Unstable build feedback thread

[Namsan]

I'm sorry to say, but some of new arts look bad.
Silver looks like some kind of cocoon bug, and meats are too bright and blurry.

[santafefoundation]

meat looks like red lego bricks.. not a fan

edit: maybe a steak look would be more fitting? idk not an artist lol

[HomelessAbe]

Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Survival Struggle
Biome: Temperate forest
Commitment mode: No
Hours played in the last 2 days: Approx 10
Complete mod list: No mods

Colony 22 years in, things more or less pretty smooth minus the occasional bumps in the road expected with how the story goes (deaths, etc). I've felt the difficulty I've been playing on has been pretty balanced more or less, and anything significant so far has already been brought up by other posters or addressed in the changes. I've noticed raids have changed in strength a bit since previous update. Have only had one since so can't say if its a definitive trend or not, but almost all my pirate raids were usually around 80 strong, last one was down to 55 which is the weakest I've seen in a long time. They were mostly melee fighters so maybe that's intentional by the design, so disregard if so.

I remember seeing a comment asking for feedback about the balance with the autocannon turrets. I'll say as far as my colony and in game experience with them (colony has probably had them for about 10 years in game time) they seem overall pretty balanced to me. I have a large perimeter of them around my base, mixing autocannon pairs that are spaced to cover each other when swarmed as well as positioned sniper turrets to help take out enemies before they can close on the auto cannon turrets. I feel the balance in my experience has been good because though they do a great job in thinning out the raids to a more manageable amount (especially when we are out numbered 4, 5 or 6 to 1), a lot of them always inevitably get overrun and taken out, either because there are just too many fighters for them to take out at once, or they run empty and get swarmed. I particularly like the sniper turret as it honestly feels more like a mounted anti tank cannon to me, especially with range and damage, and does great work on centipedes. Lancers do a good job of staying out of their range though so I still have to send fighters out to close with and destroy them, so the sniper turret doesn't come across as an unstoppable juggernaut, which obviously it shouldn't. Overall range and everything else feels right to me.

I've noticed a few issues with combat over time though in particular with drafting pawns and giving manual orders to attack. Mainly, if a melee enemy closes with a ranged pawn that has been directed to fire at them, once they are in melee range and are attacking the pawn, the pawn just stands there taking each of the hits. I have to either undraft and let them automatically defend them self (all are set to automatically engage), or when still drafted manually re issue the attack order at which they will engage. I've noticed if when drafted that they choose the target them self without me picking it they will properly transition to melee though. My guess in the code is that they've been ordered to *fire* on the enemy (as opposed to melee attacking them) and that since they are now at melee range and can no longer fire but still have the order to do, they therefore do nothing since it conflicts with what they were ordered. Whether this is the case I'm not qualified to say, but just my guess based on my observations.

Regarding bumping the orbital traders to 30k silver, I'm guessing that's one of the temporary changes to test the boundaries, but for me it definitely makes it OP with obtaining wealth. I usually manufacture a ton of yayo to sell so everytime a trader comes by I usually have enough to pay for everything I want from them with just yayo and then clean them out of their silver with the rest of it. Now I'm able to buy 5-10k worth of goods off them and still clean them out for 30k with just selling items (besides just yayo, like artwork and leathers and such). Even if I'm cleaned out of products to sell (i.e back to back orbital traders) I have more than enough wealth to buy every last thing I want from them. If there's any future intent of having the orbital traders have among the highest amount of silver out of all the trader types, I'd probably recommend making them have around 5k. The previous amounts were good since I could buy what I wanted and clean them out, but I still had a lot of products sitting around taking up space needing to be sold so it encouraged me to form caravans to visit the outlying faction bases to sell them my stuff instead of never having to leave my base (though I still do for item quests and such).

Fun note, the one of the muffalos the colony obtained early on as a pack animal is currently in his early 30's, despite only being supposed to have a life span of about 15 years. He's been through a lot, about four heart attacks, and two insect attacks that nearly killed him each time, but despite that as well as having a bad back and dementia, he keep on trucking. Curious to see how long he's going to make it.

