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Just wanted to relate a story regarding the new faction relations system which I encountered that I thought might be important:

Caveat: I'm not sure if this is my own ignorance of game mechanics, or if this is something to look into.

Early Game - Captured 3 Hostile Tribals during a raid.  Released one intentionally to bring my faction relations with the Hostile tribe up to "0", which was successful. 2 remaining Tribals are now in my prison.

I was forced to move the 2 remaining (and still incapacitated) Tribal prisoners from one prison cell to another.  In doing so, I deleted their sleeping spots (which of course de-zoned the room as a "Prison Barracks", and then created two new sleeping spots ones in the new prison cell.  I was forced to re-capture them both to move them (drafted a colonist, who moved them to the new cell), and in doing so, my faction relationships plummeted.  The faction system counted both as a re-capture of neutrals, causing that faction to become far more hostile than they were originally.  I do not recall seeing any options for "rescue", which always appeared for friendlies who were downed/incap'd, and a non-prison hospital bed was available.

Again - if this is my own ignorance of how to move prisoners, please disregard (and I'd love it if someone could tell me how to do it properly);  however, this might be of interest to the Devs if it is an unintended consequence with no work-around while 1.0 is still being examined closely.

Some thoughts on 1.0 Unstable after my second all-night session:

Things I really like:

-The Family/Raid relationships add excellent depth to the game story; so far, I've managed to recruit a father, his brother, and captured his son during a Pirate raid; the son is at 93% difficulty to recruit, however.  I'd love to see the probability of recruitment get modified (easier) based on how many family members are in the colony already.

-Smoothing stone walls is great; love the beauty modifier.

-Watermills, even slightly debuffed in the latest update, are excellent.

-Thank you, Tynan, for decreasing the frequency of Food Poisoning; only two instances in an all-night session.  It feels much more reasonable, although I'd still like to see the ability to send a colonist to a medical bed, even if the poisoning severity can't be mitigated by medicine.


Things I'm not crazy about:

-Minimum skills for basic survival items (Building a campfire, crafting a Short Bow come immediately to mind)

-The grouping together of all 10 Area zones, instead of 5 for Pawns, 5 for Animals; having 10 options visible on the screen at once makes it far more difficult to quickly identify the zones and select them, since the zone names become truncated and unreadable.  It also increases the chances of making an error in choosing a zone, since they're much smaller to click on. Slide selecting vertically down the column is much harder to do accurately (like when you'd select all animals to a "Barn" zone during a raid).

-Two toggle buttons which seperate room stats from "beauty" graphic indicators, instead of one button that includes both stats; it's a bit unwieldy, and I enjoyed having all stats on one toggle.

Things I'm actively disliking:

-The removal of boar capability to haul.  I understand that boar swarms were very OP, but the solution would seem simple: remove the ability to follow a master, and the ability to release in an attack.  Their real utility was their ability to haul, without having to ramp up Kibble production for Dogs, which can easily strangle an early game's food supply (in both meat and Hay production).  Pigs don't work in this role either, IMO: they can't be found and tamed in the wild, and they'll die on colder maps. 

My suggestion would be to give only large Predatory *wild* animals (Bears, Wolves, Wargs and Large Cats only...and not Foxes, Elephants, Rhinos, Megasloths or Thrumbos) and Huskies the ability to attack/follow.  The upkeep cost of this category would seem to offset the benefits of having them attack, in my estimation, and would make building a meat shield very expensive...and equally as expensive to rebuild.


Bugs:

-Only one encountered so far: a wooden floor could not be cleaned of dirt over several game days, regardless of which pawn attempted it.  All prerequisites were met (floor was zoned as "Home" area, all colonists assigned to cleaning and "Unrestricted", pawns left the room and returned later).  The floor was deconstructed and re-constructed, and could then be cleaned normally.

Thanks for reading!  I've got about 20 hours into 1.0 compared to about 2,500 hours in B18...I'm really eager to see how gameplay develops once I get into mid-game!

My uses for cats?

1. Sell them, immediately.
2. See #1

I go after them right away, as early as possible...I'm a sucker for caravans.  I've sent single pawns early on to retrieve items.

In your specific scenario, there might be a different approach - run, get some distance, and fire.  Sometimes it's better not to be a stationary target and get overwhelmed by numbers.  If you check your colonist's Stats page, you'll see their move speed.  A pig's move speed is 3.60 c/s, and if your colonists are faster than that, you'll be able to put some distance between you and the manhunters.  If you bait them over bad terrain, this will increase the distance between you and them.

