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Topics - Hans Lemurson

#1
I was playing around with configurations of coolers trying to figure out if I could reach absolute zero, but they kept breaking down periodically, and my design did not permit access to many interior spaces.  I would destroy and rebuild coolers as they broke down, but it annoyed me and created clutter.

I searched in vain for a dev mode action that could repair structures, but was unable to find it.  I can refuel power generators when I click on them, and there is even a command that lets you cause breakdowns, but I couldn't find anything that would take breakdowns away.

Is this possible to do?  Am I missing something?
#2
After I defeated all the enemies on a mission, I un-drafted everybody and began to bandage them up.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that one of the fleeing enemies was a Grenadier who had already tossed his bomb, and I neglected to move one of my pawns out of the way.

One explosion later and he's bleeding from his mangled leg and ear (both barely saved by his Devilstrand clothing) and his left thumb is gone.  I get him patched up and everybody home again, and his wounds heal without scar or infection...except for the missing thumb.

He was my only pawn who was "Passionate" about Crafting, and now his manipulation is at 92%    How much of a problem will this be going forwards if he's going to be continuing to produce the weapons, clothing, and armor for my colony? 

He'll work a bit slower (which I understand is an advantage for skill gain) but how much will his quality of work be affected?
#3
I acquired a Mini-Turret made out of Uranium from a pirate quest outpost. 

I have not researched enough to make Turrets myself, so I'm considering adding this to my base defenses.  However, Uranium is rare and expensive, and it would be a terrible shame if the turret were to be destroyed in battle.

Should I use my Uranium Mini-Turret as part of my defenses, or just break it down for parts to keep the Uranium safe?
#4
I've heard advice that you should avoid smoothing walls and floors in your colony to minimize the total colony wealth in order to stave off worse raids.  However, it is often necessary to provide beauty of SOME sort for your colonists. 

How does the beauty gained by architecture compare to that produced by statues?  If you dig rough rooms or have people live on dirt floors, but provide them with nice artwork, are you ahead of the game with respect to raids?
#5
What's the most effective way of making lots of stone blocks to build your base with?

There are stone chunks lying scattered over the map ready to be turned into bricks, but you quickly exhaust the supply of nearby rock.  How do you gather stone efficiently?

-Do you just go for "quantity" and queue up a bunch of stone cutting tasks and let the pawns walk across half the map for their materials?
-Do you specialize your labor and have some pawns haul stones to your dedicated cutters?
-Do you build a mobile stone-carving station and move around to where the blocks are so that your hauling can be 3-4x as effective?

What methods do you use when you need to get tonnes of stone?  Are there any ways stone hauling can be made more efficient?
#6
I am in the desert, in a land with a 30/60 growing season.  I have 4 men and one married woman, and the constant wooing attempts are getting out of hand.  When a rescue mission comes for nearby maiden held captive by evil raccoons, I resolve that a sexy Demolition expert is exactly what my colony needs!

Kyle, my Brawler-Chef and Brock my Archer-Doctor are the perfect candidates for the mission.  They take our only elephant with them as a pack animal because I'm running low on feed (too hot for outdoor crops, not enough components for indoors), and I hope it can graze on the journey.  The trip out goes uneventfully, and when they arrive they are able to take out the raccoon problem.

They got rather scratched up, though, and it takes a while to get settled so that I can begin the rescue of Mel, the lovely maiden (who tbh was a bit chunkier than Kyle was imagining, but you can't be choosy in the desert).  After tending to her wounds I realize to my horror that unlike my pawns who are sporting well-made cotton dusters, Mel is wearing just normal clothes!  She can't take the heat, and is succumbing to heat stroke. 

Kyle attempts to construct a passive cooler in a small cave from the nearby saguaro wood, while Brock treat's Mel's extensive injuries.  Kyle fails at construction and has to gather more wood.  Brock goes berzerk from discomfort, Kyle fails to build the door to the cave, but manages to get it completed in time for Mel to die. 

Well, some rescue mission THIS is.

Brock passes out from the heat, preventing a messy fight, and is taken indoors in the cold to recover.  Kyle, having worked tirelessly all day in the heat while badly wounded finally snaps with a "Slaughterer" break and kills the pack-elephant.  Both manage to sleep through the night, and face the grizzly task of survival in the morning.

Resolving not to let this mission be a total loss, I gather all the Berries and Agave I can, butcher the raccoons and the elephant, and then pack up all the resources to journey home.  I can't take the wood since it would slow me down unacceptably, but elephant meat weighs a lot less than an elephant corpse!

