Messages

Pawns are able to use drugs and food from their Inventory. Why not medicine?

And yes, I have Smart Medicine installed because it's such a QoL improvement.

On hauling:

1. The low-priority "haul to merge" is working just fine. No complaints other than I've seen them stuck in a loop at times like in that one reddit post.

2. Animals haul just enough to make them useful. I think they do it more often too! (Feels, not facts)

3. "Opportunistic" hauling way back in the earlier builds of 1.0 seems to never work ever. You know how you send your builder to deconstruct ship chunks and they do so but never haul back the components but Amy all the way at base decides to do it instead? Yeah, it'd be nice if colonists, after deconstruction or a long period of being draft (i.e battles), they scan around to haul things back to base (weapons, corpses, etc).

4. Colonists still are unable to haul medicine from pack animals to tend to the wounded during raids. Really, doctors should carry medicine by themselves. It's very annoying to find that one muffalo who carries all the meds, at the edge of the map, and you needing to pick them up, draft them to where your colonists are bleeding, and drop it from their gear tab.

5. Despite making bedrolls useful in caravans, colonists insist on putting them on pack animals instead of on their person (sometimes they give other bedrolls to the same person!) and what's the point of having them still if they're not gonna pull them out and put them on the ground when on a map? It'll help them heal faster, instead of needing to do the same song and dance of dropping stuff from the pack animals and choosing to install them one by one. Not as useful during outpost raids because you can claim enemy beds, but a pain nonetheless.

Yep! Someone on Discord mentioned to me that. 1.0 is really the first time I've actually used cryptocaskets heavily.

Bug (probably): You can't haul healthy prisoners to cryptocaskets. They need to be hurt first. Which is a really strange condition to have despite the fact colonists don't need to be like that.

Bug: Handler insists on training animals that have been designated as pack animals, following them to train them until the edge of the map.

I have 500+ hours with this game. The most memorable games are those where I failed, something stupid happened, or something silly happened. "Perfect" games where RW turns into a pure base building simulator with perfect pawns are like the junk food of RW playthroughs. Fine for a while but gets very stale later on.

I know a lot of people really love their bases that cover 90% of the map with 300 pawns and vulcan turrets covering the whole perimeter. I did too, for a while. But then I decided to embrace the chaos. No more Prepare Carefully, no more overpowered stuff and the game I feel, is a lot more memorable and fun.

On the "unfair" topic: Yes, sometimes the game's unfair and that's just the roll of the die. I posted in the 1.0 thread baffled why my colonist sprung a trap (he was hauling an animal he just hunted) only to see him die to a single trap. This was to me, unacceptable, and it is the only reload I've done in my current 3 year plus desert colony. My colonists have been oneshotted by charge lances, lost a leg after an arrest, have limbs blown apart by guns, all of this is acceptable because it is entirely MY fault for messing up.

Said current colony also had two cold snaps at the start of fall and spring, meaning that I was really suffering for food. This was also fixed if I was more active with building hydroponics and greenhouses.

It's only human to get angry when you lose your best builder, but that's the nature of the Rim. I accept it and embraced it, but probably only after the 300 hour mark. RNG will always be a thing in Rimworld no matter how much you minimise it. It's a matter of separating the frustrating (the bit about the pistol and the helmet) and not having a caravan for two months (which is why I set it so caravans appear every 5 days in scenario editor).

Better UI, better pawn control in combat, clearer instructions, the ability to get all the available info at a glance. This will make the game smoother and I think this will quell the "unfairness" complaints you get. You can't satisfy all of us, so don't. It will only lead to a bad game.

To each their own, it's your game Tynan. I trust you will do what's best.

I'm happy that the colonist bar is now rearrangeble but I feel there are some more improvements that can be done. A few things that would be really nice would be:

1. More little UI widgets. I'd like to see the colonist bar showing their weapons when drafted, maybe little mini-icons of what they're doing. Fire for cooking, a hand for hauling, a hammer for building, etc. The "background" for health is not very clear either because a reddish bar can mean anything to "a few clubbed bruises" to "literally missing an arm". Frankly, a missing limb should probably be a red alert indicator on the right side of the screen anyway.

