How to deal with Toxic Fallout (Quill18 did it waaaaay wrong!)

[Chibiabos]

I am NOT super-l33t at Rimworld.   I tend to play on medium difficulty and I tend to play on year-round-farming-weather maps in mountainous terrain and I play with Phoebe ... yeah yeah I like playing a bit more relaxed, but I do well through some crises.  I saw a "let's play" series on Rimworld awhile back played by Quill18 whom beats the pants of me off almost every game, but at Rimworld he has made some major errors in my view, and among them was his notions of the Toxic Fallout event and how to deal with it.

I've weathered this -- I know many have -- but I think some who struggle with it might deal better.

The important essentials of this event are it will kill everything outdoors -- all plants including trees, and all animals -- over time.  In general, the smaller/weaker something is, the faster it will die -- so grasses and squirrels and boomrats will die first, then the bigger stuff.  Its important to note that not only will everything outdoors die, but the process of rotting/decaying is much faster -- I think corpses go from fresh to rotted to dessicated -- all three stages -- in just a day or so, versus several days of being fresh, then several more days of rotted before becoming dessicated.  So ... don't count on being able to just haul in those animal corpses when they die from the stuff.

All plants dying includes your crops, too.

A basic flub Quill18 makes that also applies to his dealing with the winter in the colder climes he prefers to play in for more challenge is thinking you can grow crops outdoors, or you can grow them in power-hungry hydroponics bays and that's it, there's no in between, if you don't have the electrical power to power hydroponics bays then you can't farm in cold winter or toxic fallout -- THIS IS NOT THE CASE, FOLK!  You can INDOOR FARM using Sunlamps (which you don't need research to build!) from the very getgo on soil.  I am endlessly befuddeld Quill18 STILL hasn't figured this out, but since he hasn't, I think there must be other players who haven't figured it out yet.

So ... given the above ... here are the things to do:

First, most immediately, hunt as much as you can.  Put everyone you have with a ranged weapon on hunting.  If I am remembering correctly that the smallest critters die first, hunt the smaller game first -- squirrels and rabbits.  Quill18 was also wrong that you can't hunt and get meat from boomrats or boomalopes, but honestly its a bit manpower-intensive (you need someone to actually shoot to kill the boomrate/boomalope, and several others standing by to stamp out the fire so you can recover the corpse).  Its fine to hunt boomrats/boomlopes normally, generally during the rain or snowed-in winter that will reduce and contain the fires -- but Toxic Fallout is major crunch time and I don't consider boomrats/boomalopes worth it to go hunt unless they are the majority of the 'meat' on the map.

You also should start immediately building a large perimeter wall and internal support pillars to support a large roofed area for farming ... focus on growth-enhancing soil.  You'll save time and material using pre-existing walls and hills/mountains to connect walls to and minimize how many actual walls you build ... your people need to stay inside, so you should make sure to encompass an area to zone for stone chunks and the stone cutting table if you normally keep those outdoors (as I do) -- no, the toxic fallout won't hurt the chunks or table, but it will buildup and make sick your haulers and stonecutters.

Unless you are really hurting for food already, I wouldn't bother trying to harvest wild agave/berries.

If you are going to tame animals, do that quickly.  I would honestly not bother trying to tame too many -- really I'd just focus on taming a few boars if you need haulers and alpaca for valuable wool.  I would NOT bother trying to tame anything hard even though I normally do -- elephants, cougars, etc.  That takes too much time even for a high-skill Handler, and you just don't have the time -- those animals will likely die before you tame them, and your tamers will get a toxic buildup while achieving nothing.

Anyone not immediately needed for other tasks should have their priorities for hunting, construction and hauling bumped up.  If you have a store of cooked meals saved up, I'd honestly reduce your cooking to a minimum for the short term -- if you have multiple cooks, I'd honestly de-prioritize cooking for all but one (and I'd choose the one to keep cooking whom is the least useful at taming, hunting or construction, and especially if they can't haul or are slow at moving) ... only cook simple meals for the short turm, suspend fine or lavish as they are too slow and for the near future, you are under the gun for time.