On an unrelated note, as an actual medic I really enjoy the injury system in this game with body parts and types of injuries sustainable and their effects on the pawns. I feel it's a great balance between a form of being realistic and believable, but also not getting over complicated for game play reasons. It can't be as real as possible and it shouldn't anyway. Lose an entire leg in real life and assuming the femoral artery doesn't spasm and temporarily constrict you have about 3 minutes before you exsanguinate on the average person. Obviously 3 minutes in game translates to a fraction of a second in real time, so you would essentially lose pawns nearly instantly if it was realistically translated. Point overall though being that I think you guys have struck a great balance between believability and making the proper concessions for gameplay purposes in the right places. Kudos to you.

Anything else significant I encounter I'll pass along, graphs attached in case you're interested.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Madman666]

No more everyone being a Jensen? Seriously?! Oh a happy day! Very good news.

_____________________
Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Rough
Biome: Temp. forest (30 growdays)
Commitment mode: hell no
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~8
Complete mod list: empty for now

[RemingtonRyder]

Anyone else getting a crapton of "Undergrounders"? I used to be happy seeing them but now not so much. Cabin fever isn't as bad as before so the trait impact doesn't warrant its commonality. Or vice versa.

I love getting them when I'm playing a permanent Toxic Fallout map. Can't really send colonists out very often into the fallout otherwise they'll get sick. I've also noticed that the trait seems to sync up with some childhood backstories.

Maybe it could be a trait which generates at a rate depending on the planet conditions - e.g. very hot or very cold planets, you want colonists to spend most of their time indoors where you have cooling or heating to normalise the temperature. Permanent Toxic Fallout I've mentioned.

[Teleblaster18]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Rough
Biome: Temperate Forest (Permanent Summer)
Hours played in the last 3 days: ~30+

Gameplay Notes for v. 1974

-Got 8 of my 9 pawns caught completely out in the open for a 20-strong Lynx Manhunter pack.  For the first time ever, I used an Animal Meat Shield, after getting fully wiped twice.  I'm happy to say: the Meat Shield is everything it's cracked up to be.  No friendly animal deaths, a couple of moderately wounded colonists, and 20 dead Lynxes.

-I've noticed that World Quest Events have dropped off to literally zero in the last 12-14 hours of gameplay.  During the early game, there were probably between 4-5 running simultaneously.  This is valid up until this morning's 1977 build.

-I had two Mech Raids drop through my base tonight: the first was 3 Lancers, the second was 4 Lancers.  At close quarters, Lancers are much easier to deal with than at medium or longer range.  I was able to mobilize all 9 of my colonists, and grab some EMP's, and they were downed very quickly; zero injuries on the first raid, and the second raid resulted in only light bruises to 2 of my colonists.

-Had a chance to check out the new 1977 graphics;  at the risk of sounding unappreciative of the effort that goes into creating and implementing the art (which I'm most certainly not), I prefer literally every graphic from B18 over 1.0.  I think the graphics from B18 fit the motif of the game perfectly.

If all else stays, I'd only ask that you bring back the graphics from B18 for regular components...and the skeletons, both animal and human.  Especially the skeletons.

Some graphs from tonight's gameplay:

[athimus]

Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Medium
Biome: Temperate forest
Commitment mode: no
Hours played in the last 2 days: 16
Complete mod list: just vanilla for bug hunting, more in the post

Started a fresh run to hunt down some mod bugs with caravans. All of my previous games have ended with relocating the colony and getting a GUI error message:
"GUI Error: You are pushing more GUIClips than you are popping." The game can't be continued from that, so it's always a new game for me.

So, today, I decided to do bug hunting and started a vanilla game. Less than a week in, got an error.



P.S. I like the new art; stacks look great in warehouses and components seem much more sensible now.

[spidermonk]

New meat cubes looks very strange, I agree with the steak suggestion. Silver looks a little bit blurry. Do we really need separate art for multiple-item stacks? A single icon with a number worked great for me so far.

[Jibbles]

Textures: I'm only bringing it up since it's going in a direction I don't like.

Silver, Insect meat, eggs look too similar to me. 