1.1. Btw the green little lightbulb is waayyy too dark. I'd rather have a bright lightbulb or something.

2. The ability to rearrange is a godsend but it'd be a lot more preferable if you can "distance" the groups. It can be hard to remember which one's your best docs or which ones are your dedicated fighters. There's only so much clothes combination you can do before 500+ hours blurs all the colonists together.

3. You know what's great? Being able to rename your colonists' occupation. However because even with shorthands for a specific skill (Soc for Social, Tact for Melee/Shooter, Hand for animals, etc), it's hard to see the available names on the assignment tab because they get too long. I understand character spacing but being able to move the column just a tiny bit to the right is grand.

4. This is as an actual problem: when you rearrange the colonists in the colonist bar, it doesn't move them in the schedule/assignment tab. Preferably you can rearrange this in those tabs too but I'll take them following the left to right and up to down in the colonist bar too!

Thoughts on recruitment and resistance (latest patch, Cassandra Rough, desert):

To be completely honest I don't find any real issue with them. Of my 10 colonists, 3 were the Crashlanded pawns and 7 were prisoners. Of those 7, 2 were tribals and 5 were pirates. For the longest time I used Tomboy, who had no passion for Social and only had 3 of them.

Their moods for the most part were fine because they more or less got a (cramped) room that was basically a colonist's bedroom with a light and a small table. I actually find them to be easily recruited with the longest time taken to recruit being roughly a season.

Sometimes they had "bad mood" appear over their heads because a few of them were addicts going cold turkey. But other than that? I find the current prisoner recruitment much better than the previous versions owing perhaps to the fact that I no longer see much of the dread 99% recruit chance difficulty anymore.

Opening cryptosleep caskets is a "hauling" job. It really should be basic.

Also, uninstalling is still under Construction, whereas reinstalling furniture is under basic.

Also, when reinstalling furniture, there should be a "cancel" option on the original piece of furniture rather than cancelling the "shadow" of the furniture (but that should be kept too).

Can we also please cancel the forced slowdown thing during combat? It's fine for newbies but vets should be able to turn it off in the options.

When drafted, there is an option to attack and there is an attack to melee. Both are useful but it'd be nice to have an option to "shoot". A blob of pawns where 80% are shooting but the 20% is melee means that players often attack a target but also send their melee pawns into a situation where they get friendly fire.

Every time your handler retrains your animals so as to keep their obedience in check, the animals default to them as their owner. Really annoying, wished it was off by default.

The mad animal instance needs to be changed according to biome. Current desert playthrough has like 4 camels, 3 boomalopes and 2 little scarabs. On a jungle or forest, it's no big deal but one with little animals means that I'm just eying that boomalope to come over and make a mess of things.

My pawn just died by springing on their own trap. When the heck this did happen? Did I miss a changelog saying traps now trigger on pawns again?

RIP SPEAR

Anyway I tried to do some (unscientific testing) on mechs with plasteel weapons ranging from normal to excellent, level 9 melee pawn with no health issues.

On spears: still the best weapon for scythers. It doesn't one shot kill them anymore but a level 9 pawn in power armor (good) gets the job done. Terrible against centipedes, I pitted him against 5 centipedes (one by one, reloading each save) and he fails at all of them.

On maces: not as good on scythers as spears are but the superior weapon against centipedes. Took 4 hours for my pawn to actually down it by himself. I kinda gave up when I realise it still takes just as long for the second one.

Obviously one shouldn't bum rush a mechanoid by themselves but I fear this will make drop pod mech raids a bigger challenge than before considering their ability to burn all my furniture and the scyther's nasty blades.

Congrats, Dan. Now the simple helmet is available at the smithy!

