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Heya,

I have a dead megasloth and barbslinger (from alpha animals iirc) in my freezer that my colonists just won't butcher. They butcher everything else just fine, the stuff is allowed (they already hauled them to the freezer as they should), the bill has not changed and I double-checked it allows everything.

Anyone got an idea what the problem could be?

Is it a mod issue that some of the addon animals might not have a meat value set or smething? If so, isn't the megasloth completely vanilla?

This is more annoying than problematic, but if anyone has an idea, that would be gret.

Lets start with a simple statement:

Building stuff is too fast. This is especially true for buildings themselves.

Very often, a colony has built a nice, fully "finished" base with bedrooms, workshop, entertainment areas, kitchen, a greenhouse, defenses, a huge freezer, hospitals and even prisons before they have even researched more than a few basic things or crafted more than basic clothes and a few simple weapons. This kinda leaves the game with a very early case of "It kinda looks finished already", reducing motivation to play much further.


I suggest slowing down building times of all kinds by a lot. Something like double or triple, perhaps a bit more for walls and a bit less for furniture and appliances. Of course this would have severe effects on the early game balance.

To combat that, the general "low expectations" mood bonus could be enhanced and/or lengthened as well as starting ressources and equipment slightly buffed. Give us four or five emergency bedrolls that have similar stats to a shoddy quality bed that can be reinstalled wherever you want. Give us emergency canvas or something to build a big tent or two out of. Semi-Outdoor kitchens and similar stuff already work well, since a few "posts" to keep up a manually selected roof function well enough for a few months in decent climates.

Basically, the idea would be that building up your first basic colony house(s) would take a bit longer, with just enough bonus starting equipment thrown out that playing on the harsher map hexes is not completely impossible because of that. A side effect would be that building your "real base" afterwards would be a long-term project instead of something you whip up during one winter. It would also feel more realistic, especially compared to the speed with which new colony features (i.e. tech, trade and new guys) come in.

I think the game would be more interesting and realistic if more extra pawns came to your colony through other means than converting captured opponents. At the same time, captured opponents could have other uses (no, I do not mean the meme-like organ bank).

How about this:
- Drop pod survivor and refugee events happen much more often (say, almost twice as much as right now). Ideally, with extremely useless colonist setups becoming more rare than currently, so accepting refugees is not so much of a liability.
- Very rarely visitors might join you (like the Hospitality mod makes them do, just as a very rare event usually reserved to related or very friendly visitors), perhaps after some kind of quest (Hey, if you help me free my pet from the bad raiders over there, both of us will join you!).
- Most prisoners cannot be converted at all.
- Prisoners can be ransomed to their factions for stuff. Can be done via the quest system again. For example, they send you a message saying "Hey, if you free our three guys, we send you this shiny assault rifle and a tame muffalo". A ransom quest like this can be initiated by the player via the comm console. Ransom worth is higher the more and healthier the prisoners are.


The idea would be that the joiners would be more realistic, as in not 90% your ex-enemies but instead more people that actually liked you or at least sat in the same boat as you. On the other hand, making prisoners and keeping them in good shape is still giving you something besides a few goodwill points. Additionally, it slightly disincentivizes prisoner organ farming.

Two of the bigger problem spots in Rimworld are storage space handling and the ease of accumulating big loads of money by offloading bulk goods.

I have a partial solution to those two:
Divide most material costs and gains by 3 or even 5. Most notable change would be with wood. Currently, one often has a few thousand wood logs lying around after clearing some space when playing on forested biomes, which easily translate to multiple thousand silver and renew themselves almost on accident. But there are almost no things built from wood that use so little ressources that dividing by 5 would make a difference. The overhead, though, would be 20% as much, reducing accidental high cash inflows a bit.

Similar arguments can be made for most other building ressources. As an additional benefit, the numbers shrink a bit and look cleaner. Of course some prices and therefore prices of furniture and stuff need to be re-evaluated, but imho this step would be helpful in combatting the exploding economy problem.

