Unstable build feedback thread

[qwertyasdf]

Hey!

Think I just found a bug

There was an incapacitated refugee that I sent a caravan after, but they were gonna get there too late. So I dropped one of my colonists into the area to "hold the fort" until my main caravan arrived, but when the caravan got there, I got the message "Bancarbi has left the area". My drop pod colonist reverted to caravan form and the incapacitated refugee disappeared.

Sucks cause I was in desperate need of a recruiter 
Version: 1.0.1981

[Safir]

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Difficulty: Medium
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest Flat River
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 330-ish?
Hours played in the last 2 days: 10?
Complete mod list: None

I don't really want to post a complete story about how it felt atm. It did seem strange that the faction calling for peace talks decides to attack. See attached screenshot.



[attachment deleted due to age]

[Copperwire]

I think we could use a "wicker man" building that we can mount a pawn in so we can burn them as an offering to the adaption gods in an organized and dignified manner.  Old time religion.

[EvadableMoxie]

Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest, Mountainous, Year round growing.
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 332
Hours played in the last 2 days: 10

I built a reactor and fired it up to try to survive the event.  I made it, although it was touch and go for awhile.  I feel like there is a lot of luck involved in the raid type.  I got quite a few tribal raids that were completely trivial, but nearly died when I got 2 mech raids back and back (Only 3 hours between them) of mostly centipedes.   

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

Pod launchers are extremely useful, but tedious.  It would be nice if you could edit the pod's contents instead of having to cancel and reload from scratch if you want to add anything.  Additionally, only one pawn being able to load the pod at a time makes things extremely tedious.

For something like long range mineral sites it would be nice if it was possible to remember pod 'loadouts' so I don't have to go through the list every time and select what I need.

Speaking of which, I really like the LRMS but often times it's a lot of clicking and menu navigatining in order to go to a location they're going to mine for all of 5 seconds and pod back.  It's a good way to get wealth but it's tedious for me as a player.

It would be nice if you could load incapacitated pawns into pod launchers.  You can load corpses and prisoners, but not someone who is incapped.  I'd really like to be able to transport injured pawns, or 'medivac' ones that go down while on a caravan.

I would like to not be forced out of maps with an arbitrary time limit.  One time I had a colonist go Wild Man on me on item stash map.  Thankfully I succeeded the tame in time but that would have been really annoying.  I assume the time limit is to stop the player from hiding wealth in a place where there are no events.  I think a better solution would be to give the player a set amount of time without events, then past that give them a message saying their location has been noticed and enable raids and such on the map.

Losing bed assignments after caravaning is extremely annoying.

I've noticed pawns can still 'chain' break, that is they break, snap out of it, and then break again during the time it takes for mood to adjust. This is still possible because often pawns will eat and then sleep right after a break.  Sleeping locks their mood so even though in passage of time it's been 8 hours, their mood hasn't had time to adjust.

Prisoners seem to break constantly now.  Unless you use an insanity lance prisoners are always in intense pain and generally have other mood debuffs from friends being dead, seeing corpses, and other negatives from combat. Almost all of my prisoners break as soon they can stand up after being captured. They usually go right back down, but sometimes they manage to injure themselves and others, and occasionally they get killed.

I wish there were better tools for automation of a late game colony.  I feel like the game really starts to bog down there, but it might just be that it isn't fun for me personally.  I feel like things kind of drag on with building the ship because the event requires you to really stockpile food and resources. 

I started the reactor event at about 250k wealth. I ended at about 212k.

In terms of defenses:

Traps are good early game. They don't require research and can be made from basic materials.  With a simple setup they can trivialize early raids.  Later on, traps become overshadowed by IEDs.  The only reason to continue using traps at that point is for interior defenses where you don't want to have stuff exploding in your base. I had a massive minefield that could handle a lot of raids on it's own.  I used a grid of concrete over rough stone and dirt to abuse the AI pathfinding and increase the likelihood of traps being triggered.

