Messages

The beautiful idea is that they were never meant to be recruited. You're either trying to civilize savage tribals or hardcore pirates who would never be disloyal to their gang, or they refuse simply out of the outrage that you are imprisoning them against their will. They'd rather die than serve you. To see an individual convert from any such premise is almost astronomically rare, as it should be. In fact, it's a bit illogical that converts don't actually try to ditch the colony at the first chance they get after being allowed to walk free, or at least flee at the first sign of serious trouble. But then again, on RimWorld you're in the middle of nowhere. There's nowhere to go, unless you're willing to take your chances in the wild, and prefer solitude over the safety of the group. And it wouldn't be much fun if your prized prisoner would just suddenly take off. Hmm.

Try to start with a good grower and a good cook (7+). Look for proper farming spot (avoid gravel). That's where you settle. Plant potatoes immediately. No field is too large. Harvest wild agave ASAP. No distance is too long to walk to cut down a mature tree or two. Build cooking stove + energy source. Disregard shelter, sleep outdoors. Use the first wood on beds. Research stonecutting ASAP. Build stone walls around the beds and call it barracks. Build stone walls around the cooking stove and call it a kitchen. Build butcher's table (requires too much wood). Start annihilating animals. Cook fine meals.

Imaginary changelogs? I'm in.

- Colonists will now get a job if idle. Get a job, you hippie.
- Colonists no longer make snarky comments at each other (less colonist-on-colonist violence that way).
- Raw potatoes no longer lose their taste after being eaten for a while; no getting used to them now; persistent mood drop
- Mechanoids will now attempt to steal your electronic devices, preferring plasteel items. After murdering all your colonists, of course.
- Rival muffalo herds now really hate each other. Expect more altercations and trample-by mooings.
- Muffalo males now headbutt each other intensely during mating season, or possibly to assert dominance. I dunno, I'm no muffalo shaman.
- Did away with the perk 'Pessimist' because it was probably useless anyway.
- Enlarged megascarabs; should be twice the size of Centipedes now instead of tenth.
- Tribals now worship your colonists as gods and will occasionally bring you captured people as offerings. You are expected to sacrifice the gift person in a ritual sacrifice in their presence. Who are you to question their beliefs?
- Included cats. They choose a random colonist to follow around. Colonists who dislike cats are twice more likely to attract the affection of a cat.
- Cats occasionally knock items off of shelves and hoppers.
- Traders will really rip you off now.
- Option to shoot down the trader from the orbit with a missile as a warning to all the other traders; gain random few items in drop pods somewhere on the map, potentially the trader himself as well.
- Option to make lewd gestures at pirates and other hostile factions at the comms console.
- Option to grow cannabis in order to start a regional drug trade. Man. (Duuuuude.)
- Colonists now crave for extra food sometimes. Gee, I wonder why?
- Bug fixes
- Fixings of bugs
- Corrections of software insectoid metaphors
- Listening device repairs
- Major tweaks (no more sad notes from this guitar)

Because current options are:
- Recruit the prisoner. Problem: You might not want to recruit the prisoner after all, or recruitment could be challenging.
- Sell the prisoner. Problem: Selling a prisoner yields negative thoughts to everyone. Also, it might take a while before you get a slave trader.
- Execute the prisoner (one way or another). Problem: Not everyone's playstyle. Also, prisoner death might yield negative thoughts, either now or in the future.
- Keep the prisoner indefinitely. Problem: Another mouth to feed. Other potential distractions along the way.

Speculation:
- You could, for example, capture a member of a rival/partner colony, harvest a kidney and let the guy go. That would yield smaller diplomatic penalty than just killing the guy.
- You might even be able to mistreat tribals as much as you want as long as the patient is under anesthesia, but you couldn't pull that off with someone from a developed faction due to medical check-ups performed upon his return.
- Even more likely than any of the previous, the player will be enabled to rescue neutrals and friendlies from the field, patch them up, and let them go in exchange for some goodwill with the faction. Or other rewards.
- Capture-and-release function could be applied to animals as well, for whatever reason. Injury? Disease and prevention of spreading?
- It could mean setup for the interrogation system. Promise to release the prisoner in exchange for info. Incur psychotic rampage if the prisoner is not released quickly.
- You might be able to plant a tracker on an unwitting prisoner, release him and then use him to "lead you to his colony's exact location", possibly to get a target for a missile strike or a raid.

That's it. I'm out of wild speculation for today.