In theory, something similar would help with cash cropping, too, but its slightly more complicated to divide the numbers there (most easily by not cooking single meals but instead make them in 5s, which also would solve the "cooking for 5 people is a full time job" issue).

[Starting a new colony]

Hello rimworlders

Since there seems to be an influx of new players recently and some questions get asked alot, I decided to create a rough tutorial showcasing how the first steps to a successful colony might look.

Word of warning for the hardcore crowd: this is not targeted at you, this is not hyperoptimized, this is not perfectly vanilla but perfectly doable in vanilla and this is not the one and only way to do things.

Preface for the target audiece:
This was written/built "on the go" while playing a colony from start with the intention of showcasing how a typical beginner game might go if you have a few pointers. I use quite a few mods, but none of those are important for what I show or explain here. Everything in this tutorial can be done with just a basic install of Rimworld Alpha 16, it just might take a few clicks more. If I use something modded in here, I will explain that and possible vanilla equivalents or workarounds if needed.

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Starting a new colony

Storyteller: Cassandra on "some challenge".

For my tutorial map, I created a basic world and then decided on a not overly difficult starting location. I wanted to showcase growing periods and temperature ranges, so I chose a normal forest biome that has a 30 day (half a year in rimworld) growing period and should get reasonably hot in summer and reasonably cold in winter. Wood will be aplenty and the small hills should help with early base building and ressources. A typical but not completely easy beginner start.

Other interesting biomes to start in once you got the hang of the game would be boreal forest or normal deserts. They pose extra challenges but are not horribly difficult to play in. Oh, and I suggest going to "advanced" before creating your map and setting it to a bigger size. This one is 350x350, but if you are on a notebook, perhaps chose something a bit smaller.


Anyways, now I chose my starting survivors. As a beginner, I suggest taking a minute or two to make your starters not totally random, as that can really make things extremely frustrating. My three pawns were created as follows.

Pawn 1
I randomized a few times until I got someone interesting but not too bad. Kat was what came out of that. She is an incredibly good shooter and constructor and reasonably useful at growing since she loves to do it. She has a few disabilities, but nothing crippling.


Pawn 2
I then clicked a few times on randomize on the second pawn until I got someone that halfway complements Kat. I stopped when I got Ray. I renamed her Rayya since Raymond is strange for a woman. We now have a few more basics covered, but still really lack a doctor. Also, a character with social, animals, research or better cooking would be nice.


Pawn 3
I randomize the last pawn a few times until Steg comes along. She again is not the perfect character, but she complements the team decently so she gets to stay. We now lack an artist and are bad at research and have no grower that can make healroot or devilstrand yet, but everything else is decently covered.


As a beginner, you would be done here. I happen to have the mod "prepare carefully", which I use to remove the starting pet and replace it with a few extra medicines instead. I did not want to focus on the animal for the beginning tutorial, although a good dog can be a nice asset when trained. You could do the same by killing off your pet at the beginning and getting a bit of extra meat and fur out of it for that.


The crash landing

As soon as my guys hit the ground and the pods disappear, I hit pause (space key if you did not know). At this time, I plan a few basic things out and do a few first setup actions before I ever let the game actually start. I suggest you do the same.

First of all, I unforbid every single item on the map. If you have a mod for that, that takes one click. If not, you have to zoom way out and select everything in a certain area, then hit unforbid, and repeat that a few times for the distant survival meals and steel units scattered over the map.

Next, I tell everyone to equip one of the starting weapons. In my case, I gave the rifle to the best shooter (Kat), the knife to the worst (Steg) and the pistol to the remaining one (Ray). I like to unpause at this time for just as long as it takes them to equip and then pause again.

Now I have a look around. I zoom out as far as possible and scan the map for a good base location. Things to like are hills enclosing an area that is large enough for a lategame base, rich soil patches and geysers. It should not be needlessly far from your start and gets bonus points if there are structures or walls you could repurpose for a quicker start.

In my case, I chose the area directly to the north of my crashlanders. It is somewhat enclosed by the small hills, has two geysers directly next to it and is not too far off. Sadly, no rich soil, but you cannot have everything. I plan to build walls to enclose that valley from the north, west and south, leaving the easter side open towards the lake.