Once you have enough distance, you can turn, fire, and get moving again.  It's micro-intensive, but it'll work in many cases.  In my current game, really early on, I had about 8 manhunter Labs attacking 3 colonists, who had early-game weapons - recurve bows, IIRC.  I baited and led the entire pack with my fastest colonist, and had the other two pot-shot the Labs as the fast guy led the pack near them.  The fast colonist was also able to turn and fire, whittling it down.  It took awhile, but all three walked off without a scratch.

Rarely will there be a scenario where it's just RIP everybody, in my experience...there's usually a way to win a conflict, even if the answer's not immediately apparent.

This is excellent...thanks for taking the time to compile this!  I also love to run a Farm, and this helps understanding how to prepare for it quite a bit.

Great job!

I've always got caravans out, and have two transport pods loaded with emergency food, should my colonists in the field need an air drop.  One transport pod has 300 Packaged Survival Meals - no worries there.

The other transport pod was loaded about 5 game days ago with 1000 Pemmican, and 18 Simple Meals, and as it turns out, I neither launched that Pod, nor unloaded it.  The Simple Meals should certainly have expired by now, but I haven't recieved any pop-up that they spoiled.

I know from trial and error that once items are loaded into a Transport Pod, they're no longer counted in that colony's inventory...they've seemingly "temporarily disappeared" from existence, so to speak, until they're unloaded or delivered.

Does anyone have any hard information on this game mechanic, and how it works?  It can make a difference as to what I decide to pack ahead of time in the transport pods.  Thanks in advance for any insights you all might have.

My approach has been to set up temporary camps at every opportunity when I'm sending out a caravan.  If I get ambushed, I set up a quick camp for that 24 hour period, and mine all the valuables, prioritizing components, silver, gold, and jade.  Once I get to my destination (destroying a bandit camp), I do the same thing.  You have to hustle, because the clock is ticking, but it also has a secondary effect:  it keeps your early game skills pretty sharp.

I also try to hit up every orbital trader/caravan that wanders into my colony.  For me, there are usually too many other immediate priorities in mid-game to set up a full-blown component factory to assign colonists to work at full-time, so the caravan temp camps really help to accomplish that goal on the fly.

Just to say that it happened to me also : i managed to get an item without awaking mechanoids, but my animals couldnt leave the map. So i was forced to attack them to reform thé caravan. Needs fixing.

This happened to me as well.  I was doing a custom Tribal start, and the Stash I visited was a cache of 3 neurotrainers real early in the game.  My pawn was in Tribal, and equipped with a normal Recurve Bow.  Stash was guarded by two sleeping Scythers.

I tried to GTFO immediately, and got the "There are still some enemies left" message which prevented me from leaving.

Initially I hated the game mechanic that prevented me from leaving, but the problem solving to get out alive was actually a ton of fun.  There was a 3x16 abandoned narrow Marble building running North/South, and the corridor was only 1 tile wide.  There was plenty of mineable Steel on the map, so I mined the steel, built an improvised Steel Trap killbox, and baited both Scythers through.  It was literally the only way I could have gotten out alive, and it actually worked.  The key is that it wasn't timed - I wasn't working against the clock, and could prepare for it.  If it was timed, it would have been RIP Tribal.

After that, I'm kind of in favor of leaving that game mechanic in place...it was a ton of fun to do.

Thanks to everyone who responded, and to Tynan for responding personally.  As I doubt I'm going to get a better source of info than the Developer himself, just one last clarification:

To break it down into it's simplest terms as it stands with B18: higher number better, lower number worse?

And @Tynan - sincere thanks for putting together what is one of my favorite games of all time.  It's an instant classic, and makes my time melt away quicker than "Skyrim" did in it's heyday.  I can't think of any higher compliment.

Hey, folks-

I've got 600+ hours into the Vanilla game, and I'm not sure I understand how the Stealth ranking on caravans works.  Is a lower number more stealthy, or more likely to get yourself ambushed? 

Right now I'm running a 2-man caravan with a stealth ranking of "1", but I'm carrying an absolute ton of silver with me (6000+), 2 alpacas, 2 wolves, 2 cobras, and both my pawns are in full Power Armor.

Previous caravans have been 6 pawns in Power Armor, about 8 Muffalos, 6 wolves, an attack Bear, and 2 cobras...but the stuff they were carrying were nothing more than wood, and bedrolls to set up a forward base of attack.  These caravans came in with a Stealth ranking of around 5.5 in previous attempts, with an occasional ambush.

I did an exhaustive search pretty much everywhere, and couldn't find any meaningful information on the topic, so any insight that you have would be appreciated...I'm tempted to believe that the lower number is stealthier, but the fact that my 2-man caravan is carrying a major amount of silver makes me wonder.

Thanks for any help!