Kyle and Brock make it back home but at the last moment are threatened by Tribesmen who demand the raccoon leather, some meat, and a sleeping roll in exchange for safe passage.  That's a bargain I'm willing to make at this stage.  The two make it back safely to my base in time for a Mechanoid raid.  It's just a single Lancer arriving south-west of my base, so I send my stay-at-home crew to man the south-bunker and wait.

I wait, but the Mechanoid doesn't show up.  It is sitting INSIDE MY NORTH BUNKER lying in wait for my expedition-members to cross the bridge.  I scramble my defenders to run north, sneaking up on the Lancer using a Barn as cover, while I just barely avoid leading Kyle into a trap.  He gets shot at, but I keep him running at max range and he is blessedly unscathed.  I am able to take the distracted Lancer by surprise with a good Melee pawn, and he is quickly beaten down.

Kyle and Brock are sent directly to the Freezer to dump their meat with mere hours until it would have rotted away.  My other colonists have been going hungry in the absence of their usual chef, and I have to restrain them from eating raw meat before he can cook it up.  Eventually everybody is fed and gets to bed without further incident.

In total, I ended up trading a partly trained elephant for a handful of fruit.  Given that I couldn't grow any more hay due to the excessive desert heat, I may have had to slaughter it anyways.  The real lesson is that heat is no joke, and you can't rescue somebody when you have to struggle just to stay alive.  I'm just glad nobody else died.  The one casualty of the mission, the kind and noble soul "Elephant 2", will have her memory honored at the colony's summer barbeque.
#7
The youtuber Killian Experience made a video recently about the saddest story he's ever had in Rimworld.  I had to share it with you so that you all might know his pain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp7c-aW8wgU
#8
General Discussion / Best use for Synthread?
December 17, 2017, 05:20:47 PM
I just got a cargo drop full of Synthread, and I want to make some clothing out of it, but I'm not sure what.  I'm doing the Sea-Ice challenge, so my resources are somewhat limited. 
Should I make it into hats for a crude but warm helmet?
Should I make a Duster for maximum coverage of the body?
Should I make it into shirts and pants?
Should I just sell it for cash?
#9
Ideas / A17 Rock Chunks look too much like Steel
May 28, 2017, 05:19:13 AM
The new graphics for rock chunks, though looking more jagged and bouldery, unfortunately is lacking in visual distinction from Steel.  Zoomed out where the stack quantities are no longer visible, Granite and Sandstone boulders blur together with piles of Steel.
#10
General Discussion / My squirrels won't wake up!
April 06, 2017, 10:26:20 PM
When I ran short on vegetarian food (due to poor planning), my wise colonists realized "Beer has nutritional value!  I shall give beer to the starving squirrels."

2 squirrels were liquored up, and are both blacked out.  They have been blacked out for days, with no signs of recovery.  Their alcohol tolerance-level is massive (down to 28% effectiveness) one has developed Cirrhosis, and the other Cancer and Brain-Damage.

Normally I wouldn't care, but I was trying to start up a squirrel-farm, and although I had 3 male squirrels, one died of a heart attack, and the other two are dying of alcohol poisoning.

Is there anything I can do to save my squirrels?  Get them to wake up long enough to breed the next generation would be ok too, but it doesn't seem likely.
#11
I'm roleplaying my current fortress (using the "Strike the Earth" scenario from the March Reddit challenge) as a population of permanent alcoholics, and I want to properly "induct" some new recruits into fortress.

Alcoholism is the badge of true citizenship in my colony, but I'm running into the problem that alcohol is significantly less addictive than I'd hoped.  Despite freely available beer and a permissive drug policy, my recruits have been disappointingly reasonable with their alcohol consumption.

I am going to resort to administering the beer medically, but I don't want to overdo it and kill them with alcohol poisoning.  How much beer can I safely administer in order to have the best possible chance of converting my pawns to the one true faith?
#12
I was attempting to install a peg-leg on a downed colonist with a reasonable chance of success.  If you're a skilled enough surgeon, having the shakes from alcohol withdrawal should cancel out, right?  Anyways the surgery failed and my grower took a major cut to the torso, putting her within an inch of her life.

I had recently witnessed first-hand the value of good armor when I had two melee pawns, alike in skill and equipment, but one who I'd forgotten to have don her armor before facing the wargs.  She was badly scratched-up, and was one hit away from death, whereas her armored partner, though injured, his life was not at risk.

Then it occurred to me: Armor Vests protect the torso, and my botched surgery resulted in a stab to the torso...so if I made sure that my grower was wearing armor before going to bed, would that perhaps have lessened the severity of the accident?

Does anybody know if armor has an effect on surgical failures, or whether "surgical cut" damage bypass all armor?  (I personally think the game will be vastly more amusing if people habitually cover themselves in Kevlar before daring to rest in the hospital.)
#13
General Discussion / Kibble vs. Pemmican
March 10, 2017, 01:22:41 AM
Which is the more efficient Animal Feed?