Now that I know where I want to go, I go to the work tab and do some basic setup there. Set the work tab to numerical and set priorities for almost everything. Since at the start, you only got three pawns, you will likely have to make them do stuff they are not particularly good at in the beginning, but you can (and should) change some of that later.

For now, I set them up like this


I like to use 3-4 for my normal stuff, 2 for critical stuff like "get to hospital" and "put out that fire". I use 5 for "if you really have nothing better to do, be my guest" tasks. 1 is reserved for micromanagement so I can always make sure they do something when needed.

You will notice that hauling is pretty low with a 3 - that will likely change on a few of my pawns lateron, and I like to make "hauling sprees" where I set almost everyone to haul 1 for a few hours to get something done quickly, then reset to the old values. Similarly, plant cutting will not be a 2 on more than a few pawns after a while, but it helps get things done in the beginning.

Edit: Someone pointed out that an unmodded game only allows priorities of 1-4. This does not really change much - I suggest just using the numbers above, just one lower each. So use priority 1 for fires, doctors and injuries and priority 2-3 for your normal jobs, with 4 filling in for the "nothing better to do".


First steps

Just to be clear: the game is still paused at this time. I decide to build my starting house where that small marble wall is in my valley so I can save a few ressources and a bit of time.

I start with laying out a basic main building that will contain a freezer, kitchen, work/storage room and a common room to eat and relax. I start with the walls (wooden will do for now) and plop some doors in at appropriate places. When you look at the screenshot below, you will notice that the freezer connects only to the kitchen, so cold stays in better, while common/workroom allow for quick transit through the building from all the other sides.

If you are unsure where to build exactly, you might want to use the planning tool first so you do not have to click and cancel so much stuff. You can start a bit smaller than this example, but I would rather not - you will notice your base and needs grow quickly during the first few seasons and you will be glad if you left space.

After the basic house layout, I plop down stockpile zones. One goes into the freezer area and gets set to only accept (rotten) food, wort and animal corpses. Another goes into the workroom and is set to allow (rotten) everything from manufactured down to apparell with the exception of wort. I put another stockpile zone somewhere close but out of the way just for chunks and mechs, and a last one that only accepts human corpses on the other side of the northern hill. With these stockpiles set correctly, everything should have a place to be stored in.

Now I mark all the trees inside my soon-to-be house for cutting. I need more wood anyways, and most are in the way of something.

Then I plop down some basic stuff like setting the party/marriage spot, the caravan spot and, more importantly, 4 sleeping spots in the soon-to-be dining room. For the first few days, they will have to sleep there, and I designate four because we will soon get another person.

Now come a few basic workstations. A butcher table and fueled stove in the kitchen, a crafting spot and stonecutter table in the workroom (ignore the woodcutting table on the south wall, its used for a mod to make different looking wood that functions the same as the one from vanilla and therefore purely optical).

Next are two coolers in the west wall of my freezer, or it will never be one, and a few cables running inside the walls so everything can be connected. Since I need power for that, I chose a spot where I want a wind turbine and solar plant, plop the blueprints there and connect them to the rest of the circuit.

As a last effort, I set up growing zones. I like to place my growing zones in the space that will be the wind canal for the turbines because no trees will grow to block them then and that space cannot be used for much else anyways. That is why I chose the position you see below for my initial power plants. I designate a few strips of growing zones, leaving a bit of space in between them at first so I can expand them later when I have more pawns to grow and more mouths to feed.
I designate one zone to healroot, one to cotton, and the rest to different foods. In theory, one type of food is enough, I just do not like that. Just make sure your only foodcrop is not corn at the beginning, because it takes too long to yield the first harvest.

After all this, the base looks like this:


Now we unpause.

Note: In more extreme biomes, you will likely need to start smaller and micromanage your pawns work priorities more. In most cases, the way presented here will work out nicely, though. It will now take two or three days for your crash survivors to cut, haul, build and seed most of this base.


3 Days later

When the popup came, the colony got named "Tutorigals" because the three initial pawns were all female. Welcome to Tutoritown!

