Messages

For those asking, 11 colonists, fairly late game, and about 520,000ish wealth. Also, this is a strictly vanilla game, so it's not a mod issue.

I just requested military aid from an Outlander faction to help fend off a decent group of mechanoids. They sent me 4 soldiers equipped with an incendiary launcher, a revolver, a pump shotgun, and a knife. To fight mechanoids.

While I don't expect Outlanders to be matching the mechanoids technologically surely they could send a larger force with weapons more like bolt actions and LMGs? Does military aid scale at all with map threats or wealth? I almost feel like I need to report this as a bug for how underwhelming they were, but as it may be intentional a discussion seemed more prudent.

Surely this is something that needs fixing?

An enemy in a raid was captured after losing her arm in the attack. I had an old prosthetic arm lying around, so I installed it to replace her missing arm before releasing her, but I lost 15 reputation with the faction for 'needlessly installing prosthetic arm'.

The pawn was missing her arm entirely, the prosthetic was correctly installed on the correct spot and the pawn is not a body purist, so this seemed like a bug to me, as this prosthetic is a clear upgrade over not having an arm at all. Perhaps it is thinking because it replaced the shoulder it is needless?

The Fiction Primer mentions there are domestic mechanoids, so I thought I'd share some ideas for potentially including them.

Domestic mechanoids could each have a specific function they were built for, allowing them to do one type of job.
-Construction mechanoids could build and repair. Due to their lack of any creative spark and their standardized building patterns, they are unable to make items of any quality other than normal.
-Cleaning mechanoids could clean your home area and perhaps also help put out fires.
-Crafting mechanoids could take care of basic crafting tasks such as cutting stone bricks or smelting slag. They would be unable to handle more complex tasks such as tailoring, smithing, or drug synthesis.
-Gardening mechanoids could sow any plant that does not require a growing skill, as well as cut blighted plants and bushes/grass/etc, however, they would not be able to harvest plants.

Domestic mechanoids, being part of human society and not a mechanoid hive, would likely need some sort of fueling. My first idea for this is an option when selecting them that allows them to go into a "charging mode." Upon selecting this, you would give them a spot where they would essentially become a furniture item, allowing them to interact with power grids to fill an internal battery. I would imagine their power consumption would be somewhat high but not hugely so, perhaps 500-1000 while charging, since they would ideally be a mid or late game item.

Mechanoids could be repaired by pawns at the cost of steel, plasteel, and components. Ideally, you would not want domestic mechanoids to be near a combat zone.

Mechanoids would be sold by orbital traders and perhaps outlander groups rarely, and possibly offered as mission rewards.

It may not actually produce any heat, just telling you that it can't cool two rooms at once.

It definitely produced heat in older versions of the game at the very least. Quite a bit. I've always had to vent it out of my mountain bases.

After some testing on why I could not get my character to show up in my starting survivors, it seems anyone whose name is marked with a (B] as opposed to an [N] in the preferred character list doesn't seem to show up consistently, sometimes at all, when randoming starting characters. Characters marked with [N] seem to show up quite frequently, which is how this feature tended to work in the past as well, and thus is what I expected.

I am assuming (B] is "backstory in game" and [N] is "name in game" packs.
The backstories appear to be in the game, but chances of getting them in your game may not be increased by the preferred character list, as you would expect. While my testing was not incredibly extensive, this seemed to exclusively affect the (B] characters.

EDIT: Had to change some brackets, as I was just bolding some text in this explanation, making it quite confusing.
As a note, every instance of (B] should have a left bracket instead of a left parenthesis in the preferred character list.

[after 1.0 came out]

So, my character I contributed awhile ago was resubmitted for a quick update, and I was grateful for the opportunity, but they had to be removed for a bit for that to happen.
Now that 1.0 is up, he should be back, as he barely missed the cutoff for the version before it.
Now, I've done some searching and I have my character on the "preferred character" list, but I haven't seen him yet. This of course could still be random luck, so I wanted to ask:

Has anyone seen Andrew "Grub" Menear in any of their games started after 1.0 came out? I can't seem to get him into my starting colony and this is making me quite sad. He pops up when on the list of names and I've tried taking him off the list and re-adding him, but still can't seem to find him. If you've seen him at all since 1.0, whether he's been a pirate, an outlander, a colonist, or whatever, please let me know :O

It makes more since to me that a lazy pawn or a gourmand would be fat and a brawler would be buff.

A brawler is more accurate, not hits harder. That has very little to do with body size. Also, metabolism changes from person to person, so eating more often doesn't always equate to fat, and neither does being lazy.

I haven't seen it in action yet, so I don't want to judge, but the animals being tamed "degrading" over time as I read in the 1.0 patch notes really scares me. I loved animals, especially my muffalo ranching, and the thought of them "untaming" makes me want to avoid the entire animal system. Why bother investing in them if they won't stick with me?

It's clear that Tynan has a goal in mind with these changes, specifically for us to fight out in the open mano a mano and forgo base defenses.

No, that's not the goal at all.

What I'm trying to avoid is really simple, one-piece-fits-all base defenses that solve every problem risk-free. Your base defense should be contextually adapted, complex, varied, interesting, and should fare differently against different threats.

Also related is that caravan fights and attacks on enemy sites, where you have no base, should be viable, as base defense should also be viable. This implies that base defenses are useful but no particular defense is absolutely necessary versus a given threat.

Which personally, I appreciate. I like building bases that are more like a collection of nearby buildings with some security checkpoints and sandbags and such. It contributes more to a sense of story for me than always building some kind of gigantic death fort. I'm trying to follow the narrative of some survivors trying to make it on a harsh world, not of a lost band of space marines waiting for pickup and fortifying their evac point to a ridiculous degree.

Caravans are easily my favorite part of the game and the fact you can't make a temporary camp or tents or anything like that really bothers me. :C

Yeah, Pemmican is made in batches of 15, it's really easy to accumulate huge amounts.

I set all melee to fight, all ranged to flee.

Currently the best protection are to build fences or walls to seperate your animal from the predators.
A mod just give your a warning when a predator is hunting something from you.

And about the protection.
Sure it would be nice to give animals this kind of training. But at the other hand do you realy want this ? When your dog try to fight some bear or other strong predators ?
Then this training would include pack tactics, so they never hunt stronger predators alone.

Dog? My guard animal would BE a bear.

But a direct hit on a mechanoid ship before they have disembarked can actually make them fall out dead.

Wait what? They can be hurt before they spawn into the map? Or do you mean while they're clumped around it?