I don't like the look on most items when they're stacked.
Things like leather/wood/plasteel/neutroamine are fine.  But stacking stuff like meals and meds - reusing the same texture just looks off. Still don't care for the steel when stacked. I'd rather stick to one image type of thing. Yayo, and chocolate for example. Another example would be chemfuel; I wouldn't want to see multiple jugs on one tile, but rather it progress to something like larger jug into barrel instead.
Meats, maybe you could package them? Meals, display em in small trayrack when fully stacked? Idk
Components man, gonna take some time to adjust lol. They're not bad, just preferred the old ones.

Anyways, know it'll all look good when it's done. Still waiting on my rotatable solar panels hehe 😏

[Tynan]

Thanks for the great feedback HomelessAbe, Teleblaster.

Athimus I'm pretty sure it's a known bug, we'll get to fixing it soonish I hope.

[zizard]

Storyteller: cas
Difficulty: ext
Biome: bor for
Commitment mode: mega savescum casual mode
Hours played in the last 2 days: like 8?
Complete mod list:
hugslib
minify everything
no forced slowdown
replace stuff

IMPORTANT MODS BEGIN HERE:
show hair with hats
rimnge
gloomy hair
kantai collection hair styles
lovely hair style
rimhair
lolidrop's hairshop

Realised I haven't posted any graphs yet so decided to be useful for once and show people what a god player's graphs look like. Pretty easy so far. As usual for boreal it's convenient to make a greenhouse for the first winter. Cold biomes are obviously slower but you can be lazier with hauling and yucky brown corpses don't turn up as often. Pretty sure refinery was the first tech. Caravans are a PITA due to -20 zero recreation. Pausing caravans for recreation doesn't seem like a good deal. I'd rather they mental break and get +40 catharsis for a while. Even if it were effective, it's not fun to micro anyway. Bridges are fun to mess around with. Currently slowly digging into the mountain to make my invulnerable ultra killbox base. I caught a wimp, so maybe I will send him to punch moose to drop my raid score.

Latest major threat was a poison ship, which was 2 cent 2 lancer 2 scyther. Used about 10 wood traps to kill the smol mechs and kited the centipedes around for half a real life hour. Guess I could have punched it but I cbf getting shield belts yet and walking up to them with 50% ms from snow isn't safe. Reminded me that I need to get a killbox up to save sanity. One of the first raids I got donated me 5 sniper rifles, 2 of which I immediately melted for wealth control. Otherwise it would have been even more tedious. If you get lucky, a lot of raids neutralise each other or run into caravans. An early tribal raid walked right into a caravan. The sniper raid came shortly after a psychic ship drop and I obviously made them kill each other. This made the siege really trivial by sniping them for a few ingame hours. So I haven't even had to bust out the micro god yet.

In the picture, I think the sharp raid points drop corresponds to a patch. Early minstrel means mood is practically solved for the rest of the game. Disappointed that wool offers so little extra insulation compared to cloth. Might as well be shaving money from my muffs, since it's all going to be sold guaranteed. BTW could we please get purple alpacas? Also I like the leather art, it's grown on me. Always on the lookout for more cute hair mods. Would like more cute hair in vanilla. One of my first memories of the game was being traumatised by ugly hair on girls.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[davefin]

Random thought, and I'm sure you already considered it, but what about adding some sort of basic telemetry to the Dev builds, so you'd get much more info/graphs/data about people's games and balance than the few faithful who post their saves every build, with the N so low, to get the bigger picture?
Gamers don't respond to that stuff very well if done wrong, but just a 'we send a list of stats of your colony when you're exiting the game to get a feel for the numbers', only enabled in dev builds, with a large disclaimer/opt out button on the main screen shouldn't rustle too many people's jimmies I don't think.

Now that I think about it, it's probably too much effort given how (relatively) close we are to 1.0 and it'd not be trivial to implement, but I just wanted to throw the idea out there.

[AkraSiA]

Storyteller: Cass
Difficulty: Extreme
Biome: Boreal Forest 20/60
Commitment mode: Yes
Hours played in the last 2 days: 10 or more lol
Complete mod list: Prepare Carefully, SPS Hairstyle mod, Show hair underneath hats mod (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1180826364)

I started this colony like 3 days ago and am quitting now since my load got reverted to like a day behind and everyone is mad for some reason & my hair mods are messed up .