My house was built and the fields seeded after three days, just the power generators lacked because some of the initial steel had to be hauled from pretty far away. Because of that, I remembered to deconstruct some nearby spacship chunks to yield additional steel, and set a few spaces of the nearby steel vein to be mined.

I also had my first hazard. In a mighty battle, Ray shot a crazy rat running straight at her. Phew!

In other things, my workstations are now complete, I build a dining table and a few quick wooden stools to sit on (place them on the workspaces, too, since they increase work comfort). Stools are very cheap and quick to build and therefore perfect for start of a new colony.

Since the workstations are built, it is now possible to actually work on them. I set up some basic bills: The stonecutter table should cut marble and sandstone until I got about 150 each, the butcher table is set to butcher creatures "forever", the stove is set to create simple meals until we have 25.

Oh, and I set the coolers in the freezer to -4 and -6 degrees so we now actually have a freezer, not just room with a stockpile. The different settings are so only one cooler runs on full power unless both are needed.

The base now looks like this:


Just before I made that screenshot, we finally got our 4th pawn. Our new wanderer turns out to be no one else but the ex husband of Rayya, which might create some tension in the future, and he is not that good of a pawn overall. But he has high medicine and is a decent constructor, which are things we can really use right now. Welcome to Tutoritown, fist-male-ever.


The second week

Now that the basics were covered, it was time to build my gals (and the ex) some personal rooms and beds. Since these will still be temporary barracks, they do not need to be terribly spacious or nice, just a seperate small room with a bed in them will do for now.

I had just laid out the basic bunkhouse when I got lucky and yet another person wanted to join right during our second hazard, a solar flare.


Well, lets just say that she definitely was a step down from our first four people. A pyromaniac that has a low break threshhold and refuses to haul and fight is pretty bad. But funny enough, she fills the only skill niches we have left perfectly, being good in social and artistry and decent as a researcher. Have a seat, gal - beds have to wait until they are built.

Roughchild joining reminded me of something I forgot when Yoshi came: I did not set new work priorities for him. Well, since we have the basics built and 5 people now, it was time to have a look at them anyways. I tune them a bit to look like this:


You might notice that I started to remove or lower the priorities on some work types for some of my original three girls. Since we now have more people to work with, I want them to mainly do stuff they are actually good at. There is a bit of a lack of crafters right now - we only have Ray that is actually good, but since everyone can at least hew chunks into blocks and so on, its not so bad.


Our first raid

After I think 7 or 8 rimdays in total since the crash landing, the dreaded siren warns of an evildoer. Oh no, a single naked guy with a club, whatever shall we do! We pause!

I decide the best course of action is to carry on at max speed until he is close to my base, then quickly draft a few guys and get rid of him. Which is exactly what they do:


I set up like this so the two shooters have a bit of clear space between them and the attacker, with my knife swinging third pawn slightly up front on the flank to intercept if they shoot bad. They did not. In a movielike show of protagonist shooting, they down him in exactly one shot from each. I send my knifer over to kill the poor sod because I do not have a prison yet, undraft, take the club with me and leave.


Now that this was over, I resumed building my barracks. I needed to add some basic temperature control to my base now, so I added heaters and coolers to the barracks, workroom and common room. I connected the top and bottom row of bedrooms with a few vents so I do not need as many coolers/heaters.

At this point, I noticed another oversight: I forgot to add a battery to my basic power setup earlier. This was quickly remedied by building one right outside of my main building and then going to the zones tools and make a roofed zone over it so rain does not short curcuit it. This is an important "trick" to make quick and easy stockpiles or space for batteries, crematoriums or power plants. You can extend roofs up to 6 spaces from any wall, so use that to make shelters for this kind of stuff so you do not need as many walls.

Soon, my first harvests came in and I had some cloth to work with. I decided it was a good idea to finally give my newcomers some pants and shirts so they do not feel so vulnerable, so I made a bill for 3 pants and 2 shirts on my newly built hand tailor bench. I guess I could have used an electrified one already, but this one will do for now.

