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[Day 1, Hour 0: Fuck My Life]

So I finally got around to deciding to get back into Rimworld. It's been a while! I figured I'd wait a few iterations, see what changes had been wrought. I'm going into this basically blind. Anyway...

Day 1, Hour 0: Fuck My Life
From the diary of Alice Lovegood.

So, there I was, enjoying a nice, long hypersleep, when BAM! Alarms start going off, you get literally blasted from your hypersleep coffin, smoke is filling the compartment, and fuck-knows what's going on.

The ship is burning, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs for my sister, and she grabs my hand. We run for the lifeboat bay, only to hear the sound of a gun going off. Some... Some big guy is pointing guns at everybody, there's four, five girls already on the decks, he's screaming that none of us bitches are going with him and screaming for someone named "Mark" to join him. I dunno, but he points the gun at me and asks me if I wanna die now, or die when the ship burns up.

Then some big girl hits him from the side. I don't mean "big" as in "obese", though she could probably have stood to have missed a few cheeseburgers. I mean that this girl towers a foot over him (okay, he wasn't all that tall, but still!) and is built like a giantess. She plows into him like a freight car, smashes his head into the airlock, headbutts him senseless, grabs his gun and my sister's hand, and drags the two of us into the escape pod.

It was sized for ten, but that was when "Mark" showed up. He had a shotgun, and I panicked. I slapped at the controls, and the next thing I knew, we were off the ship, hurtling towards the planet below. The pod got knocked up, but thankfully made it down more or less in one piece. Well, "less" in one piece, but they overbuild things on those interstellar ships, and the lifeboat had escape pods of its own.

We land shortly after our lifeboat had crashed and self-buried itself in the sand, thankfully scattering at least some of the supplies over the sands before we hit. So... FML. Now I'm stranded on a fucking Rimworld.

I guess I should introduce myself, for whatever ghoul is going to be picking over this diary in a few years or centuries. My name is Alice Lovegood, but everybody calls me Lovey. I'm from an Urbworld that was called "Diane". Unimaginative, I know. I'm fifteen.

My sister's name is Laura, she's three years older than me. Obviously, she has the same last name as me, and everybody calls her Luna.  Something about an ancient book older than the Bible or something, I dunno. Anyway...

Well, we got caught... And tried, and convicted, something about the authorities not liking us having participated in an armed robbery, but, you know... We were hungry! So they put us in a hypersleep simulation to give us a colonist type training. My sister and I both picked 'Herbalist' because it sounded cool and mysterious, and we spent the next five or so years in a simulation of being medieval exiles on some medieval world, starting a village and living off the land, doing herbs and stuff. It was kind of cool.

Then they shipped us off. We got put on an interstellar, back into hypersleep (No sims this time,) to go live somewhere the hell else. And then, well, see above, under "So there I was."


Anyway, that's the two of us, but there's three of us here. That brings me to number three, the girl built like a truck who saved our lives. Her name is Genevieve Langley, though she tells us to call her Gen. Gen's from the same system as us, though she lived on stations all her life. She grew up with a fantastic number of phobias, according to her, and got over it by taking up working in a cantina. She was perfect for the job, since she was built like a truck and easily capable of keeping rowdy patrons in line. She's seventeen, which is kind of hard to imagine, but when she put her hair up in pigtails, suddenly I see it.

So, here we are. Three girls from the same planet, lost. And you want to know what's the most fucked-up about it?

We're not even in a nice forest. We're in a desert - a fucking desert! I don't even know if half of what I learned in the herbalist sims is going to help us... But, well, we'd better do something, soon.


Looking around, Luna says we have a few things going for us here. First off, we obviously have survival fabrication tools, so we can build stuff without, you know, needing to be expert engineers and shit.

Secondly, we landed right next to some old ruin. It's pretty simple: just a square room on the sand. It's got no walls, but also has no roof, and the scans from our pods as we came down show it to be empty. So we can tear a wall out, put up a door of some sort or another, and sleep there. Thirdly, there's a steam geyser immediately south of it - and I do mean immediately. We can probably have someplace to sleep that's lit all night long built in about, ooh... Well, probably before nightfall tomorrow. We're gonna get started on that.

It beats sleeping on sand. Anyway... well, I kind of want to take this bad girl and tear some rock up! Oh, and my sister took the pistol, and I took a rifle that fell with us. Just like old times.

Day 1, Hour 13
We've been working all morning. We've got a door and some roofing up over the old stone shack, we're going to build some beds, but we need more metal if we're going to illuminate our lives any time soon. We're mining an outcropping that was south of us, but for fuck's sake, it's raining. FML.

Day 2, Hour 4
Well, I slept in a bed last night. Luna and Gen didn't, they hauled throughout the night. Anyway, someone's wandering through!

Her name is Meowski Davidson, it seems. She's twenty-five, and it looks like she's a joywire artist. She won't do labor, and she's afraid of fires. She's also a paranoid empath, who seems to be a villager from some local village called Cab Driver's Hill.....

Yeah. Just keep moving right along there, crazy lady...