Pemmican has the higher nutrient conversion ratio, but Kibble enables the use of high-yield Haygrass.  So which ends up being better?

Haygrass has a growth-cost of 5.00 and a harvest yield of 18.  This gives it a crop-efficiency of around 3.60.

Potatoes (as representative of food crops) have a growth-cost of 3.15 and a harvest yield of 8.  This gives a crop efficiency of around 2.54.

3.60/2.54 = 1.42 
This means roughly that it takes 14 tiles of potatoes to get the same nutrition as 10 tiles of Haygrass.

For comparing Pemmican to Kibble, I will be assuming that you have a quantity of meat already available to you and are deciding whether to grow Hay to convert it into Kibble, or Potatoes to make it into Pemmican.  Both Kibble and Pemmican use Meat and Vegetables in the same ratio, so the only differences are the output multipliers for the recipes, and the agricultural cost for growing the vegetables.

The "Make pemmican" recipe converts 5 units of meat and 5 units of veggies into 18 pieces of Pemmican.  The vegetables here cost 1.42x as much to grow as Hay does, so I'm going to give the recipe a cost of 5 + 7.1 = 12.1 food. 
18/12.1 = 1.49 raw->processed efficiency.

The "Make Kibble" recipe converts 20 units of meat and 20 units of veggies into 50 pieces of Kibble.  I have assigned Hay a cost of 1.0, so the recipe has a cost of 40 food.
50/40 = 1.25 raw->processed efficiency.

Pemmican looks like the winner in terms of efficiently converting your food into a processed good.  I'm still a little uncertain as to whether I did the math right in the cost analysis, but even if you assign the meat a cost-value of 0 (or assume that the products are made from 100% veggies), Pemmican comes out slightly ahead at 2.53 vs. 2.50.  Any increase in the value of meat only make Pemmican proportionally better.  So Pemmican *IS* more resource efficient.

But Pemmican has one major drawback compared to Kibble:  It's a lot more work to make!  How does the extra cooking labor relate to the amount of labor required to plant and harvest a somewhat larger farm?  No idea.

Addendum: If your land is poor and you are having to subsist on Gravel-Potatoes or Hydroponic Rice, then this more heavily favors Pemmican.  If your Rich Soil is plentiful, then Rice will perform comparatively better against Haygrass, and Pemmican gets better.  Aside from the additional labor and the danger of contaminating your food supply with human-meat, Kibble just can't seem to catch a break.
#14
This was a theory I developed when I was new to the game and thought that arresting people was the only way to make them join your cult Colony.  But even though well-treated rescues will join voluntarily, I still think it holds up.

Consider:

  • Everybody works tirelessly together for the greater good, as determined by your particular whims.  Without your guidance they will apathetically starve to death.
  • All of the pawns obey your bidding, and under your direct control can even act against their own interests to the point of death.
  • Mental Breaks in fact are only really bad because it is a time when you lose your ability to control or influence the pawns.
  • The only purpose of Happiness is to prevent Mental Breaks.  Perhaps excessive stress weakens your control over your drones?  If not for that, it wouldn't matter.
  • Perhaps a "Mental Break" is actually just the pawn struggling to claw their way out of a mental fog and haphazardly exerting their free will in feeble fits and starts.
  • Why are prisoners often so resistant to join your colony, even when it's a very nice place and they used to live in a tribal hovel?  Why do they refuse your gifts of unity?  STOP RESISTING AND ACCEPT OUR LOVE.
  • After they break down and surrender to your will, their life begins anew with all their past affiliations forgotten.  They will remember relatives and friends, but unless something truly distressing happens, they just don't matter as much as they once did.
  • When a Wanderer Joins, perhaps the crash had spread your Spores of Wisdom farther than you had realized.  As a stranger wanders near, the Song of the Hive draws them in, awakening the feelings of unity and purpose that had been whispering at the back of their mind.  ...Why DID they leave their old colony?  It doesn't matter any more, because they are home.
#15
General Discussion / Best way to train-up crafters?
February 28, 2017, 12:45:08 PM
Certain things, like the Component Assembly Bench require a minimum skill level to even use, and when making expensive weapons or clothing out of rare materials, it is vitally important that you have a crafter who isn't going to eff it up.

But how do you get crafting experience in the first place?  Nearly everything seems to cost a lot of resources, which are the very things you are trying to conserve by having a skilled crafter.

The best idea I've come up with is based on the fact that Experience is gained not on items completed, but on time spent.

I'm currently having some good luck making cotton Dusters with a one-handed tailor working at an unpowered sewing table while high on smokeleaf.
#16
I was trying to give an answer in this thread about how big an acre would be in-game, when I went on a massive tangent about how the distances actually scale to that of the whole planet.