Also, I finally built more joy objects. I had a horseshoes pin before and added a chess table with two stools to the living room. Those two basic joy items are great since they give different kinds of joy experiences (dextrous vs mental) and cost basically nothing. In deserts you could even craft them out of steel or stone to save wood.

I noticed that with now 5 people, I was getting a bit low on food, since I had not many harvests yet. Because of this, I extended my growing zones a bit (you might notice that I left room for exactly that) and set a few nearby animals for hunting. Luckily, the bears that were here during the first few days wandered off in search of other prey. Also, I set a few nearby berry bushes to harvest to give a short boost to my foodstocks. Berries can be eaten raw without penalties by your colonists and are a good bridge-gap measure. This is especially important on boreal forest biomes since those have huge amounts of berry bushes but short growing periods, harsh winters and low animal count outside of summer.


My first caravan

Right after all of that, I guess it was day 9 or so, Tutoritown had another lucky break: a caravan came visiting, and it was a bulk goods vendor that had a few chicken to sell (in this case, ptarmigan hens, which are from a mod but behave exactly like chicken). I sold all my leather and most of my wood and bought the four hens and a bit of extra food to tide me over. Even made a profit of 100 silver because our otherwise useless #5 gal is a good haggler.

Now that I had chicken, I needed to manage where to hold them. For now, I decided they could as well sleep in the south end of the common room, so I placed some animal sleeping spots there (and deleted the ones for my guys becasue they now have real beds and real rooms). I placed a small stockpile that was configured for haygrass and nothing else next to those (it looks like a wooden pallet in the screenshot, but any normal mini-stockpile zone will do for that).

I took this opportunity to set up an animal zone - my chicken are allowed to wander the common and workrooms right now and nowhere else so they do not get eaten by predators or eat food from the freezer. Until I have enough hay for the stockpile, they can eat the grass from the ground in my house, since I have not gotten around to place flooring yet anyways. Lastly, I set some haygrass to be grown in a small stripe next to where all my wind turbines will soon be.

Oh, and a few short bows and clubs were to be built on the crafting spot so our guys at least have decent primitive weaponry until better stuff comes along.

This is what the base looks like after 10 rimdays (note that we just got a heatwave event - good that we built coolers a day or two before).

Even if colonists finally learn to pick up something when going back home six alphas from now, they are still very inefficient with their movement.

This is not only frustrating but creates that constant feeling that "everyone is just moving around but not actually doing something". Also, it feels kinda weird that one my pawns can theoretically build an entire building in a single workday (yeah, okay, one rimworld day represents about a week, but that would still be a bit quick) but takes almost the same time to haul one single item from the map border to a stockpile.


I suggest upping pawn move speeds by 10-20% (if needed, up shooting ranges accordingly, but better rebalance all shooting in general) and at the same time reducing work speeds by about 20% percent for most jobs (especially construction and mining). This would not have a huge impact, but together with a few other small AI behaviour tweaks would make the game feel subtly "more right".

Aaaand a third post about numbers balance. I promise I am done for today after this.

Power generation and consumption in Rimworld seems all over the place. Like is typical for an alpha, some workable numbers got slapped on stuff and never changed, because the net result was halfway decent. I can understand that, but I think we can make it much better with just a few tweaks:

1) Simple lighting and a few other things take too much energy. 75w for a light bulb is too high in comparison to the amounts of power a plant gives or what workstations take. Most lighting mods already take that into account by adding cheaper to run lights. Reduce the basic lamp to at most 25w for starters, and ideally incorporate some of the really, really cool alternate light sources like wall, floor or ceiling lamps.

2) Workstations are always on and on max power drain. Since freezers and coolers are using power depending on their use state, why not extend that to every workstation? If its not in use, it drains only 20% of the usual power amount.

3) Power plants have too few options and give too few energy per piece / size. A typical lategame colony needs dozens of wind/solar plants in addition to grabbing every geothermal vent you can. That is unrealistic, tedious and does not look very good. The actual ressource costs for "teching up" and expanding are good, though.