I posted earlier that the midgame was too easy and was pleased to see it adjusted in the patch notes just a few days later!  Maybe the data agrees with my gut feeling. The midgame was still pretty easy this run, but lategame I really started getting hammered. Where my wealth started evening out at around day 300 was when I felt really smothered by the game. It was great. I built my base incorrectly and should have used more funneling - and the bugs from the northwest mountain where the river is were a huge nuisance. They spawned 3+ times. There should be an easy way to seal off mountains you've tunneled into or rivers like this one with overhead mountain. I remember I used to be able to place sleeping spots like I did, but I don't know if that still works. The way that I know does work is to go line by line with walls until it's completely filled. Boring!

I noticed I started getting a lot less quests when I was ready to go out on them, but I was given a ton early on when I wasn't ready to leave. On naked brutality, it's kind of hard to leave early on. I feel like quests should probably designed to spawn closer if you only have 3-4 colonists. I can't spare half my guys for a 6 day trip!

Overall, I think the difficulty is pretty good. There is a lot I could do better and I feel like the game is pretty fair. I am using deadfall traps a lot more but still thinking of ways to effectively use turrets. I think they could have a use inside the base to help with drops. I love IEDs; didn't they used to take a component? The way they are now is perfect. Being able to use the charge lance is great, too. Maybe the heavy charge lance could be a weapon that only shooters with a bionic arm can wield? I want to make my own centipedes.

Some thoughts:

- I should be able to put dead colonists in cryptosleep chambers until I get a mech serum instead of laying them out in an air conditioned tiny house. I had to watch as my dead colonist slowly started rotting due to solar flares every week! I can't haul them to the cryptosleep casket that I built. Is there a way to? Am I a noob?

- Currently to train my crafters, I will put them in the cold and have them churn out useless parkas and recurve bows. I feel like there should be a specific practice item. It could be something like whittling wood or making blankets. Construction has this with smoothing rocks. If I have spare time, I will send a constructor to smooth random rocks around my base because it's easier than having them build stuff with resources. Crafting needs something low-cost high-labor like this.

- It sucks having to click through area privileges for animals every time anything happens on the map. There should be a preset area like the home area for animals whenever a raid/infestation/manhunter/anything event happens. It could initially be set to the first building you make just so animals always attempt to get to safety whenever anything happens. Any time I forget to tell my animals to get to safety, I end up reloading. It's ok if a muffalo is grazing and raiders happen to spawn next to it - it sucks, but it's fair - but the vast majority of my animal deaths are from forgetting to restrict animals during any combat and them wandering into the fight or raiders telepathically hunting them down from across the map. The noise that queues when a raid happens could be your colonists automatically ringing bells to make the animals automatically go to base.

- Insect meat should probably be more nasty with a lower cook but better to eat with a better cook. -3 is nothing when I'm starving in the winter earlygame and I'd imagine my system-wide transcendental Gordon Ramsay would be able to make it taste better than my level 0 colonist that's never heard of cooking. It could be this way with all cooking, too - as it stands, any cook at level 6 is basically equal besides speed. By the time I can get a colonist from 3 to 6 or find one at 6, I can make a metal floored kitchen that almost never gives anyone food poisoning. I would make less hats out of 10+ cooking pawns with nothing else if I knew they could make a meal that gives +1-3 mood or +10% work speed or +100% joy, etc. Gourmand is as bad as pyromaniac at the moment because +4 cooking is negligible at best unless you're roleplaying with starter colonists.

- Speaking of traits, I think traits are awesome. Traits and the stories of pawns are literally the best part of the game to me. There should be way more. A fish trait that gives someone the tendency to recreation in water and love being wet. An OCD trait that makes colonists not like opening doors. An addictive gamer that sometimes goes on chess and horseshoe binges but gives people mood bonuses for playing with them. Indoorsman could give someone a mood bonus for sleeping under rock roofs/overhead mountains. Loud Snorer. Hallucinator. Religious. Pyromaniacs should get huge bonuses for equipping fire weapons and burning enemies. Etc. I feel like traits could be expanded on so much more to great benefit.