One negative aspect of the trap change is that as far as biomes go, the rich got richer.  It's just not worth it to grow your own trees ever due to the insanely long sowing time, and so decisions like playing on an arid grassland instead of a forest are more punishing.  Traps now being a resource drain to the point where realistically you can only use wood means it's now even more punishing to not play in a forest.

I used turrets for interior defense, as a stalling tactic to keep the enemy busy while I position pawns.  I keep my turrets on hold fire until I need them, as they mostly served to just shoot my own pawns in the back during infestations. I found positioning them is difficult when you don't actually have a dedicated kill box. Between worries of friendly fire and exploding, placement options feel limiting.  I don't know if it's just confirmation bias but it sure feels like turrets friendly fire your pawns way more than other pawns do.  It also feels like turrets are just an expensive IED against infestations.

I did not use a killbox in this playthrough.  I used several layers of walls/doors with sandbags in front.

Door peaking completely trivializes melee as you can shoot them with complete impunity.  You can order a pawn to walk into a doorway, then as soon as you see the door start to open, draft and undraft them.  This stops them in front of the door, but the door still opens and your pawn will shoot through it.  Enemies can't walk through the door.  So this just lets you abuse melee by shooting them when they can't fight back.

Early on you can similarly abuse ranged enemies by waiting for them to wander and doing the same process.  Late game, however, I found there were so many enemies that it wasn't really practical. It may just be I didn't know the best techniques for it and it remains viable versus ranged even with large numbers, I'm not exactly sure.


[attachment deleted due to age]

[XeoNovaDan]

Alright, just finished my second run for 1.0 unstable, having fended off another relentless onslaught of raids for one whole quadrum.

Storyteller: Cassandra Classic
Scenario: Crashlanded (but all starting pawns 65 or older)
Difficulty: Savage
Biomes:
Main base - Ice Sheet (mountainous, -8C to -54C seasonal)
Outpost - Tundra (flat, 5C to -43C seasonal)
Commitment mode: Yes
Hours played in the last 2 days: Probably another 12-16
Complete mod list: Core, More Faction Interaction (playtesting)

Imgur post with screenshots of the base, outpost, as well as each colonists' bios, equipment, health and records: https://imgur.com/a/d1UGhjY
- I'd recommend checking it if you want to see me somewhat outline my thought process throughout the endgame sequence, as well as just the logistical process of my faction's development.

Graphs are directly attached to this post as well as in the imgur post.



Now for my general thoughts on 1.0 from my second completed run, and what I've found to be rather odd:

