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You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.

Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.

Have you tried growing trees in 0.19? I have. On my boreal forest I set out a tree farm in year one when wood became an issue. Unfortunately because of the short growing period, the very long planting time (a lovely 0.19 mega-nerf) and the fact that you can only plant in growing season meant that I could only seed the field towards the end of the growing period in year 2. I'm on year 4 now and the trees still have not reached a harvestable state. Put it this way: even the best tree generates 1.15 wood per day of its growing season. For a mild-ish map with say 25 days of growing period, that is 29 wood per year per tree. If I need 300 wood every, say, 7 days, that means 43 wood per day or 2600 wood per year. Thus I would need to be planting and maintaining something like 100 trees or more!

Don't rely on a single source then; use trading, caravans, naturally-growing trees, and tree farms together.

Also, this doesn't change the fact that you can use other materials to build traps when wood resources get low. I substituted in stone/steel traps for my colony when I was running low on wood until I was able to stock up again by waiting for tree growth, caravaning to farm other tiles, and calling in traders to buy wood.

Your strategy remains only practical for very small scale trap use. I doubt even the most caravan-happy player could sustain a loss of 300 of any combination of wood, steel or stone blocks every few days in perpetuity. The number is just too large. 300 steel is just over 8.5 tiles of steel. 300 stone blocks is 15 stone chunks. 300 wood is 10 trees. What I've been trying to communicate this whole thread is that the trap cost is just too high for sustainable use at what I consider a reasonable level of losing 10 traps per attack. Even losing 3 traps per fight the number is too high.

In contrast a turret needs rearming with 40 steel every 120 shots, i.e. the cost of 1.3 traps to do 1320 cumulative damage (11 damage per shot), something like 10x or 20x more damage per unit resource. If traps are given such a nerf then IMO turrets should also be nerfed as well!

You can build traps out of literally any material. If you're short on wood, you can use other materials to substitute while waiting for the trees to grow back.

Or you know, grow your own trees? Trade? Caravan for resources? There's tons of ways to get materials in this game. In my colony I've used wood traps early game and switched to steel later on.

Have you tried growing trees in 0.19? I have. On my boreal forest I set out a tree farm in year one when wood became an issue. Unfortunately because of the short growing period, the very long planting time (a lovely 0.19 mega-nerf) and the fact that you can only plant in growing season meant that I could only seed the field towards the end of the growing period in year 2. I'm on year 4 now and the trees still have not reached a harvestable state. Put it this way: even the best tree generates 1.15 wood per day of its growing season. For a mild-ish map with say 25 days of growing period, that is 29 wood per year per tree. If I need 300 wood every, say, 7 days, that means 43 wood per day or 2600 wood per year. Thus I would need to be planting and maintaining something like 100 trees or more!

Experienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.

You seem to say that because they aren't a total solution, nobody ever has any reason to use them ever. It's not a valid inference.

In reality it's in between, as it should be: Useful sometimes, less useful other times, based on circumstances and strategy. Not a total solution; not totally useless. I look forward to seeing how the metagame works out as players get experience with them.

As 5H noted, I suspect they're still OP if used optimally, but so many RW strategies are.

I have something like 350 hours in Rimworld and so would consider myself an experienced player. The attraction of traps is that they use renewable resource, unlike any other defense in the game. If your colony relies upon IEDs, turrets and mortars you will quickly reach a point where you are entirely dependent upon external sources of steel and components. Unfortunately there are no reliable sources of these resources; bulk goods traders are few and far between, leaving mining colonies or settlement trading as your only real options. Both of these options come with a number of severe downsides including the need to maintain a significant number of pack animals, lots of micromanagement either in the generation of trade goods or in controlling your miners, plus extended periods when your base is heavily undermanned and vulnerable.

Edit: As to the metagame it seems obvious to me that it will inevitably lead to two groups of people: those who use traps only as last-ditch defenses behind their front lines, in which case they will rarely ever see action, or those like myself who will end up shackled to the trap economy.

The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate?

I guess the answer is however many will stave off that amount of loss of another - more valuable - resource.

How many traps is a person's arm worth? Or their life? Or the medicine to fix them? Or the serum to grow back their leg? Or the bionic leg? Etc.

For me the answer is all the traps it takes. I spam them and am happy to use wood instead of plasteel and advanced components to fix up my people. Then I have turrets and sandbags to further weigh the odds in my favor.

I spam them too, but then end up getting sucked into a black-hole of wood chopping and trap rebuilding. It's a slow and subtle death of a colony - what some might call a noob trap. Experienced players simply won't use traps knowing that it will screw them over in the long-term. A sad eulogy to a formerly viable game strategy.

Thank you for your response Tynan. The question is really: what is the amount of trap usage that is considered appropriate? My figures are based around losing 10 traps in a fight, which I deem a very small number of traps, yet still requires an exorbitant amount of resources and maintenance even if made from wood. It seems to me that you feel that losing 2 or 3 traps per fight is more appropriate, which suggests an extremely sparse scattering of traps. At this point, why bother?

In 0.19 traps are much more deadly but they break after a single use. This seems like a decent compromise on the face of it, but in my experience it almost completely negates the use of anything other than wooden traps, and even then this is very difficult on maps with short growing seasons or no natural tree spawn.

