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I noticed my map shaking for no reason with no notifications, so I started looking around to see who was lobbing grenades and discovered a tomb on fire (see attachment).

Any idea how this happened?  I haven't poked my nose in yet but I figure either mechanoids or cryptopod pawns or both are shooting at each other inside.  Or maybe the pods are just spontaneously detonating?

Either way, flammable steel will soon reveal what's going on inside.  More to follow!

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This seems a bit OP... something like over 50 muffalo wandered into bullet range of a mere five pawns... the carnage was incredible.  And now I have food forever.  Is this by design?

If the muffalo revenge had been triggered I would have been a little worried, but since muffalo are so slow my pawns could have outrun them anyway.  I dunno, this event needs to be toned down a bit to not be such a free meat event.

Now a migrating boomrat herd, that would be a different matter

There's nothing fun about predators ambushing pawns.  So I'm going to devmode/destroy any I see from now on.  Should the developers decide they would like to save me the trouble by removing them from the game, or by permitting a "no predator" setting in the game options, I will be duly thankful.  But in the meanwhile I will take care of the matter myself.

The subject line says it best, but if you are interested in my reasoning please read on.

I was thinking back to playing Gnomoria where colony wealth determined not only attack strength but also how many new gnomes you get each year.  I assume something similar happens in Dwarf Fortress (I could never deal with the UI).  And it seemed like an obvious way to solve two common complaints: that raids get too hard as wealth increases, and that population growth tapers off too quickly.  Want more colonists?  Build more pretty stuff to entice them -- and then you'll have more defenders then the raiders show up (which helps to reduce the reliance on turrets).  And it actually increases the realism of the game.  The worse of a hellhole your colony is, the less likely anyone will want to join it.

Which reminds me also of a question I wanted to ask: is there a mod that does this already?

OK, this has to be fixed.  Cassandra has to time her assaults better.  I can handle a poison ship landing on my one colony and sappers attacking my other colony, but *not at the same time*.  Flipping back between the two screens is just too much of a headache.  Especially when a warg decides to show up and attack the colonists cleaning up after the poison ship while I'm still trying to deal with the sappers at the other, etc. etc.

There's no reason Cassandra can't be told to wait a day so I can concentrate on one colony at a time.  Until then, it's going to be devmode explosions from the sky any time a second attack shows up while I'm still trying to deal with the first.

This is a scary message to get when you've burned through all your components building power and you're dependent on your bench to make more...

...but fortunately I have two benches so my other one can make a component to fix it

Sometimes Rimworld is just hilarious.

I get a huge zzzt event in my greenhouse, and I start to panic, because the temperature soars to 100'C and all my psychite is going to bake.

Then I see that the fire is sitting on top of my artillery shell stockpile sitting in a dark corner of the greenhouse room.  Oh crap, I can't send my pawns there to put out the fire, they'll get killed!

Wait a second...

...a few seconds later the problem solves itself.  KABOOM.  And no more fire.  Damn, gotta make some more shells now

Well this got me aggravated today.  Because it's so easy to grow stuff to sell and make money I thought I would make it more challenging for myself by insisting on selling finished products rather than raw materials.  So I made a bunch of parkas and hauled them off to the nearest outpost to sell.

I had some scrap bear skin to sell.  Market Value $2.10, sale price $0.98.  Not great but I can live with that.

Then I have a nice normal cotton parka to sell.  Market Value $265.  Sale price $86.33.  What???

So I dig deeper; "item sell price multiplier 0.70".  The game is applying a 30% penalty for manufacturing something instead of just selling the raw material -- I assume to deter people from selling clothing of raid victims (which is now pretty irrelavent since most have the Deadman tag and are nearly worthless).

So much for that plan.

So how does everyone else making raising money more challenging/interesting?  Smokeleaf is way too easy.  Drugs take some work but then some experimenter pawn will show up and consume your stockpile.  Animals take way too long to breed (I'm still waiting for my first yorkie puppies to pop out, let alone grow up). 

What else should I be manufacturing to sell instead?  It doesn't have to be particularly profitable (in fact I prefer that it isn't) but it should be at least more profitable than selling the raw materials to make it.

My tundra colony of 5 pawns just got hit by the plague.  3 of them got it.  Is 60% the new norm for disease hits in B18?  It seems... surprisingly high.

I guess the real test will be to see what % survive...

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And of course, that's when some scythers decide to show up and attack.

This is why I play with turrets.  My two remaining colonists were able to pull my turrets out of the killbox, plonk them on the far side of the base where the scythers broke through, and kill them. 

So I just got hit by my first tornado, and I'm uncertain about whether I enjoyed the experience or not.  I did find that it made having the trading spot mod absolutely essential, because the tornado decided to target the very spot a visiting trading caravan was standing.  By moving the spot I was able to get them safely out of the way.  I was also able to recruit my colonists and get them to run away as well.

