it while the attackers are gone.  It seems I need about 20 colonists to do this; 10 to attack and 10 to defend.

Trouble is... how do I get that many people?  Obviously doing this with Cassandra is a bust.  I tried Randy and tried setting up a separate colony as bait... but even there with only 5 pawns enemy raiders bite the dust as soon as they hit the ground.  Getting fresh captives after I have about 12 pawns is just really hard.

Any suggestions?  Or should I just give up on getting more pawns and focus instead on building marine armor and try to knock over settlements with merely 6 pawns?

I decided to try manufacturing bionics in my latest run, only to be disappointed on discovering that they've been nerfed from 140% efficiency to 125%.  I'd like to restore the older behavior but I can't see where to do it.  It seems like they're getting their effectiveness from the "Spacer" techLevel tag.  But I can't see where this is defined.  It's not hardcoded, is it?

Why won't my pawns engage in recreation even when I order them to and forbid them from doing anything else?

I have a pawn at poor mood and 50% recreation.  I've set her to "Joy" activity on the restrictions tab, zoned her into a room with tables, a horseshoe pin, and artwork, but she just stands there "Wandering" idle instead of relaxing and enjoying herself.  Oh, and her boredom levels are all below 40% so that shouldn't be stopping her.  Unless pawns lose interest in an activity faster than that? 

But even if I release the zone restriction she won't go to her room and meditate or go outside for a walk, she insists on dutifully cleaning and hauling and all sorts of other work... right until she snaps and loses her mind.  What is going on here?

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Edit: I just remembered, I have the "Pawns are capable!" mod installed which could affect work priorities and mood behavior.  Has anyone seen something like this before with it?

OK, this is just getting stupid.  Only 3 out of 10 pawns in my latest colony can haul.  And then there's this:

Childhood: Scavenger
Pigeon spent her childhood escaping grunt work to go digging through wrecks and ruins for treasures.  Her natural curiosity got her into a lot of trouble, but it also yielded many interesting finds.
Hauling disabled

What???  A scavenger who finds lots of interesting things... but who refuses to haul it back to the village?  "Hey, I found this great stuff, but I'm too lazy to bring it back, why don't you go get it and pay me for it."

I'm seriously considering modding out this stupidity.

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Edit: update, it wasn't hard to mod out.  To keep it somewhat fair, pawns with "hauling" explicitly prohibited I left in.  But I just edited WorkTypes.xml and removed the ManualDumb workTag from the Hauling WorkTypeDef.  The downside is that now my Glitterworld nerd can haul, but my Ranch owner can too so that's a fair tradeoff.

After my experience with my latest colony... I wonder if Ludeon has actually struck the right balance here.  I decided this time around I would recruit *everyone* that winds up lying bleeding in my killbox.  And play without turrets.  And the result is... interesting.

I have a colony of complete misfits -- missing legs, psychite addicts (one was an alcoholic who spent a season unconscious while in withdrawal from both), missing eyes, pyromaniacs, wimps, all sorts of refuse.

And yet with this gang of clowns and some well prepared defenses I've been able to repel all of the pirates and tribals that have attacked me.  I never would have been able to accomplish this at top difficulty in 1.8.  So the reduced combat difficulty does create more incentive to employ less efficient game strategies.  I think this is genuinely working.

Anyway, now I have to go and put a peg leg on one of my colonists.  We had to beat her down because she was on a drug spree and wiping out our precious supply of psychite tea, and someone managed to rip her leg off in the process.  D'oh!

Not sure what I'm supposed to do when the caribou gang up and exterminate my colonists, other than devmode explosions and heals after watching them get slaughtered.  Quite ridiculous.

I'm not sure why raiders have been nerfed and caribou not.  It would be nice to see this reversed.

OK, time to go blow up some caribou...

So a thought just occurred to me on a method to fix Rimworld armor without radically changing anything.

Most players are more interested in preventing critical injuries ("Damn, my pawn's brain got shot out!") than significant damage reduction.  The old armor system which applied a flat percentage helped a bit; your organ would get injured but would then heal.  (Not sure about brains healing)  The new system tends to be all-or-nothing which isn't much help.

