A game where I can't get any new colonists

[jasta85]

So, been in a game that's lasted approximately 8 months at this point.  All the hostile factions around me except 1 are tribes (99% difficulty to recruit them, next to impossible).  The last faction is pirates and they only attacked me once and all got killed with no wounded.

I've had maybe 2 slave traders stop by but both times I was too poor to buy a new colonist (no valuable metals around and tribes people drop crap that's not worth much, made the mistake of buying an assault rifle early on which ate up most of my starting cash too).

there was one emergency pod that crashed by but I made the mistake of "rescuing" the survivor instead of "capturing" them and as soon as they were healed they ditched my colony.

So I'm stuck with my starting 3 colonists, my colony is doing fine, plenty of food and has most of the necessities, however I know that at some point I'm going to have to deal with the crashed space ship and I don't have nearly the manpower (and very little firepower thanks to no pirates attacking so no looting weapons) to deal with a serious threat.

[EscapeZeppelin]

Build a bunch of turrets around the ship before you engage. Or buy some rocket launchers from a trader. You'll get more colonists eventually.

[brobe94]

I know its probably harder to make silver with few colonists, but one possibility is to buy off some of your hostile enemies using comm console to make them neutral, then try and kidnap / arrest few of them next time they visit. I guess you could rinse repeat this if you have the silver.

[Panzer]

You dont really want to piss off friendly factions, especially non-tribal ones. In my experiences those guys come in high numbers and bring good equipment (got an excellent lvl PDW during a siege), they re really hard to deal with if you dont wall in.

[Andy_Dandy]

So, been in a game that's lasted approximately 8 months at this point.  All the hostile factions around me except 1 are tribes (99% difficulty to recruit them, next to impossible).  The last faction is pirates and they only attacked me once and all got killed with no wounded.

I've had maybe 2 slave traders stop by but both times I was too poor to buy a new colonist (no valuable metals around and tribes people drop crap that's not worth much, made the mistake of buying an assault rifle early on which ate up most of my starting cash too).


there was one emergency pod that crashed by but I made the mistake of "rescuing" the survivor instead of "capturing" them and as soon as they were healed they ditched my colony.

So I'm stuck with my starting 3 colonists, my colony is doing fine, plenty of food and has most of the necessities, however I know that at some point I'm going to have to deal with the crashed space ship and I don't have nearly the manpower (and very little firepower thanks to no pirates attacking so no looting weapons) to deal with a serious threat.

Nice, I hate it when I grow too fast in population. My best games have been when it takes a long time for me to just grow to 4-5 colonists.

[cultist]

Just a quick note: If you mess up and rescue a space refugee instead of capture him, you can re-capture him at no penalty. They're not a real faction and you won't suffer any negative penalties for messing with them.

[tommytom]

I believe it goes off your colony's wealth now, so you should be able to crack open the fallen ship part and get 1-2 mechs

I didn't get a dropped ship for a few months and 1 popped out. A year or so in, I got another and it was I think 3, but I had about 10 colonists at the time.

Granted, that's on "Casual", and I don't know what difficulty you are playing at. I never had to make anything other than a few pillars and a sandbag line at the entrance to my mountain base.

[Vexare]

What storyteller and difficulty level are you playing?

I've been playing on Phoebe this time around after nearly yanking every hair in my head out with Randy (see my avatar? That's what Randy does to you!). I decided to see how long I could go just 'building' and gaining colonists for a longer term game. Now it's almost too slow and while I'm not getting many attackers I'm also not getting new colonists either so the two must be related by proportion in the storyteller's roll percentages. If you're not getting attacked and losing colonists the game doesn't factor in gaining any new ones either. This is kind of frustrating. I'd like to build up my numbers without having to play on the harder difficulty modes so I can focus on quality building (trying to get more creative like the creative colony thread).

Seems the pendulum swings too far one direction or the other. I've not yet found a setting that suits my playstyle perfectly.

[jasta85]

I'm playing casandra rough, aside from no new colonists I don't have much silver either.  as I said before there are no valuable metals on the map I'm on (that I've found at least) only steel, marble and granite.  Since I'm only fighting tribesmen they drop primative stuff that doesn't sell well.  I've tried to craft stuff to sell but a small marble sculpture takes my 10 arts colonist (he's 10 now at least, thanks to sculpting for like 6 months) a couple months just to finish a single, poor quality sculpture.  I also tried growing devilstrand to weave into clothes to sell but between solar flares and blights I've lost every single crop.  and usually I need to purchase things like medical kits so that cuts into any money I make.

