Messages

[Seed:]

Does your "no mods" rule even extend to pure UI mods?  I'm using Moody, Medical Tab, and World Without Hat.  These have no in-game effect except making my life easier, not my pawns.
...
In any case, I started the challenge.  I ended up in an Extreme Desert, so early food will be a problem.  Because I didn't want to have to kill my best friend, I decided to solo a mega-scarab.  Bad idea for food source, they bite back.  Steel shiv did the trick though.  Hope the wounds don't get infected, otherwise I'm screwed.

I rolled a character whose pretty good outside of the combat skills, so if I can avoid starving to death, I'll be in business.  Interestingly, his sister Erisen is the leader of a local pirate gang.

...
Died of infection on 3rd day.  Should have gone after a dromedary instead.

...
I started again with the same seed and same coordinates, but with a different (and less impressive) colonist. 
Seed: "Solo"
Climate: Sliders all in middle
Coordinates: 5.76^oS, 1.82^oW.

Is that legit, or do I have to do it full random?

I have a large amount of 20% durability armor vests lying around from raiders, and rather than selling it for pennies to traders I was wondering if it is possible to melt it down for scrap.  I remember doing this in A15, but there doesn't seem to be any options for usefully disposing of Helmets/Armor in A16.

Another pro tip would be not to shoot firearms in close proximity to a spaceship.

But what if the enemy is using your ship as cover and you just bought a shiny new Doomsday Rocket-launcher that you're itching to try out?

So if I give my pawns a dose of penoxycycline before they go into battle, they won't develop infections when my doctor doesn't patch up their burnt and mangled flesh in time?

It says it is supposed to prevent diseases and infections, and it adds immunity to plagues, but it doesn't seem to do anything for you know infections.  I applied penoxycycline to an injured pawn with an infection that was greatly outstripping his immunity, but it seemed to do all of nothing. 

Am I not using it properly, or am I a fool who cannot read some important detail?

From what I have read, a room can have up to 25% of its tiles unroofed before it becomes "outdoors".

From my testing on this, I have found that Campfires are more efficient at producing heat than Torch Lamps.  Torches use 2.2 wood/day and it takes 6 torches to equal the heat of 1 campfire, which uses only 10 wood/day instead of the 13.2 that 6 torches would demand.

I have not been able to determine whether you can grow enough sky-lit fire-warmed trees on glacial gravel to keep fueling your campfires.

The rate of heat loss through holes in the roof is quite substantial.  In a series of 5x5 huts made for scientific testing, I found that a double-walled room with 3 roof holes (out of 25 room tiles) had the same heat loss as a single-walled hut with 0 holes.

Double-walling is 1.5x as effective insulation as single-walling (same heat source will give +50% delta-T relative to outside), so my guess is that ~12% roof removal results in a heat loss rate equal to that of the single-walls.  It might not scale perfectly for all building sizes though.

Going to a full 25% roof removal, based on these estimates, I would guess that the heating cost would be 2x what would be required to keep that room warm with an intact roof.  If 2 campfires keeps your room cozy, 4 should let you grow crops under the skylights.

Keep in mind though that unlike electric heaters, Torches and Campfires have a maximum temperature they can heat a room to, 23C and 28C respectively, so this can disguise what the true heat output is.

Lastly, Campfires can be deconstructed for a 100% return on remaining materials, so you can feel free to build and remove fires as necessary to maintain a stable temperature for your crops without fear of wasting fuel.

If Grenades take damage from burning or degrading in the open, does this affect their utility?  If I have to choose between equipping a 16% grenade to a pawn and an 81% grenade, how much does it matter?

I know for guns it will affect their accuracy, but grenades?  I'm not sure what HP does for them.

Another thermodynamics observation:  Heat leaks through roofs!

Rooms exchange heat with the environment not just through their perimeter walls, but also have a small amount of heat-flow through each tile of roof.  Two rooms with the same perimeter, but different areas, will have different temperatures (for the same heat-supply).

Further, if you make a "Room within a Room", and have your temperature supply in the outer-ring, the inner room will be a few degrees closer to the outdoors temperature than the outer-ring is.

Hmm...so in theory you should be able to achieve a delta-T of 120 for each layer, so 3 layers can get to absolute zero 3^oK?

I'm pretty sure that Coolers work just as well in parallel as in series.  Also double-wall insulation is vastly more effective than two single-wall layers.

3 Coolers sucking heat out of a double-walled room can achieve roughly the same temperature as your setup.

...
Hold on, misread some numbers there.  -185C is a lot better than you can achieve with just double-walling.

I'd say stick with it.  Early wooden buildings can be deconstructed and rebuilt very easily.  In any case, playing a map with suboptimally placed buildings will give you the experience you need to know what works and what doesn't for next time.

Then again, the tutorial start might not feel like yours, and that's important too.  Do whatever will be most fun.

I *believe* that once you choose the storyteller, you are now off of the tutorial-rails and the game will go normally.

Yes, the whole building is roofed.  I took the screenshot with the cursor over the central tile to make it clear the status of the tile, but the cursor didn't get captured. 

The lower left-hand info-corner says "Constructed roof" and the lower right-hand one says "Indoors -7C", but there is no indication as to what was actually being pointed to! 

Well I want "Axial Tilt" to be a configurable setting for the planet so you can choose the strength of seasonal climate variation.

I was manning some forward fortifications aimed at taking out a psychic ship crashed nearby, when I got a notification that a colonist had gone berzerk (unsurprising, given the extreme mood penalty at that point) but then immediately was notified that his rage had ended and a colonist was in need of rescue.

Head-shot from a survival-rifle at point blank range.  Miraculously, no permanent damage!  He was out of the fight for the next raid, bed-ridden with minimal consciousness, but he eventually made a full recovery.

It did however make me super cautious about mental-breaks and high-powered weaponry.  I also reconsidered attaching a scyther-blade to a colonist who had lost a hand...