Alpha 17 is on public unstable branch

[Tynan]

Thanks for the feedback! Play stories are really useful. Keep it coming!

I'm uploading a new build, the second for today.

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Increased combat points cost of some weak animal enemies, especially chickens.
Long-range mineral scanner is cheaper.
Wrote a new analyzer for species food maxima and hunger rates. Adjusted a few values.
Fix: Water texture occasionally inverted.
Readjusted how max food levels are calculated for young animals with tiny BodySize, by adding a factor-up at young levels. Adjusted when animals will try to eat; herbivores will wait until 45% food to eat instead of eating at 65%, to waste less food when maxing out.
Added descriptions for SiteCores. They don't appear in-game though.
ShootingAccuracy noSkillFactor 0.4 -> 0.5
Camera in gameplay map now clears to a solid color. This should fix: Leaving RimWorld in windowed mode and in the background causes visual trippiness
Changed Unity asset serialization mode to force-text.

[khearn]

Tynan,

When you annonuce a new build upload, would you mind listing what the build number is? I just started up a game, and while it was starting I looked on the forums and saw that you have uploaded a new version. I know I have 0.17.1535, but I'm not sure what version you just uploaded, so I'm not sure if Steam has given me the new version or not. Thanks!

[Tynan]

Good though; I'll try. But often I don't remember the version... the versions increment each day automatically. Today it's 0.17.1535, tomorrow will be 1536, etc.

[MikeLemmer]

Infections might be too powerful for elderly pawns now. Had an infection on my 80-yr old pawn on Day 3 of crashlanding, started at +5% and ended at +18%, despite confining her to bedrest and having a Medicine 4 doctor tend her with standard medicine. Not sure what I would've needed to save her.

There's a hidden penalty to recovery based on age, right? Could there be a way to make that visible, like a modifier to blood filtration due to age?

[Tynan]

Old pawns are susceptible to disease, by design.

[Khall]

Infections might be too powerful for elderly pawns now. Had an infection on my 80-yr old pawn on Day 3 of crashlanding, started at +5% and ended at +18%, despite confining her to bedrest and having a Medicine 4 doctor tend her with standard medicine. Not sure what I would've needed to save her.

There's a hidden penalty to recovery based on age, right? Could there be a way to make that visible, like a modifier to blood filtration due to age?

You can see the multiplier for age under Stats, in Immunity Gain Speed

[Limdood]

won't capped "sight" bonus to shooting make bionic eyes fairly useless?

All bionics are useful for replacing lost body parts, but legs and arms have really nice movement and manipulation bonuses that affect loads of skills, making them a worthwhile investment whenever you can afford them.

With sight being capped at 100% for surgery and now being capped for shooting, is there any significant reason to try to "augment" yourself with bionic eyes, EXCEPT for replacing an injured eye?

[wyoian]

On raids.
I'm not sure if this is a bug and I will probably post it to the bug forum later if i can reproduce it consistantly along with my save, but 2 raid the 4 raiders split up. First 2 left to go attack my base through the "open" path through deadfalls, about 10 seconds apart. The second two stood there for another 30 seconds with the status "standing". While this was happening my game crawled to a halt, exactly until they began to retreat at which it resumed at full speed. I wonder if its because the path to get to my interior base is incredibly long (around like 3 mountain ranges) but it is open so they prefer it.

It sounds like a bad bug. Can you give any savegame where it happens? You could just post your map.

Please post it in the Bugs forum if you can!

Just spawned Smart raiders, just 2 (spawned 2 regular and it didnt happen) and it appeared to happen again. One is standing at spawn waiting and its a bit laggier than it should be for this early. When i do more testing i will post to bug forum with more info.
Heres the save

http://puu.sh/vNfif/4de950c3c0.rws
posted to bug forum

[trihero]

Phoebe - Base Builder - Base Crash Colony setting

Ok this time I waited quite a while until 100 days in, I had 6 colonists equipped with normal+ assault rifles and I decided to go hit up a pirate base 8 days away. I got completely shrekt by 15-20 pirates who had a variety of aoe attacks and all had decent medium range weapons.

