First game observations and questions

[oddible]

So here is where I'm at currently...





I received my 4th member shortly after start.  I don't even know how, I think he just wandered up and joined.  I saved 2 injured folks from downed pods but they returned to another faction and increased my goodwill.  Overall relations are 3 factions united against 2 others, I have closer goodwill with the 3.  I had a raiding party of 1 from one of the two hated groups but my turret downed her quickly.  It was a rather tough time for food at that moment so I couldn't spare any cycles to build a prison or feed a prisoner so I just let them die.  I assumed that this wouldn't incur any animosity so I didn't kill them.  I then stripped them and butchered them and sold the meat and leather. 

So the goal of this game is to get my a** off this godforsaken planet so there isn't any breeding, either of humans nor animals, right? I'm not here for the long haul.  Though I've heard of players with 25 people in their group - how is this possible? From capture and joining of prisoners? I have only had almost friendly factions visit.  There isn't any way to influence them when they do right? Only give them silver via the comm?

Training up skills is painfully slow.  Is it really meant to be part of the game? Because at its glacial pace I'll have an armada of space ships before any of my crew go up a full point in anything.  I have one guy almost fully on hunt duty and his skill hasn't changed.  Likewise my miner.  Dying for ONE point of Handling (I have 2 people at 5) so I can even train a rabbit. 

As far as trading goes... HOLY COW trained animals make BANK in trades!  I've mostly been trading cotton, wood, food.  If I can spare time off the research station I make clothes for trade as well. 

[A Friend]

- While the point of the game is to GTFO the planet as soon as possible, it's mostly requires years before you get to amass the resources and such required to build the spaceship. Overtime you'll gather more and more people (or alternatively lose more and more). Heck someone even managed to create a fortress containing 130+ people once. 10-25+ is pretty normal.
Anyways, it can considered as a long haul so beef up your defenses, stock up food and hope to RNGod that the game doesn't throw solar flares and murderbots at you.

- Skills develop faster when colonists have a passion or interest (Flame thingies) in that area. But it still takes some months of them doing it over and over to attain a high level.

Also I recommend you save up steel and use wooden walls instead, quickly research stonecutting and replace them with stone walls. Steel is gonna be very valuable and scarce later on. You haven't experienced the true brutality of Rimworld just yet...

[REMworlder]

Getting up to a high population isn't too difficult when you capture and recruit. Those two crashed spacers you rescued, for example, could easily have been captured and recruited. The faction they come from is essentially Space so relations with it don't really matter like with actual factions.

Also you can breed tamed animals. Or more specifically, they'll breed and you'll get a notice of pregnancies in the second trimester.

Just a heads up, turrets explode when they get damaged too much. The blast radius of the turret you have will probably take out that adjacent wall unless it's made of stone.

[UnityIron]

I would deffo start capturing anyone who needs rescued, then set their tabs to allow meds if they are dying and set them to be talked & recruited. Got to make sure you have a good warden who isn't too busy to speak to them.
Captured dudes will fight if they are not the same faction so keep them isolated. I had one dude death match and kill 2 other prisoners before I realised this.
You can sell your prisoners to pirate merchants for about 300ish but all colonists will incur a -7 mood penalty per prisoner sold.
If you harvest a kidney and a lung then sell the prisoner you will make about 900 in total, but the debuff starts to get out of hand when you do it to 3 or more prisoners at once.

One thing about keeping animals I learned quickly was give them zones! Otherwise they wander into fire fights or get killed by forest fires. Also the high intel animals when attached to a trainer have a habit of following them into fights. And animals can breed! Chickens are really fast breeders and sell for somewhere between 30-40 each (after a couple of  months).

[A Friend]

Captured dudes will fight if they are not the same faction so keep them isolated. I had one dude death match and kill 2 other prisoners before I realised this.

I don't think they do that. Prisoners upon capture often have moods below the threshold and has high chance of going berserk without warning. Dunno if they really do though, haven't checked yet.

[Limdood]

A Friend is correct.  Captured prisoners do not fight each other UNLESS one goes berserk.

Working on skills can be frustrating or easy depending on the skill.  one flame medicine can earn 6-7000 experience over the course of one operation, and jumps by 500 or so per treatment.  I regularly have people with construction at 20 over the course of building my colony because it is used and levels so fast.  On the other hand, social and animal skills are painfully slow to level, and it is often worth it to keep an eye out for pirate raiders with those skills.  Shoot up the rest of the pirates, then run out and bludgeon the "target" pirate with fists for capture.

