Give me ideas. BaseGen, world events.

[zeidrich]

I'm working on a basegen mod. It's coming along faster than I expected.  I'm generating a walled area with various rooms that are themed. I'm looking for ideas for room definitions.

I've been disappointed by vanilla basegen.  25 colonists, 12 beds, 300 pemmican and no farms or defenses seems super stupid to me. There's also little reason to attack a colony except for an obscene amount glitterworld medicine in vanilla.

Vanilla basically generates a "points" value for the number of colonists its going to generate, and creates a few rooms, designating the smallest as a store room which it just fills with junk based on whether the faction is neolithic or not.  It puts sandbags around non-neolithic bases.

My methodology instead generates rooms of reasonably standard size (about 9x9).  It generates farms based on the number of rooms (about 2-3 farms for 9 rooms).  Each room generates its pawns based on the room definition.  So a bedroom for instance might generate a single pawn with a weapon, and a faction pet.  The pet might be a labrador retriever if it's non-neolithic, or it might be a wolf if it's neolithic. 

Rooms also contain treasure, which I hope to offset the power of the inhabitants.  So if the room has more treasure the pawns from it can be stronger.

So ideas I have for rooms are:

• Bedroom: Bed, animal bed, 1 pawn, 1 pet, treasure: televisions, sculptures
• Kitchen: Butcher Table, Stove, 1 pawn with edged weapon, treasure: food, packaged survival meals
• Hospital: Beds, vitals monitor, hospital beds, 1 pawn, 1 injured pawn, treasure: medicine, prosthetics
• Tribal Chief: throne, scultpures, 1 pawn heavily armed/armored, treasure: gold and jade, sculptures
• Farm: growing plants, 1 pawn, treasure: raw food
• Workshop: workbenches, 1-2 pawns, treasure: finished goods, raw materials.
• Warg pit: faction Wargs, corpses, treasure: meat?

I'm also considering world events, working on basegen made me realize that it's sometimes a bit awkward to actually leave your base and often not incentivized.  I want to later, when I'm happy with basegen stuff, add some events to the world so I'm interested in what people think.

Ideas are:

Opportunity events: a comm signal or wanderer tells you about something on another tile, and you can check it out or not.  Things like a crashed colony ship looking for rescue, a rumor of a wrecked caravan to salvage, an abandoned mine.  These can be good or bad or neutral.  Some can be a deception like a distress signal that turns out to be an ambush.

Pressure events: A notification about an event in another tile that if left alone does bad things to you.  For instance, a poison ship or psychic ship on another tile that will poison or drive mad your colony, and send mechanoids or mad animals, or toxic fallout if left alone.  A forward raiding camp that will send raids periodically if not destroyed.

Scouted events: You send out your own caravan and scout nearby tiles. You come across your own things, a sealed up temple, maybe filled with gold, maybe filled with mechanoids.  A deep mine filled with goodies and insects.  A colony destroyed by mechanoids.  Some things could be strictly bad, some could be strictly good, and some could be balanced.

The idea would be that for many of these, you would part with a scout, check it out, then follow up with support either as another caravan, or with drop pods, as reinforcements.   The purpose is to add some character to the world, but also to let some events happen a bit closer to home, so you don't need to stockpile thousands of pemmican to see something outside of your base.

I'm curious what people would like to see in a mod like this, that fits within the theme of the base game.

[AngleWyrm]

• Some info on the size of rooms and colonist need for space
• I did a study on how much haygrass chickens eat -- 10/3 haygrass/chicken

I've been disappointed by vanilla basegen.  25 colonists, 12 beds, 300 pemmican and no farms or defenses seems super stupid to me. There's also little reason to attack a colony except for an obscene amount glitterworld medicine in vanilla.

Most of my colonies have reached a size of about a dozen using the Iron Dan story teller mod; some as little as eight before disaster struck, some as much as fifteen. Is that similar to your game experience for population size history?

Also, examining the price of things the player may construct in game shows that developers generally charge steel as a primary cost for their toys, so it may be considered a currency.

[zeidrich]

Yeah, Interiors are probably all 7x7 with 9x9 walls, but I might cave and make some interiors 9x9 with 11x11 walls. 

This is the plan that I often use to build my own bases. Space need is a funny thing because of the way space is calculated.  The clearance page on the wiki is actually wrong, I'll test it and then correct it if I can verify.   But in RoomStatWorker_Space, a standable tile gives 1.4 points, and a walkable tile gives 0.5 points.  To get 70 space you need 50 squares.  But you'll likely need a few more because some will have a bed. A 7x7 room gives 49, just under "spacious interior" if it were empty but that's OK.  In a real game, you don't spend too much time in a single bedroom, so impressiveness is more important and thats a composite stat.

Thats actually the reason I would want a 9x9 room. I might reserve that for barracks or dining room.

The haygrass to chicken ratio is interesting.  Could easily make a nice coop with 10 haygrass and 3 chickens in a 7x7 area fenced.  Could even have indoor climate control for eggs.

My game population size is relatively irrelevant. I hang around 10-15 typically but when I play, I'm generally starting Tribal, and I'm typically on the move relatively early with low-tech.  In a crashlanded game I can get a lot more than that because the ramp-up in raid sizes can be handled by good defenses.

I'm not really worried about the colonist population of the settlements generated.  But if you're going to have 25 colonists, show me a way that you could actually support the 25 colonists.  You should have at least 25 beds and enough food generation, or other kind of wealth generation so that I can believe you're trading or raiding to support them.

If you have a colony of 25 colonists and 300 pemmican, if the DefendBase lord didn't transition to assault colony, and my attacking force could just stay at the edge of the map, I could starve the colony out in a couple of days.

Now, I'm not expecting to get it to a point where the colonists will actually farm and plant.  That's not the intention.  The intention is to build a more believable facade, and to make it a bit more themed.

So if they have a chicken farm, you can collect some fertilized eggs.  If they have a medical facility you can get some bionics.  If they have a machining workshop, you can get some weapons.

I'm having some challenges with specifically spawning the pawns I want though. Groups are fine, individuals, some of the code is not properly disassembling so I'm not sure of the process.

[AngleWyrm]

	Efficiency Studio 30 tiles of floor space Single room quarters laid out for maximum use of floor space
	1-Bedroom unit 30 tiles of floor space Bedroom has room for a double bed with dressers, plants, artwork and/or storage chests Living room has space for a work bench, lighting, and storage for important material
	Large 1-Bedroom unit 52 tiles of floor space Living room can comfortably house three work benches Bedroom has room for a couple more work areas, if desired