I suggest roughly doubling cost and output of the two basic power plants (and while we are at it, make the wind turbine 4x2 and its canal 4 behind and 8 in front so they play more nicely together - or the other way round with the solar 5x5 and the wind canal 5x5 and 10x5, respectively). Since this might make the very beginning of the map more difficult, consider adding another 100 steel or so to the starting drop pods to compensate. I suggest upping the non-uranium costs of the asrg quite a bit and at least doubling, if not tripling its output. This gives the plant and uranium an actual use. Lastly, slightly adjust the geothermals upwards, but not by quite as much. Perhaps 4000 power instead of the current 3600, with a corresponding cost increase to 450 steel and an extra component or two. Possibly do not quite double the output for the solar plant for reasons outlined below.

The idea behind that is to a) rebalance the steam vents to be something that is nice to have but not crucial and b) to not have to plaster half the map with power plants after a year or two to keep up with power demands. The actual ressource costs for expanding are similar to what they are now, from a steel/components per power generated point of view.

4) Workstations and some other facilities take more energy than right now - either always or when in use.



All the above changes together make it so your industrial basis is the thing that forces you to expand your energy grid, not so much that you added a few colored lights to make your base pretty. Basic functions are affordable tech, but high end stuff like vitals monitors need to be accounted for. Your workstations put quite a drain on your grid when many of them are used at the same time, making batteries much more important to have [small intersection here: something similar to the fuses mods would be really fair to have then].
Solar plants would play nicely with the extra power needs during the day through active workstations, which is why I suggested making them relatively a tad weaker. Wind and the constant power sources are useful to fulfull your "baseline" around the clock needs.

If these changes lead to power generation being to high in general (since we just reduced power needs of all those lamps across the board, for example), tweak all power gen numbers down again accordingly (I guess about 20 percent should suffice).

This might be interesting for modders that add research, too.

One problem I have with the research in this game is that the costs associated with the projects often seem pretty arbitrary - which is to be expected during an alpha :-)

Still, perhaps research times can get a quick pass in the next update or two to make them more in line and produce a better game pacing.

Problem points:

1) Some research is gated too much. Cremation does not need to be behind the relatively long smelting, for example. Hospital beds take a tad long, too - they are expensive enough to craft since you need "real" medicine to build them anyways. The asrg is pretty bad (even the better modded one is not particularly good) and needlessly gated behind a long research. Component assembly is a crucial anti-bottleneck-tech, crafting them is slow and expensive as is, it needs a huge extra workbench with sizable energy cost - why does it need to be gated behind 3000 research points in addition to that?

2) Sometimes the base research and the extended luxury research regarding the same game element seem out of whack compared to each other. For example, hospital beds should be available sooner, but the vitals monitor is an extra luxury that can very well be relegated to lategame. If you would just switch the current research values around with those two, it would make more sense at once.

The worst offender in this category are of course the new deep drilling techs. Since you can do nothing useful without the scanner, there is no real need for it to be two techs at all. And if anything, the scanner should be the first one so you can at least build it and plan where not to build stuff because you want to mine there soon. The cost of the package is actually allright, see next point.

3) Some luxury techs can easily be a bit more expensive, time wise. Powered armor and charged shots are two excellent examples of late game techs that should take a while to unlock and could easily take 5k or even 8k research.

Hello developer(s)

Something that has come up in context now and then but afaik never been spotlighted is the fact that skills vastly differ in how quickly they gain experience and therefore levels. I would suggest taking a pass at how much skill xp certain actions give sometime in the near future.

Right now, construction and research, usually followed by art and crafting, are maxed (i.e. 15+) extremely quickly on most colonists doing those things often. I suggest toning the xp gain on things like constructing furniture or crafting sculptures and researching in general down a bit, perhaps 25 or 33 percent, so having a "good researcher" actually means something besides "he has 1 blip passion, he will be at 18 in 2 seasons".

