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Back to OP - for b18 I've also noticed that MV of some materials as well as mat cost for apparel have changed as well as the MV formula. Someone did a pretty detailed Reddit post with spreadsheets on the post profitable stuff. Some of which depends on if you have high level crafter, builder or social. B18 changes some of that but it's still a good start to check out. (I can't find the link atm but will post when i get home later today)

For b18 I updated some of those calcs -parkas are now one of the lowest money per resource apparels. Ifnyou still want to make clothibg, Bowler hat is the highest on a per material basis. Making flake still makes decent amount  but if you have a lvl14+ crafter you will make more money with bowler hat on a per growing plot per day basis  (cotton vs psychoid). Of course the difference here is that only bulk trader buys clothing but almost every trader buys flake.

If you have a high social. You can make a ton of money buying neutromine and making Wake up. With lvl 20 social you make around 2x what you pay. (Even with the 50% and 150% selling/buying factor). With this you break even somewhere around lvl 8 social?  I have a ill 10 social and have about a 15% profit margin.

The issue is that I am paying attention to pawns and not ignoring warning messages, but at the start of the game you have other challenges to focus on. Getting enough food for your first winter, a sturdy enough base to withstand raids and other events, having enough time and resources to make some decent rooms, well lit rooms, some comfortable chairs, a table etc. If you have starving pawns, not giving them rest, not giving them any joy, then I agree players deserve to have mental breaks. But to have pawns fully fed, well rested and full of joy, in ok surroundings considering we have just crashlanded on a planet, and they still break is just frustrating. Having your only cook, only constructor, or only farmer break several times a year, meaning they cant do anything, is overly punishing players imo.

Granted, late game the likelihood of breaks will decrease, as players can afford to make rooms nice, get fine/lavish meals, get heaters in rooms for the cold, make decent art, clothes, items, get other creature comforts, but early game is challenging enough without pawns breaking almost constantly.   To compound this, and as my original post says, you just have little options at the start to prevent breaks, and little good options if a pawn does break. Imo either the game needs to reduce the frequency of breaks, the length of time certain breaks last, and/or have more options to mitigate if a pawn breaks besides arresting them or waiting till they stop/collapse.

O, don't get me wrong - i'm not trying to accuse you of not knowing how to play the game. i was just making a generalization. I completely agree that the early game is the most difficult where mistakes or inefficiencies in either build order or micromanagement can easily snow-ball into more challenges/failed colony later on. This is especially true if you just roll with whatever pawn u start with instead of cherrypicking your starting pawns. I personally feel this is when the game is most fun b/c the initial start SHOULD be difficult and that's  where careful planning, smart strategies, and good micromanagement makes a lot of difference. Yes, breaks can still happen (most of the 8 breaks i mentioned before happened in the first year), but for me that adds to the story and what makes RW unique. For me, the point isn't trying to achieve the perfect efficiency and build order, but just to  enjoy the ride. (much like FTL, which RW gets a lot of influence from). If a pyro maniac breaks and burns himself to death from the fire he started, i think that's hilarious and like to believe that he went out with a smile on his face and build a tomb in his honor later and maybe erect a statue...

That said, i'm not saying that this is the way you should play, so if you still want to min-max your plays and avoid breaks as much as possible, then from my experience, the below tips will generally help you achieve it

1) do not need to focus on defense at all until maybe the third raid - taking advantage of your building corners, trees/natural terrain, and microing the battle should be enough (even on extreme). You might have some broken walls/outside stuff but shouldn't be too bad.
2) This also means you probably don't need to focus on research cutting stone blocks right at the start either.
3) focusing on food and shelter is obviously priority 1 so some tips there:
- putting growing zones with no resow over berries will make your pawns automatically harvest them and boost your food stockpile quicker.
- make your first room/barack large enough to make it decent. put beds far enough from each other so you don't get the "disturbed sleep" debuff.
- keep it clean, add tables chairs, wooden floors, and some flower pots should be pretty fast to build in the first few days and should keep away many of the negative debuffs that starting pawns usually suffer from.
- use campfire/passive cooling early to keep away the slept in cold/heat debuff. 20/50 wood is pretty effective way of avoid a -4.