So without money I can't buy good weapons or colonists from slave traders, or boost my rep with any faction.  I think I might just start over, my colony has stablized but it's just not doing anything, just existing.

[tommytom]

http://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/2xc6u9/what_is_the_best_way_to_incapacitate_enemies/

According to that, you want to use fire/blunt. Basically anything that can knock someone out with a lot of pain or temporarily damage limbs. You could shoot or cut off legs, but if you are poor, you will have slow peg leg people.

You could probably soften them up with turrets then turn them off, or carefully place some blunt weapons near by and switch to those and melee after injuring them a bit.

[magicbush]

I am in the same boat as well and was starting to get mad until I finally wounded a enemy and captured him after 8 month's. I still need more so my crafting industry can take off(still do not have an artist) but at least I got a 4th lol! My other playthroughs on previous builds seemed to have people crash land more often to rescue that has not happened once on this game I am on. I am always to broke when a slave ship comes by as well as there isn't much silver on my map and I am not sure if there is something I can craft to sell to make good silver from?

It seems a bit hard now though to get new colonists. I also have been playing on Casandra Casual and I am thinking that's the problem. My other other 2 colonies I played as Phoebe casual and got attacked a lot more often allowing for more captured people, and more colonists in turn. I have run into getting bored as well , so I think I may restart soon if things do not pick up and go back to Phoebe or try a harder difficulty.

[Teague]

So a nugget of advice I read from a different thread. There are a few options to get new recruits which you didn't mention trying in your OP.

A. Kidnapping: You can capture visiting people, and usually, there chance of recruit is higher than people of raid because they didn't see there friends die and don't have injuries. (yes this makes faction hostile to you, but that is good, because more recruits when they attack)

B. Clubs and Maces and Logs: Bludgeoning your foes prevents the chance of important body parts becoming cutt off, and bleeding wounds causing them to bleed out. More likely to have capture option instead of dead bodies.
--- Also note, avoid multi shot weapons, like assault rifles, mini guns, turrets and the like because they will continue the burst fire after the target is incapacitated usually killing them.

C. High social skill warden, seems simple, unlikely you made this mistake, but having a warden with less than 7-8 social is really gonna make alot of 99%ers.

[Boboid]

I'm playing casandra rough, aside from no new colonists I don't have much silver either.  as I said before there are no valuable metals on the map I'm on (that I've found at least) only steel, marble and granite.  Since I'm only fighting tribesmen they drop primative stuff that doesn't sell well.  I've tried to craft stuff to sell but a small marble sculpture takes my 10 arts colonist (he's 10 now at least, thanks to sculpting for like 6 months) a couple months just to finish a single, poor quality sculpture.  I also tried growing devilstrand to weave into clothes to sell but between solar flares and blights I've lost every single crop.  and usually I need to purchase things like medical kits so that cuts into any money I make.

So without money I can't buy good weapons or colonists from slave traders, or boost my rep with any faction.  I think I might just start over, my colony has stablized but it's just not doing anything, just existing.

To address your Silver problem - Stone Sculptures take about 6x longer to craft but are typically only worth about 4.5x more than Wood sculptures, if you've got spare wood opt for those instead.
Keep in mind how resource intensive that can be however, stone sculptures use almost nothing in terms of manpower to create the materials whereas wood is a lot of time and chopping.

In terms of Devilstrand - Don't grow it in hydroponics!
It seems like the most intuitive way to grow such a precious material but in reality it ought to be planted in the ground.

Devilstrand crops don't suffer Blights, so it's perfectly safe to plant them in the ground, however they can't survive a solar flare ( Or an eclipse if you're using a lot of solar power without sufficient batteries ).

My suggestion is find an area away from your standard construction (Preferably somewhere easy to wall off) and plant a huge swathe of devilstrand there. Animals will eat your growing crops so it's best if you can wall it off and kill all the animals inside, but not essential if that's unfeasible.


As for medical kits, just don't buy them. You can function using exclusively your own grown herbal medicine, especially since it can now be used for operations unlike in A8.

[magicbush]

I'm playing casandra rough, aside from no new colonists I don't have much silver either.  as I said before there are no valuable metals on the map I'm on (that I've found at least) only steel, marble and granite.  Since I'm only fighting tribesmen they drop primative stuff that doesn't sell well.  I've tried to craft stuff to sell but a small marble sculpture takes my 10 arts colonist (he's 10 now at least, thanks to sculpting for like 6 months) a couple months just to finish a single, poor quality sculpture.  I also tried growing devilstrand to weave into clothes to sell but between solar flares and blights I've lost every single crop.  and usually I need to purchase things like medical kits so that cuts into any money I make.

