Alpha 17 is on public unstable branch

[giltirn]

I haven't played that much with A17 yet but i noticed one minor annoyance in the last playthrough.
With wild healroot and the ability to self-tend i tried a solo-run (custom scenario, start with nothing). Was quite challenging and i lasted 11 days. What killed me in the end was malaria and here is the thing: Despite being herb medicine available, self-tend activated and the diesase requireing tending my pawn decided to stay in bed for nearly a day - in hindsight i should have dropped the priority of patient - and i was unable to force him to tend himself.
With other pawns it is possible to override their current action and force a pawn to tend another one, apparently that is not possible if doctor and patient are the same person.

Malaria lasts for ages. I had to micro 4 pawns for malaria for something like 15 game days. Plague comes and kills quickly, as do infections, but malaria is miserable because it basically knocks out half your colony for several weeks.

[Tynan]

Tree coverage was reduced in last update.

[ReZpawner]

Tree coverage was reduced in last update.

Ahh, sorry, I didn't notice that it had been. Thanks for fixing that!

I'm running out of things to complain about, but is the price on Wake-up correct? It's got the same ingredients as Penoxycyline, but the value is $45 vs Penoxycyline at only $32.  Fair enough that it has 15 work as opposed to 9, but I cannot help but feel it's a little overpowered for cash at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, I do love my drug-money, but it may need a slight adjustment for it to not be overpowered.

Other than this, it feels pretty good right now.

[Nainara]

The way that immunity has been tuned in this build, it seems like a death-sentence when a colonist loses a kidney.

[XeoNovaDan]

The way that immunity has been tuned in this build, it seems like a death-sentence when a colonist loses a kidney.

That's pretty much always been the case.

Trees now provide 43% cover. It's more than a little overpowered in my oppinion, but it seems to be here to stay. May want to let those beavers linger around a bit longer than normal in A17, because they provide one hell of a service. Also, rock chunks are now worse cover than trees.

As Tynan said, trees have been nerfed (to 25%) - chunks have also been buffed (to 50%), and sandbags remain at 65%. Pre-A17, trees have always been better than chunks - I guess with updates, we only now start investigating and finding out.

Fun fact: torso-sized small sculptures, televisions, hydroponics basins, and snowmen all have better coverage than full-sized trees (and saplings).

[A RANG MA]

I think I may have found some kind of bug, but I haven't tried to reproduce it yet. I recently had a caravan with a few dromedaries holding stuff arrive at my base, and I had serious issues with the game freezing for a second or two very frequently. The problem went away when I went into the dromedaries' gear tab and forced them to drop all of their stuff, so it might be a problem with colonists unpacking animals' gear.

[Goldenpotatoes]

I'm noticing infections hitting WAAAY earlier in-game than usual, even for Randy. I've had at least five different situations where my colony has been hit with disease within the first few days of landing, two of those incidents hitting before mid-way through the first day.

There's story, and then there's "2 of the 3 colonists got hit with the plague/gutworms immediately after crashlanding and proceeded to use up all of the medicine/food before anything could be done and leaving progress at a stand-still for the next in-game week." That isn't fun, that is just a sign for me to restart on another save.

[faltonico]

Plague, malaria and infections are not bad to handle as of now even with herbal medicine. Infections are easy to catch, but i found them not so hard to treat. I bumped into a console error, but seemingly not related to a recognizable bug, so i didn't report it.

And... Why the partial implementation of "Look at me, I'm the worker now"? it is half as useful as it was before. Forcing a pawn do something not assigned to temporarily by only a left click is merely a QoL addition.

Anyway, It is nice to see all those other mods included in A17.

[mumblemumble]

I would think plants would be gradient upon type (great oaks better than jungle trees) and on growth size. But that would take time to put in.

Infections don't seem terrible for me : using standard medicine, moderately trained doctors, normal wooden bed, and full bedrest, infections are easy to beat : my only concern is how herbal medicine fares, since its obviously reduced, and with the most stringent precautions early on, I beat infections by 20%...though with herbal, it seems it would be much closer.

[Nainara]

The way that immunity has been tuned in this build, it seems like a death-sentence when a colonist loses a kidney.

That's pretty much always been the case.

Maybe it's just apparent now because colonists are getting dismembered more often. Anecdotally, two out of my latest colony's six fatalities have been from kidney loss + flu, and kidney loss + infection.

