Multiple colony management ?

[Hieronymous Alloy]

After reading this thread, I decided to start a new game and try to have two colonies soon after starting. My main colony is in an extreme desert and the second colony is in the nearby hills less than a day's travel away. My main colony is focusing on farming and building defenses while my second colony is focused on mining and shipping goods home. It's been pretty fun so far.

I've been sending all my neurotic/pessimist/brawler/chemical interest/incapable of hauling pawns off to the mining colony where they can have all the mental breakdowns they want while my main colony is filled with steadfast optimists or otherwise acceptable pawns.

A second colony filled with rejects is a somewhat more humane way of dealing with rejects than my previous method.

Hahaha, that's a great idea.

Right now I'm experimenting with an insect jelly farm in a second colony, just so any outbreaks will be limited.

[b0rsuk]

Automatic sunlamps - power them with solar panels.

[MisterVertigo]

Automatic sunlamps - power them with solar panels.

I don't mean to derail this thread but...

So I can connect a single solar panel to a single sun lamp, and my lamp will remain operational during sunlight hours? I'm assuming during an eclipse they would power off too. What about volcanic winter and/or nuclear fallout? Will they operate at full power during the daytime during those conditions?

It would be awesome to be able to operate my sun lamps in my greenhouse off the main power grid.

[cmitc1]

I got a mod that will let me make camps, so I don't have to make another colony, so its not that difficult to manage.

[Barazen]

I actually wondered about this... does colony placement effect much? I have two at the moment, one of them on the coast behind a "impassable" mountain range, only two gaps for travel that, if a colony was placed, would act as a sort of gatehouse.
Is this the case? As my second colony is already placed like this and the second is only waiting for a population boost to try.

I dont think events/storytellers take this into consideration but my gatehouse colony does see more raids/ caravans then my 'capitol' colony.

[Shurp]

I've been sending all my neurotic/pessimist/brawler/chemical interest/incapable of hauling pawns off to the mining colony where they can have all the mental breakdowns they want while my main colony is filled with steadfast optimists or otherwise acceptable pawns.

But how do you keep that mining colony alive/running?  If everyone's wandering around in sad depression and manhunting muffalo show up how do they survive?

[DeathWeasel]

I've been sending all my neurotic/pessimist/brawler/chemical interest/incapable of hauling pawns off to the mining colony where they can have all the mental breakdowns they want while my main colony is filled with steadfast optimists or otherwise acceptable pawns.

But how do you keep that mining colony alive/running?  If everyone's wandering around in sad depression and manhunting muffalo show up how do they survive?

They don't.

[Hieronymous Alloy]

Ok, yeah, setting up a jelly farm on a second colony seems entirely doable. After a few nights of playing around, added this to my guide:

[h1]Jelly Farming [/h1]

A secondary fort can be a great place to set up a jelly farm. Jelly is a great food and gives a mood boost that stacks with all other bonuses, so this is worth doing. The problem with bug farms is you have to leave the bugs alive to keep the hives maintained, and bugs are dangerous..

The secret is that bugs have a max comfortable temperature of 122 F, so they'll start getting heatstroke around 145F; if your colonists have on good wool cowboy hats and dusters, they should be comfy up to around 170F, so we can exploit that differential. (Very cold temperatures can do the same thing, but they damage the hives and prevent new spawns, plus it's harder to set up large-scale cooling).

•   Dig out a big area underground, but don't build there, and make sure there's only one entrance and there's a LOT of rock between your living quarters and the dug-out area.
  
• Don't dig out under any other "thick rock" anywhere else on the map. (If you do, *sunlamps* and/or temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit will stop bugs from spawning, as will filling every square inch with rubble or other furniture, but they actually stop the spawn, which means it will take that much longer to get bugs to spawn elsewhere on the map).
  
• Set up a lot of space heaters and put them on the inside of the hollowed out area. Set the heaters to 170F and seal them off from your main base with a door. Keep them turned off for now with a switch.
  
• Eventually, insects will spawn in the dug-out area (this may take a long time, though you can insta-spawn an infestation with dev mode tools).
  
• Let them grow and reproduce until there are 30 hives in place (the max number of hives on a map).
  
• Once  there's plenty of jelly spawned, turn on the heaters crank up the heat. If you buit enough heaters, you'll cook all the bugs, and can swoop in and gather up a bunch of jelly while they're all knocked out from heatstroke. Animal haulers are a good choice for this work as the hives will still keep spawning bugs so there's some ongoing danger.
  
• Once you've gathered enough jelly, turn the heaters off again and let the bugs recover.
  