If I can get a good grower from day 1 and there's plenty of good farming land, then it's berries from day 1. If not, then it's potatoes. I switch until I have at least 2 adequate growers, or when I can be bothered to switch. I suppose I usually switch when I receive the first 'ate raw food' incident. I call them incidents because I actively try to avoid them from happening. IMO colonists eat raw food far too easily. They should use the cook stove to cook themselves a meal.

On a more interesting note, has any of you ever switched BACK to potatoes? I recall doing so at least twice, due to my colony population growing out of control, and I had run out of immediate farming land. On one occasion I had taken multiple prisoners from a big raid so that put extra strain on food production without me realizing it soon enough:

"Am I low on food? Nah. It's harvest soon. That's why the stockpiles are bit empty."
"Wait, I'm low on food again, and harvest was just a while back. Gotta look into it at some point..."
"Why is my food stock at half? Gotta look into it. Just after these few things..."
"Why am I out of food! UGH! PRISONERS! I'm an idiot!"

Funny thing when you have 10 colonists and you capture 5 prisoners - your food demand goes up 50%, so pretty much that's how much your farming area should expand, too. Or switch to a more efficient plant.

Ah. Statues - the age-old bird crap collectors. On 25th century statues sh*t will practically flow down on its own due to advances in statue surface anti-crap technology! Perhaps the avian fecal matter would dry up and scatter in a record time due to the high-tech coating on the future statue. Only then, my friend, would the answer be blowing in the wind.

If things were up to me, I'd invest in genetic research to produce a bird species which fecal matter would mimic the surface where it'd land, camouflaging on it like a chameleon... no wait... that's a terrible idea...

Why not instead investigate if it could be possible to create bacteria that would break down avian fecal matter or even create something desired out of it, be it harmless gasses or even a new beautiful high-tech paint-like coating for the statue.

Will water hoses still exist in 25th century? Or will statues be banned from indoor spaces due to the hygiene risk they possess? I don't know where you guys live but over here birds will sh*t on statues, be the statue indoors or outdoors. Ever seen a magpie holding a stolen smartphone in its beak while it sits on an old family statue after you've come back home from work, so you just stare awkwardly at each other and you're not sure if you should step back out to give the bird some privacy? Happens every day somewhere around here. Better just leave the statues outdoors willingly. On the other hand, RimWorld doesn't seem to have birds.

Further speculation: Art enables crafting of beautifying objects. Art objects will likely require several different ingredients and they'll take a lot of time to produce. The production could function like research - it can be paused and continued at leisure. Obviously all art will be highly flammable, or at least paintings should be, and upon destrcution it'll give everyone a mood penalty. Even selling the art piece might give a slight debuff, same as selling prisoners. Art objects might have unique names, and therefore be unique items. Artists could sculpt statues in remembrance of dead or living colonists. It's possible the player can't control artists, and artists will just produce whatever the hell they feel like.

My first guess is Art will simply work as a beauty modifier for all constructed objects. A great artist could build prettier objects even from the ugliest of materials, or more likely, it'll be wiser to order an artist craft something out of rare and expensive materials. Direct mood bonuses or penalties would be great though.

Alternatively, we might start seeing paintings and other clutter that beautify the colony, all produced by artists. Some of these items could possibly have a minimum required Art skill.

- I don't do a battery room. I spread batteries evenly throughout my colony.
- Hospital and prison go next to each other, and they'll use the same medkit stockpile, since fresh prisoners usually arrive in damaged.condition.
- The first growing zone pretty much decides where things get set up. Next to it pops up a kitchen with a dining table. Prison needs to be fairly close to kitchen since I feed meals to my prisoners.
- Trade beacon goes close to growing zones.
- Kitchen can double as a hospital. Just whip up a bed and set it to medical. Quick to feed the patient.
- As far as crafting stations go, if it doesn't use electricity, it goes outside.
- Stonecutting can be handled in two ways. Either I make a room and haul rocks there, or I build a table in the middle of a bunch of rocks and later disassemble it when the crafter's hauling starts to take too long. Usually that happens around 15 square radius.
- I put the naturally happier colonists in shared bedrooms and close to kitchen to save space and to shorten the time they have to walk to get breakfast. They can handle the mood penalty. In the same way, the more miserable colonists get pampered first with royal beds and big personal rooms.

