Topics

I had thought that colonists would haul things to the nearest applicable stockpile and the five priority settings (Low, Normal, Preferred, Important, Critical) were for transferring things between stockpiles. However, it appears that they haul things straight to the stockpile with the highest priority. Is this right?

If so, how would one set up a chain? For example, I have a colonist making medicine in the drugs lab. There is a stockpile set to Critical for medicine in the hospital, and another one set to Low right next to his drugs lab desk. When finishing crafting a medical pack, he carries it to the hospital stockpile. Carrying single items longer distances is obviously very inefficient. How would one get him to place medicine packs in the stockpile next to him so he, or someone else, could haul multiple items at once?

Will enemy ever pick up your weapons?

I was thinking of placing some mini-armory stockpiles dotted around near my towers containing weapons like SMGs and Machine Pistols, for my snipers to switch to once the battle gets to inside the base. So I was wondering if it was safe to do so from a security point of view. Would raiders that breached my walls ever pick up these weapons and turn them against me?

What about berserk prisoners? Will they pick up a weapon if one is available to them?

Then I was thinking that guns also have a negative beauty value so having them in sight is best avoided, which might mean creating mini-rooms with a door. But then I thought about equipment racks - do they hide the ugliness of the things they contain? If so, then they'd be quite cool to use for this purpose.

What time of year is best to stop sowing outdoor plants? There appears to be variation in the seasons, such as cold snaps, so seasonal weather is not entirely predictable.

Rice's growing time is shown as 2.4 days and healroot as 6.5 days. These must be under optimum conditions as they take a lot longer in the actual outdoor conditions, with light and temperature variations.

Any suggestions for an efficient growing calendar?

An AI Persona Core, obtained by destroying a psychic ship, is needed to build a Ship Computer Core, part of the spaceship needed to fly off the planet. According to the Wiki, at least one Ship Computer Core is needed to fly the ship.

AI Persona Cores are also worth a lot of money with exotic traders, almost 3,000 silver.

I have three AI Persona Cores now. Should I be saving all of them for the spaceship or cashing in on one or two now?

I really hate needless friendly fire deaths in this game. I've had a couple in my current game.

The first was in about the first raid. The raiders were fleeing and I ordered three or four colonists to melee attack a wounded enemy who was hobbling away, and moved another guy out of the way. The guy I moved out of the way then turned around and shot this woman who'd joined my colony point blank and killed her instantly.

Then in my current game, a woman I'd spent ages in recruiting finally joined my gang. She was making her first pair of pants and went berserk. I moved another nearby colonist out of the way, but not far enough, as she instantly turned around and shot the berserker in the head, giving a permanent brain damage injury, which means I'm going to have to harvest her organs and kill her.

I guess ultimately it's my error for not switching off auto-fire and not being super-careful enough. I wish there was a better way of trying to avoid these things.

To be able to click on someone who's carrying somebody, like an injured person or a prisoner, and then click on the bed you want them to carry the person to. For example, to take an injured person to the operating theatre bed, rather than a hospital ward bed, or to take a prisoner to one's lavish visitor hospitality centre rather than a dungeon cell.

At the moment it requires juggling with turning off and on beds.

I gather one can grow plants indoors with a sun lamp and hydroponics basins.

What happens if:

a) One places a sun lamp outside near some crops, perhaps only turning it on at night. Sun lamps cause short circuits if soaked by rain, so let's say one built a small roofed area supported by pillars, so light was able to get out to the crops.

b) One roofed over an area of outdoor rich soil, creating a room, and then putting a sun lamp in there.

I think the best-looking floor tiles in the game are the wood tiles, which are beauty-neutral. High-beauty stone floor tiles, on the other hand, look a bit rubbish.

So I'd like to see better stone floor graphics in the game, so their in-game "high beauty" value is reflected in their actual appearance.

So a pod crashlanded with the father of one of my colonists. I captured him and he was being transported to a prison cell. However, he was being taken to a dungeon-style cell rather than my lavish visitor hospitality room (prison cell). So I changed the cell he was being taken to to a non-prisoner bed. The prisoner was dropped on the floor, but was now able to walk, and walked to a hospital bed. I'm unable to interact with him at all, even to heal his wounds (and he dies in seven hours from bleeding). I don't think he's a captive any more and his name has blue lettering.

What to do?

I would like to see a colonist history page, which lists and has a picture and the backstory of all the colonists over the course of one's game in order of their arrival, with dates of joining/death/cause of death and perhaps other details, like marriage, lovers, enemies, or other notable things.