I've attacked migrating herds head on.  When you first attack them, the revenge doesn't occur right away. Chances are they will try to escape first and you'll have elephants run amok in diff direction. Use this opportunity to down as many as you can. When they go revenge mode and turn into manhunters retreat back into your base and lock everyone in. You will need two exits, preferably in opposite end of your base, for this to work. It's cheesy but works. I've dealt with 20+ polar bear manhunters this way with 0 casualty. Basically, after you retreat back into your base, the elephants will roam around your building. Go to the door where they are least concentrated, and start taking shots at them, hopefully you'll down a couple before they charge at your door but if not that's ok, just retreat back into your door and have your builder ready to repair it. The elephants will attack the door a few times but will stop shortly so just keep that door healed and they won't break thru. Once the elephants stop attacking, rotate to your exit on the other side of the building and start taking pot shots again. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

I would argue the opposite - players have gotten too used to not caring enough about the pawn mood that they oftentimes develop a play style that ignores the minor risk of break warning and only start thinking about building a better environment when major risk warnings pop up. And even then it doesnt get as much priority like economy and defense.

I think these latest break mechanics just means players should pay attention to the warnings and mood earlier and better, like the warnings are designed to do (trigger a response)

I currently have a Randy extreme perms cold snap sea ice, and I've probably had 6-8 breaks total in 13 years. By comparison, since I keep pawns very happy all the time I get so many of the good mental breaks that for my population of 10 now that at anytime I usually have 1 or 2 pawns under some like of good mental break bonus.

11,000W of free power that came from nothing.

Place solar panels,wind turbines or Ship reactor core and you have real free power from nothing, because these all don't need some input made from pawns.

But even this isn't true, because the power isn't from nothing, it just comes from outside your watching perspective.

Not quite true - solar/wind I know comes from the energy from sun/wind, which since the game doesn't quantify, i can make the assumption that it maintains the First Law. In my set up, however, we have a closed system in which the only input comes from the light from sun lamp, heat from the heaters and power from the hydroponics. There isn't anything else outside of the perspective.

Unless... we are saying that somehow the rice plant is absorbing roughly 100% more energy from the "mystically surroundings of the planet" - I theory i guess i can buy. 

On a second thought, since we don't know what kind of waste is generated - if we throw in some kind of thermonuclear factors into the power-generator equation, then i guess that will fully reconcile the the extra power and maintain the First Law.

On the boomalope front - i'll look into the consumption rates/milking rates and get back to you shortly. FYI i'm not sure Hydroponics can grow hay? I'll use rice instead since that's still by far the best nutrition yield for hydroponics.

Dev Mode?

You can create 2x2 safe-rooms where objects only take 25% damage (perfect for hiding valuables and keeping pawns alive) while everything else gets trashed. 

My original thought was for each side to have 25% damage reduction that's stackable for each direction with a wall, and also have this DR % decrease with distance. So for ex, 2 tiles away 15% DR, 3 tile away 5% DR. So in your 2x2 room each tile will have 25%+25%+15%+15% = 80% DR, or only take 20% damage.

We can let Tynan/community decide on the actual % and the distance DR phase out rate, but the idea here is that this mechanic makes 1) smaller rooms safer, and larger rooms increasingly more vulnerable away from the walls. 2) make double/triple layer walls have meaning - by offer more protection - ie, a triple thick wall will offer 25%+15%+5% = 45% DR from a single side alone for the directly-adjacent tile.

First, Disclaimer: I have no issue with this "free power" set up, i think it adds to the quirky/wackiness of the Rimworld story.

That said, let me channel my inner physics nerd for $hits-and-giggles to show hands-down this is a giant violation of the First Law. Conservation of energy be damned!

1) in the original post's set up, 1 sunlamp, 2 refinery, 24 hydroponics, 5 heaters can be powered by 5 generators and yields about 190 rice per day (factoring in "harvest failed" and other random losses)
2) 190 rice yields 95 Chemifuel a day.
3) 5 generators burn 20 chemifuel a day, creating a net 75 chemifuel extra.
4) you may argue that "well you will need to dedicate pawns with the extra haulling/refininig, etc.. that's cost too. Ok well, assuming in this wacky rimworld that the kinetic energy of "pawn activity" can be converted 100% into potential energy stored in rice chemifuel, then we can add 3 pawns in a 24 hour shifts dedicated only to hauling/refining in this system, which should be enough to cover the labor need (conservative estimate). Throw in a electric kitchen too if you want, the power requirement from that won't cause a dent in equationt
5) so, adding in 3 pawns costs another 60 rice per day, which still nets 45 extra chemifuel per day - converting that into 11 extra generators yields an extra 11,000W of power generation

There you have it - total energy input per day, including pawn activity, is 100 rice per day (40 goes to the 20 chemifuel to power 5 generators to cover the energy needs of this system, and 60 goes to make 6 meals to feed 3 full time pawns working this system). Total energy output = 190 rice per day. Net positive 90 rice = 45 chemifuel = 11 power generator = 11,000W of free power that came from nothing.