Continue up the sizes for hunting.  Its a fire sale, everything must go!  I don't like hunting elephants or rhinos, but if you don't, they'll just die and dessicate quickly.  I think trees will be among the last things to die, but they too must go -- cut 'em or lose 'em.  Toxic Fallout can last up to a year.  I generally find it lasts at least a whole season ... I think it can be much shorter, but you never know and I think its best to assume the worst -- that it will last a very long time and absolutely everything will die.

Get those walls and supports (single-tile walls) built.  Turn off 'Growing' entirely until the walls and supports are built, harvest what you can of your current crops immediately.  Use your growers for other tasks -- taming, hunting and construction to start -- even if they aren't particularly adept -- and if nothing else, hauling if possible as a higher priority than growing.

Speaking of supports ... you probably know you can only have a certain maximum span between constructed walls to support a roof.  I can never remember the exact amount ... but if you do a square grid with ten spaces in between, that will support a roof (so a single tile of wall, ten spaces, then another tile of wall).  You may want to adjust things a bit to build those single-tile-wall-roof-supports on ungrowable terrain such as sand or rough stone to minimize how much growable terrain is eaten by those supports.

You may want to consider growing trees as well for wood -- IIRC, Cecropias offer the best wood-per-unit-time ratio.  Yeah, you can grow anything indoors with this method, not just the crops you can grow in hydroponics!

Sunlamps cost a LOT less power than sunlamps-with-hydroponics, but they are still an extra power cost, so you may also need to build additional power generation.  While anything can grow under a roof, solar and wind power only works in unroofed areas -- something else Quill18 misses and I did as well, until recently, is solar panels do NOT block wind turbines!  This can help you make much more efficient power setups.  Of course its ideal to shoot for Geothermal as quickly as possible.

Don't forget haygrass among your indoor crops, either.  If you have wargs, cougars or other meat-only creatures, you will have to keep them supplied with meat -- you may have to forgo fine/lavish meals to leave all your meat to your meat-eaters if you want to keep them alive.  However, its also important to note that wargs and cougars are JUST FINE eating corpses and even ROTTEN corpses -- so if you are too late to hunt/retrieve an animal (or human ) and their corpse has reached the rotted stage, setup a refrigerated zone near your carnivore sleeping area just for rotten corpses (its a bit of a pain I hope gets fixed in a future version -- give it a slightly elevated priority but not as high as your freezer, allow it to accept rotten) and your colony carnivores will chomp them down.  Unfortunately, as I previously mentioned, corpses go from fresh to rotten to dessicated very quickly during a Toxic Fallout Event, so you'll have to act quickly if you spot a corpse that's already reached the rotten state -- don't wait for haulers to find it on their own but manually force a nearby colonists to haul that corpse immediately (do this for a regular fresh corpse too!).

Get those walls and supports up as quickly as you can, and set zones to keep your colonists and animals indoors.  Bring all the resources you will need indoors -- metal, rock chunks, everything.  I think trees are among the last to die, but don't forget to harvest them too as they will eventually die if the fallout lasts long enough unless you have a ridiculous surplus of wood already.

UNFORTUNATELY, raiders/attacking tribals are a HUGE PROBLEM and Quill18 BLEW IT BADLY HERE.  You -CANNOT- wait them out.  ALthough supposedly the fallout is affecting a huge area or the entire planet, in game terms anything that enters your map from outside starts out fresh.  That means even minor amounts of toxic buildup in your colonists gives your colonists a shorter survival span than the attackers.  Do NOT let raiders take out your walls.  You will need to be at the ready to draft colonists, pop them outside your walls for a minimum possible time (if the enemy is waiting for awhile and will then attack, wait for them to get close to your colony first -- but if they're sieging or bringing sappers, go out and attack immediately -- its crucial you keep your crops you worked so hard to roof in and support protected from toxic fallout; if sappers or siegers breach your walls, it will expose all your crops in that area to fallout and you could lose something precious to a roof collapse).  If you have meat-eating animals (carnivores or omnivores -- anything that can eat a corpse), consider just hauling fallen enemy corpses to an indoor freezer zone near where your animals are.  Animals do NOT get mood debuffs for eating human corpses -- but its a good idea to keep a freezer separate from any other freezer for this, just for your animals, and with no doors leading anywhere within this freezer so your colonists won't keep walking through it and getting debuffs for 'Observed corpse.'  Generally just a freezer with only a single door to go in and out of.

