how to survive long enough to make cool stuff

[ahowe42]

I hope this doesn't get drowned out by the new spamming @sshole.  I'm looking for some general advice about how to survive long enough to get good stuff going (with the Cassandra AI and basebuilder level, ouch!).  I've done a fairly decent job of staffing my colonists, getting better at optimizing work and keeping them happy, and they only rarely starve!  Also, whenever I get traders, I buy all the medicine they have.

However what I experience is that the biggest problem I have is "mad" animals and hunted animals going for revenge injuring my colonists.  Of course, this is unavoidable (gotta eat meat!).  Throw in raiders also injuring my colonists and - even when I successfully fight them off - I have real shortfalls of medicine.  This is exacerbated by the fact that I only rarely get traders lately.  As I can see, this result is entirely out of my control; even when I do everything right, my colony is dying off (only doctor is critically injured? sucks to be me!) after a few hours of play.  I have enough time to make them a house that makes them happy and to stockpile sufficient food / resources stores.  I also have enough time to research 1 or 2 items, but that's all.

What am I missing?  Advice please!

Thanks!
Andrew

[Tynan]

Stop hunting. Just don't hunt. Then there will be no revenge. Meat eating really is optional; it's perfectly possible to live off crops alone.

Against raiders, that's really a matter of combat tactics. Main tips are: have everyone behind good cover, concentrate fire on single enemies, and try to set up situations where all your men can attack but some of theirs are blocked. Don't be afraid to give ground in order to gain tactical advantage. In doorways you can easily make 3v1 melee situations and win very effectively.

[chaotix14]

First of all don't hunt what you can't handle as I've explained here. Hunting doesn't need to yield injuries, it's careless hunting that causes injuries. If there is nothing safe to hunt, then don't hunt.

Secondly don't waste medicine in every old scratch, look at the actual damage that has been done to your colonist. Bruises need no medicine whatsoever, with 0 chance of infection you don't need to worry about that too much, no need to waste medicine on increasing the chance of healing a few extra health points due to treatment. Light scratches, 2-3 damage same deal, just having them treated will do nicely(getting an infection on them is mostly bad luck or a very dirty colony). If you can plant healroot make a patch of the stuff(it grows slow though), it's a less good form of medicine, but can be grown and thus can be used more liberally(If you have the stuff and someone gets a light scratch, just use herbal medicine, to ensure you don't have to deal with infections). This way you'll have a better chance of having proper medicine when someone actually gets seriously hurt, or at least the fallback of herbal medicine. Also don't waste proper medicine on captured prisoners, they live or they die, generally if it isn't the plague or they aren't so old that their immune system has gone to hell(in which case, the next disease would have probably killed them off anyways) they live.

[Canute]

- Where did you start ? Try out a forest biome without any extrem temp.

- Random colonist are just for hardcore gamer. Try to reroll your pawns until you got a good growth/cook , crafter/constructor ,researcher/doc.

[Kagemusha12]

Stop hunting. Just don't hunt. Then there will be no revenge. Meat eating really is optional; it's perfectly possible to live off crops alone.

...

That said ... will there be an option to create fine meals that are pure vegetarian?
Like, a fine meal that,. instead of 5 Meat + 5 Veggie will require you to to use 2 different kind of Veggies (or 5 vegetable + 5 milk or 1 egg) 

[Kagemusha12]

As for foodstuff:
Always make one of the first steps, to create vegetable fields that are large enough to not only feed your colonists, but also are prepared to accomodate colony growth and possible prisoners.

And plant Healroot early on ... they produce herbal medicine that will likely become your normal use medkits later on (as they can beregrown, in contrast to real medkits, which have to be bought)
(I think it requires a grower with level 7 however, so, ideally bring one with these talents with you)

[keylocke]

-avoid hunting predators, unless they're too close to base. (always attack predators as a group via drafting)
-always use rifles for hunters. (don't let melee go hunting) sniper/survival rifles long range attack gives you enough time to flee from mad animal revenge.
-once you get the message of animal revenge, draft your other gunners and send them towards the mad animal, while your hunter run towards your gunners.
-use your hunter to run around as bait so the your other gunners can bullet rape the mad beast.
-if the beast changes target, then send the new target to run around and bait the beast.
-repeat until beast is dead.

[Skaliri]

Another problem you talk about is the lack of medicine. There are 2 vanilla ways to combat this (and mods, woo mods!  )

If you click on your colonists and go to health, you can select what kind of medicine your doctors will use on them. I personally always put all my civvies at the start of the game on NO medicin, and only allow medicine when they get  multiple bleeding wounds or similar heavy chance for infections. Non-bleeding wounds cannot get infected and only give pain modifiers and some temporary reduced stats as main worry (anyone had one of em beserk chains where your guys keep beserking after gettting beaten by the guy that went beserk before?)

