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Early game disease/food poisoning/etc are one of the bad implementations in Rimworld.  Depending on starting pawn(s) sometimes there is nothing you can do, just lose pawn to RNG outright (awful if you're doing a 1 man start).  It's different if you're taking damage and getting infected or something since there is player agency, but getting plague or something before you even get 2nd pawn is just "whoops, you lose".  Even if you tend on time and rest optimally, since self-tend takes a penalty and the pawn is already compromised from the sickness.  At least if you start crashlanded you can use paste to get past the food poisoning silliness, but that won't save you from diseases that kill or hit mood so hard you have *guaranteed* break on single-pawn that spirals into being lethal.

Rimworld isn't balanced for tribal naked brutality, but it also isn't balanced for rich explorer.  Glitterworld meds help offset some of this pure RNG death, but it doesn't remove it.  Sensory mechanites into mental break can kill you even if you have 10,000 glitterworld meds when your base has 1 pawn.

Check the Sharp vs Blunt defense on various armors.  You'll find that Sharp goes above 120 on well made power armors, and blunt tends to stay well below half that.  So even though the warhammer penetration is lower, the armor value - penetration, which is what actually determines if you hit, and for half or full damage, is much better. 

No guarantees you'll beat a plasteel longsword with a uranium warhammer vs anything but the thickest armor, but if its steel daggers and steel clubs vs centipedes, I'd probably go for the clubs. 

Also, for prisoner taking, stick with blunt unless you like wasting all your medicine on treating raiders with infections.

Bleeding and then stalling raiders is the most early-game method available for downing them w/o the otherwise high chance of killing them in the act of downing them.  You do pay the cost of having to stall them out though.  I'd not want to do this with melee normally, but IMO infection risk is worth having a much higher chance of target raider living for capture early in the game.

If you don't care about that, defeat in detail w/ blunt will get past armor and the hit stun + multiple hits following up limit the damage taken.

There will always be nice-to-have things and such that modders can cover while devs just don't have the resources to keep up.  Which things like that make it into vanilla is a matter of priority.  I can give leeway on that.

The things in Rimworld that actually bother me are the internal inconsistencies in design/implementation.  There aren't a ton of these but when they turn up they're pretty glaring.

Predators are micro hassle.  Hunt them down or don't let pawns wander from the base.  At least you get some notice when being hunted now, even though the game is internally consistent doesn't target hostile predators like it does other threats.

It is possible with good play to never lose a colonist while never reloading, even on the highest difficulty.  However telling how to do this is more along the lines of multiple long-form guides, not a forum post response.

Quick tip: you can make a sleeping spot and designate it hospital to tend an injured colonist 1 tile next to where he's downed, which can save crucial time compared to hauling to base first then tending.  Infection risk is higher, but if you prevent death right now you can then probably tend the infection(s) successfully later.

I was expecting a better quality troll.  Something about a dwarf fortress ripoff, or borrowing modder ideas too much, or other accusations that are silly but at least have some basis in the actual gameplay of Rimworld.  Even a complaint about the game being shallow due to no Z axis would be better haha.

Though I admit the casino thing had some surprise factor to it, in a game where people can nearly guarantee survival on normal biomes/settings at merciless.

IMO on higher difficulties neither is an attractive option.  Major mood debuffs are pretty rough to deal with, and the $ value is neither large nor contributes much to base security.  If you want dosh pretty fast making a big farm gets you there, as can other options that are mood-neutral or positive.  Also has small prison break risk + feeding time/etc, so it's not like you're purely saving labor by selling people.

Organ harvesting makes more sense if you need an organ though.

One thing prisoners are excellent for is medical training, however.  Stack of herbal medicine and peg leg installation practice can get you a few good doctors for those hard plague times.

If you get ambushed in the forest you should be able to cut down some trees... but yeah, if you're on tundra or an ice sheet you're screwed, no way to capture them.

Tundra still generates trees.  Only ice sheet and sea ice completely lack natural wood.  Extreme desert is really sparse though, might be hard to actually get enough material in time.