Hmm. Be sure to capture only pessimist, depressed and neurotic types and other such easily agitated types. If possible, keep the jails small to induce 'cramped space'. Keep the jails also dark and dirty. Maybe have the prisoners sleep on the floor? Undress all prisoners for the nudity penalty.

Wait... my phone is... Yes? Hello? Ah, hello, Geneva Conventions. What's that? Mm? Uh huh? Oh.. Now wait a m... If you could just let me expl...

4 mortars is nothing. You'll want 12 or more. Double it, and the booming should be glorious. The micromanagement could kill you though. Mortars cannot be manned or managed enmasse, which is kind of weird. Just alpha being alpha, I guess. A workaround could be to mod the mortars to be better but more expensive, so that you'd need fewer of them to get the same result while maintaining the same cost for the effect.

I bet a novice modder could quickly mod in construction options that included rough stone, sand, soil, etc.

If you are jyst gonna reroll over and over why not go dev mode and place the geyser where you want, seems silly to waste all that time. Granted you will have more geysers on the map then but ehh....

Because randomness is part of the entertainment. What the player wants is acceptable randomness followed by an acceptable challenge. It's not fun if there's no challenge, or if the challenge is unpleasant. And there's no challenge if you have full control, since assuming full control is the polar opposite of surrendering yourself to acceptable randomness. There's a reason why the starting colonist screen has a button named 'Randomize' instead of 'Tweak colonist properties', just as there's a reason that the saved games can be fully edited simply with a text editor.

On the other hand, I do wish the steam geysers would adhere to seed and be fixed locations in the world, instead of generating randomly every time. Steam geysers are a highly strategic element, perhaps even more important than the terrain. Steam geyser location is a game changer. To have steam geysers generate randomly almost defeats the purpose of having a recorded seed, since a good steam geyser location can compensate for the shortcomings of a boring or a difficult terrain, while a poorly placed steam geyser can make an otherwise great map to be an annoying, difficult or an uninteresting one.

I bet players would use more solar energy, and thereby be more willing to let go of steam geysers, if battery explosions didn't occur. I know I would. Or maybe the steam energy needs a downside, such as fluctuating output, changed daily or weekly. Mwahaha!

Prisoners DO eat from the paste dispenser. I'm not 100% sure if it completely stops meal deliveries. For example, you could have multiple prisoners go hungry at the same time, so the first one could go for the dispenser, while the second prisoner could be queued to have a proper meal. I... I think that's why I stopped using the paste dispenser in my colony jail...? I can't remember. It seems like a decade ago. IIRC, the dispenser is a great backup, so at least your prisoners would never starve if your wardens were all unavailable. Oh! You could try installing like a dozen dispensers if you have the electricity! That might prevent meal deliveries almost completely. Or just 3 or 4, if 12 sounds somehow excessive.

It only takes one person to display talent. It's not the size of the studio but how the studio mastermind uses it.

RimWorld keeps getting nerdier and nerdier, sci-fier and sci-fier, and that's a good thing. The scope of the intended simulation is just beginning to dawn on me, and at one point I was like... well... if at some point you've been riding shotgun with a driver who has been driving too slow, and you've nagged at the guy for the past hour about it, and it's seemed like he's been ignoring you the whole time, driving stoically and peacefully, but then at one point he squeezes down the gas pedal and you start to be like "Now that's better...! Uhh, whoa, WHOA, hey ummm maybe you should slow down, man..." It's been kinda like that. Not sure when Tynan pressed down the gas pedal, at A6 or A7. Now I'm just staring down the road from inside the speeding car, both terrified and impressed.

I think there's two things that hooked me. It's the rich detail (the character detail alone got me) and the world permanence. I mean, if some poor passerby dies at the edge of the map, his body STAYS there, together with his gear, and it all just stays there, almost taunting you, whether it taunts your OCD or any other hunter-gatherer, gotta-keep-my-house-clean instinct. At the same time, it's beautiful. DF and RimWorld have cured me of my compulsive need for order so now my home is a (worse) mess and I've learned to embrace chaos a bit. Oh.. I remember the times when I first played DF, and I tried to keep the map clean of bodies and clutter and it drove me mad... Ha! Haha! What a fool I was. Now my RimWorld and DF maps are beautiful messes, filled with evidence of past battles and other assorted minor chaos. The map becomes a story, a book. I feel like an artist for painting the map with chaos, but the real artist in RimWorld's case is of course Tynan and whoever has helped him along the way.

Order is nice but chaos is good!