Anyway, here are my pictures. Like I said above, I felt like around day 300 was when it got REALLY difficult and it hasn't gotten any easier since. The hardest enemies by far are still the ranged scythers. All 3 of my colonist deaths were from getting oneshot by them. Ouch! Bugs IMO are perfect, as are melee scythers and centipedes. Tribals were always a breeze and sappers with nades were more annoying than anything else. Maybe tribals should do double damage pounding on walls or something.

https://imgur.com/a/6nB8u8G




[attachment deleted due to age]

[Syrchalis]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Survival Struggle
Biome: Boreal Forest (my favorite)
Commitment mode: no (hell no, not with how much my saves break)
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~6 hours
Complete mod list:

Code Select Expand

<li>Core</li>
<li>HugsLib</li>
<li>ModSync RW</li>
<li>Giddy-up! Core</li>
<li>Giddy-up! Ride and Roll</li>
<li>Giddy-up! Battle Mounts</li>
<li>Giddy-up! Caravan</li>
<li>Rimworld Search Agency</li>
<li>Share The Load</li>
<li>EdB Prepare Carefully</li>
<li>Dubs Skylights - v1 test</li>
<li>Simple Bulk Drugs</li>
<li>Incident Person Stat</li>
<li>Numbers</li>
<li>Advanced Shield Belts</li>
<li>More Slaves [1.0]</li>
<li>Deep Ore Identifier</li>
<li>Simple Bulk Cooking</li>
<li>Recycle</li>
<li>[FSF] Encounter Map Resources</li>
<li>[FSF] No Bionics Uneasiness</li>
<li>[FSF] Vanilla Bionics Expansion</li>
<li>ED-EnhancedOptions</li>
<li>Syrchalis' Additions</li>
<li>Syrchalis' Terraform</li>
<li>Syrchalis' Patch</li>
<li>Work Tab</li>
<li>Where is my weapon?</li>
<li>TD Enhancement Pack</li>
<li>Spoons Hair Mod</li>
<li>Selectable Sculpture Graphic</li>
<li>Room Food</li>
<li>Rimsenal - Rimhair</li>
<li>[KV] Impassable Map Maker - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] Trading Spot - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] Show Hair With Hats or Hide All Hats - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] RimFridge - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] Change Dresser - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] Weapon Storage - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] ReColor Stockpile &amp; Growing Zones - 1.0</li>
<li>[KV] Adjustable Trade Ships - 1.0</li>
<li>[XND] Stuffed Flaks</li>
<li>[XND] Profitable Weapons</li>
<li>[XND] Proper Shotguns</li>
<li>[XND] Visible Pants</li>
<li>Prepare Landing</li>
<li>Five Second Rule</li>
<li>Damage Indicators</li>
<li>Mending</li>
<li>A Dog Said...</li>
<li>Animals Logic</li>
<li>Tech Advancing</li>
<li>Research Tree</li>
<li>Simple Stockpile Presets</li>
<li>HousekeeperAssistanceCat</li>
<li>Nackblad Inc Rimhair</li>
<li>[Ods] Mens Hair (B18)</li>
<li>P-Music</li>
<li>[RF] Consolidated Traits [b18]</li>
<li>Fallout Traits</li>
<li>More Sculpture</li>
<li>More Toolboxes</li>
<li>More Furniture 1.0</li>
<li>Roof Support</li>
<li>Exotic++</li>
<li>Training Rack</li>
<li>Cut plants before building</li>
<li>NamesGalore</li>
<li>No Forced Slowdown</li>
<li>GeneTech</li>
<li>Meals On Wheels</li>
<li>ED-Embrasures</li>
<li>Orbital Animal Traders</li>
<li>But I have bionics...</li>
<li>DEVRIMMSqol</li>
<li>Wall Light</li>
<li>Healing Gun</li>
<li>PrisonerRansom</li>
<li>Crafting Quality Rebalanced</li>
<li>Map Reroll</li>
<li>Archotech Expanded</li>
<li>Replace Stuff</li>
<li>Nano Repair Tech</li>
<li>What Is My Purpose</li>
<li>Allow Tool</li>
<li>Use Bedrolls</li>
<li>Smart Medicine</li>
<li>BetterMiniMap</li>
<li>OgreStack</li>
<li>MinifyEverything</li>
<li>Pick Up And Haul</li>
I'm lazy, so I just copied the modlist from my savefile.