• I've found that threat points only cap at 10,000, which throws a wrench in the scaling. To be fair though, by the time one hits 10,000 points, they're probably going to be borderline unstoppable anyway
• The corpse obsession mental break is very lacklustre and feels more like a free catharsis. Provided that the colonist who unburied the corpse can haul, you can simply order them to re-bury the corpse upon finishing their mental break (which is usually very quick), which'd usually prevent other colonists from getting negative thoughts
• Hostile melee pawns that are clumped together (most noticeable with deep late-game/end-game tribal raids) have their weird ways of 'decompressing' upon taking damage, which can prove to be very bizarre in tight spaces
• I've found that skill levels past 10 or so regarding quality don't really matter much - especially when it comes to inspired creativity. I've had level 10 pawns end up making legendaries, and level 18 pawns only end up making excellents and masterworks. Even in general, roughly level 14 pawns can quite consistently make excellent gear. Anything much further beyond 14 is borderline placebo
• I've found that deep drilling uranium and plasteel has been very bountiful - perhaps too bountiful. I was able to get to around 1500 uranium and plasteel from basically none just by drilling a single node. While it's nice to see there are good ways to get these resources, I feel that the yields should certainly be cut down
• Unlike the flak vest, flak pants (and by extension flak jackets) don't really do much to actually protect the wearer, and it's almost not worth bothering with them and just skip straight to power armour. They probably need a buff
• Colonists will pocket insect jelly if there's any around rather than fine meals, despite fine meals generally being safer to eat and being more nutrition-efficient. This could be a proximity thing though, but it would be more desirable for colonists to just generally choose the 'safer' option
• Transport pods have their fair share of technical oddities - for those who want to see my thoughts on those, see here
• I still stand by the fact that mechanoids need some better way of tracking them; haywire mechanoids in particular are difficult to keep track of, and since they somewhat blend in with the snow, that exacerbates the problem in this case. Maybe they should have name tags.
• In records, the 'Time as colonist' seems to cap at 9.6 years. This is probably just a bug though
• I've noticed with cold biomes like tundras that although they start off with a very minimal amount of foliage, they quickly become totally barren and devoid of any plant life - no usable trees or anything. Any plants that do spawn there typically don't get to grow since temperatures are too low, even plants like pine trees or healroot which are meant to fare well in cold conditions
• In cases where I've had unroofed snow clearing zones, it's a bit strange that colonists will try to clear snow while it's still snowing, which means that their efforts will soon be reverted. While it is possible to roof over these zones (although less-so for mortars and transport pod landing zones), this generally does take up a lot of cleaning labour
• Similarly, higher priority production stockpiles located closer to particular workbenches (e.g. smokeleaf leaves by drug labs) are a bit janky to work with since there isn't a way to only have colonists fill those stockpiles if stacks are at or below a certain percentage of their stack limit, which results in constant stockpile filling which takes up around 90% of a colony's haulers' time

Despite these oddities though, I've had a blast experiencing 1.0 with old starting colonists on an ice sheet, and it's shaped up to actually be a pretty great update. Keep up the good work!

Economically, this was probably my strongest colony to date, undoubtedly helped by More Faction Interaction which has trader wealth scale with colony wealth. My total silver count peaked at around 34,000. Main sources of income included old apparel, chemfuel from insect/human meat, human leather dusters and slate artwork from the mountain. This was supplemented by surplus textiles (mainly muffalo wool and devilstrand from the outpost).

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Syrchalis]

One of the least developed and most "awful" (it's not that bad) things I find when playing is the research tab. I nearly never play without a mod for it, but unfortunately fluffy hasn't updated his mod in a while and it broke, so I had to play with the vanilla research tab.

The "tabs" you can add with mods are great, but overall the experience of using it is still pretty bad. What I miss most compared to the modded versions is:

• Queueing up research
• Graphical preview of what will be unlocked

[BlueMarble007]

Hey all! I'm having a small issue: a colonist of mine died (as they do) but she left unfinished apparel. Would it possible to implement that the game 'unreserves' apparel when a colonist dies (or becomes unable to move)?

[gkolocsar]

Scenario: Crashlanded
Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest, small hills
Commitment mode: YES (always)
Current colony age (days): 217
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~8

I'm getting a ton of Mechanoid raids (6 in total of  the last 7 with 3 in a row dropping in the middle of my base).
I think after the first weeks you get no more missions... I have nothing to do in the world map. No downed refugee, no family rescue, no outpost... nothing.

I had 18 colonists but now after a few difficult raids I'm down at 14 with 1 prisoner. Too many prosthetic arms and legs so far... Having a hard time getting components.

[Koek]

Hey all! I'm having a small issue: a colonist of mine died (as they do) but she left unfinished apparel. Would it possible to implement that the game 'unreserves' apparel when a colonist dies (or becomes unable to move)?

I have not been in this situation before, but can you burn it?

[jchavezriva]

My colonist with broken pelvis always stays alone in the hospital. I wont be able to move her to her room without destroying all medical beds.

Could you configure it so that incapacitated colonists stay on their room? That would make more sense, specially if they have a partner there.

[BlueMarble007]

Hey all! I'm having a small issue: a colonist of mine died (as they do) but she left unfinished apparel. Would it possible to implement that the game 'unreserves' apparel when a colonist dies (or becomes unable to move)?

