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Kibble doesn't spoil and you can store it in separate animal zones, in case you don't want your animals to enter your freezer and gulp down all the raw meat there.

Other than the ability of using hay and human meat, it really seems a little pointless, though.

"I love the mechanics of Components, but they are rarely available, the cost/time/research to produce it is too high. The amount used in crafting ok."

While I do like components for putting a slight cap on spamming turrets or mass-producing weapons and armour from bare steel, I feel like I have to prepare for component fabrication right from the start, depending on the map and storyteller at work. At first it even seems that components aren't much of an issue, but as soon as the map is mined dry, they can become really scarce. Traders carry only a few, if any at all, I've only ever seen starship chunks falling down once or twice, and even a full mechanite raid is just enough to keep things running for a week. Even when you finally get all the research done, and the component workbench set up, the problem is far from solved because they're still so expensive and take so long to craft.

I tend to end up at a point where I spend all my time smelting down slag and weapons and turning them into components just to sustain the status quo. Especially when playing on maps that need a lot of temperature management or lots of power to sustain indoor farming, breakdowns and the need for firefoam poppers will eventually eat up all my steel and components.
I guess it's supposed to work as some sort of hard cap, but it really just feels like a grind at times.


Of course I don't expect to be able to churn out power armors by the dozen, but given that you need components even for tiny things like IEDs or autodoors, I ended up not using a lot of those things AT ALL because they are just too expensive in up-front and maintenance cost.

Well, I think a manhunter pack of 25-30 boomrats is the biggest problem that you can face.
All that's missing is them yelling ALLAHU AKBAAAAR upon entering your base.

Mine lasted about two seasons. Lost a colonist to perm dementia because she bit the bullet to build shelter over the colony.

Ever since then, it is standard for me to build 'outside caves'. That is, just large buildings with 100% cover and hydroponics. If weather allows, I'll use outside farming to supplement.

You don't even need hydroponics if you build over soil. You can just use the soil in the ground to farm on, with sun lamps providing light, and heaters/coolers allowing year-round growing.

They once started to tunnel into the side of my colony, but always just before breaking through the final wall and ending up in my courtyard, they would change course.

Once they also broke through one of my outer walls that encompassed the wind turbine array, but upon breaking through they decided it wasn't worth the effort and just went back through my maze of deadfall traps.

It's really weird.

Very. Sustaining -65°C for over a day did nothing for me.

Depending on the biome you live in, it might be easier to cook them with heaters, campfires or molotovs.

I agree, in my latest game it seemed about half the wanderers that joined refused to do any hauling. I had to resort to some of them having a little accident.

Yeah, luckily it's even easier than in DF.
Cook them with heaters, freeze them with coolers.. making them punch grizzly bears doesn't work with people who refuse to do any violent deeds, but those you can just send into your array of steel deadfall traps and watch the magic happen.
If you're really mean, build an execution place of wood deadfall traps, so they can die slowly and horribly from all the small injuries.

Try to always have one really REALLY good craftsman in your colony, and research machining quickly.
Devilstrand clothing is another thing that you can use if you're really paranoid about your people getting shot at.
Also try setting up mazes of steel deadfall traps, they're extremely effective, even against mechanoids.


All in all, you should try to get at least one sniper ASAP, crafting one if you can't find one, so you can decimate sieges and mechanite ships from a safe distance. It sucks when all you have are pistols and shotguns, and the enemy has snipers in their siege camp.
Then you might want to stock up on assault/charge rifles for encounters of all sorts. Their fast warmup and burst fire also makes them great training weapons for your low-skilled shooters.
I usually keep all sniper/assault/charge rifles that I find, maybe some grenades, too. Everything else will be sold or smelted down for raw materials.

When it comes to the later stages, I actually favor making armour over weapons, because you usually only find armour pieces with really low durability. With weapons, the damage is always the same, and only the accuracy gets hampered (somewhat) by low durability. Usually it's mostly the shooter who hampers the hit chance anyway.
With armour, the actual armour value goes down, and people will get negative moodlets for wearing tattered helmets and vests.
Even if your blacksmith is a total buffoon and he makes a shoddy/poor armour vest, it will always be at 100% durability and usually outclass anything that you can find in the field. And while limbs are replacable, heads and torsos are not. Also, since most enemies don't attack downed opponents, you'll want as much armor as possible so your pawns get downed from pain (having a lot of small, harmless wounds), not from blood loss or losing a limb.