SILLINESS:

One of the most memorable moments in B18 to me is when I sent a 4 man squad (2 charge riflemen, 2 longswordsmen) to get a vanometric power cell and drop pod to what I expected was a heavy raider based outpost, only to be attacked by a total of ..... 18 manhunter chickens.

So yes, I do hope Tynan keeps the not so dangerous manhunter animal and other sorts of silliness.

QUESTS:

On current questing: a while ago (earlier builds, maybe four-five versions ago?), quests for archotech/rare gear was more common. Vanometric cells, psychic tower thingamabob, healer serums, antigrain shells, etc. Now, all the settlements are giving me quests and they reward stuff like TVs and resources (plasteel/uranium) and the odd masterwork furniture/weapon, and while this indeed a good thing, it does mean the rarer stuff are non-existent. The addition of these quests rewards, ironically, drown out the more interesting and rarer ones.

This is the same swamp/cassandra rough playthrough. 7 years in, not a single mech serum or the B18 stuff. I do however got 8 flatscreen/megascreen TVs at this point. I think the quests generator in the backgrounds needs more tuning. Alternatively, there could be a seperate "box" of quests for the rarer B18 stuff. So you have your mundane (destroy outpost, get furniture/weapons/materials) in one box or the more dangerous and rare "artefact" quests like archotech limbs and B18 rewards. Would also like to have a method of generating these quests themselves (maybe by using Research skill). It's a real pain needing to grind outposts and bases for a persona core just to wait the settlements to give me a mission. Heck, I don't think you can even spawn these quests in devmode.

HEALING:

As for limbs/lots digits, the big issue is just putting in more bionics does very little. I think the bionic ear should not even be a thing, as hearing does very little to improve the pawn in any social capacity. Another issue is that a pawn with have a scar on their right limb but have a missing finger on their left hand, pointlessly needing to install bionics where there doesn't need to be just to get rid of a minor debuff. Putting more prosthetics/bionics, I think, isn't the correct solution. I'd rather use the glitterworld meds I have (which I have very little), to get rid of a minor scar or restore a toe. It's even lore friendly! The description says:

"A kit of advanced ultra-tech medical supplies, probably manufactured on a distant glitterworld. It contains advanced polymorphic drugs, nanite diagnostic and healing assisters, a mini-imager, and various multi-use tools."

Nanites AND polymorphic drugs. Surely advance enough to restore a toe. This makes healer serums more useful for regrowing a lost limb, curing diseases, fixing brain injuries, and so on.

Also, if we can treat cirrhosis, then we should also be able to treat gut worms. What's the point of having all these good surgeons if you're only using them to patch bloody gaping holes.

PRISONER FRIENDLY CHAT:

I agree with everyone, put em back in. But I think this shows the underlying problem with the Social skill in RW. Aside from trading (which isn't a very good method to level up), what really other uses does Social skill has? There's very little use of them unless you have your best trader make a caravan run or do peace talks. I can think of a few methods to make Social more useful:

1. When drafted, be able to calm a raging colonist. Yes, there is a mod for this. It should reward a healthy amount of XP for success and a mediocre amount for failure.

2. Therapy: Psychology mod allows the player to treat both drug addiction and pyromania via a "surgery" and requires a minimum amount of 3 medicine and 6 social IIRC. The therapy mod (which name escapes me) also does this to an extent. Obviously therapy is more than just "Talk Really Good" but if you wanna give it more use, here it is. I don't know how it would be implemented, but it would be really nice to treat an addict. And, it has the great ability to make for good stories, which a primary vision of Tynan's for RW.

3. Social between pawns: One of my pawns cheated on her husband, it'd be really nice if there was option to convince them this was a bad idea. One of my highest Social pawns (13 Social) is an enemy with one of the pawns. It's also be really nice if they bury the hatchet, perhaps passively, and have a nice message pop up. So you know, more overall being nice and charismatic.

Anyway, gonna try the LRMS. Haven't build one yet. Will give report soon.

That's actually pretty smart! I'll consider trying it at some point. Are there any differences in stun time between EMP grenades, mines, and mortal shells?