So without money I can't buy good weapons or colonists from slave traders, or boost my rep with any faction.  I think I might just start over, my colony has stablized but it's just not doing anything, just existing.

To address your Silver problem - Stone Sculptures take about 6x longer to craft but are typically only worth about 4.5x more than Wood sculptures, if you've got spare wood opt for those instead.
Keep in mind how resource intensive that can be however, stone sculptures use almost nothing in terms of manpower to create the materials whereas wood is a lot of time and chopping.

In terms of Devilstrand - Don't grow it in hydroponics!
It seems like the most intuitive way to grow such a precious material but in reality it ought to be planted in the ground.

Devilstrand crops don't suffer Blights, so it's perfectly safe to plant them in the ground, however they can't survive a solar flare ( Or an eclipse if you're using a lot of solar power without sufficient batteries ).

My suggestion is find an area away from your standard construction (Preferably somewhere easy to wall off) and plant a huge swathe of devilstrand there. Animals will eat your growing crops so it's best if you can wall it off and kill all the animals inside, but not essential if that's unfeasible.


As for medical kits, just don't buy them. You can function using exclusively your own grown herbal medicine, especially since it can now be used for operations unlike in A8.

Which plant is for herbal medicine(I as did the OP apparently usually buy medkits)? I see a bunch to plant when making a new farm . I have only used farming for food to this point, but will branch out .

[tommytom]

So a nugget of advice I read from a different thread. There are a few options to get new recruits which you didn't mention trying in your OP.

A. Kidnapping: You can capture visiting people, and usually, there chance of recruit is higher than people of raid because they didn't see there friends die and don't have injuries. (yes this makes faction hostile to you, but that is good, because more recruits when they attack)

B. Clubs and Maces and Logs: Bludgeoning your foes prevents the chance of important body parts becoming cutt off, and bleeding wounds causing them to bleed out. More likely to have capture option instead of dead bodies.
--- Also note, avoid multi shot weapons, like assault rifles, mini guns, turrets and the like because they will continue the burst fire after the target is incapacitated usually killing them.

C. High social skill warden, seems simple, unlikely you made this mistake, but having a warden with less than 7-8 social is really gonna make alot of 99%ers.

A. I believe he already did that. He must have gotten 99'ers and gave up and never fixed relations and can't afford to to attempt again.

B. I kind of disagree, to an extend. Usually, multi-shot are lower damage per shot. Yes, you could hit all (say) 3 shots and kill them, but you could also hit for less causing less damage.

C. I was under the impression that is simply a trait of the prisoner. Otherwise, why is it not 100% or more? I have started a colony with terrible social and have recruited people with less chance. I think the social just gives them a higher "talked with warden" buff. Like lvl 1 = 1x30 = 30 where lvl 10 = 10x30 = 300. lvl 10 is well over the 99 happiness requirement where worst warden is not even 1/3 of the way there. You need to boost their happiness passed the recruit requirement, so you need a better bed/social/beauty/food/space/lighting/non-shared/etc or otherwise your warden will have to talk to them a lot more before you reach the 1% chance threshold and even then it's only 1% chance (has to be max on happiness AND only 1% chance).

Personally, I think the problem with A9 is the survival rifle. Switch to pistols. Less damage across more body parts. Also, later it's easier since they have armor and you are less likely to shoot them in the heart and brain and stuff like that. I have no way to back this up, but I'm kinda thinking "burst" weapons have less chance to hit torso/head as well and even if they do, it's less damage per hit probably across more body parts causing more pain and less damage. Granted, shooting someone's leg off in one shot is the easiest but probably worst way to recruit someone, but I don't think that is your goal, so stay away from high-damage single-shot weapons.

Which plant is for herbal medicine(I as did the OP apparently usually buy medkits)? I see a bunch to plant when making a new farm . I have only used farming for food to this point, but will branch out .

Xerigium. You will probably use a lot at the start, so I would plant a lot. Later, you can tone it down once you have a stockpile. I only use med-kits for colonists or making hospital beds. Generally, you will want to use hospital beds ASAP anyways and it increases the percent for good operations and bandaging more than medkits alone. Research and make at least one then switch to herbs.