It's pretty situational, though. If you live inside a mountain and have to expect a bug hive to pop up in your bedroom, get assault rifles for everyone ASAP. If you are scared of sieges or sappers, get at least one sniper. Then focus on making armour and devilstrand clothing.

And for the psychopaths, lets just have a feast where the dead colonist is made into tasty steaks so he can live on INSIDE his comrades forever. 

Try to stagger it a little. If you get prisoners, cut off their legs first so they can't escape or have a mental break. That gives you almost unlimited time to deal with them. Then harvest their organs one after another, giving them a little break in between operations in case someone accidentally messes up the surgery.

Meanwhile you put all the corpses of your fallen enemies into a separate walk-in freezer that you only use for human corpses (so no one walks into them and gets the "Seen corpse" mood debuff. Also put a butcher table right into that freezer if you can.

Then, when your colony has forgotten about the harvested organs, butcher up ALL of the human corpses in one day. All of them. Make sure that your butcher is not a teetotaler so you can knock him out with beer afterwards.
Also try to have a separate stockpile for the leather, because it's surprisingly ugly.
Remember that human leather is worth a ton, so making clothing or furniture out of it can severely ramp up your colony value and increase the severity of raids.

I think the amount of prisoners that share a room, as well as the amount of prisoners compared to the number of your colonists also factor into this. But since it's an event, it could technically trigger at any time.

Just cut off one leg of each prisoner and they wont be able to have a mental break or escape in any way. Also, you'll always have spare legs that you can use for your colonists or sell on the black market xD

What also frustrates me with the breakdowns, the component madness AND the constant power line explosions is the fact that you have this GODLIKE lvl 20 builder who only builds superior to legendary stuff, but the things he builds break down and explode violently every other minute.
If a total buffoon haphazardly smacks together a ramshackle battery it has the same chance of blowing up in your face as the legendary one right next to it, so maybe that should be adressed, too.

And yes, I must say I actually love the low-tech variants of stuff. The wood-fueled stove or the deadfall traps are nothing short of amazing. I just wish IEDs wouldn't cost components, or else they might be fun to use as well.

I'd also like to play as some kind of low-tech or medieval colony without any electricity and components whatsoever, but when mechanites and power armor clad pirates drop down on you, it's kinda stupid. I mean what do they even try to accomplish there? What is even the point of them besieging you? With the tribals I can kinda get it, they are rather dumb, they have too many people (apparently), and they have a lot to gain from you. Food, clothing, heck even some low-tier guns would be high loot in their eyes.

Why a batallion of power-armor pirates with charge rifles and incendiary launchers comes dropping down on your rundown hovel from frickin orbit, when you have like 2 disabled, 70 year old people with cataracts, asthma and bad backs is far beyond my comprehension.

I've played the mod with ore extractor, is there a mod with a closer idea of mining as in my post? The ore extractor can be placed anywhere, and you can select the resource you want mined. Every X ticks it gives you X resources. Whilst this makes the game playable on non mountain maps, it is a bit of a cheat too. The idea of certain resources being in certain tiles in a non renewable but potentially large way, and it having to be "found" like treasure, adds enjoyment to the game, and I haven't seen a mod like that. If you know one I would appreciate the link! Thanks.

I originally used the M-Co Deep Driller, but the mod author stopped developing the mod. I LOVED it for having those geyser-like spots on the map that you could place your drill on, and you also had to consistently produce and replace drill bits for the machine. You could also add some components to the drill that would allow you do "dig deeper" and get things like gold. You could also make more advanced drill bits that required a higher crafting level but lasted longer, that kind of thing.

Now this mod here hasn't been updated for A13, but it looks similar, it even uses the same drill bit sprites that the deep driller had, and also incorporates the specific spots on the map that you can place mines on.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=8902.0

I haven't tried it out myself yet, though.

I love the idea of entertainers... Would make high art people a little less useless if they could provide a mood buff.

I mean even cooking or building could be considered art. High quality, ultra-comfortable and actually beautiful furniture is currently even more useful than sculptures, since good furniture not only increases beauty but gives a comfort mood boost and even increases the rest and immunity effectivity of beds.
A cook can cook faster and get more food from butchering.

It's just that art isn't just underpowered, it's such a broad topic that it could and should encompass way more than just making sculptures.

Right. It's not just steel, the components are really high-tech stuff apparently, so it kinda justifies the turret thing. I mean you can make power armor and tokamak charge rifles from components, so they gotta be good, right? XD