My estimates are that the planet is around 1440 tiles in circumference (120 tiles from 31.72oN pentagonal-tile to the equator).  Assuming a roughly earth-sized planet (~40,000 km circumference) this gives planet-tiles a width of about 27 Kilometers.  Walking speed for humans is around 5km/hour, so it should take about 5 hours to traverse a tile on an earth-sized planet.  Caravans however can traverse a flat tile in a single hour, which either implies that the RimWorld is vastly smaller than earth, or that its day-length is longer so that an "hour" (1/24th of a day) is more time than we are accustomed.  (Longer days would account for the ridiculously fast growing times, but raise even more questions about sleep schedules and food needs).

Even so, if we just shrink the planet so crossing a tile takes an hour at normal walking speed (assuming hours are earth-hours), this still gives us a 5 kilometer width to our tiles.  The "medium" map-size is 250x250 tiles, which implies a whopping 20 meters per tile.  Even so, that's still giving us a world smaller than the moon (about the size of pluto).

It gets worse.  Walking from edge-to-edge of my 250 tile map took almost exactly 2 hours.  This implies that a medium map is actually BIGGER than a planet-tile...but let's ignore that.  Maybe your pawns go double-time when on caravan.?  Or maybe your colony-map actually includes more than one planet-tile worth of area?  Dunno.  On-map though it takes a pawn about an hour to traverse ~125 tiles.

So...this boils down to several equally implausible scenarios.:


  • 1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
    • A planet-tile is 125 meters wide
    • Pawns walk at 3cm/s
    • The world has a circumference of 180 kilometers.  (1/10th that of our moon, and at the lower limit for gravitational rounding.)

  • 1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 0.02 earth-hours (72 seconds)
    • Pawns walk at 1.5m/s
    • Planet is still tiny.
    • A year lasts 29 earth-hours, so you can literally watch the grass grow.

  • 1 tile is 100 meters and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
    • A planet-tile is 25,000 meters wide.
    • RimWorld is about 90% the size of earth.
    • Pawns walk at 7 meters/second (25 km/hour, sprinting speed, 5x walking speed)
    • ...Yo pawn's so fat that she fills 2-and-a-half acres of land!

  • 1 tile is 10 meters, and 1 Rim-Hour is 0.5 Earth-Hours (30 minutes)
    • Planet-Tile is 2500 meters
    • Pawns walk at 2.5kph on-map, and 5kph as caravans
    • Rimworld is 3,600km in circumference (30% size of moon, 150% size of dwarf Ceres in asteroid belt)
    • 1 Rim-Year takes about 1 Earth-Month
    • Walls are 10 meters thick, Pawns are the size of elephants.
    • Agricultural yields are reasonable, though growth speed works on the assumption that 9 pregnant women can make a single baby in a month.

    I think the only way to resolve this is to assume that some physical constants are different in the RimWorld universe.  Higher gravity so that tiny planets can have atmospheres?  That would certainly give faster orbits too.
#17
Campfire: Consumes 10 fuel/day.  If you spend 5 hours cooking at it, you will burn through 2 wood.  You will need to deconstruct it after you are done to not waste fuel, but you get all the remaining wood back.

Fueled Stove:  Consumes 160 fuel/day (according to the ThingDefs).  If you cook one meal at the stove you will use about 2 fuel (less if your cook is fast).  "Turns Off" automatically when not being used.

If you have no electricity and need to conserve your fuel while you convert raw food into more nutritious meals, then the Campfire is the clear winner!
#18
General Discussion / Can Armor be Smelted?
February 19, 2017, 11:07:39 PM
I have a large amount of 20% durability armor vests lying around from raiders, and rather than selling it for pennies to traders I was wondering if it is possible to melt it down for scrap.  I remember doing this in A15, but there doesn't seem to be any options for usefully disposing of Helmets/Armor in A16.
#19
General Discussion / Penoxycycline: What does it do?
February 19, 2017, 02:49:50 AM
It says it is supposed to prevent diseases and infections, and it adds immunity to plagues, but it doesn't seem to do anything for you know infections.  I applied penoxycycline to an injured pawn with an infection that was greatly outstripping his immunity, but it seemed to do all of nothing. 

Am I not using it properly, or am I a fool who cannot read some important detail?
#20
General Discussion / Are damaged grenades less effective?
February 18, 2017, 03:02:33 AM
If Grenades take damage from burning or degrading in the open, does this affect their utility?  If I have to choose between equipping a 16% grenade to a pawn and an 81% grenade, how much does it matter?

I know for guns it will affect their accuracy, but grenades?  I'm not sure what HP does for them.