But we could keep the current 100% / 50% dynamic and still have usable armor... if we just extended that division to 25%, 12%, 6%, and so on.  That is, when the attack percentage is higher than the armor value, the armor *still* reduces the damage, just by a lower percent.

So say you have 50% armor, reduced to 40% by a 10% penetration attack.  And then the attack gets a 67% attack value.  67% / 40% = 1.675, so that falls in the 1.5 - 2.0 bracket, which means only 12% of the damage is absorbed.  Maybe that's enough to keep your colonist's stomach intact.

Note this would allows stacking weak armors to actually be useful.  Your devilstrand duster and devilstrand t-shirt would actually produce some damage reduction in addition to your flak vest.

1) Colonist gets brained by a machine gun pistol
   *sigh* guess I'll euthanize her
2) Colonist's father gets a -20 mood penalty for the next 29 days
   *gah* guess I'll banish him

Oh, wait, I could have banished the daughter in the first place -- her brain had 4hp left, she would have wandered off 'safely', right?

Anyway... I just have the sense that I'm missing something here; what's the correct storyline?  Keep a babbling useless pawn around?  Something else?

I was hoping I wasn't going to have to relearn modding for b19, but the clothing penalty is back.  30% sale penalty for manufactured clothes, which means that as usual, it is more profitable to grow cotton and sell it *raw* than make stuff with it.  This is just Not Fun.

So before I go through the hassle of modding my game to fix this, can anyone tell me if (a) a b19 mod already exists for this or (b) will my old b18 mod work without changes?

(Note that I'm posting this in General instead in Mods because I'm trying to direct attention at the penalty itself in the hopes that it gets removed in the future.  There's no sense to having raw materials worth more than finished goods unless you really are trying to penalize people for manufacturing things?  If the problem is that Legendary items become worth too much without it, the solution is to reduce their bonus, not penalize everything!)

So I thought it would be fun to extend the range of all firearms in Rimworld to 55 and see what sort of combat results.  Well, for the most part it works, except that it turns sappers into morons. 

With the extended range I don't have to build perimeter walls to protect my units from enemies with sniper rifles plinking them from out of range.  So I now have an open base design.  But since there's no distant walls for the sappers to attack they get confused.  They pick a point out of range of my shooters / turrets and then just mill about waiting for something to happen.  Occasionally one will wander into range and get picked off... this repeats until enough die and eventually they flee.

Any thoughts on how to address this?  I like the sort of firefights that extended range yields.  How does Combat Enhanced get around this problem?

I'm looking for the best way to increase the range of every projectile weapon in the game to 60 to end the annoyance of scythers parking *just* outside of the range of your weapons.  Right now the only ways I know to do it are either to copy the whole weapon file (Weapons_Guns.xml) and edit every range or create a monster patch file that updates verbs/li/range for each weapon.

Is there some way I can edit BaseHumanMakeableGun, stick a range modification in there, and have it inherited by every weapon?  I've already done a similar mod to ApparelBase/statBases/SellPriceFactor but that attribute already existed in ApparelBase.

So I was looking for something for my pawns to do during the winter, and came up with the idea of making sculptures from blocks to sell.  I then started wondering about how difficult they would be to haul overland, and this is when I discovered something shocking.

Mass of small sculpture: 5 kg
Mass of 70 stone blocks: 87.5kg

!!!

So if you want to transport a lot of blocks... say, to build walls with at your new base... first pack them into a sculpture wormhole, then carry them off, then deconstruct at your destination.  Even with the deconstruct penalty you'll still have far more than if you just carried them straight!!!

I recently decided to try to get away from my usual habit of stuffing turrets into killboxes and instead installed a mod which increases firepower so that 12 pawns can throw enough ammo downrange to chew through tribal hordes effectively.  But I discovered an unfortunate side effect of this.  Pirates carrying all sorts of firepower (the mod gives them good guns too) never get around to shooting back.  They pour into the killbox, charge into the bullets, and die too, rather than standing and shooting.

Strangely this leaves me in an awkward position.  Playing with vanilla weapons and no turrets just means my poor pawns will get overrun.  (I could design a base with fallback positions and play door games and such but that's a lot of micromanagement).  Playing with turrets is a huge material investment (gobs of steel, lots of components, etc.).  And playing without killboxes... well... I'm not sure how I would handle a squad of pirates with advanced weaponry...

