The horror, the horror...

[timeandtherani]

I wish I'd thought of taking a screenshot, but I just have to share the horror I felt after a toxic fallout.  The intrepid colony of Oshit was dug into a mountain, so I kept my pawns alive by turning off all outside tasks and locking the front door.  We got a lot of mining and research done, made a ton of "awful" art and "shoddy" clothes, and the entire base was clean as a whistle.  All the domesticated animals died so the colony had no trouble with food.  The fallout lasted almost a month.  After it was over I sent all my pawns outside on an all-hand-on-deck grow task to replant my crops.  Then I scanned the map to find animals to hunt.  Everything was dead -- not only all the plants and trees, but there were piles upon piles of skeletons everywhere.  Every single muffalo, deer, boomalope, etc.  Tons of little corpses with little red "x"s.  Seriously, it was a wasteland.  My jaw dropped, I was absolutely stunned.  It took a while for the crops to grow and more animals to wander into the map.  Until then, that's when the food ran low and the true horror of Rimworld began. ...I don't want to talk about it.   

[falconbunker]

Did you have hydroponics researched yet?

[timeandtherani]

Not yet.  Silly me, I thought they didn't need it yet because the crops did well outside.  I've changed it to next on the queue.

[Limdood]

toxic fallout takes a good bit to kill someone....if you have a thriving wildlife, i highly recommend monitoring the outside herds of larger animals and unforbidding and hauling them in as they drop dead.  You'll get a few colonists up to moderate toxic sickness, but it'll fade off quickly enough as long as you don't KEEP the same pawns going outside regularly.

[cultist]

The toxic fallout and psychotic animal events really shine in animal-heavy areas like shrubland or tropical.

By the way, toxic fallout takes quite a while to build up, and drops if you keep the pawn inside for a while. So there's nothing wrong with sending a few guys out once in a while during the fallout to pick up some free dinner. Just try not to think about how it tastes.