I have not been in this situation before, but can you burn it?

I can cancel it, but I'd prefer just reassigning it

[jchavezriva]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: The one that used to be the second one to the last one (cant keep track of its ever changing name, sorry!)
Biome/hilliness: Mountanious boreal forest
Commitment mode: Yes, with shameless alt+f4 savescumming
Current colony age (days): 330+
Hours played in the last 2 days: 7 aprox
Complete mod list: None

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I noticed a really weird bug.

I get notifications of people getting the Flu, and those people are not my colonists.

I checked in a visiting caravan and couldnt see them either. "Jump to location" button was disabled. Has happened twice in last update.

[logikzer0]

Scenario: Crashlanded
Storyteller: Cassandra
Difficulty: Survival Struggle/Intense/Extra Hard ---> increased to Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Tundra, Mountainous
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 400-500
Hours played in the last 2 days: 20

So I have about 300-400 hours total in the game but I haven't done a mountainous colony in a while because bugs are annoying, but I decided to do something different this time.  The game is complete and I didn't take notes so I'll just run through some highlights:

Started with 3 decent colonists and even though it was tundra it was just barely tundra and I was able to find some rich soil and 15-20 days of growing.  Got some rice going fairly easily and never really struggled with food at all.  In fact, as mentioned later, I was able to stockpile over 1200 packaged survival meals and easily have food for colonists and several muffalo the entire game.  There were just constant elk, caribou and muffalo herds entering the map and because they instantly came into my base to steal my food I could easily hunt them down.  My meat stockpile was a bit absurd at various points in the game.  My base was eventually able to sustain 3 greenhouses for year-round growth with a diverse array of power sources.

For defenses I used natural mountains and left the front of my base with about an 8-tile wide opening to invite raiders in.  I used exactly 2 mini-turrets, 1 autocannon, and 1 sniper.  I also had 3 other mini turrets in other base areas that were problematic with jailbreaks and infestations.  Both front retaining walls had doors so colonists could peek out and take shots before the main assault.  For the first time ever I used high explosive IEDs as defense and I was extremely pleased with them.  I set up a minefield at the front of my base and on the side entrance (which was never actually attacked by anything other than manhunters).  The IEDs worked amazingly well at crowd control and weakening the enemy and they made manhunters a cakewalk.  The sniper turret is scary AF.   Overall I only rebuilt the big turrets a couple of times, raiders almost never made it to them before fleeing.

The biggest threat were the infestations, but I don't know if I was just lucky but I only got one really dangerous massive infestation before I left the base for greener pastures.  It was by far the closest to a colony wipe I experienced.  I had strip mined the large mountain next to me for resources, I had little choice.  I then sectioned the mines out with doors and added wooden flooring at various places so I could burn out the bugs when they arrived.  My plan didn't work.  Massive infestation hit so I sent my fastest pawn with an incendiary launcher to peek through a door and set the wood on fire and run.  Two problems:  apparently fire doesn't spread that well on wooden floors (I don't know if this was a change or if it never did), and apparently the moment their hives catch on fire the bugs go full commando mode towards your base hell or high water through anything that stands in their path.  They busted through every door and came at us full strength.  This was after having a few days to multiply because I waited for a caravan to return home that had came down with flu and was moving at a snails pace.  So an insane amount of bugs came at us, killed our animals, destroyed half the base, but I kited them to our minefields and somehow didn't lose any people.  The cleaning up and rebuilding took a long while but we got there.  Afterward I dug out a huge room in the mountain just before our base entrance held up by 4 pillars.  I placed IED's in a chain to blow the walls and collapse the mountain on the bugs the next time they came at us.  Sadly I never got to test my trap before we left.  At some point around year 5 I changed difficulty to merciless.

This is the first game I ever got offered Tornado Generators and this time I got like 5 of them.  They were pretty fun to play around with but it did backfire one time.  I used one to absolutely decimate a sapper raid, unfortunately the tornado then turned around a demolished a section of my prison, fridge and OF COURSE my mortar/chemfuel room.  The rebuild wasn't too bad.  It was funny though.