[Malpractice]

I just finished up a long play (ended on Day 142) of the most recent build and had a blast.  Cassandra Rough, Boreal Forest, 10-day grow period, totally random colonists.  During this time I had 21 major threats and 17 enemy raids.  I've been playing Rimworld since A14, and this patch has been the best improvement I've seen to the game yet.

The game feels incredibly well balanced now in general.  My favorite improvements are the smoothed out pacing, strongly driven by revisions to raiders (especially making good weapons and shield belts rare).  Crafting and trading for good was worthwhile instead of waiting for raiders to deliver goods to you.  Every skill was rewarded. 

Sunlamps work much better now.  The increased upfront cost pairs well with solar panels, because you aren't paying the energy "tax" of batteries. Early on hunting and gathering were essential for survival, and as the game went on I was able to transition to more farming and herding for greater efficiency.  Predators felt more impactful in general, ambushing my people as they were out in the wilds, and their improved AI made for dynamic combats (when you shoot them, they come at you instead of just eating the guy they downed).

My colony eventually fell when I had two raids in rapid succession:  a poison ship followed by a siege.  On my way to the siege, four of my people got malaria.  Between wounds, infection, and disease my colony rapidly collapsed.  I lost 5/9 people rapidly, which caused a mood death spiral, including a berserk puppy that did some serious damage.

Prior to that, I'd been able to handle infections cleanly - but I always had to be careful and get people to bed quickly.  Early on the cold climate made me really struggle to have enough herbal medicine.  I may have been able to survive that catastrophe if I had actual medicine and a better doctor  (I had a few in the 6-8 range).  I think infections and disease are right where they need to be - a dangerous compounding factor, but something the player can manage in calm times as long as they make reasonable choices. 

Caravan ambushes seem frequent and risky.  I never know how many people to send.  It feels like I get ambushed 20% of the time, even across a very short trip (2 days or so).  I never took a trip more than 2 days away... it's just too much time to lose.  If I only send one person, I'm pretty much going to lose them.  If I send 3-4 combat people, I feel more secure... but that's really hard to manage if you only have 8-9 in a colony.  That's usually all my good fighters.  It's not clear to me if raid threats are totally random, scale with colony size, or scale with caravan size.  Each of those requires a different player strategy, but it all feels very opaque.

Those raids revealed one small mistake in text output. My lone trader was ambushed, and I had her run in circles for a very long time until I could have my people from my colony arrive to save her.  Unfortunately, they were about an hour too late - they caught her, took her hostage, left the muffalos with the silver (?) and eventually executed her.  As soon as they left the battlefield with my person, it said I was "Victorious and I had 24 hours to reform the caravan"  You may want to add a different text message when you have no people left in an ambush spot.  I was able to get my stuff back with the other crew... but that was not a victory.  I also didn't understand why the raiders decided to "take who they can and get out" when there were no other threats in the area.  Did I break the AI with my kiting, triggering some sort of timer?

The only addition that seemed lacking was the long distance mineral scanner.  It didn't feel like a strong incentive to ever "move" my colony or really set up an outpost.  It also takes a long time to do anything.  I liked the idea of it, because it seems like it's aimed to create high risk / high reward secondary colonies.  Right now it feels like biomes just act as a difficulty slider, and then you have little reason to move. This might be able to be fixed by changing the numbers, or maybe it'd require something much bigger (exotic, dangerous biomes in a future patch).

A small issue, but it's too easy to accidentally leave the caravan formation screen from the distance estimation tool.  I assume 90% of the time the user's going to want to go back to the formation screen.  Any chance we could get a warning box if you're about to quit out of the caravan setup mode while in that tool?

It feels pretty much ready for release.  Great job, Tynan!

[mumblemumble]

Bit of a confusing text on trying to do an organ removal on prisoners with herbal med or bellow permitted : it says "not enough resources", rather than warning the player to enable medicine for the prisoner to be cut open.

[Tynan]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I'm hoping nothing else major will come up; it'd be nice to get this puppy out this week.

[wafflep90]

Does anyone know if the saves corrupting with each alpha release will ever be resolved? just asking as I enjoy doing late game plays and watching my colony grow and flourish, and it does get a bit annoying having to start anew (not that its bad cause it creates new stories)

[Casazzo]

I encountered a similar glitch with a carvan ambush. They downed my lone colonist ... walked around for a while and left the pack animals with all the silver (around 3,5k) to take him hostage. That just felt weird and i expected it the other way round. Why leave the tasty muffalo with all the cash to take the moron sheperd?