- I sent literally all my colonists on this caravan, because I decided I needed every bit of firepower available. I noted in particular that the game becomes extremely dull when you're waiting for your caravan to arrive at the destination, it's like watching paint dry. I don't like this aspect of the game; I understand ambushes break the monotony but it was still overall very very boring waiting.
-Yes I had a couple ambushes which I managed to survive this time so I feel the balance is better; one was 4 raiders with crappy melee tech, and another was 2 megaspiders which were new to me and I almost lost one of my guys because I didn't realize how many bullet they could soak and there was a lot of friendly fire as well. I felt it was awkward to have to build beds and hang around to heal the men. It was also confusing that one of my colonists was starving but I couldn't figure out how to feed her with my caravan supplies while inside the scenario. I just reformed the caravan a day later (I decided to give my injured guy the most time to heal) and then the food issue resolved itself, but this whole feeding/healing thing is very confusing in a caravan
- do pawns heal while the caravan is traveling? I have no idea. Do they use medicine while traveling? I have no idea. I carried 100+ herbal meds on this trip.
- I have no idea how to assault a pirate base with 15-20 men and they have a mortar turret. I think the game does a "bad" job of introducing you to combat like this where you are the attacker and don't have the luxury of entrenched defeses. I have no idea how to learn from my mistakes and mind you, I already prepared 100 days for this. It's hard to learn these kinds of scenarios when they occur relatively late into the game and is so different than base building or defending your own base. Save scumming feels bad and also it's hard to pinpoint what the issue is, the preparation phase of the first 100 days or the actual execution of the attack.
- even if I had won - would it have been worth the effort? I mean what kind of phat lewt do these pirate bases even have that's worth giving up a season's worth of 6 colonists building up your wealth?

Overall I think caravans should be lower risk and lower cost. It seems to me the idea of caravans is really cool and they are relatively well executed in terms of functionality with the whole packing stuff, but it's absolutely crazy to think about sending caravans off unless you have 10 colonists (on top of whatever you need to maintain your base during non-phoebe play) with excellent tech/armor and intricate knowledge of the game's combat systems, and even then I don't even know that the reward is worth it.

I think a big step in the right direction would be to try to incorporate the caravan system into the earlier game as lower risk/cost by

-guaranteeing muffalos on the starting map so you have some chance of having a good hauling animals
-having early quests be no more than 5 days away , this is already almost a full season's worth of sending off your colonists when you consider the round trip
- just in general making quests and base raids really be worth it rather than it feels like to me you have to be either a complete expert/genius or build up for years and years and have an embarrassing excess of riches to go out and explore/kill stuff.

[Neotic]

Infections are extremely deadly still even with medicine and bed i might be a little salty because this happened

But, infections basically incapacitate you pawns if you don't insantly restrict them to a bed and give them medicine they will die and i'm fine with that but its soo aggravating could we possible have a new drug specifically for infections "Antibiotics". Other than that it seems really easy to get food it doesn't really seem to be as much as a problem at all. One final thing for now is that the transition between shallow water and marsh is really ugly and the scroll bar on the caravan gear menu is overlapping the exit "x"

[trihero]

Neotic, I had a very similar situation, prior to my caravan to the pirates I had 4 colonists catch malaria simultaneously and luckily 3 of them were developing enough immunity to overcome it, but my fourth one was at 95% immunity when he reached 100% symptoms and died, no matter how hard I tried to give him great care. =________=

I also had a recent game where in a cassandra/some challenge game I was doing all right fending off raiders then 3 of my dudes catch malaria and things fall apart quickly when you don't have enough men to fight raids.