Medicine, and to a lesser extend, wardening and combat skills (especially melee) on the other hand take ages to level simply because the actions associated with them are relatively rare and therefore do not generate enough practice. There are a bunch of mods that add training facilities for most of those, and I think that is the fluffiest way to incorporate that, but they can actually make boosting those skills a bit too easy sometimes. A solution needs to be found here, perhaps a mixture of a relatively inefficient learning method (a generalistic "interactive training holodesk you can get from exotic goods vendors perhaps, where pawns learn something in their currently weakest passion skill as a joy activity?) and some simple buffing of how much xp a surgery or a successful recruiting and other relatively rare actions give.

Hey modders,

I really appreciate the active modding community here and am currently running about 50 mods.

That said, one of the things I noticed with many, many mods is that everyone seems to add one or even multiple new workstations. Is that really neccessary? If a mod adds a lot of recipes and they do not quite fit one of the existing ones, adding a workstation for that is absolutely the logical thing to do. But some mods add multiple ones or add one for crafting 2-3 things that could as well be added to an existing one.

There are other kinds of "needlessly complicated" complaints I have with some mods, but this one is triggered by a lot of them. Since Workstations take a good chunk of space, the crafting halls get bloated more and more if you add a few mods. Please consider that in your creative work.

Hello Modders,

Is there a small, single-purpose mod that simply alters the "chop wood" command to just affect trees that are, say, at 90% grown or more? Right now you always have to manually select each tree/cactus for chopping if you do not want to waste lots of wood and growing time, which is really, really tedious.

If there is not, can someone either make it or point me to the correct file to edit if this is possible as a simple edit mod?

Rimworld uses the exact same rules in most regards for any pawn, be it colonist, raider or merchant. That is admirable, but one of the reasons why players stocking up on strong weapons and raids getting ever more brutal is such a steep spiral.

There are a few checks in place to reduce that somewhat: capturing guys is harder to do since NPCs tend to die more often when downed, and the new dead mans clothing debuff is intended to discourage getting rich with loot from natives - but feels rather tacked on and unfluffy.

I suggest the following concepts in conjunction with each other to improve upon those systems and the durability stat of items (most importantly, weapons) at the same time:

1) Items can be repaired similar to what certain mods do, via a bill that is available at the most fitting crafting stations. You can repair any item you could craft. Repairing items costs 50%*[lost durability] of the cost to make an item. So for example repairing a 22% Assault Rifle would cost 39% of the mats and time it would normally cost to craft it, and it would be repairable via a bill at the machining table as soon as the player unlocks the corresponding tech.

2) NPCs get equipment with pretty low durability stats (even more so than now). Something like 25 to 50 percent. Instead of "dead mans clothes" or something like that, lets do something similar and not totally unrealistic to the "NPCs die more" rule:

When an NPC is downed, all his worn gear and his dropped weapon (but not carried items like food) lose a random amount of 20 to 40 percent durability.

This would mean that a sizeable but not overwhelming amount of the loot would be lost, and the remaining pieces would likely need to be repaired before being usable. If the low base durability would make raiders too weak (I have no idea how much below 50% influences weapon stats, if at all), make NPCs ignore those drawbacks.

All this would allow for realistic loadouts and sizes of raid groups without the player gaining a dozen strong weapons and shields after just a few raids. It would also feel realistic to be able to repair and maintain and use stuff - after a certain investment of time and ressources. Loot would still be preferable to crafted stuff, but two early charge rifles no longer up your damage output by 300%.

Because it just happened again:

Predators can spawn anywhere on the map without any forewarning. They can spawn right in the middle of your base. And five seconds later they will likely attack and cripple a colonist before you even realize what is happening. Since you only get a warning when your guys start taking damage, you have no counterplay.

This needs to be fixed. Predators should not spawn so close to your base and players should get some kind of warning when they come near your pawns/installations.

My current colony is in a tundra area. As such, having good cold insulation is important.

Sadly, if I leave my colonists to manage their own clothes, they tend to pick the ones that offer the most combat protection instead. That IS a good basis, but it leads to them chosing some leather coat with 4% resistance and 5 cold protection over one of my nice muffalo wool coats with just 3% damage resistance, but 70 degrees of cold protection.