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/106232555621521770/CD98696A88C0E18E4FED2A37F59B98FDD529CEC8/

[Seeker89]

Ok, yeah, setting up a jelly farm on a second colony seems entirely doable. After a few nights of playing around, added this to my guide:

[h1]Jelly Farming [/h1]

A secondary fort can be a great place to set up a jelly farm. Jelly is a great food and gives a mood boost that stacks with all other bonuses, so this is worth doing. The problem with bug farms is you have to leave the bugs alive to keep the hives maintained, and bugs are dangerous..

The secret is that bugs have a max comfortable temperature of 122 F, so they'll start getting heatstroke around 145F; if your colonists have on good wool cowboy hats and dusters, they should be comfy up to around 170F, so we can exploit that differential. (Very cold temperatures can do the same thing, but they damage the hives and prevent new spawns, plus it's harder to set up large-scale cooling).

•   Dig out a big area underground, but don't build there, and make sure there's only one entrance and there's a LOT of rock between your living quarters and the dug-out area.
  
• Don't dig out under any other "thick rock" anywhere else on the map. (If you do, *sunlamps* and/or temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit will stop bugs from spawning, as will filling every square inch with rubble or other furniture, but they actually stop the spawn, which means it will take that much longer to get bugs to spawn elsewhere on the map).
  
• Set up a lot of space heaters and put them on the inside of the hollowed out area. Set the heaters to 170F and seal them off from your main base with a door. Keep them turned off for now with a switch.
  
• Eventually, insects will spawn in the dug-out area (this may take a long time, though you can insta-spawn an infestation with dev mode tools).
  
• Let them grow and reproduce until there are 30 hives in place (the max number of hives on a map).
  
• Once  there's plenty of jelly spawned, turn on the heaters crank up the heat. If you buit enough heaters, you'll cook all the bugs, and can swoop in and gather up a bunch of jelly while they're all knocked out from heatstroke. Animal haulers are a good choice for this work as the hives will still keep spawning bugs so there's some ongoing danger.
  
• Once you've gathered enough jelly, turn the heaters off again and let the bugs recover.
  

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/106232555621521770/CD98696A88C0E18E4FED2A37F59B98FDD529CEC8/

Where do I find and make that map?

[Hieronymous Alloy]

Where do I find and make that map?

All my A16 screenshots are using seed "Baby", with camps as illustrated here (the light blue):
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/106232555621862407/87C824FF078E9CED3977B862F3E30542383A8A0D/

Bottom colony is my main fort and an open plan setup, top colony is where I set this up. They're just about exactly one full pod jump apart.

Map size is 400x400 and I should probably mention I've been having some out of memory crashes possibly as a result. You shouldn't need that precise map though, this would work with any mountainous colony that had a nice expanse of rock.

[Wanderer_joins]

make sure there's only one entrance and there's a LOT of rock between your living quarters and the dug-out area.

Yeah, i can see there is a lot of rock. But do you know only the first one slows you down?

[Hieronymous Alloy]

make sure there's only one entrance and there's a LOT of rock between your living quarters and the dug-out area.

Yeah, i can see there is a lot of rock. But do you know only the first one slows you down?

I meant rock wall to mine, not rubble. And yeah that's precisely why it's there. A hive can't spawn on a tile with rubble on it, and if there's rubble on *every* tile, it won't slow you down, either. It's all there to make sure the hives spawn way in the back.

[Wanderer_joins]

Ok, then there is only one rock wall to mine for your farm to be outdoors.

[Hieronymous Alloy]

Ok, then there is only one rock wall to mine for your farm to be outdoors.

Right, that's actually an underground bubble that got revealed by bug activity while I was testing the heat mechanics -- I used dev tools to fill the single square of rock back in so that all the heat wouldn't escape during my test!  If I were going to keep that colony going I'd put in some constructed walls there to keep it sealed off, but this was just a proof of concept.

edit: if I'd been smart I'd have dug a hallway-and-room setup and just heated the hallways directly, letting the rooms heat passively. Then if any one room got breached it wouldn't compromise the whole hive farm. Hrm. I may roll back a save and test that method for the guide.

[pdxsean]

I don't mean to derail this thread but...

So I can connect a single solar panel to a single sun lamp, and my lamp will remain operational during sunlight hours? I'm assuming during an eclipse they would power off too. What about volcanic winter and/or nuclear fallout? Will they operate at full power during the daytime during those conditions?

It would be awesome to be able to operate my sun lamps in my greenhouse off the main power grid.

I usually do two solar panels per lamp, just for redundancies sake. This actually provides slightly more light than the sun itself. I like to do two in case a panel breaks down, and two panels provide enough power during a volcanic winter.

Here's a screenshot of a couple of greenhouses from a recent colony. The heat is on the main power, lights on the unique networks.