As far as animal taming, the usefulness goes down as wildness goes up.  you'll want to tame these animals from the wild:

Alpaca, muffalo, dromedary - for wool.  only if your food generation is high enough.  Your colonists will periodically shear these animals for wool.  No additional training is required, just tame them, set their zones to keep them out of the way (and away from beer and prepared meals!), and profit from the wool.

Wargs, Boars, Elephants - these animals can haul and rescue, but you need an awful high animal skill and/or a LOT of time to train these to haul, as the train chance is quite low (boars are arguably the best non-dog to train for hauling).  These animals also do fairly decent damage in combat, so can be worth training in release.  They will die fairly easily in combat though, so don't get attached if you plan on using release!

Boomrats, Boomalopes, rhinos, megascarabs, and the haul animals - these are worth training up to release if you have a fairly strong animal handler.  They're strong fighters (or for the boom animals, release them on the pirates and watch them kamikaze) but will die fairly easily in combat.

Domestic animals are easiest to train and worth keeping: cows, chickens, labradors and huskies.  The dogs can haul and are easy to train, the cows are not worth training, they just make milk, treat them like the wool producing animals.  The chickens can't be trained.  keep them around for eggs (they reproduce like crazy) and keep them in a zone between your base and the enemy and they'll absorb bullets from raiders.  They can't be tamed, they have to be bought.

[oddible]

Excellent, thanks for all the advice.  I originally built all my outer walls out of steel because boom rats kept setting huge fires and I was worried about my place burning down with wood walls.  Next playthrough I'll start with wood and upgrade to stone. 

I have zones for my animals and currently had a M & F tamed Llama but no offspring for a very long time so I thought that maybe they just don't breed - will keep an eye out for it though. 

How important is faction goodwill? All mine are negative at present but I have 3 that are close enough to zero that I could get there without too much problem.  Should I be spending my silver on goodwill?  If I start capturing folks from my enemies maybe I should make friends with someone so that I can ask for help. 

Do trees grow back pretty regularly? Any way to establish logging as an industry?

Does everyone build their bases into mountains? I started from an existing structure out in the open. I guess using a mountain means building less walls, ie, less resource intensive. 

Lastly I have a bunch of buildings on my map but I don't know how to tell my dudes to go into them to explore them without telling them to build something there or mine something there.  Is there an explore command?

[Coenmcj]

Excellent, thanks for all the advice.  I originally built all my outer walls out of steel because boom rats kept setting huge fires and I was worried about my place burning down with wood walls.  Next playthrough I'll start with wood and upgrade to stone. 

I have zones for my animals and currently had a M & F tamed Llama but no offspring for a very long time so I thought that maybe they just don't breed - will keep an eye out for it though. 

How important is faction goodwill? All mine are negative at present but I have 3 that are close enough to zero that I could get there without too much problem.  Should I be spending my silver on goodwill?  If I start capturing folks from my enemies maybe I should make friends with someone so that I can ask for help. 

Do trees grow back pretty regularly? Any way to establish logging as an industry?

Does everyone build their bases into mountains? I started from an existing structure out in the open. I guess using a mountain means building less walls, ie, less resource intensive. 

Lastly I have a bunch of buildings on my map but I don't know how to tell my dudes to go into them to explore them without telling them to build something there or mine something there.  Is there an explore command?

For the animals, some critters take forever to breed (See the thrumbos), if they're just not breeding though, it may be age, too young or too old and they just refuse to. Plus it's only a chance to breed each day, and even if they do, it's another chance on top for them to get pregnant.

Trees, kind of grow back, but they're real slow.

Mountain bases are really an old habit from the days when that was the only possible way to survive, now, it's all up to how you play, if you like defences and safety, then go for it, if you want a more interesting game, then try it out in the open.

As for the buildings, you can draft your colonists with 'R' and move them around that way, it means they won't build or do their jobs, but they'll be commandable and combat ready at a moment's notice.

Edit;
Goodwill is good for if you want a group of friendly cannon fodder that show up when you've got a particularly large raid rolling through.

You have a visitor tab that can tell your colonists whether to treat them well or recruit them, be warned though you'll take a hit for your goodwill if you recruit them (It'll be better than if you arrest them though!)

[A Friend]

Ally factions are pretty useless unless you use mods.

You have a visitor tab that can tell your colonists whether to treat them well or recruit them, be warned though you'll take a hit for your goodwill if you recruit them (It'll be better than if you arrest them though!)