If the gear manager allowed to set priorities via a pulldown menu, that would be very helpful. Options could be:
- best protection only
- best cold insulation
- best heat insulation
- best movement speed
etc

The pawns would then equip themselves according to a weighting of that priority and the general "be protected" priority (to prevent them picking a good insulation piece with nonexistant protection over power armor, for example).

PS: while we are at it, why are muffalo wool and clothes made from it worth so little, and those from alpaca so much? Does not reflect their stats at all.

[Phoebe]

My recent plays reinforce the feelings I had about a year ago when I last played a lot:

Phoebe as a storyteller is too boring, sometimes nothing happens for many weeks at a time. If she is intended to be anything more than a tutorial storyteller (or a fallback one if you decide you need a break from cassandra, see below), she should be a tad more active.

Perhaps her event severity could be reduced slightly, but her frequency buffed?


Cassandra has the opposite problem: She is simply too frantic. By the time a raid is over, your wounded halfway healed and the loot gathered, the next raid is already there. Shipwrecks tend to get put off for weeks because you never have time for them. Actually building up your base is almost impossible because you rarely have more than a day of peace. It is simply unfun.

Cassandra's difficulty is fine, but the frequency of major bad events, especially combat ones, really should be toned down a bit. This is not a perception issue or something that only happened in one game - its a consistent problem with her over a dozen games or so. I suggest doing the exact opposite of what I prescribed for Phoebe - reduce her frequency, and slightly buff her severity on higher difficulties.

As the title says, it would be really helpful if you could set up furniture settings while in blueprint mode - and perhaps even set a kind of default.

I am currently using the extended storage mod, and it is incredibly annoying to have to set the stockpile settings in between the actual building of the stockpile furniture and the first guy hauling stuff there - but there are many more and vanilla uses for this, too. You could set crafting bills when setting up the respective stations so you do not forget to do so later, for example.

Heya

After a longer pause I recently started playing again, and some major annoyances the game had in a12-14 seem to still be a pain. In no special order:

1) Fires, especially those through "dry thunderstorm". Not only do they still leave barren wastelands, they are also hardly containable and the "scheduled rain" often comes far too late. I even had to reload a much earlier save two times with my last colony because of uncontainable fires near my base basically engulfing and burning down everything faster than my 5 or so pawns could handle at that time.

Not only is that an excessive amount of danger and work undone, but it also happens because of "nothing" (a normal thunderstorm is not even an event, let alone a major bad one, by game definition) - and regularly.


2) Mental breaks have been discussed at length and the entire mood system still needs a lot of work - but one thing that seems new to me is the duration of mental breaks. They take a full day, sometimes longer now - and often end because the pawn in question collapses from exhaustion, which is a bit excessive. Also, there should be a minimum time between breaks that prevents pawns from having a 1-day-break, collapsing, and having a 1-day-break 5 minutes after waking up and eating right again.


3)Medicine use could use a few quality of life fixes. One I have from a mod - setting a default for certain pawn groups (like colonists, animals, enemies and so on). What would be even more important, though, would be a way to differentiate treatment of differently problematic health issues with different quality meds.

For example, simple bruises, cuts and cracks as well as long-term but not critical diseases like gut worms should be treated with herbal meds, while "real" issues should be treated with the best meds available. This could be either done by classifying health issues into "minor" and "major" and letting players assign defaults and pawn specific sets of meds for those cases, or even better, have a list of possible health issues in a sub menu that players can sort into different groups and assign a sort of medicine to.


4) Pawns absolutely should be able to at least carry a small melee weapon even when equipped with a ranged one - or be able to use their ranged weapons as a club in melee. It is completely silly that a mad wolf reaching my hunter has to be fended off with my bare fists because the stupid pawn was not allowed to bring that shiny plassteel knife we have lying around.

Heya modders,

I want to make a simple weapon rebalance (for myself for starters, similar to what I talked about a few weeks ago in general discussion). As far as I know, that should be easily doable by doing a few numbers edits in the original xml files and putting them into the correct \mods substructure.

If so, can someone give me a very quick rundown of how that has to look and what I have not thought of? All the modding tutorials I found on a quick search seem to be very indepth and overly complicated for my endeavor

Thanks in advance.