If you build a large-enough roofed-in area, it may not be necessary to re-arrange coolers even if your roofed-in area encompasses the hot side of your coolers you use for your freezer unless a 'heat wave' happens.

With boomrats/boomalopes, I think Toxic Fallout suppresses fire spreading a bit ... at the very least, grass dies quickly so fires from the fallout killing the boomrats/boomalopes won't tend to last long.  Its up to you if you feel like exposing your colonists to the toxic fallout temporarily to stamp out the fires to collect the corpses of boomrats/boomalopes ... it will probably come down to your situation, how much food you have and how long it will take before your indoor farming gets going if you have had to significantly re-arrange what grows where.  I would generally draft and move 3 or so colonists out to knock the flames out from the boomrat/boomalope corpses (ANOTHER common misconception I've seen Quill18 make and repeated a lot on here -- YOU CAN SPECIFICALLY ORDER COLONISTS TO FIREFIGHT by drafting them and having them stand near a fire), and have hauling-capable other colonists at the closest proximate point to indoors the moment you stamp the fire off a boomrat/boomalope corpse to haul it to your freezer.   Its micromanagement-intensive.  I honestly wouldn't fuss with trying to knock down all the fires that result, unless its close to a flammable structure of yours (hopefully you have enough cut stone blocks to build your walls of stone instead of wood!).

After your walls and roof supports are built, make your growing zones.  Make sure to remember every crop you might need -- food (corn tends to be optimal for food-per-unit-time but strawberries and rice grow the fastest, cotton and/or devilstrand, healroot and trees for wood) and build Sunlamps to cover your crops (its okay to leave sime in the 60% lit zone at the edges) and power conduit to power them, but only AFTER your walls/supports are complete and you have a roofed-in area (Sunlamps have a tendancy to explode if outdoors).

After all that is set ... then adjust colonist work priorities.  Hunting should be turned off, taming back on if you tamed some animals needing training (like boars to haul).  Make sure your colonists and animals are set to stay indoors ... if you chose a hilly or mountainous region and your roofed-in area encompasses a hill/mountain, you may want to consider including part of the hill/mountain itself as a zone your colonists can be in, so you can mine it out a bit while you wait out the toxic fallout.  Keep your colonists indoors ... toxic buildup CANNOT be cured by a doc, it will only very slowly reduce over time (IIRC, it takes longer to reduce than it does to buildup, so don't count on keeping your colonists working outdoors, taking them back in when its major, and expecting to be able to let them go back out after a short while).

[Chibiabos]

..... and I JUST GOT IT WRONG ABOVE.  My current game has a Toxic Fallout in progress, and unfortunately my assumption that larger size = slower buildup has proven false, as squirrels and rhinoceri are dying just as fast. :/  In this case obviously grab the biggest victims first!  (takes same time to haul a big thing as a small thing over the same distance, but big thing obviously has more meat -- better to let the squirrel dessicate than the rhinoceros!)

[firescythe]

First of all, I am not a moderator, just having 16 years of experience of talking on forums and keeping order on some of them, please take it as an advice:
- You do not need to point fingers on who got it wrong. If you have better idea, people will roll with yours.
- You repeat yourself too much. The ammount you wrote is not comfortable to read through, and seeing that it has plenty of repeats just demotivates readers.
- If you find that you were wrong, either edit your post if initial, or quote the part you need to correct, so you save the readers time to follow-up, what context was around your correction.

I guess you don't play vanilla, so it is not sure that my reply is valid for your playthroughs, however as I noticed toxic fallouts, you don't have much time to prepare isolation after event heads-up. Either you have high stock levels or well-prepared base to live it through. It worths to risk minor level toxication at colonists, but not further. Also manual priority list will serve well for colonists, and saves ginormous micromanagement.