Day 2, Hour 20
So! As promised, we have shelter with light and a food dispenser. I mean, it's a nutrient paste dispenser, eugh, but it's better than nothing. It's also crammed in along with our beds, with its hoppers and stuff, but hey, it's still something.

We talked with the crazy lady who passed on by. The news is not great. There's five factions 'round these parts.

There's Cab Driver's Hill, an outlander town. They don't like us. They don't like anyone. But they don't hate us. That's the good news. The bad news?

There's a tribe of feral people called the Black Ant Camino. They really hate us. They hate everybody. They may or may not be cannibals.

Then there's three pirate bands: the Sword Partners, the Red Spears, and the Soldier Group. They hate everybody and want to pillage, plunder, maim and murder.

We took one look at that shit and asked her if we could come join her town. She told us if we followed her, she'd lead us all into tribal country and let them pick our bones clean. We elected not to follow the crazy paranoid empath.

FUUUUUUUUUUCK! My! Life!

Well... I guess we're boned, but we may as well keep trying, right?

I wonder if anyone else does this: I realized that my colonists don't have any objections whatsoever to sleeping in the canteen, nor do those who eat mind if they do so with a person whose bedroom it is sleeping a few tiles away.


I'm sure this'll be changed sooner or later, but for now I like it. I like to stick social-only characters, Courtesans and Nobs (primarily Courtesans) in the canteens as the keepers. I also combine the canteen with the communications panel room, so the courtesan who lives there should hopefully never be too far away to jump on the blower when a ship arrives.

Does anyone else do this - keep a prisoner around to have your social monkeys (the nobs and courtesans and con artists, assuming you don't do as I do and put the con artists to work at hard labor,) gab at them, spamming "friendly chats" to grind up their Social abilities?

I've got some poor schmuck of a male con artist locked up in my fortress (which has been since the beginning a girls-only place, just for the hell of it,) and he's constantly being gabbed at by two nobs and three courtesans.

I wonder what the poor bastard must think. (Or what they're doing to him. Bwahahahaha. He loves this place, he's happier than all of my actual colonists.)

Also, if you can stand having someone's labor missing for a bit, the best cure for the sad and grumpies is to be thrown in jail and gabbed at until your loyalty is maxxed out. There's something fundamentally wrong, in a funny, hilarious way, when throwing someone in irons to cure an imminent mental break results in them getting out of your prison happier than they've ever been before.

So, lately I've taken to leaving frag grenades Forbidden around my fortress, just lying on the ground, so the cleaners won't sweep in and clean them out, and I won't accidentally sell them off. I'm leaving them around as if they were fire extinguishers, so that someone nearby can grab them and put out the fire. You can manually force someone to equip a forbidden item (though it wouldn't be hard to pause, unforbid, click, rightclick, equip, even if not,) so that's not even a problem.

I think it says something is very amiss about this game, largely in the firefighting AI and the inability to manually force someone to override a job that someone else is already doing, that I'd quite honestly rather use fragmentation grenades to manually put out a fire and blow up whatever is burning and rebuild it, than get my colonists lit on fire trying to fight it manually.

Does anyone else do this?

A picture really is worth a thousand words, so have a gander at the screenie I chopped down.

That is an escape pod from my ship. It landed in a bedroom. As you can see from the bottom-left hand side of the screen, there is a roof there.

I'm fairly sure this is a bug. However, as bugs go, it is fairly hilarious. I'm just imagining the roof has this gigantic hole punched in it and the light was broken from the impact, and now some poor colonist is sleeping with a moonroof until that gets fixed.

[attachment deleted by admin: too old]

I've noticed this since .250: If you dig all the way to the edge of the map inside the mountain, you'll get travellers randomly appearing on the inside of the mountain. Also critters.

Soooo, the ground caravans thread got me thinking...

We need more caravans from the Mountainhomes. Well, from other outposts, anyway. RimWorld isn't supposed to be just you alone on this planet, there's supposed to be other settlements, just... Far away. Hard to get to. No paved roads, no flying cars, and a shitload of bandits.

But remember rule of Acquisition #62: The riskier the road, the greater the profit.

So, I'd suggest that those other remote outposts are willing to do business, and could be a fertile grounds for events. You'd need to randomly generate some other settlements and their details when the game is generated.

To start with, of course, there's trade. Outposts like to trade, especially when they have something to trade and have shortages in another area. One outpost might be short on armaments and have a lot of metal, so they'd be willing to buy guns expensively, sell metal cheap, and would deal in food fairly. Another might be an exceptionally well-armed agricolony under constant siege by suicidal raiders, with food coming out of their ears and a drastic shortage of metal, willing to trade food-for-metal at extortionate 5:1 rates and offering lots of cheap guns. (Gee, that sounds familiar.) Yet another might have prisoners they're willing to give you money to take off their hands, because they're not quite bloodthirsty enough to just execute them.

And so forth and so on. You build your relations with them by being nice - selling them stuff at good prices, buying what they have surplus, offering them gifts, etcetera. You wreck your relations by being an arsehole, charging them extortionate prices for the things they need desperately, looting their caravans, etcetera, and they should have radios, so just making sure there's no survivors won't mean they don't know what you did.