I like the challenge of malaria, but maybe limit it to 2 colonists max catching it at a time? It's just so debilitating and depressing to catch that. It's kinda funny I was literally considering quitting this game for about a month because of a really depressing loss to malaria no matter how hard I was trying to cure it.

[O Negative]

Maybe the commonality of modern medicine on the planet is just too high?
And maybe that's why infections are hard to balance.
I always thought that infections were only ever deadly in impoverished places, due to the lack of medicine.
Infections should be easily overcome with modern medicine.
Maybe consider making medicine more valuable, or just less abundant in every way? Or both?

Standard infections should only be somewhat scary in the super-early game.

Maybe even explore the option of having severity follow a sort of exponential curve, rather than a linear one? Nothing too steep, but a bit of curve couldn't hurt, right? It would make early treatment more powerful, and neglected infections more difficult to deal with. Rewarding the player for taking care of their pawns promptly, and punishing those that wait or are flat-out unprepared. I think that's fair.

[whitebunny]

To me infections feel right on point now considering the scenarios when you're more susceptible to feel them are when your colony is already struggling in other respects (i don't have defenses yet, my pawns are old and get infected easily, my protective gear is nonexistant) and the new, lower rate helps avoid the infection snowball i experienced many times in early a17.
On the matter of infections being a death spell for old timers maybe give us some antibiotics in the way of very rare and expensive items we can buy from merchants ? Helps as a money sink and prevents your super useful grandpa dying from that festering bunny rabbit scratch.

Quests are a non-factor early game since you can't really do them without commiting colony sudoku but it's not a huge issue otherwise.

Those starship trooper insects seem to no longer be tied to a small area around the nests and now they all aggro when you hit one it seems.
Please implement more anti-cheese measures like these i'm loving it.

Rivers are kind of an issue as there is with no way to cross them.

[XeoNovaDan]

With sight being capped at 100% for surgery and now being capped for shooting, is there any significant reason to try to "augment" yourself with bionic eyes, EXCEPT for replacing an injured eye?

When I checked the XMLs, sight is capped at 200% - so you've still got a fair bit of overhead after installing the bionic eyes which add 20% sight each (40% total), luciferium adds 15%, go-juice is another 25%, and sensory mechanites add another 50% (pushing the pawn over the 200% threshold) - and those'll actually be nothing but useful if your pawn has a painstopper to stop the consciousness penalty from pain. Anything greater than the cap is effectively just extra overhead so should your pawn take a knock, it won't actually harm their accuracy.

Bionic arms are somewhat less useful for the purpose of shooting as manipulation's usefulness is capped at 100% - but if you was to get shot in the arm without any bionic arm, your accuracy takes an immediate hit - whereas being shot in the shoulder with a bionic arm will probably most likely still keep your manipulation above 100%, and therefore not affect accuracy. Shoulders are hard to hit anyway.

[East]

This time a Shaman merchant was created. They sell expensive artifacts. The tribal traders and the villages are not as good as the outlander in a balanced way. If starting is a 3 tribal faction, it will be a bad start. Why do not tribe sell a lot of animals, animal products, slave, and artifacts for a better balance? Will they survive on the planet longer and have more opportunities to find artifacts? And most of all, I want the tribe to sell something unique. It's like an outlander. It's like an outlander's bionic item or a neuro-teaching device. Would not it be fun to sell tribal unique seeds like the seed please mod? The fertilizer that improves the soil quality of the land is also good.

Trivial quests How about hunting a monster boss with a unique shape in its own quest? It will look like a boss if you only grow the size of an existing animal.

I would like to add another tribal raid pattern even if it is not Alpha 17. Among the various patterns such as siege, sappaer, melee, and basic, tribe is only one. What about attacking with animals and stunning some pawn with weakened artifacts? The poison (infectious) weapon also seems to be interesting. A terrible tattoo may frighten the pawn.

A17 has enriched world map events, and I hope it will be fun even if there are many tribe faction