So this post was originally going to be a complaint about the AI not responding to a killbox effectively ("Hey, don't just run in, blast a few walls down and make positions to fire from!") but now I'm not sure what I'm trying to say

So an idea came to me today which I think could correct the silliness involved with forced miss radius.  If forced miss radius weapons all had 100/100/100/100 accuracy, then the pawn standing at the center of the targeting area would have the same chance of getting hit as anyone else in it, right?

Well, half-right -- anyone standing in front is more likely to get hit, and anyone at the rear less likely of course.  But it would end the silliness of centipedes unloading a barrage at a turret or a really courageous pawn and missing entirely.  Or gauss cannons in the mod I'm using missing.

Of course I can mod this change myself, but I'm wondering if maybe the devs should give it a try in the main release and see how it plays.

Jet was having a bad day, so I told him to smoke a joint and chill out, which improved his mood.  Then he got hungry; ok, not a problem, go eat a meal...

...and in the middle of eating a meal he has a mental break.  Last straw?  Hungry.  Now he's hiding in his room, and *won't eat*, and is starving to death (current malnutrition: 13%).

"I'm soooooo hungry I can't take it any more, I'm not gonna eat!!!"

Rimworld pawns are so mental...

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Edit: his malnutrition got all the way to 30% before his mental state finally broke and he grabbed the meal I had left for him in his bedroom.  Good to have him back!

The subject is pretty self-explanatory, so I will instead explain why I think the ability to add mechanoids to a colony would greatly improve the game.

It would greatly improve the complexity and variety of combat.  Players will be much more willing to venture out of their killbox if they can reduce the risk to their pawns by putting the mechs on the front line.  And because mechs have features not easily available to pawns they add tactical opportunities.  Scythers can shoot and scoot, centipedes can soak up damage and flush enemies out of cover, etc.

It wouldn't be unbalanced.  Mechs can't do useful work so a colony's resources would still be limited by pawns.  Pirates could bring their own mechs with them.  It would take crafting skill to reprogram and repair mechs; the repair would consume resources.  The quality of the mech could be affected by the skill of the crafter; a badly reprogrammed mech might function like a poorly trained attack animal.  Events could be added which turn your mechs wild so they attack you again.

It also wouldn't be difficult to implement.  Mechs would be assigned zones like any animal, and would shoot any non-friendly in range.

Question: is there a mod that does this already?



Edit: two thoughts occurred to me which would help prevent this option from becoming too OP:

1) Reprogramming should have a very high failure rate.  I was thinking of a success percentage equal to the crafting skill of the pawn, with the mech shutting down permanently if reprogrammed incorrectly.  So a skill 10 pawn would only have a 10% chance of success.  This way the dozens of mechs you collect in a year result in a modest squad for you to attack/defend with.

2) Repair ability should be modest.  You should be able to scavenge parts from downed mechs but not fabricate new parts, and any part should only be repairable up to the skill of the pawn (ie: a skill 10 pawn can only increase a part's HP to 10.)  This way you're leading a shambling army of zombie-mechs.  Any mechs accompanying pirates should come pre-injured to resemble yours.

The last time I raided an outpost in A17 I found plenty of food, medicine, and other stuff in the barracks of the pirates occupying it.  I finally got around to trying raids in B18, and I'm discovering the only stuff they have is the gear they're carrying after two outpost and one base raid.  Is this normal?  What happened to all the supplies (especially medicine) they used to have?

I guess I have to start carting my own medicine in when I do raids now?

So I got frustrated with Rimworld again after a centipede that was completely unable to hit the pawn he was shooting at splattered another pawn 3 squares away who was hiding behind cover.  I get the impression that "forced miss radius" completely ignores cover for whoever is standing where the bullet lands, which drives me nuts.

So what mods are out there to fix this sort of silliness?  I'd like something that just gets rid of the stupidity inherent in most combat scenarios rather than a massive monster overhaul like Combat Realism (which from what I gather is dead anyway?) 

Edit: I just realized it's Combat Extended which is the current incarnation of the monster combat overhaul... again, I'm just looking for something which fixes what is broken, not a complete re-do.  Is there such a thing out there?