Later on, you could send caravans to these remote colonies. A caravan should need some way of carrying things, whether it be a hover-truck, a rickshaw, or muffalo-drawn wagons. You can set the prices you'll charge for your goods (which they will be free to refuse or only purchase a little of, based on how much you want for them and how desperate they are to get it; after all, you can't eat credits, metal or guns,) what you're willing to buy/take in trade, and if you'll trade, how much you'll take in kind, etcetera. The better the Social of the guy you appoint as the caravan master, the better deals he can negotiate... And of course, you need to send well-armed guards who know what the hell they're doing with a gun, or your caravan will just get picked off and your people will be lucky to crawl home alive.

Or you could send your folks to go a-raidin', either disguised as a caravan or not. Obviously, not all of these outposts will get along with one another, so if you send raiders to hit the slaver compound and liberate their people, a lot of folks might cheer you on for it. Sending slavers to hit the nearly-defenseless mine whose schtick is that everybody loves them because they'll deal with anyone, not so much.

They could ask you to get involved in conflicts and the like, may send requests for material aid in the form of whatever resources are around, and so forth and so on. They could ask to borrow specialists, folks with a rating over 15 for some project, etcetera. They could also offer the same; offer aid if you've been good to them and you need it (or grant a request for it,) send a specialist to help out for a week or so, etcetera.

Of course, there's always a risk, though if you've been diplomatic and made friends, the risk should be miniscule. And your colonists should almost never die on a remote assignment, that just wouldn't be cricket. You might need to mount a rescue mission, though.

Simple concept, probably not so simple too execute: all colonists (barring unusual circumstances) should have a first name, and the possibility of gaining a nickname - and the player ought to be able to change nicknames and possibly other names.

Also gives me an idea for a random event: colonists could randomly change their name for unspecified reason

I'm thinking that colonists could have defined ethnicities with different name tables, to weight the naming chances.

[Day 1; Hour 0]

[Note: I don't plan to write anything terribly explicit here, but I'm not going to filter it, either. Expect swearing, cussing, and frank discussions of the ugly implications.]

Day 1; Hour 0
From the journal of Angela DeSoto, castaway.
So, have you ever found yourself aboard an interstellar space-ship, traveling stupidly long distances on a pointlessly long journey, only to be rudely awakened from your cryo-pod in the middle of the night by the shrieking of alarm klaxxons? Dashed through the smoke and flames to arrive at an escape pod and spend hours tumbling through space, barely having boosted free of the ship before it tore itself apart, and landed hard on some rocky soil?

No? It can't be just me, I'm sure that experience has happened to thousands of thousands of people by now. Anyway, here I am. The name is Angela DeSoto, and fuck my life.

I landed along with the other escape pods that made it clear. They're supposed to connect to one another and seek out a safe landing spot together... There are three of us. That doesn't bode well. I'm the first out of my pod, and I nervously look around, wondering who's going to come out. My mind flashes to the possibilities; from the good (veteran settlers, grizzled and wise to the ways of the wild, ready to put down stakes and strike the earth of any planet,) to the bad (a couple of useless, whiny medieval nobles who were for some reason rescued from their dung-age planets instead of being shot as useless morons,) to the ugly (A couple of big, beefy man-convicts who'd just love to have a weedy teenaged fuck-doll as a slave.)

It's...



Two more weedy teenaged girls. At first, I felt relief flood over me, visions of two big, beefy guys holding me down and forcing themselves into me over and over until I passed out fading away. Then, I felt a wave of hopelessly; we're three teenaged girls lost on an uncharted planet!

We may be fucked. Maybe or maybe not literally, but either way, fucked.

So, time to explain who we are. I'll go first, since I already know me:

My name is Angela DeSoto. I chose it myself, since I have no idea what my mother's family name was. She was a whore, on an urban hive-world, and I an unwanted child, the result of the activities of that profession, which should tell you exactly how successful she was. (Successful prostitutes have birth-control implants. Or at least the clout to compel their clients to either wear a condom or accept an act that doesn't carry with it the risk of pregnancy.)

She took care of me for a few years, then got rid of me when I was seven. She said that I was old enough to take care of myself and she didn't need the hassle. Thanks for nothing, mom. I wound up on the streets and skyways, fighting and scrapping and even shooting for every scrap of food. Yeah, I'll admit it, I even spread my legs for credits a few times, but I always swore I wouldn't make that my life.

Some urchins make good - they fight for everything they can learn, read everything they can get their hands on, make a few big scores and break into the world of business with the seed money. I tried to do that... And I fucked it up. I got pinched at the age of 14, and I was given a few options, none of them fantastic.

Option A was that I could have my ovaries extracted and be otherwise sterilized (more on that in a minute,) and be conditioned for a life of some kind of menial service-sector job; mental conditioning so you'll happily count a rich person's money without so much as once thinking of taking so much as a credit for yourself, or so you can work long hours for subsistence pay without once thinking of agitating against the system or countenancing the idea of worker's rights, or even wind up working in a state- or corporate-sponsored brothel.