[Chibiabos]

First of all, I am not a moderator, just having 16 years of experience of talking on forums and keeping order on some of them, please take it as an advice:
- You do not need to point fingers on who got it wrong. If you have better idea, people will roll with yours.
- You repeat yourself too much. The ammount you wrote is not comfortable to read through, and seeing that it has plenty of repeats just demotivates readers.
- If you find that you were wrong, either edit your post if initial, or quote the part you need to correct, so you save the readers time to follow-up, what context was around your correction.

I guess you don't play vanilla, so it is not sure that my reply is valid for your playthroughs, however as I noticed toxic fallouts, you don't have much time to prepare isolation after event heads-up. Either you have high stock levels or well-prepared base to live it through. It worths to risk minor level toxication at colonists, but not further. Also manual priority list will serve well for colonists, and saves ginormous micromanagement.

I have twenty years of experience on forums, having found my way on to political debate forums in 1995, and I've moderated and even owned a few.  Diversity is both a challenge and opportunity ... thoroughness used to be more appreciated, but unfortunately these days most folk don't appreciate it as you do not seem to.  For your information, Quill18 is a famous/popular gamecaster, which should be clear if you actually read through my post.  Your commentary/critique is suspect for not having picked this up, as I mentioned and referred to his "let's play" series on Youtube.

Unfortunately the 'won't read because its too long' is becoming all too commonplace as well.  I don't intend to appease the TL;DR crowd to convey complex ideas.

I'm not certain what of my post indicated I don't play vanilla.  I tend to build large farms and the infrequency of traders means I often have a surplus of food.  This is likely due to playstyle differences ... I notice most players whom cast their games build much smaller farming operations than I do; I am often having to ever-expand my freezer to accomodate my large harvests.

[b0rsuk]

Who is Quill18 and why should I care ?

[Mese]

I enjoy Quills letsplays. He may not know everything about Rimworld but he is entertaining to listen to and watch and he learns as he goes along (as we all do) and as thats pretty much what counts for a youtuber its all good.

[Shurp]

Question: what's this about toxic fallout killing trees?  I just got hit by one on a boreal forest... it came, it went, all the grass is dead but there are still plenty of trees around.  Although not as many as before, maybe it kills some but not all depending on how long it lasts?

Anyway, yes, farming indoors with a sunlamp in soil works just fine.  Rimworld needs an irrigation mechanic

[edit] I looked at my map again.  I noticed that 40 squares from the map edge is untouched, lots of trees and grass there.  And inside of that... wow, I must have lost something like 75% of my trees.

[Klitri]

The 40 squares only exists because it respawned

[firescythe]

I have twenty years of experience on forums, having found my way on to political debate forums in 1995, and I've moderated and even owned a few.  Diversity is both a challenge and opportunity ... thoroughness used to be more appreciated, but unfortunately these days most folk don't appreciate it as you do not seem to. 

Do as you wish, I wanted just to let you know.

I also observed political debates and it is majorly full of "he isn't right, I'm right" reasonings. This needs no subject, therefore not serving any subject. It has no point.

Myself, I do not watch youtube casts too much, just focusing on topic and specific info I'm looking for.

I appreciate thoroughness, but not without a structure. To quote from a respected professor at our Uni "That topic you can not speak about in short, does not worth to be discussed (long)." He is a philosophy professor with area of Social Communities on Internet. I dare to think he knows enough to say that. On the other hand, if the audience do not appreciate long stories, does it serve you still well to keep on them?

By the way, I really do not mean to cause any fight here, so keeping it ON-topic, from my side I already told what I felt to. We may continue in PM if you wish.

[Jonofwrath]

Thanks - I found this thorough and interesting - good job!

[RazorHed]

Many lets players really aren't that good at the games they play. But it doesn't matter much if they are very entertaining as I thing Quill18 is .

That doesn't mean though that I didn't double face palm at some of the things he did in his playthroughs and say out loud to no one in particular "Did you do ANY research at all for this new alpha???"

[Chibiabos]

I enjoy Quills letsplays. He may not know everything about Rimworld but he is entertaining to listen to and watch and he learns as he goes along (as we all do) and as thats pretty much what counts for a youtuber its all good.