Is this vanilla? Seems a lot like the Hospitality mod. If I remember correctly, the only way you could recruit visitors in vanilla was capturing them. (Man, I don't remember the last time I played the game without a bunch of mods.)

[Coenmcj]

Ally factions are pretty useless unless you use mods.

You have a visitor tab that can tell your colonists whether to treat them well or recruit them, be warned though you'll take a hit for your goodwill if you recruit them (It'll be better than if you arrest them though!)

Is this vanilla? Seems a lot like the Hospitality mod. If I remember correctly, the only way you could recruit visitors in vanilla was capturing them. (Man, I don't remember the last time I played the game without a bunch of mods.)

Could of sworn there was a visitor tab and visitor beds at one point in time, in Vanilla Rimworld
Curious. I must of missed when they were removed. O_o
It must of been. I just ran through all my Rimworld copies and couldn't find a previous alpha with it.

[Limdood]

quick help for you on breeding.

non-egg-laying animals:
You want more males than females, strangely enough.  each male has a 5% chance per day to try to find a female and get her pregnant.  This means that 5 females and 1 male is a 5% chance per day to get 1 female pregnant.  5 males and 1 female gives 5x5% chances to impregnate the 1 female.  The animals BOTH have to be proper age - not too old, not too young.  Lastly, you won't be notified that the female is pregnant until the second trimester.  There's no immediate way to know if the female is pregnant (yay realism!).  Its important that you keep the female healthy once you know she is pregnant - malnutrition (at least, maybe other diseases, but NOT injuries) will cause a miscarriage.

Egg laying animals:
You want plenty of females for laying eggs, and only 1 or 2 males to fertilize the eggs.  2 is good in case of an accident killing one.

[Limdood]

Trees can be planted in grow zones by clicking the growing tab.  As stated, they take a long time to grow.  the good news is that after planting, they're low maintenance - just forget about them until they're done.  It's a good use for rich soil thats far from your base, since it'd be inconvenient to plant faster growing crops far away.

Mountain Bases have beauty problems.  Constructed walls have no beauty, positive or negative.  Natural stone walls have a -2 beauty for each square.  Overhead mountains protect from mortar fire and can provide a hard to access base.  On the other hand, they can be hard to ventilate, so building mountain bases in warm biomes can have heating issues, since the ACs have to vent the hot air...somewhere.  They can also be vulnerable to sappers, since the sappers will tunnel thru the solid rock and walls, which you very well may not be ready to defend against - as opposed to an all-around defense in the middle of a flat area.

Buildings on the map can be "opened" by using the deconstruct command.  Beware that larger structures can contain some significant threats, hostile mechs, or cryptosleep caskets with living or dead people inside, that may or not be hostile, or have megascarab swarms.

becoming friends with factions will turn them non-hostile, which means they won't attack you anymore.  This means its possible to eliminate the chance of tribal raids by befriending all the tribes.  Reputation over 40 or 45 (around there) means you can request help from that faction (at the cost of 25 goodwill).  The downside of friends means lots of visitors, which may not be friends with each OTHER (colonists can be lost in the crossfire).  Also, as far as i can tell, reducing the number of factions that will raid you doesn't reduce the number of raids you suffer, the tribal raids will just be replaced with pirate or mech raids.  As an aside, you can get goodwill from non-pirate factions by releasing their prisoners.  I always capture every tribal i can, nurse em up and release the ones i don't think i can recruit or don't want (infected or not).  Each healthy prisoner that exits the map is 15 goodwill.  If you befriend them, you can always later handpick a perfect colonist visitor to arrest (making them hostile again ofc) or just use the goodwill for reinforcements.

[mokonasakura]

May you first colony be given a quick painless death. Big kill boxes are minatory in this game if you don't have it modded about after the 5th raid you will be visited by about 30 tribals, or 100 squirrels.

[Mmgfrcs]

May you first colony be given a quick painless death. Big kill boxes are minatory in this game if you don't have it modded about after the 5th raid you will be visited by about 30 tribals, or 100 squirrels.

This depends on the difficulty
Playing on extreme and you will get 100 tribals instead. Playing on basebuilder (I usually play at this level) will only yield 4-10, at max if you stayed at 4 colonists
Killboxes are not mandatory for winning (or so I thought?), just keep your wealth proportional to  your offensive and defensive power

I have this experience while playing on Extreme Randy. By year 2 the maximum number of raiders (in a wave, cause RR just throw more waves) was 19. At this time I have 10 colonists and 3000+ resources (mostly ingredients for meals and steel)

One tip I found out: When assigning jobs, make sure to see the character's passion also as the job can be their source of joy