Fuck that, I thought, what's option B. Option B was to join the military: No forced sterilization, long-term training until 17 upon which time I'd be in for a five year rip plus the number of years spent training. Next.

Option C was death. I'd be taken into a chamber with a table with a pill and a gun. The pill would kill me quick and painlessly; the gun, even faster. To encourage me to take the pill or gun option, the collar around my neck would start to constrict after a minute, choking me to death. (I did mention I grew up on a not-nice place, didn't I?)

And then there was Option D. If you're thinking it's bad that Option D is lower on the totem pole than an execution-encouraged suicide, you're probably right. Option D was deep-space colonist training. I'd be taught a smattering of the skills people heading out to settle new worlds would need, and shipped off in a year.

After that, I asked to go in the military, but I was told that only the option I was now considering or the previous option was available: conditioning and military were off-limits to me, my last options were suicide or colonization. I asked if there was an option E, and I was told no. At that point, I told the judge telling me this that a choice between death and colonization was no choice at all, and she smiled an ugly smile and said "Well, how else would we get you street trash to stop choking the ranks of the military and go out to settle something else?" Then she took out the choking collar and grinned.

So, yeah. Fifteen years old, given a crash-course on mining, farming and construction; packed into a cryo tube to be deposited on some world with hundreds of other settlers. What a fucking railroad, right?

Let's meet Contestant B, shall we? Her name is Graciana Rodriguez, and I'm not sure how well she's going to hold up.

She was from a satellite world in the same star system I was born in. It was called a midworld - that doesn't mean "middle technology," it means "middle population." In other words, instead of being one choking, planet-sized city, it was cities and suburbs. She had good parents, a good upbringing, if somewhat socially starved, and few friends. She's two years older than me, and had a minor run-in with the law.

By which I mean, she tried to hack the central solar bank and got caught, around the same age I was. She was given a choice not quite as sadistic as the one I was given, but still, a choice between forced sterilization and service conditioning, the military, and deep space mining is not quite a great choice. She went with the mining and was immediately bound as an apprentice to the trade, doing a two-year stretch on a mining vessel. Her skin's the color of dark tea and she has a somewhat buff build - you know what I mean, not exactly muscle-girl territory or anything, but definitely more buff and tough than a weed like me? She's latina through-and-through, but even a tough latina miner-girl can be overwhelmed by all of this. She was on her way to an out-system mining gig, which is why she and I were on the same ship.

Now, onto what I mentioned earlier: Rodriguez and I are from the same star system. That means that we, like most every living human being in that system, were descended from genetic stock that universally had one specific type of modification - it was a planned system, you see. Both of us are female, as the humans where we came from understood it, which is not the same as how humans from other places understand it. It should be noted that where I came from, "male" was a concept taught and spread primarily as a concept to understand what humans were like outside our home system - you see, the founders of our planned system decided that civilization would be better without gender dimorphism. To that end, they had us engineered so that we're all functional hermaphrodites - a word I didn't even know until I was told it and had it defined for me. Which brings me to our third contestant:

Meet Mina Kaufmann. She wasn't from our star system, which means that unlike us, she does not. To say that this came as something of an horrific surprise to her would be an understatement. Then, after she got over her initial fear and abject surprise, she started poking our hips, prodding, groping, and I just barely managed to prevent her from sticking her fingers in me (I'm a bit too freaked out to let a girl three years older than me finger me at the moment, thank you,) asking us questions like how we were supposed to progenitate (who the hell even uses a word like that?!) young (she had to explain she meant 'make kids') if we didn't have any testes, or whether having a penis attached to our pubic mounds complicated vaginal childbirth; questions I was wholly unable to answer (I did mention that my education comes primarily from the school of hard knocks, right?) and which Graciana was too red in the face to answer.

Did I mention she's a scientist? Because she totally is. She too is from a midworld, but she has some kind of genius-ditz autistic savant thing going on; without the autistic part. At the age of eight, she was academically on par with university students, and earned her first Bachelor's degree by the age of ten. This got the attention of some big imperial navy or another, and she was promptly recruited (it was not really optional, but they did pay her family a nice hardship bonus for losing their only daughter,) and sent to work in a lab. She's been there ever since, and was transferring to a new post when she was rudely awakened by the ship we were on tearing itself apart. She's now 18 years of age, give or take the years she spent in cryo before me and Graciana went into the big freeze.

So, yep. Here we are. Three girls, only one of whom as humanity in general would recognize them, from two different stars, on a moon orbiting a gas giant orbiting a third star entirely, crashed, lost, cast-away.

Fortunately, our datapads still have those survival manuals we were all issued; I am at least partly trained for this shit, what with having spent a year learning to operate a power pick, constructor-tool and genetically-modified foodstuffs, and we have the advantage of orbiting emergency satellites with hundred-year-lifespans, launched when our escape pods launched. Here is where we are.