I agree on both.  I wouldn't be commentating on Quill18 if I didn't follow him and enjoy his videos, but some of the assumptions he makes playing Rimworld make me cringe a bit.

[Chibiabos]

Who is Quill18 and why should I care ?

If you don't know who he is and don't care about Toxic Fallout events, why bother reading and replying to a post on the topic?  Seems trolling.

[Chibiabos]

I have twenty years of experience on forums, having found my way on to political debate forums in 1995, and I've moderated and even owned a few.  Diversity is both a challenge and opportunity ... thoroughness used to be more appreciated, but unfortunately these days most folk don't appreciate it as you do not seem to. 

Do as you wish, I wanted just to let you know.

I also observed political debates and it is majorly full of "he isn't right, I'm right" reasonings. This needs no subject, therefore not serving any subject. It has no point.

Myself, I do not watch youtube casts too much, just focusing on topic and specific info I'm looking for.

I appreciate thoroughness, but not without a structure. To quote from a respected professor at our Uni "That topic you can not speak about in short, does not worth to be discussed (long)." He is a philosophy professor with area of Social Communities on Internet. I dare to think he knows enough to say that. On the other hand, if the audience do not appreciate long stories, does it serve you still well to keep on them?

By the way, I really do not mean to cause any fight here, so keeping it ON-topic, from my side I already told what I felt to. We may continue in PM if you wish.

If all you provide are short posts and aren't prepared to convey, then no, I disagree.  It sounds like a "neo-study" to trash very long-held and long-established traditions of reason, debate and contemplation to declare short slogans and unreasoned statements trump all.

You also seem to dangerously use "the audience" like some monolithic thing that fits in a box, indivisible with no distinguishable parts.  Perhaps assured you it is impossible, but different people have different tastes, varied perspectives and different learning styles.  I absolutely cannot get a solid grasp on something if I cannot grasp a bit of the often complex and "messy" inner workings, how different sub-parts to 'a thing' interact, react, affect each other, affect their surrounding environment and how the surrounding environment affects them.  Yeah, my type are not terribly popular, but no philospher has ever really advanced a cause without a thorough understanding of context.

I am a writer with professionally published work.  Is my post messy and unedited?  Of course.  Most of my peers -- and I readily admit I am a puny amateur -- share a similar process:  essentially throw everything together in a draft, which actually tends to happen quickly, and then whittle things down through a long, slow editing process which, no, I don't tend to spend much time on in an active discussion board such as this.

One of my favorite professional writing gigs was writing quality control documentation at an aerospace factory, which was my first writing job -- this is technical writing.  I was extremely inexperienced, had no clue what to do, and I was the only one at that factory that cared about writing; there were no senior technical writers for me to draw from, nor even fellow amateurs.  I wound up with over a thousand pages of notes I took on the processes I needed to document, and whittled them down to 300 pages which sounds like a lot, but separate processes were on separate pages so many of those pages described a whole process and probably three-quarters of those pages were about half white space.  Actual text was short and concise from an editing process that took much longer -- I'd guesstimate about ten times as long -- as the process to gather the notes and data and complete first drafts for each process I documented.

I'm not going to translate understanding into slogan-length posts for those with short attention spans, particularly when I am attempting to correct what I believe are common mis-understandings.  If you see a post and you lack the attention span to read it, consider just not reading it instead of whining there are too many words for you to follow.

[nuschler22]

Who is Quill18 and why should I care ?

If you don't know who he is and don't care about Toxic Fallout events, why bother reading and replying to a post on the topic?  Seems trolling.

Here are my reasons:

1) I've yet to have any toxic fallout and wanted to know what to expect if I did.
2) I don't know or care who Quill is.
3) The topic actually reads "How to deal with Toxic Fallout" with a caveat about Quill doing it wrong which is like a topic reading "How to throw a touchdown pass (Ryan Leaf did it wrong)."  The expectation for me is that the topic is more about dealing with toxic fallout and less about caring about who did what wrong.
4) I was bored, probably the most important of all my reasons.

On a side note, I, too, felt the first post was a bit disorganized and repeating (which I'm sure I often do myself when making topics).  I skipped to see the conversation about toxic fallout to see if I could learn anything that way.