But my structures got beat up pretty badly.  I like the idea that the bigger your base is the more damage it will do.  But I dislike that there's not much you can do to reinforce it.  Stone walls hold up fine (like they should) but the stuff inside the walls just gets obliterated which makes no sense.  Can't we have some sort of reinforced roofs?  Or maybe anything within 2 squares of a standing wall with a roof automatically is safe?  This way you could build lots of pillars to protect the important stuff inside.  Also this way your colonists could flee to a safe room -- having them run away *outside* is completely ridiculous, but right now it's the safest thing to do!

So I just discovered to my delight that there is a '4' speed when in devmode, to speed up those endless boring nights and also daytime research sessions.  But why isn't this in the standard game?  Being able to speed up the dull bits is a huge bonus.  But I don't like sitting in devmode for fear I might accidentally click something that will make the game unnecessarily easier.

I'm looking at the travel times from one hex to another on the world map, and something is going on near the poles which makes no sense.  On my current map I'm comparing summer movement times in Flat Tundra terrain.

At 69.43'N / 7.54'W summer temperature is 7.8'C and summer movement time is 1 hour.

At 73.94'N / 2.62'W summer temperature is 5.7'C (not much colder) but summer movement time is 15 hours !!!

What is going on here?  Certainly 2'C cooler doesn't yield that much more summer snow -- does it?

Also when I generate a map with colder conditions the "polar" zone expands and the rapid slowdown occurs further south.

One last bit of silliness: on the ice sheet one hex to the north (74.2'N, 2.13'W), summer temperature is 5.6'C and summer movement time is only 3.2 hours.

So David is married to Patty, but has decided to have an affair with Fiolina (my pyromaniac sherrif psychite addict from a prior post... damn, David likes bad girls   The interesting thing is, Patty doesn't seem to mind.  So I decided to switch his bed and give Patty a tumble tonight...

But shouldn't David be deciding this on his own? 

Oh, wait, I just noticed that David has the "Want to sleep with Fiolina" debuff after I set him to Patty's bed.  But Patty did have the "Want to sleep with David" debuff prior to the switch.  So what's going to happen tonight when they get into bed together?

As The World Turns... ;->

Oh my, I think I'm going to seriously regret deciding to recruit everyone that comes along.  See attached; she's also a psychite addict.  So she'll be locked in a room for about a season...

Has anyone else tried to keep a colony alive recruiting *everyone* who comes along, no matter how defective?

I figure I'm going to need lots of turrets and mortars...

Oh, wait a second.  If I lock her in a room she's going to set herself on fire, isn't she?  I guess that's all the excuse I need to let her bleed out.  Better luck next time!

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I'm considering starting a new game with a 100% refugee admittance policy.  Obviously doing this will give me a lot of awful pawns, but I'm confident that a combination of mortars, traps, and turrets can defend my base even if my pawns can't shoot their way out of a paper bag.

One threat that has me concerned, though, is ship parts.  Colonists with a minimum shooting ability can stand behind freshly walls and plink at the mechanoids that come out and eventually kill them.  But this strategy won't work if they can't even pick up a gun or are so trigger happy they can't hit anything.

I know that mortars won't be useful, and I don't want to do something twinkish like surround the ship part with explosive shells and blow it up when mechanoids come out.  So what's another way of dealing with them?

I suppose I could park a dozen turrets around it but that seems pretty twinkish too...

I find it ridiculously annoying that I have to save my game before going hunting.

"Caribou Revenge"

Either make it the standard behavior for animals to attack when injured or get rid of this stupidity altogether.  The 1:20 chance is just stupid.

Some "friendlies" showed up to save me from a madhunting rabbit horde that had attacked my base.  I thought it would be nice to rescue the few survivors, so I patched them up and gave them beds to rest in...

...and now they have infections, which is fine, because I've treated them, but now they've decided to get up and try to walk home, guaranteeing that their infections will kill them before they get there.

Am I going to get slammed with mood and faction penalties for their stupidity?

Some tribals attacked and blew up two of my turrets.  OK, no serious problem there, I'll just rebuild, or so I thought --

until I discovered that the blown up turrets left *nothing* behind.  No steel, no components, no slag, nothing!

Is this something new in a17?  Or is this a bug?  Or did I just get unlucky? 

So what does everyone use to make chemfuel when they're on a treeless tundra or ice sheet?  I'm starting to manufacture mortar shells and discovered that chemfuel is now a requirement for them.  It looks like you need either 70 units of food or 70 units of wood to get it going.  Am I right to think that growing rice indoors will produce feedstock faster than trying to grow trees indoors?

So I just discovered something interesting.  Predators seem to preferentially target downed animals.  I discovered this when several muffalo wandered through my base and I shot them up; usually once they drop I just leave them there to bleed out because my colonists have better things to do than shoot at stuff that's not moving.  Since then two wargs and a timber wolf have shown up to chew on them, and I shot them up too.

This suggests a strategy for dealing with predators.  Put an animal sleeping spot in an accessible part of your base.  Down a big herbivore and carry him there to be tended and kept alive.  (Cutting off his legs will keep him from wandering off).  Wait for predators to show up and kill them as they come.

Note that you'll have to remove the sleeping spot when he's patched up if you don't want your animal tenders wasting food on him.