This is the north:


Here's the middle, where we are:


And this is the south:


My 'Colonist' training tells me that this is a decent place; there's four steam geysers exposed, and if there's steam geysers out here, there's more in the mountain to our west. We're in a big, rocky valley, full of crags and outcrops and hills. It looks defensible, especially with some good walls around us. There's debris from our ship fallen all around.

Mina demands - demands - that our first priority be a research bench. Why in the fuck she'd want one here, of all places, eluded me, and she told me in no uncertain terms that I was too young and too ill-educated to understand what could be wrought with a research bench. Graciana put it in perspective: if I wanted to be eating within a week, I'd be smart to invest in a research bench in the hands of a midworld nerd who went on to become a navy scientist today. Mina explained that she could design a hydroponics table to fast-grow the potatoes that appear to be the only feed-stock our pods crashed with if she had a space to work.

I said I guess that made sense. Mina gets a table, me and Graciana get to take our picks and go to work... Joy.

Firefighting shouldn't just be something everyone does - I mean, it should be. But colonists who do it more should get better at it, like everything else.

I also think hauling should be a skill, in that people who haul a lot should get faster at moving. This would allow us to chase down those last few jackass runners without breaking down walls.

This is a problem for me, especially on a huge map, and most especially when my living quarters are basically in one corner of the map.

I wish I could set everybody up with more than one bedroom - one "Primary" bedroom to go to when they're near to it, and secondary or "Hotel" rooms that they can crash in when they're Urgently Tired and nearer to the secondary than their own room.

I also wish I could set up dorms which are "for whomever needs it tonight," to the same effect - IE, set up a remote mining dormitory in one end of the map, so the miners don't run to the mine in the morning, plink off one and a half squares of minerals, then sprint back to their bedrooms screaming that they're so hungry and tired they're gonna go psycho.

[anywhere in the system]

So. You think you're in for a nice trip in cryo, free from dreams and nightmares. You go under peacefully, on your way to a new world... And then you wake up to the sound of alarm klaxons and smoke. Your cryo-pod rips free from the wall and you manage to leap free, jumping, clawing, kicking, biting, anything, to get into that one-man escape pod and get the hell out of what has become, essentially, Hell. Your pod tear-asses through space for just long enough for the soul-rending, panties-pissing terror of whatever happened to the ship to wear down and be replaced by soul-numbing, existential terror of what's going to come next. If there is a God, or Gods, or Goddess, or Goddesses, or Ten Million Kami or whatever, you're going to land on a civilized world, with things like law enforcement, civil services, and foster families.

Then you get a good scan on your datapad from the landing pod's sensors. You're coming down in the goddamned crags of some forsaken scrublands, half desert and half dirt, and there's no beacons anywhere in the system, other than the distress beacon of the ship which is now a debris field.

Then you land, stumble out of the pod, get a good look around. The first stroke of luck is that this world is earth-normal, more or less, so you can breathe and eat things that grow here. Hell, there's agave and saguaro cacti growing, so it must have been seeded by one of those probe-ships they sent out millions of years ago.

And then you realize who you landed with. A space marine, skilled in survival, or maybe a professional colonist, a lifelong frontiersman who makes a living packing up and moving out when the local planet he's settled gets too civilized for his tastes?

We're three teenaged girls. Oh hell, we're doomed.



This is us. Goddesses help us all... I guess I'd better introduce us all. I'm not going to write down who I am.

Up at the top, the Asian looking girl with the short brown hair and the lithe build, is Lin. She's like a headcase or something. She's a nerd girl from a midworld who was in some kind of junior cadets program. Completely lost in computer games and fiction about empires and super soldiers, she even has - or well, had - this really silly black and red peaked cap with some kind of silver badge. I guess she lost it in the crash. She keeps going on about how she's this veteran military commissar and she should be in charge... And she has practically no social graces whatsoever. I don't mean that she's a slob, or she doesn't wash or anything, but she has like, no clue how to talk to people, even her peers, face-to-face. So she kind of defaults to that 'Commissar' personality. It'd be cute if it wasn't so damn aggravating.

The brown-haired girl with the figure is Juno. She was some kind of lordling as a kid - a bratty girl whose only acclaims were that she was pushed out of the vagina of a landed noblewoman, and that she was a mischievous devil who got into everything. A mining ship came trading at her planet - you know how it is, places like that have one communications array and some half-addled idiot three generations down from the actual technician who installed it who thinks he's a techpriest, worshipping the batteries and solar panels that keep it going. Anyway, trade was done, and she stowed away on a mining ship... At the age of nine. You might think that would end pretty badly, and, well, it ended pretty much exactly how you're expecting it ended, except that she wound up warming the bunk of a female space miner instead of a man. At least it got her an education of sorts, in the way things are in the galaxy on planets that are not ass-backwards. Somehow she learned to dig really, really well, and learned to brawl. She finally got tired of being someone's bunk-warmer and slipped away on a station with a fistful of credits taking passage on the first ship she could find... Probably wishes she were back in her miner's arms. She's got an artistic side to her, but also a touch of the acquisitiveness. I don't think that's going to be a problem here, though - there's nothing to steal, and anything we get is going to be shared by simple virtue of the fact that here we bloody are!