For additional $hits and giggles: Add in a 4th pawn for full-time meal duty to use meals to convert into chemifuel:

1) 190 Rice - 80 rice for the pawns = extra 110 Rice = 11 extra simple meals = .85 nutrition per meal * 10 chemfuel per nutrition *11 simple meals  = 93 chemfuels
2) 93 chemfuels - 20 chemfuel for the 5 generators to power the system = 73 extra chemfuel = 18 extra generators = 18,000W extra power.


Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Kelvin) must be rolling in their graves.

Is my food-coma post Turkey brain playing trick on me or is there's a massive hole in my math that i'm not thinking of? Hear me out:

1) the new Chemifuel generator sips 4 fuel per day for 1000W power. 4 chemi fuel per day = 8 rice per day.
2) 1 hydroponic produces roughly 8 rice per day (2.5 hydros are usually enough to feed 1 person, or 20 rice per day. 20/2.5 = 8 )
3) 1 Sunlamp, 5 heaters, 24 hydroponics, and 2 refineries require roughly 5000W power, or 5 generators.

SO... doesnt this mean that with this set up, you'd either A) get about 19 self-powered hydroponics, or B) even crazier, build 19 more generators for a whopping 19000W of self-sustaining power???

I know with 19 generators you'll probably need a few more refineries and maybe a few full-time fuel makers.. but still... that's 19000K of free power...

I'm going home now to test it on my base by someone please tell me I failed to consider something here b/c otherwise.. o man.. all that free power....

EDIT: in fact, throw in a couple of kitchens and convert the rice into meal first (i know, more man power needed) but that will DOUBLE total chemifuel yield for 40000+W.. 

Hi Tynan, I saw from a different post that you responded with the plan to cut it and turn it into a weapon instead. I really hope you don't do it because I think players like it as disaster but just don't like the fact that there's very little counter or preventive measures to it. I would rather you keep it and implement a few counters such as the ones listed below.

1) make it so that it can only spawn outside of your home zone (but can path thru the colony)
2) make it deal MORE damage on outside tiles - I want to see an epic path if destruction.  But the damage can be mitigated for indoors. (See next point)
3) this is an important one that'll address most of the players' issues with the current version of the tornado: give tiles close to walls damage mitigation - ie, tiles next to wall has 25% damage reduction for each side (so 1 tile with 4 walls around it will be fully protected). This % then decreases with distance away from the  wall, reaching 0%  around 3- 5 tiles away. This will make small rooms offering better protections against tornados. Tiles closer to walls will be safer, and Larger rooms are more vulnerable in the middle but can be improved by support pillars.
4)a late game tech that gives a device that wiill have a chance to alter the path of the tornado
5) make wind turbines operate at 100% For the duration of tornado
6)Do NOT give the ability to build thick roof (like the mountaintop) bc this will make siege raids pretty harmless...

Thank you. Please consider this plea!

Just had my first tornado ripping thru my sea-ice base. Does it simply destroy everything in its path or does it deal X damage to everything in its path? I'm asking b/c based on my observation, all my walls were left standing (granite and plasteel). wooden benches were destroyed by metal/plasteel ones are kept in tact. Stools were destroyed but armchairs are not. other low-HP items were also destroyed (hydroponics, lamps, etc..)

So.. it seems to me that if it's supposed to be dealing X damage , then a possible counter play is simply to make things out of higher HP materials? My wooden shelfs with all my valuable weapons were destroyed so maybe if i made the shelves out of plasteel/granite then the items may have survived?

Ok, i think we all want the same thing but are hung up on the semantics of the definition of "flaw". So for the sake of progress lets just all agree that it's at least a game design challenge that needs to be addressed - either by 1) overhauling the current pace/feel of RW to achieve closer to RL movement to work ratios or 2) make the gap in the in-game to RL ratio have less of a game impact by implement design mechanisms in OTHER areas of the game to balance out the anomalies created by the time scale and ratio gap.