It would be nice to have an event log to review event messages.

For example, sometimes a raid happens and I click the message and it disappears before I've absorbed whether they're attacking immediately or hanging around for a bit. Or cargo pods land and then I can't remember where they landed.

With an event log, one could go back and view the message again, with map jump to location.

Not a biggie, but when zoning growing zones, it can be hard to make out exactly which squares are rich soil squares.

So it would be useful if there was some added visual indicator only visible when the growing zone zoner was selected, like a dot, plus sign or other symbol as an overlay on rich soil squares.

What does the "Hide" stockpile option do?

I had thought it might mean that colonists ignore the stockpile and not haul stuff to it, but it appears to have no effect in this regard.

Putting a table and dining chair in someone's bedroom leads to other people coming in there to eat, waking up the bedroom owner.

Parties only in happen in my dining room. The only table in my Rec Room is the chess table.

If I put a small table in the Rec Room, with armchairs around it, would people come in there to eat food? Do people only eat at tables if there are dining chairs, or would so do so with stools and armchairs?

So you build a second entrance to your freezer - one connected to the kitchen and one another one nearest your crops. Now the colonists use the freezer as a corridor for getting around the base. A 'Forbid' sign on the door does not do the task as then growers and hunters can't go through it.

So the solution is a 'No Through Access' or 'Access Only' setting, probably applied onto doors. Colonists would only use that door and enter the room if one of their tasks required it, such as hauling stuff in there or out (such as in cooking or eating) or other tasks like construction and so on. Once the task was completed in that room, colonists could then leave by any door.

Sometimes colonists won't do the work where you want them to.

For example, you want them to construct a wall in one place, but they want to work on building another wall elsewhere. You order them to work on the wall where you want it. They will do one square and then go and work on the other wall elsewhere, requiring re-ordering them to build the wall you want for every square.

So perhaps they will do work orders in the order they were placed? Why not have them work on the job closest in proximity to where they are, so if there's some work you want prioritized you can move them close to it and leave them to get on with it?

I'd like to see some indicator for the colonist icons at the top of the screen showing whether they are under automatic or manual control.

Perhaps if colonists are set to manual control, the colonist icon at the top of the screen gets a light blue outline.

There are times in the game when I feel an emergency setting is needed. Maybe it does and I don't know about it.

For example, your base is under threat from fire or on fire. So you order the colonists that won't fight fires to deconstruct wooden walls or cut grass to prevent the spread of fire. They will deconstruct one block or cut one square of grass and, if tired or hungry, they will then go and eat or sleep.

This necessitates micro-management of ordering them to cut a single square of plants, pausing when they've completed, and then ordering the next square and so on.

So an emergency setting would make colonists keep doing their assigned task, overriding their need for sleep or food, with the with consequent mood risk penalty.

The herd of muffalo that attacked my base last game year, breaking down an entrance door and roaming round my base was hard to deal with. Now sixteen boomrats are attacking my largely wooden interior base.

When they appeared at the edge of the map, there was only one colonist outside the base, near the base entrance and half a map away from the boomrats. So they chased him inside and broke down the entrance door.

I moved everyone to the furthest corner of the base from the boomrats and, while the boomrats ran around the corridor, they no longer locked on to my colonists. I waited it out, hoping the boomrats would go to sleep at some point so I could go and fix the front door. The boomrats never slept and continued milling around in their hyperactive state.

Whenever the boomrats were outside and around the other side of the base, I'd try and move a colonist towards the entrance door to fix it, but one or more boomrats from the other side of the map would see through walls and rooms and come running round to attack the colonist.

By this point, my colonists were all exhausted and hungry, trapped in a far corner of the base. So I got them to eat and then converted all the nearby prison and hospital beds for their use, as their bedrooms were near the breached base entrance.

Now the boomrats have started breaking down the base entrance near to where my exhausted colonists are trying to get some rest, at the opposite end of the base where they initially attacked.

I'm trying to understand how manhunter packs operate, in order to find solutions to their base attacks. They don't rely on sight as they can be in a general moving state and then lock on to a new target who is distant and with many walls and buildings in the way.

They can also detect and lock on to colonists at least half a map away.

They can detect colonists behind doors, even if the colonist has not been through that door and they will try and smash it down.

I know colonists don't like wearing dead man's clothes, but is it worth stripping clothes off corpses and selling them to traders, particularly early in the game when money is tight? What sort of trade value do they have? Will traders even buy them?