And then there's the blonde, Ayers. From a massive ecunemopolis world, Ayers' claim to fame is being the oldest of us... By which I mean that on built-up planets with conservative laws, she'd be considered old enough to smoke, have sex and join the military, but still three years away from drinking alcohol. She was an urbworld urchin, one of tens of millions like her throughout the galaxy - street meat. Unwanted kids, thrown out in the absence or disinterest in social programs. She scrapped, scraped, and fought for every morsel of food she could find, and did well. From the street rat she reinvented herself as a teenager into a businesswoman, cutthroat and competitive, but successful. At least until her past came calling, and one of her old gang threatened to reveal the nature of several felonies she had been involved in unless she paid him off. Ayers went to see him, had a gun with her, and shot him dead on the spot... It was just her luck that some other kid saw the exchange (of gunfire.) She couldn't exactly shoot down a kid, so she grabbed what money she could and fled offworld, looking to find a new urbworld to set up shop again. Instead she landed here. She claims that she should be in charge, since she's the oldest and presumably most experienced.

I suppose now would be a good time to show you where 'here' is. We spent a while looking over the terrain images taken by my pod on the way down.


F

M

L


We're stuck beside an enormous freaking mountain. Juno says it's obvious we're on the leeward side; enough rainfall makes it over here to water the local area, but past that it looks like it's more or less desert to the west. North and south are more of the same; mixed brush and sand, mountain to the east of us, crags all around. There's a lot of wildlife; squirrels seem abundant, but there's also some kind of red rodent. My datapad analyzed the nearest one, proclaimed it to be a "Boomrat" and helpfully informs us that when killed, they have a similar effect to an incendiary grenade.

Fucking wonderful. There's also "Muffalo," but they seem to be more or less harmless, if territorial. Lin suggested - well, ordered that we hunt them for food. Juno asked her, ever-so-sweetly, if she knew how to skin and filet a once-living creature. That made Lin pause for a moment, then she proclaimed that Juno should do it, being the one who came from a world where that kind of thing was common.

Juno proceeded to recount, in gory detail, a time she had seen her mother and her huntmaidens return from a hunt with the carcass of something called a "horndeer," had strung the thing up in the courtyard of their manor house and dissected it. That pretty much broke Lin completely; the commissar vanished and she started to cry. Ayers hugged her, and Juno then mentioned that not only did she not intend to hunt any critters for food or pelts, but that she didn't actually know how to do so in any event. As Ayers had never even seen a living creature as large as a muffalo before this, that pretty much put the kibosh on that. Looks like we're on a vegetarian diet. (Juno could stand to slim down a bit anyway. All hips and no boobs is not a particularly attractive look, especially on a girl her age.)

We discuss what we should do. Juno has some skill at construction - putting together and tearing down mining jigs, whatever a jig is - and our pods helpfully contained prefabricators that will let us put up a limited, but useful, selection of structures and help us build some basic necessities.

Looking around, there's tons of steam geysers around the immediate area. One is even inside the mountain, but we can see it steaming out through a vent. Lin immediately suggests that safety can be found behind the rock, at which point Ayers gets freaky. It turns out she's claustrophobic and prone to nightmares. She adamantly refuses, but Lin and Juno both agree that they want someplace safe and defensible. We promise to dig her a nice big room as soon as possible.

First thing's first, though: there's a massive chunk of rocky ores immediately next to us. We're going to need all the metal and food we can get, so we'll start by stockpiling it. Then we move up near the steam vent to set up camp.

Lin and Ayers squabble over the gun. Lin says she's the best markswoman, Ayers says she's older and she's the only one who's actually killed someone before. Ayers' objection is withdrawn when it's pointed out that both she and Juno are handy with their fists and improvised melee weapons, while Lin is not. Lin takes the gun, and we get started. Juno shows us which end of these picks to hold, and we'll have to get to it.

Day 1, Hour 17: Good gods that was hard work! Juno seemed suited to it, but Lin and Ayers were panting like dogs. How we kept at that for seventeen straight hours without killing each other or taking a break, I can only ascribe to the survival implants our escape pods injected us with. Evidently, they make our bodies generate some kind of natural attention focus drug that keeps us on task, and we spent the whole time chatting. Then we hauled the metal and the nearby foodstuffs into the stockpile. It's bright out, but thankfully not unbearable. Mainly the light seems to be reflected from the gas giant, not direct.

Anyway, we've grabbed what we can from the local area. We have over 1,700 units of metal and 186 of "food." I'm not sure what this stuff is; Juno says it's spaceboard survival rations, raw boxes of what they call "Potatoes." We stuffed it in the stockpile anyway, now it's time to relocate. Lin's suggested that the first thing we need to worry about is our defenses. That sounds nuts, but Lin got a little hysterical, spelling out in rather terrifyingly graphic details what a group of bandits, raiders, or slavers who got their hands on three teenaged girls would do to them.