But then we would get a thread like "Why do we still use boats in 5500 ?" Don't we have something better ? We should be using transport pods! Rimworld is a sci-fi game !

I don't doubt that we'd get such a thread per se', but it would be silly considering that you can still use bows and pre-2000 firearms.

Any logic about the difficulty of constructing an ocean-going vessel would be inconsistent with the game's logic of constructing a space-going vessel.

Main argument against it is the programming/design time.  Though I suppose you could just abstract it as a low-to-no forage area that blocks settling/encounters entirely (pirates could be a thing but blocking all events means no need to implement new maps/terrains).

Unless it gets reworked the best move is to manage wealth.  Whatever benefit you're getting from all these big ticket items gets yanked away by the expectations modifier delta, and the game's balance goes off the rails in very large colonies.

Yeah you can have areas that just count as normal thin roof.  This is almost always the case just as you begin tunneling into a rock structure, but the layout of the mountain itself can have thin rock too.

If you're the opposite of tribal vs non-tribal you have a huge base recruit difficulty spike.  For tribal recruiting a tribal prisoner is often in the 60-75% range on recruitment, whereas a pirate will have 99%.

You can overcome this in time with good social skill, nice prisoner rooms, etc.  Early in the game those things aren't available and it will take many days to recruit an early off-faction prisoner, badly straining resources when they're most scarce.  Later on sure.

You need to be closer to hit with charge rifle than with recurve bow btw, and you don't need that many bow hits for the animal to bleed out.  Charge rifle is faster for hunting, but I'm not convinced it's materially less risky.  Also most biomes have either agave or berries, so being forced to hunt immediately is the territory of deserts, ice sheet, or sea ice.  Once you have a little time, you can make structures that let you hunt herds relatively safely.  These have been proven possible to win with tribal NB, but the method(s) used are tedious.

Hunting in general is tedious because using automated hunting is a false choice and draft hunting to maintain food still requires a lot of manual inputs inconsistent with just about any other work task in Rimworld, with a larger penalty if you don't do it (pawn death rather than inefficiency).

Could you be clearer about what you're trying to achieve with triple-solo?

If the goal is to just have a harder start, you could just modify the crashlanded scenario to be a single colonist with 1/3rd the stuff.  I don't see how there's any added entertainment value to the micromanagement headache of running three of these games simultaneously, especially since you seem to want them to be independent.

To me, what sounds more interesting would be intentionally *not* running them independently -- taking on the added difficulty of running three single colonies initially for the long term benefit of having three sprawling settlements supporting each other.  Why are you eschewing this?

While I'm not so sure about this solo, it sounds like it would be pretty fun in MP, and the MP mod worked respectably for me when I tried it recently.

Actually playing on split maps like this is recommended in the MP mod IMO, so you don't have things like "stop cooking simple meals at X count" failing because the other guy has "enough" simple meals. 

^ Charge rifle with bad or average traits is worse than having nothing at all on the pawn + no extra techs beyond tribal with good traits.

Super immune, sanguine, masochist are major winners for tribal/naked brutality on merciless.

For just about any early encounter you can get them to tap out by simply waiting for them to target something other than your pawn, peeking + shooting with bow, then hiding behind door again.  Bonus points for letting them get downed by bleeding (no high-odds death check) so you can guaranteed strip for clothing and/or try to recruit a prisoner (recruiting non-tribals as tribal sucks though, probably not worth trying to feed non-tribal for recruitment early on with a NB tribe start).

You don't need prepare carefully or other mods, just avoid rolling traits like depressive and such which can just straight up end the game early too easily.  Having a competent cooking skill helps too, food poisoning is a crippling hit to early productivity with 1 pawn.

I wish it weren't so, but hunting w/o using draft hunting remains a false choice in Rimworld.  It is strictly more risky and strictly less efficient to use the automated hunting feature, each by significant margins.

Mostly don't use, costly for tribal to research and small benefit.  Better to wealth manage and micro pawns decently.

That said battery + moving turrets can help against sappers, though door micro is still the winner there IMO.