The reason is that traps require 30 resources to construct, just under half of their former cost. In a typical raid I will lose upwards of 10 wooden traps, which means at least 300 wood to replace them, or the full harvest of 10 typical trees (pine, birch, poplar). This happens every few game days, resulting in an insanely heavy demand for wood. In my unstable playthrough starting a week or so ago, I managed to completely denude my large boreal forest map in the first year - there were no harvestable trees remaining! Fortunately it appears that natural tree spawn was buffed in the past few days as my map in year 3 is now repopulated (year 2 it remained largely desolate). Nevertheless the time investment in chopping trees and rebuilding traps remains prohibitive - I typically barely have a chance to rebuild before the next attack comes along.

While wooden traps are a struggle to use, I cannot imagine how anyone could support the consumption of 300 steel or 300 stone blocks every few game days. The resource cost for even a modest trap use is just staggering! IMO this is far too heavy of a nerf to trap usage. My suggestion would be for traps to have a chance to break on use which averages at say 3 uses per trap. Thus a typical trap would cost 10 resources, which is still a heavy load but not unbearable.

Thoughts?

I don't recall the dispenser having an option to create meals - maybe this is a mod? Usually a pawn automatically interacts with the device to produce  a meal when desired.

Just wait until the game decides to throw neverending waves of rescue quests with relations to your colonists. You're pretty much boned whatever you do; leave them to die and your colonist gets a heavy mood debuff lasting over half a year, rescue them (at risk of life and limb) and promptly banish them and you also get hammered by a debuff. I fully intend to mod out relation-rescue quests at release but for now I am just deleting the mood debuff entry from the save game file.

I was considering it as a defensive strategy. Make some corridors with rooms branching off that are connected allowing colonists to move. Draw the raiders into the corridor and try to split off individuals by luring them through open doors that then close behind them locking them in a room with 5 angry melee fighters. Micro intensive but probably quite good fun.

This is awesome! Does it work on raiders too? This opens up a lot of new strategic possibilities; I hope it is not nerfed!

I would prefer a buff to livestock rather than a nerf to hunting. On colder biomes with short growing seasons, hunting is very important to survival, not just for meat but for clothing. On these maps livestock is already very difficult to maintain due to the requirement to stock haygrass for the long winter. I like the idea of giving more meat from tame animals.

There's 2 scenarios that removing adaptation improves upon (and a 3rd which would be improved if adaptation was "better"  , that being turret spamming)

1) 2 newbs buy the game.  One builds a mix of melee and shooters and plays with reckless abandon and does well due to random downing of melee dudes.  Another plays a more careful deliberate approach and gets a crushing defeat when he meets an enormous raid and gets cornered.  When finding out the solution is playing worse, he says the game sucks and stops playing/recommending.

2)More experienced players start getting increasing raid sizes when doing well and think in the back of their mind "I can survive this a lot easier if every now and then I just let a dude die"

The first is really bad, the second is annoying and immersion breaking, but will probably just lead to adopting mods 

I agree that it does seem to reward bad play and punish good play, and encourages players not to learn how to play better but instead how to game the system. Personally I felt the difficulty progression in B18 was just fine and didn't need touching.

Don't lose faith. While you are still learning the ropes I suggest saving regularly, so you can reload when something bad happens. If the spider aggro seems inevitable you can enable dev mode and kill them off. Usually in my experience they leave me alone and I leave them alone, and they end up getting killed off by attrition through picking fights with wild animals.

Traps weren't nerfed, they were buffed quite substantially. They're cheap now and do a ton of damage. And you can uninstall and move them if you need to. My only complaint about them is the auto rebuild won't use uninstalled traps from storage. It will always build new. Nonetheless, I use them heavily.

They are single-use, very resource heavy (you say they are cheap, but they are only 50% of the resource cost they were in B18), and have to be placed so far apart that they become next to useless for anything more than acting as a minefield for unlucky raiders. In my experience I lose so many to random wildlife and manhunting rodents that they become too resource-intensive to manage; and that's just with wood traps. No-one in their right mind would use steel or plasteel for traps now, and stone is far too precious to throw away until you get deep drilling. Used to be that you could place them strategically with careful wall placement to funnel the enemy, but now they are just a spray-and-pray largely mindless affair and a massive burden to keep operating. Not a fan at all.

They are quite useful. The spacing nerf was implemented because they are so deadly now. It encourages tactical placement. If you have a map with a lot of obstruction (mountain) it is easy to determine what paths raiders will take after observing a few raids. Corners and narrows are excellent places to trap. I have had enormous success with them. Animals do occasionally trip them, but it is not too bad. I generally have a lot of steel or stone, but wood traps are viable on any forest map.

I admit that after spending the evening on it yesterday that the wide separation of the traps is not as big a burden as I thought. It does, as I expected, make traditional uses of traps accompanied by funneling systems much more difficult, but placing a few near corners and hidey holes where you expect enemies to take up position works very well given how damaging the traps are. However the biggest difficulty for me is the resource demand. I am playing a boreal forest and have quite literally stripped the entire map (large!) of trees. I've had to stop using them for now as I simply cannot afford the resource cost. God knows how anyone would be able to use plasteel, steel or even stone traps for anything but last ditch defenses. The cost needs to be reduced by a factor of 2x or more IMO. Most likely come 1.0 I will mod them to buff their initial cost back to 70 and stop them from being destroyed after one use.

It may be coincidence but my current base is quite spread out, and usually this means that pawns whose bedrooms are far away from the dining room will eat on the spot after they get out of bed; however in this run it seems they will always go up to the dining room. The only time I've seen people eating elsewhere is when they are far away from the base. Maybe something has changed?