I have to say it's been on my mind; it looks like it's been on all of our minds. Juno's particularly uncomfortable at the idea, and so it's unanimous: we shall erect some defenses first. We designate some sleeping areas up north and get to work.



Day 2, Hour 0: Well, this is what our work since light until we fell asleep has wrought. A half-completed... Shack? I'm not sure why we appear to be walling ourselves in, but Juno explains that it's an artifact of the auto-constructors we're using. If we want a roof over our heads, they absolutely insist on a completely enclosed building. Since we're not planning for this building to be permanent, as it's just a temporary shelter and fighting position, we'll finish the walls first, thus roofing it in, and then demolish the walls to reclaim some of the metal, rather than building doors (which are expensive.)

I also learned that Juno isn't actually super-hippy, just wearing an outfit that makes it look that way. I learned this because she didn't seem able to actually sleep while clothed, and had to sleep using her outfit as a blanket. We really need to make getting some real bedrooms a priority. FML.

We also went to bed hungry, which sucks. Evidently, once we've put the foodstuffs and other materials into the stockpile - which Lin explained was a kind of military/survival field stockpile using ubiquitous matter transportation tech - they can only be materialized in the appropriate location; IE, when we use our auto-builders (for metal,) or inside of a nutrient processor (for food.) So for breakfast, it looks like we're going to be scarfing down raw nutrient-paste material rather than nutrient paste itself.

FML again.

Day 4, Hour 18: So far, it's been incessant sun, no rain, no... Anything, really, except us. Working. Thank god for an endless supply of sanitary towlettes. Anyway, Fort Girl Power is complete.



We cut down and hauled out everything that could provide an opposing force with cover, enjoying some nice raspberries and a bit of cactus juice in the process. We made these weird defensive baffles in the entrances out of sandbags - not a solid row of them, but connected walls of sandbags, without enough space between them for a person to crouch, that make getting in and out a royal motherfucker. Lin swears up and down that it's a sound military strategy called a "waffle," which slows down enemies and prevents them from taking cover on the edges of the walls, forcing them to come out and get shot in the open, while we enjoy leaning out from behind corners with sandbags in front of us. I can't help but wonder if she's getting this from some kind of holotable wargame, but it's the best idea so far. We celebrate with more raw nutrient paste material. FML.

Day 4, Hour 20: Well, maybe there is a little luck in the universe! No sooner are we sitting down to eat our raw "Potato" when the roaring sound of aerobraking reentry pods fills the air. My heart soars with joy - maybe here comes some adult who knows what the flying hell she's doing, and - oh. It's more raw "Potato."



Well, at least getting a drop of foodstuffs from the wreck is better than a kick in the crotch. We muse about our fortunes and decide that the next thing we need is to get a bloody generator up and running. That means tunneling. Lin is aggravatingly insistent that we cut a defensible position from the rock rather than just tunneling straight into the mountainside and erecting the geothermal generator with cables leading out. Ayers is petrified by the idea of living underground, but the prospect of having a lot of space seems to mollify her somewhat.

Also, worryingly, my datapad is saying that we've "probably been seen" and that "pirate raids will probably start soon." Getting that generator up and running seems pretty urgent now... Not just for nutrient paste, either. FML.

This is a very odd behavior... And frustrating. I'm seeing colonists, walking parallel to my dumping grounds, actually choose to path inside the debris field instead of stepping one square to the side and pathing outside of it. As in, they actually had to go out of their way to step INTO the debris field to climb over rubble for a while, then get back out of it to go where they want to go.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Currently, I've debuted 5x5 bedrooms, and my colonists are still complaining about cramped quarters, saying "I feel like I have no room to breathe."

Do these greedy so-and-sos actually require 10x10 bedrooms to not be unhappy about the quarters?

Okay, so... I have a massive stockpile of corpses. There's probably more gravestones outside my colony than there are in the actual graveyard near my hometown, which has been open for business since like, 1900.

After a certain point... It seems my colonists just won't bury the damn corpses anymore!
The corpses are not forbidden; there are graves available and accessible.

They just won't haul them into the graves. When I select a colonist and rightclick on a corpse, the option isn't even there.

Alright, so, one of the things that bugged me early on was that my colonists got unhappy thoughts from sharing a bedroom.

Fair enough, some folk are antisocial and all, but, it makes me think... Why? Some people are going to form friendships tight enough that they don't mind rooming together... And eventually, some folk are going to form relationships tight enough that they'd actively prefer to sleep next to one another. Without any clothes on, if you get my meaning...

I'm talking about sex, obviously. Hell, one of the possible character backgrounds is courtesan!

This is the kind of thing that's probably slated for later on, but I'd like it if we could build 2x2 beds. These could give people a happy thought - I have a huge bed! We must be doing kind of well - and could be shared with someone they fell in love with, or at least find agreeable enough to share a bed with. That doesn't necessarily have to be a sexual relationship, and attitudes on it could differ based on origins. A medieval worlder might well simply shack up with a friend for warmth and someone to talk to at night, giving them a sociable chat before bedtime and both of them a happy thought for having great digs, while urbworlders might be quite private and not prefer to share quarters unless they're shagging someone.