Second, as soon as you start (or as soon as you have a colonist with farming lvl plant yerself a big ol' field of healing root. Basically herbal medicine. It takes ages to grow, but with a decent sized field (I usually do 6X12 or something like that) it should give you quite a bit of medicine and should be the main medicine used imho.
(If you don't know how, when you click a growing zone, that little block that says potatoes:  that is clickable and changable)

Of course, if you already knew this, feel free to disregard it ^^ just trying to help.

[ahowe42]

- Where did you start ? Try out a forest biome without any extrem temp.

- Random colonist are just for hardcore gamer. Try to reroll your pawns until you got a good growth/cook , crafter/constructor ,researcher/doc.

Thanks - I've only so far played in temperate forest, and have cherry-picked my colonists.  So I've got that goin' for me :-).

[ahowe42]

Another problem you talk about is the lack of medicine. There are 2 vanilla ways to combat this (and mods, woo mods!  )

If you click on your colonists and go to health, you can select what kind of medicine your doctors will use on them. I personally always put all my civvies at the start of the game on NO medicin, and only allow medicine when they get  multiple bleeding wounds or similar heavy chance for infections. Non-bleeding wounds cannot get infected and only give pain modifiers and some temporary reduced stats as main worry (anyone had one of em beserk chains where your guys keep beserking after gettting beaten by the guy that went beserk before?)

Second, as soon as you start (or as soon as you have a colonist with farming lvl plant yerself a big ol' field of healing root. Basically herbal medicine. It takes ages to grow, but with a decent sized field (I usually do 6X12 or something like that) it should give you quite a bit of medicine and should be the main medicine used imho.
(If you don't know how, when you click a growing zone, that little block that says potatoes:  that is clickable and changable)

Of course, if you already knew this, feel free to disregard it ^^ just trying to help.

Thank you, this is useful - I didn't know I could turn off medicine for people.  I also have not thus far ended up with someone with growing skill high enough for the healroot, as I had not sufficiently focused on that aspect.

[ahowe42]

Stop hunting. Just don't hunt. Then there will be no revenge. Meat eating really is optional; it's perfectly possible to live off crops alone.

Against raiders, that's really a matter of combat tactics. Main tips are: have everyone behind good cover, concentrate fire on single enemies, and try to set up situations where all your men can attack but some of theirs are blocked. Don't be afraid to give ground in order to gain tactical advantage. In doorways you can easily make 3v1 melee situations and win very effectively.

Thanks Tynan.  It never occurred to me to not hunt - I'll take your word for it that my starting set of food is enough to last until my crops grow in.  With both the mad animals and raiders, even with successful tactics, colonists still get hurt (especially in a melee situation).  But an answer by someone else clued me into the fact that I can restrict medicine, so that helps.

Hope you don't think I'm being a hater - I'm enjoying the game a lot and just asking so I can last longer and enjoy better :-)!.

[Skaliri]

Oh, one last tip, cause the amount of food usually is not quite enough to last until the first harvest for me (even with rice, which I *think* is the fastest growing of the main growing crops), but most biomes have some kind of natural food source on the map. Unfortunately, the only thing that springs to mind right now are the berry bushes in the forest biome, although I know there are more (someone else? )

You can manually select harvest on individual plants (if grown far enough) or go to architect tab and select harvest tool and just drag, so you can just harvest all the berries in that area.

[Kagemusha12]

Oh, one last tip, cause the amount of food usually is not quite enough to last until the first harvest for me (even with rice, which I *think* is the fastest growing of the main growing crops), but most biomes have some kind of natural food source on the map. Unfortunately, the only thing that springs to mind right now are the berry bushes in the forest biome, although I know there are more (someone else? )

You can manually select harvest on individual plants (if grown far enough) or go to architect tab and select harvest tool and just drag, so you can just harvest all the berries in that area.

The other natural plants are Agaves.
Unfortunately, because they just appear as green plants, it often is difficulty to distinguish them from the other plants growing on the map

[Franklin]

Stop hunting. Just don't hunt. Then there will be no revenge. Meat eating really is optional; it's perfectly possible to live off crops alone.

...

That said ... will there be an option to create fine meals that are pure vegetarian?
Like, a fine meal that,. instead of 5 Meat + 5 Veggie will require you to to use 2 different kind of Veggies (or 5 vegetable + 5 milk or 1 egg)

Yeah, I'd love this. Higher grade meals should just require multiple food types, not necessarily one from each category (meat/veg/dairy).

[ahowe42]

Oh, one last tip, cause the amount of food usually is not quite enough to last until the first harvest for me (even with rice, which I *think* is the fastest growing of the main growing crops), but most biomes have some kind of natural food source on the map. Unfortunately, the only thing that springs to mind right now are the berry bushes in the forest biome, although I know there are more (someone else? )

You can manually select harvest on individual plants (if grown far enough) or go to architect tab and select harvest tool and just drag, so you can just harvest all the berries in that area.

This is awesome info (I tried it, there's not enough food to last until the first harvest).  I had no idea that the red berries I saw on bushes were edible.  Hunting smaller game (raccoons, rabbits, etc...) is also a fairly safe way to also augment my food supply.