Personally, I prefer to leave the pace as is b/c 1) I don't want to make production time longer - i'm already playing on 3x and don't want game progress to drag on longer (which, if we want to make any meaningful impact to address the "challenge", will need to at least drag out production pace somewhat materially). 2) I don't want to make walking speed/animation faster - playing on 3x already feels like i'm watching a movie on permanent fast-forward, and 4x dev mode like a time-lapsed video.

Therefore i'd focus on balancing out the other areas of the game - ie by making movements more "bang for the buck" - in theory, if we make 1 movement count as 60 movements in terms of hauling, we'd get effectively the same result as a 1:60 RL ratio with a 1:1 in game ratio. RW already does this to a degree with a somewhat outlandish hauling mechanism (see my wall construction and animal hauler example in the first response). I feel like this is enough, but OP's opinion is that we need more, which I can live with - just difference in preference. If we want to add more such mechanism to further balance out the challenge, maybe Tynan can consider the following two areas that come to mind:

1) make certain types of workstations STORE a sizable materials in them, at least 2 stash size worth, and set it to replenish (requesting haul) only with less than 50% remaining - this will guarantee that each movement into the bench has the max haulable material being delivered, instead of the single-product-ingredient per trip that's currently in game.  Implementing this for at least low-cost-high-frequency items like meals and drugs will drasticallly reduce the movement cost. Players current work around this with by having single tile high priority stashes next to the benches but that still doesn't fully resolve the issue b/c 1) meat spoil, 2) pawns still "shift" and move a little bit in between each production 3) Haulers can still deliver to the single stash inefficiently (ie, delivering only 5 meat b/c the single tile already has 70). Storing material inside the bench would solve this. Fueling, fermentation, and refining currently employ this mechanism so it probably isn't that difficult to expand it to other benches.

2) making the production mechanism less "conveyor belt driven" by making it less dependent on deliverable ingredients. . ie - making production speed more impacted by pawn conditions (speed boosts, etc, like the OPs original post). Adding additional non-deliverable ingredients - maybe power, or some new type of resource...this probably requires more creativity...

I played sea ice ALOT and usually add perma coldsnap to it. Being efficient in every aspect of the game can go a long way with survival. Tips:

1) Heating: the game's heating mechanism is a function of the size of the room and heat loss is a function of wall thickness and # of edges facing the outside. So, you'll want to have room shapes that gives the maximum area with the fewest "edges" facing outside. In game terms, this mean you should use squares for all your rooms to achieve heating efficiency.
2) Building material: You can start with whatever material u have to make walls for those temp shelters but eventually I prefer to have all walls be made of stone b/c fire is extremely dangerous if it burns down a wall and outside temperature is -100C. Your access to stone is likely going to be limited, so room shapes that achieve "material efficiency" is circular. This isn't always compatible with point 1) b/c in game to make a circle you have to make diagonals which counts as 2 "edges" facing the outside per tile. So this will be a balancing act between "heating efficiency" vs "material efficiency". You can play around with the "ovalness" of your square to find a happy medium. I'm currently using a "square-ish" circle for my base that I found to be fairly good heating-wise but costs less stone to build for the same area.
3) The corner wall tiles (ie, the 2x2 next to your wind turbine in the lower right corner) serves no purpose as far as heating is concerned so consider removing them. If you applied this to your whole base (including the inside corners, you can save roughly 200 building blocks. The only purpose corner tiles serve that i can think of is a) ascetics, 2) defence - raiders have to dig thru 3 tiles to get into your room if they dig the corners, vs 1 if you remove them.
4) Power efficiency - solar lamp will be one of your biggest power draws, so consider fitting as many hydroponics as you can for 1 lamp. In game terms this means building a circular room the exact same area as the reach of the lamp. this can fit up to 24 hydroponics with 4 empty squares for heaters. If you need more heaters you can always add additional tiles by changing the room shape. I know you only have 2 colonists so the number you have now is enough for food - but you still want the option to build more for future for things like growing herbs, or cotton/psychoid to make $$ with.
5) your current growing area has single walls in the north and south - this will give u pretty significant heat loss
6) consider making a separate dining/rec room that's large enough to fit at least the table, a few different sources of joy, and maybe room a for a couple of statues. the mood buff from impressive dining/rec room in late games can be very useful.
7) need a lot more batteries connected behind switches - esp later for defense -i'm assuming you'll need a lot of turrets sicne you are keeping only 2 pawns.
i never use crematorium - I usually either get a psycho/cannible and butcher all the corpse for $$ (selling meat and humanskin bowler hats). If you don't have one of those, just have corps zone outside and throw a molotov in there.
9) how will you trade? caravans will be few in between due to temperature and i don't see orbital. Trading will be your main source of getting resources.
10) your starting set up - not sure regular lamp can give enough light for the hydro. Also don't see a renewable resource generation method (either orbital, or smelter for slag).

