Late Game Economy

[Shurp]

So wait, a *superior* silver sculpture sold for 940 silver, while a *normal* granite sculpture sold for 560?

It sounds like sculpture value has nothing to do with the material it is made from.  I don't know if this is a bug or an opportunity.  If this is Working As Designed, then sculptures should be made out of the cheapest stuff you can get your hands on.  Wood if you can buy it, stone if there's enough on the map left to mine.

[brcruchairman]

That's a negative, Shurp; a superior small silver sculpture sold for 940, while a normal large granite sculpture sold for 560. After checking, it looks like a good small wood sculpture sold for 82 silver, maintaining the notion of materials making a difference. Too bad, though; when I read your post I got really excited; would've been fun to have a colony of insanely productive artists.

[Shurp]

Oh, wait, we're looking at *sale* price, not value?  That's going to throw it off a bit, since I think sale prices are one quarter of value.  It's still going to be difficult to make a profit if you're buying your material.  Assuming wood costs you $1.40 (?) even that wood sculpture is going to cost more than you get for it.

I suppose you could grow trees for sculpture manufacture.  But if you're farming indoors in a tundra you'll be better off with boring corn/beer.

[brcruchairman]

Precisely; the "true value", while a nice metric to get an objective value, doesn't tell us much about profit. That's part of why I've been doing this study; I want to see what can yield practical profit. As you pointed out, stone sculptures definitely can.  Their main cost is the time of your colonists, which if you have a food supply, is practically free.

(Thank you, by the way, for pointing this out to me; I need to make that more clear in my next abstract that values for base commodities are purchasing costs, and values for sold products are sale prices. It's one of those minor details that totally changes the meaning of the whole thing.)

In a way, this makes sense; stone is a notoriously difficult medium to work in, so hand-crafted sculptures of that variety would be rarer in the galaxy-at-large, meaning that a place where labor is cheap, such as our poor shipwrecked colonists, would be a great place for that kind of manufacturing.

[Mutineer]

If you want to make profit form art, just make wood sculptures. Wood is renewable source on most maps. At the end of day, best strategy is to limit spending of steel and getting as mach of it as possible. It might be a good idea even to buy low quality metallic weapon from traders and melt them. personally i send all my 20 colonist in space at about 3.5 years. I did not used steel almost for anything except essentials. Even my traps were made from stone. I did not had to buy any steel, i did not sell any low quality weapons, i melted them. My money come from wooden art and wool clothes.

[Shurp]

Yes, if you have a map with trees that's an excellent resource.  A map with grass can also be used to farm animals.  But if you're one of us eskimos living in a box made of ice then potatoes, hops, and cotton are your only longterm solutions it seems.

[b0rsuk]

I like selling parkas, I get materials from drop pods and hunting. An average parka by a very good crafter is 120 silver or more.

I find storage space to be an issue. Yes, you can make small sculptures and hats, but that's still 1 item per square. Beer is not too bad because you can keep it outdoors. A pile of 25 beer is equivalent to 125 hops. But one square can only hold 75 cotton or corn, and it deteriorates outdoors.

[makapse]

The best thing to sell if you are an eskimo or a polar bear like me playing only on -70C avg ice sheets is human meat and human leather. By mid game the raids are so huge that i think many a times to buy peace with the tribes else its a constant job butchering them up. Labor costs are not cheap there with the need of insulation and extreme power(for hydroponic rice too) .The bodies dont rot naturally unless an toxic fallout occur so you need to take care of them anyways.

[JimmyAgnt007]

I've been thinking of a way to mine minerals from the ground. Because mineral exhaustion in long games is a real problem.

Yes!  I think I and others have suggested this for a while.  Setting up mines like you do geo-thermal power is a start.  Only not limited to specific spots.  Though only on rock might be a good limiter.  Making them manned rather than automated would also help keep them from making them too easy.  Depending on the size they may have more than one worker slot if its possible to have more than one person using an object.

[b0rsuk]

But resource exhaustion is happening in our world. We live on a finite planet and oil has already hit a plateau. USA has been forced to import oil for years, and it's only getting worse. Oil still exists but it's much less pure and more expensive to acquire.

[brcruchairman]

But resource exhaustion is happening in our world. We live on a finite planet and oil has already hit a plateau. USA has been forced to import oil for years, and it's only getting worse. Oil still exists but it's much less pure and more expensive to acquire.

While technically true, this is practically false; although there exist finite resources on our own planet, due to the increasingly sophisticated technology, the exploitation of sufficiently dense resources has actually increased, and more importantly because we require less and less dense resources for exploitation, the total quantity of resources available to be exploited has also increased. Take, for instance, your example of oil: aside from a decrease between 1980 and 2000, US domestic oil production has gone up, and is in fact almost as high as its peak production in 1970.¹ A similar trend can be observed in oil reserves.²

A more relevant industry to look at would been iron ore production. That industry too has seen grown in recent years.³ However, I do take your point; in a real-world closed system, such as a small section of an alien planet, no new non-biologic resources are being created; it's all refining. To this, there are two counterpoints:

The first is that the quantity of resources are exceedingly small. On any given map, enough resources exist to build perhaps a dozen geothermal plants, a hospital, several wind turbines, and so on. It's not much. It also completely ignores the vertical axes which, to be fair, aren't accessible in-game. As such, the vast resources below our pawn's feet and, in mountains, above their heads remain untapped. I wouldn't mind seeing a resource-intensive extraction and refining system (mine->iron ore->iron ingot->steel, maybe?) but to imply that a score of people with hand tools could completely exhaust a 62 000 square meter area down to a depth of four kilometers in three years seems a bit of a stretch to me.

The second, and probably more salient point, was made by Shurp in another thread: it's not about realism, it's about fun. A totally realistic Rimworld would have severely reduced opportunities for our pawns, ranging from requiring a massive industrial base to quick, simple death. So, while it may be somewhat more realistic to have strictly limited resources, it removes a lot of fun for the late-game, requiring people like the OP to just do crops for their entire economy. It's realistic, but watching cotton grow isn't really what I'm looking for when I play Rimworld.

¹: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=a
²: http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
³: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2014-feore.pdf

[Rim soldier]

I was reading ender in exile (one of the books in the enders game series) and there was a bit in that that said the formics used insects that turned rocks into metals. In the book they ate rocks as larve and when they became adults thair exoskeleton was made of metal, the formics then used acid to disolve the insects in acid so the organic flesh melted and left only the metal. So i was thinking you could buy bug larva from traders and feed them stone bricks. Then maybe after 3 months they become adults and every 10 bricks you fed them as a larva = 1 metal brick as an adult (you could collect these rescorsces when you slaughter the bugs. Or mayby the metal bugs could be another form of bug spawned during the hove event.

Also just wondering how many colonists do your colonies max out on because randy has given me 55, i have enough food and houses for them but its hard keeping track of them all and during raids micromanaging them all is hell.

[Mr. Ego]

 This post is getting hard, but i love hardcore players, even if they just start calculating rentability and things like that. For me another way to support a colony is beer-based economy. Hoops never fails

[Mutineer]

Instead of mindless mines, I would suggest give ability to controlled collapse of mountains. Right now Some mountain roofs are irremovable.
If we could collapse mountain into tunnel, lowering it height a bit and creating layer of what ever for as to mine again that will be mach more interesting and still finite amount of resources. That mach more interesting then plain invisible mines and probably easy to do in existent system.

[Mutineer]

They dont, really, you do not need to know what is up there. It could be generated on a fly.