And, of course, there is that courtesan you picked up from a slave ship/who came wandering by. S/he (can they be male?) might well take someone into their bed just because they're having a rough time (IE, they're close to a mental break,) simply to cheer them up. Or, of course, folk might just get to boning their friends.

So, what I propose, broken down, is...

1: Beds. 2x2 large beds, possibly even 3x2 kingly beds, for extra fun and luxury!
1a: Beds which are larger than 1x2 could sleep two or even three people. Only one person could be the owner of the bed, but if their relationship with others is good enough, their friends/lovers will come join them.
1b: If people are on good terms, they don't get unhappy thoughts from bunking up in the same room, no matter the size of their bed.
1c: People who bunk in the same room will automatically have a chat before bed, and if allowed to wake up on their own, after sleeping as well.

2: Sex! When and if an interpersonal relationship system is established, it should track characters' sexuality and relationships - people should start to get friendly with the person who's always chatting, etcetera. If two characters' sexuality is aligned, they can shag in any bed or on a sleeping spot. Obviously, a desperate shag on the hard ground is probably not going to be as relieving to the mind as a soft, slow lovemaking session on a massive, kingly 3x2 bed.
2a: Pregnancy? Let's not, not unless you really want some Dwarf Fortress action going on. It would probably be safe to say that the nutrient paste incorporates some very strong birth control, as it can be safely assumed that in any situation where you're eating it regularly, let alone on a day-in, day-out basis, you're not in a good position to raise children. Or hell, say that the "Potato" and "Accel-potato" plants are contraceptive in and of themselves.
2a.1: If you do decide to allow pregnancies, don't forget about menopause, and the fact that some women might have had birth control implants or their ovaries out.
2b: Courtesans should be a special case. Sleeping with people is old hat to them, after all. Shagging a courtesan should give a larger morale boost than sleeping with most folk, but unless the courtesan really likes the person, they won't get much out of it, and if they don't like the person at all, they could actually get an unhappy thought from it! They should probably prioritize persons who are near to mental break, with the lowest loyalty coming first.

Anyway, just some first thoughts on it. I really do wish I could sleep these colonists two to a palatial room and have them not ready to chew each others' faces off in the morning.

I'm currently running a rather successful Dwarf Fortress - I mean, accidental colony - on my first try, no less. There's been ups and downs, of course, there always are. However, my main problem at present is the lack of metal.

I've just about excavated the entire bloody mountain! Well, that's a bit of a fib - I've HALF excavated the bloody mountain. The other half is coming soon. What happens when I'm done?

I think there needs to be a way to reclaim metal from "Slag Debris." There's quite a lot of it on the map to start with, and I generate quite a lot more whenever raiders show up. (Well, the raiders generate more.) Far and away my chief problem is the incessant cost of replacing sandbags, turrets, and blasting charges. I don't really mind the cost for blasting charges, you get what you pay for (a line of corpses.)

So, then, my proposals are that any or all of the following would help vastly with the metal shortages.

1: Sandbags should not cost metal! There's literally no reason for sandbags to cost metal. The very name of them indicates exactly what they are - sand in a bag! If you feel it needs some kind of further balancing point (and what with waffles to slow down the raiders, it probably does,) then either make it cost a sand resource, harvested from any sand squares but taking time to haul back to base, or just make them cost a lot more time to build than they already do.

2: A recycler building. Obviously costs metal, and probably should cost someone to operate it while it's running. Colonist collects slag from the dump pile or the area, drops it into the recycler, and out comes metal.

3: Digging deeper: Unless and until Z-levels are implemented, there still needs to be some way of acquiring more metal once the entire map is depleted. I'd propose that you can construct mine shaft entrances, either on the surface or under the mountain. Probably under the mountain. Once this is done, you can send a miner down there to mine. They'll pack up some nutrient paste (one or two days' worth, perhaps,) and head on down. Then you don't see them again for a while, and they can't be called up to fight (or alternatively, it takes them some amount of time to return to the surface level,) but assuming they're left alone, eventually they'll emerge from the mine with a vast stack of metal for the haulers to pounce upon.

4: Stone constructions instead of metal. I'm surprised this isn't already in a game which was greatly inspired by Dwarf Fortress. Let us choose to build certain things out of stone instead of metal, if we please - stockpiles, wall, etcetera. Stone walls should take longer to build than metal walls, be just as durable, probably not flammable, but should not carry a current. The colonists would probably think they don't look as pretty as metal walls, though, which is really their problem. They need to grow beards and suck it up.

Some things, of course, should require metal. You're not gonna build a gun turret without metal, not a communications array!

6: Instead of only random traders, allow you to use the hypercomm to send notice to the galaxy that you're looking to do business with a specific kind of ship. They'll arrive.. Sooner or later, anyway. Unless of course, they get shipjacked by pirates. Then when they arrive, they'll pretend to trade with you, but instead of goods, it's a bunch of bloody pirates that land around your drop beacon!