I'm having a great time so far with everything in 1.0. Nearly all the changes that I disliked have been reverted or changed.
Most notably:

• Tree sowing way too long
• Early research too slow
• Mid/Late research too fast
• Not enough difference between quality levels

Currently I am looking at the new textures for items and I have very mixed feelings about them. For simplicity I'll just say which I like and which not with reasoning if there is one (sometimes it's just my personal preference).
Like:

• (Herbal) Medicine
• Textiles
• Neutroamine
• Metals (Plasteel, Uranium, Gold, Jade)
• (Advanced) Components
• Meals
• Insect Meat (looks reasonable why colonists don't like it)

Dislike:

• Silver (grey potatoes, CANT UNSEE)
• Animal Meat (blocks of watermelon)

Note: I don't have every item in my game of course, so it's not a complete list.

As for gameplay I started this playthrough with the lost tribe scenario - I added regular orbital traders and item stash/trade deal/outpost quests (around every 4 days) - I think having a lot of quests available is great, because you can cherry-pick the ones you like to do and the rest can expire. I also have carrying capacity multiplied by 400% - because I use a stack mod and this allows colonists to haul at least a third of a stack, while animals can haul even more.

Early game was difficult, as one would expect. Research felt really good however. I've carved myself into a mountain, and feel very safe, infestations happened often compared to other maps, but they weren't too difficult. It's the first mountain map I played in 1.0. By now I have electricity and am further into the research, just finished multi-analyzer. Trading feels pretty decent now, however I don't really know what to trade. Mostly it's small amounts of different stuff - usually leather and meat from hunting. Crafting anything to sell feels not worthwhile. I started some decent cotton production to make dusters, but it hasn't taken off yet and I don't know if it will be worth it, despite a really good crafter and negotiator.

Overall my best bet trading right now is beer. I barely ever made beer in B18, but in 1.0 it feels really good. It's a great mood boost, sells well to many trader types and the fermenting delay becomes rather irrelevant once you have it running. On the other hand I still find myself not making any smokeleaf ever and psychoid production died. In B18 I often used psychoid to make tea (for mood and selling the over-production). Flake and Yayo are some work and don't actually sell well. It's much smarter to buy neutroamine and make wake-up. Go-Juice sells at a loss, because Yayo and Wake-up together are worth more. So it's only really useful as a combat drug.

Two things bothering me right now: Lack of trade goods (specializing in an area, like drugs, tailoring, smithing and it paying off) and traits being so one-sided. I would much rather see every single trait have a positive and negative side. These shouldn't be equal. E.g. abrasive should still be a negative trait, with the negative side being more relevant than the positive. E.g. an abrasive person still insults/slights more, but they don't get a mood/relationship penalty from being insulted/slighted.


Also in the modlist are 3 mods by me: Additions adds a few plants (coffee, bamboo, ironwood) from vegetable garden, replaces vanilla plant graphics (visual only) and adds stuffed batteries. Patch changes a few things, mainly room size stats (smaller rooms are acceptable), less market value for higher quality items, weapon cooldown affected by quality, removal of yield stat maximums, transport pod 500kg capacity, thrumbo shearable, muffalo body size way up (leather/meat down so overall it stays exactly the same), grass plantable, cactus sow work halved, bionic spine giving small manipulation bonus, anesthetic duration down, inspirations requiring 10 skill instead of 3. Terraform is just for testing so I don't have to use the dev tool if I want to terraform something... clicking every tile is really annoying.

[Paul_]

Last build:
- Survival struggle - catatonic breakdowns every cca 10 minutes, 2-3 from 4 colonists are permanently in bed