I have a pretty good mid-game sea ice colony now with 6 pawns. I can share my screen after i get back home from work.

Getting back to the point that i think OP is trying to make - I don't think that it's a "flaw" but it's more a game-design challenge of reconciling two vastly different time scales - In-game time vs RL time. OP seems to be trying to get at achieving a solution that has the "best of both worlds", which, by the very nature of the difference, is impossible. Let me explain:

Simulation games, by design, require different areas of the game to "feel" like real-life to create the simulation "immersion" that players crave. For games where pawns are involved, one of key areas to achieve this "real life immersion" is to make the animations close to "real life time". This necessitates for things like movement speed, shooting speed, hammering speed (the ding ding ding sound when pawns are working on something) to be at a pace that looks and feels realistic. The issue however, is that the game MUST speed up other areas of the game in order to achieve an overall game progression pace that makes sense for the average player's playing time (a few hours per sitting). This is not a flaw, it's just cards that we are dealt with. Looking at the infamous "meal making" example, in game it probably takes roughly the same amount of time to gather/walk as cooking the food (a movement-time-cost-to-production-time-cost ratio of roughly 1:1). The same process in real life is probably somewhere around 1 minute to walk/gather stuff in your kitchen and 1 hour of cook time (1:60).  People probably don't realize the true vastness of the difference in these two time-scales. Even slowing down production by 4x and increase movement speed by 4x like the OP suggests truly only migitate the issue by roughly 25% (1:16 vs 1:60). This brings us to the following point: as long as the in-game movement to production ratio do not approach the RL ratio, there will always be a point in which "reducing movement cost design or lose" becomes a limitation

Taking the above point one step further, only way to solve this "ultimate flaw" is to have in game ratio be close to RL ratio, which definitionally will result in one of only two possibilities:
1) keeping pawn animation speed (movement) close to RL time. But this will also drag out production time to ridiculous lengths - meals in game will take hours of RL time to complete, parka full day to make, houses and buildings days/months to complete. Imagine how bored players will be waiting for that kind of game pace?
2) speed up in-game production time - if doing this while trying maintain RL walk/production ratio, the pawns will be zipping around so fast that for practical purposes it loses all the "simulation immersion" value of having pawns in the first place.

Other games are designed in one of the two options mentioned above and they don't have this problem (think EVE online for 1, and SimCity 4 for 2). However for RW and many other games in between, a true solution to this "ultimate flaw" simply does not exist. The best that these games can do is to balance other aspects of the game to create the best game-playing experience. RW does this masterfully - ie, it gives movements "more bang for the buck" (ie, hauling enough material for 40-50 feet, or 10-15 tiles, of walls in one trip), or, it reduces the movement cost impact by having "super intelligent" animal haulers that knows exactly where and when to haul materials without intervention (by comparison I can't even get my dog to fetch me a beer)

TLTR: the "ultimate flaw" that the OP laid out is a "flaw" only insomuch as trying to fit a square block into a circular hole is a flaw. It's simply an attempt to reconcile two vastly different time scales that is definitionally impossible to achieve within the confines of most simulation game designs such as RW.

it looks like there are some changes to the market values. A few things i noticed:
1) the MV of ingredient + work x 60 x .003 formula doesn't seem to work anymore?
2) the MV of various clothing in shown in the work bill if you press the "i" doesnt show a "normal cloth" version anymore
3) some of the MV of items changed. I noticed cloth and wood both decreased.

For ex. a bowler hat in the work bill shows mv of 63.4. using the old MV formula gets a value of 49.6. A completed normal quality cloth bowler hat shows a mv of 53.4.

I didn't realize price rebalances are part of this build so just trying to make sense of what the new economy system looks like...