Messages

Rather frustrated at the moment.  My map didn't spawn with any gold ore as far as I can tell (I swept through it a few times with the debug viewer), so my ability to make integrated circuits and anything up is completely at the mercy of the RNG giving me traders with the right materials.

I tend to build defensive positions with sandbags, often in those shapes, so being able to easily get my colonists into position behind said sandbags without needing to micro them would be nice.

I would like to request the ability to easily control how groups of drafted units group up.  Currently, they all group together in one big block, but I'd like to be able to easily order them to form a firing line, or a crossfire V shape.

As I envision it, when you group select and draft a number of pawns, it would bring up a menu on the bottom of the screen (similar to the build menus), where each icon would be a different formation: a horizontal line, a vertical line, four Vs, each opening in a different direction, and maybe a few custom formations.

For custom formations, the interface could bring up a grid, and you'd select where you want each pawn to stand relative to the click point, as well as having eight-directional arrows to put in some of the grid boxes, to let the game know how extra pawns should stand, if you've selected more than are specifically designated in the formation. 

Just wondering, have adjustments been made to the joy "jobs"?  Because my colonists are doing things like visiting graves, meditating, and building snowmen to the exclusion of things like hunting, butchering, constructing, hauling, feeding and treating prisoners, and so on.  My colony is only surviving at the moment because I am micromanaging everything they are doing (hunting is especially annoying, as my hunter gets bored and tires to wander off every time he reloads his gun.)  I'm running a version of 2.5 that I downloaded yesterday.

I don't think that something was changed. Everything works as it should. Maybe you have set something wrong in work tab?

If you set in work tab everything on work, no one should wander around, except in cases when they are extremely hungry or tired or of course if you don't set priority on specific job for that pawn. Also in work mode they won't do joy things and go to sleep only when they tired. So check your needs tab, check job priorities and work tab.

If you have everything set on do anything than that's a problem. They will perform actions that will fulfill they needs, and then go working. Hunters check needs every time they reload so on work mode they should do job order or go to sleep (if tired) or eat (if hungry) never do joy task.

At the beginning you can have problems because beds are nerfed, compared to vanilla ones, and everyone will be tired really quick.

Adjusting the schedule did it, thank you.  (Also, I do have an archery target, incidentally.)

On another note, how much charcoal does it take for the coal burning heater to turn on?  I had over a hundred charcoal in the hopper, and it wasn't doing anything.

Just wondering, have adjustments been made to the joy "jobs"?  Because my colonists are doing things like visiting graves, meditating, and building snowmen to the exclusion of things like hunting, butchering, constructing, hauling, feeding and treating prisoners, and so on.  My colony is only surviving at the moment because I am micromanaging everything they are doing (hunting is especially annoying, as my hunter gets bored and tries to wander off every time he reloads his gun.)  I'm running a version of 2.5 that I downloaded yesterday.

Are there any plans to add mid-tech range temperature controls?  That is, prior to getting someone to crafting level ten to make electronic parts, I can only heat a room by constantly rebuilding fires in it, and don't seem to have any options to cool it at all.  A permanent stove or fireplace would be very nice for keeping things warm in winter, and something to deal with heatstroke in the summer would be great.  Hand fans as an equipable tool, perhaps, or the ability to insulate ice so we can make an ice house.  The mod already has straw, and IIRC, sawdust, so it would just be a matter of being able to apply it to ice blocks, to let them last into the summer.  An ice house would probably be the equivalent of a firepit.  Something on par with an in room stove or fireplace would likely be something like a mechanical cooling machine, which a bit of research shows did in fact predate modern use of electricity. (It was just really annoying to have to watch one of my colonists due of heatstroke because I didn't have the electronics to build fans or air conditioners, and I couldn't rescue her from her bed.)

I'm running 2.4, is there something I need to research before my colonists can clean?  They keep going berserk, primarily because the place is a huge mess, and they go idle instead of cleaning.

Cleaning zone is split from home zone, so you can have more control on what spots get cleaned and what don't. You just have to manually set a cleaning zone and they'll get to it. That is the "No Cleaning Please" mod.

Ah, thank you.  I had entered "clean" and such into the in-game help search, but nothing came up.  Maybe this could be added to the help tab?

Again, thank you for clearing that up. 

I'm running 2.4, is there something I need to research before my colonists can clean?  They keep going berserk, primarily because the place is a huge mess, and they go idle instead of cleaning.

The realism argument doesn't move me. Real trees take decades to grow. If we made them grow realistically, there would be no point in planting them in RW since they'd be nothing more than saplings by the end of even the longest-lived colony. Have you ever heard of a town in the old west in 1875 planting a bunch of trees for lumber? It just doesn't happen because it doesn't make sense in real life. Reforestation is purely a modern phenomenon and only makes sense in the context of huge mechanized logging operations. The only old counterexamples are things like olive, fig, or cork trees, and only because these trees produce for decades after maturity and don't need to be chopped down.

In the old west, not as far as I know.  In the UK, yes.  In the late 1800s, timber plantations were established in the New Forest to ensure the Royal Navy had a continual supply of timber for their ships.

The rest of the faction maybe, but the guys right there, who turned on me when they saw a bunch of tribespeople blow up a turret their companions were standing next to (and didn't run from when it started sparking)?

In my current game, a group of tribespeople attacked me while I had some visitors wandering around.  While the tribesmen were shooting at one of my turrets, they hit one of the visitors and angered them, and the visitors started attacking the tribespeople.  So far, so good.  However, they chose to stand next to my turret while doing so, and when the turret exploded, killing two of the visitors, I received the Bad Will alert, and the visitors became hostile to me as well.

My request is that the AI be made to be able to recognize when something like that isn't my fault.  If I intentionally shot them, or attacked them, or even if they walked into a trap I set, and they get angry with me, that's fine and sensible.  But when an enemy causes one of my turrets to detonate, and they chose to stand next to it, they should blame the faction that detonated the turret, not me.

For the smokestack, I like it.  It could be a good early game power option, to replace solar panels which should need some degree of research.  (They are far more technically complex than steam turbines, even.)

Why not turn the random visitors into this (or at least some of them)?  They don't really do much at the moment?

Vultures: they would eat dead animals and human corpses, eventually removing random corpses and skeletons from the map. (Obviously, they've been altered by humanity over the years like many other animals.)

If a colonist spots a vulture eating a human corpse, it could cause a larger mood penalty than just seeing the corpse.

Also, the setting document mentions that humans have been bioengineered to be resistant to radiation.  Why not go one step further, and have a trait that indicates an abnormally high level of resistance, letting the colonist ignore fallout?

Would it be possible to have a randomize button for the colony name, so you can have the game pick a new name if you don't like the first one?