We only lost one colonist during our time in the tundra.  He died randomly to centipede heavy charge fire.  Other than that it was a pretty easy time.  I managed to get all 15 of our people decked out in marine armor and marine helmets, stockpiled 1200 PSMs and headed toward the ship halfway across the globe.  The caravaning was more or less easy but it's a good thing I packed 3-4 doomsday launchers because the ambushes were intense.  I still had a tribe and outlander union as enemies and they came at us pretty hard.  We traded and raided our way there in 40 days or so.  I really enjoy the traveling part of RimWorld and I think the improvements have made it way better.  I wish you could get better stuff from settlements though.  The attacks aren't the easiest thing to accomplish and you don't seem to get much out of it.  Honestly I got better stuff from tribes just because I could harvest their crops.  Once I got food and another time I got devilstrand.

When you first arrive at the ship it's quite difficult to set up a defensive structure around the ship without everyone losing their minds.  It was in a temperate forest so we chopped down trees and quickly build a large wall around the ship and us.  I made small bedrooms and a couple stockpile rooms.  During this time one of my colonists with a painstopper installed in his brain went berserk and was beaten to death.  That was our 2nd colony death.  Way too many mental breaks to count.  I had 3 people "give up" on the colony at this point, which seems dumb from a role-playing perspective (we just hiked across the world as a team to get out of here and when we get there they give up?).  Anyway I beat the crap out of anyone who tried to leave and I found it amusing that as they lay on the ground beaten and bruised the game says "had a change of heart about leaving"...hell yeah you did.

The raids were intense as usual, basically non stop.  I called in several outlander friendly squads to help out at various points and they were actually pretty darn useful.  I made one launcher to send them extra stuff I had as gifts to keep our relations up.  Unfortunately the tribespeople couldn't help us because they couldn't arrive in time.  That was disappointing.  The biggest problem was when a mechanoid drop pod raid dropped right on top of my mortars and destroyed my entire food stockpile and half my valuables.  Luckily I was able to throw down a stove and hunt and cook a few meals to get us by.  The hardest point came when two mechanoid raids happened within 3 hours of each other, both of which were almost entirely centipedes.  My base was simply a square wooden box with a basic pillbox (wall, sandbag, wall, sandbag) on each side, no turrets or traps or IEDs at all.  I now had two catatonic colonists and two extremely injured colonists and TWELVE centipedes to deal with.  I almost turned it off and gave up but I underestimated full marine armor.  I used one colonist with EMP grenades to basically go kamikaze and hope for the best.  It worked.  I stunned each 'pede long enough for my fighters to take care of business, but it was easily the closest we came to losing.  After some more raids we finally made it.  I launched off all my stuff to my buddies and climbed in the ship.  Two colonists were carried to caskets but the rest made it there on their own.  14 left the planet.  Fun experience overall.

Two nagging issues I would like to see fixed:  Every time I sent pawns out on missions they lose their bedrooms, which sucks for greedy pawns or lovers because I always forget about it and soon I have people grumpy for not being with their lovers and people sleeping on the floor because some idiot took a double bed that wasn't theirs.  Also it takes so long to load a large caravan (like when you are loading up your whole base) that it is nigh impossible to get it done before someone goes crazy.  Not sure what can be done about this.  In drug colonies I just have everyone snort some yayo first, but in this one my best bet was to activate a sooth pulser and hope for the best.  We made it, but I had to beat someone out of a daze and patch them up before finally making it out.

After playing several games where we traveled to the ship and several games where we built the ship and survived the raids I have to say that both are quite fun ways to play.  Certainly traveling to the ship is more challenging just because you have to set up a temporary base for 15 days that can defend insane raids and not have your whole colony lose their minds.  The advanced component bottleneck was a little rough when building my own ship but with more than one fabrication bench you can get it done much quicker.  My main takeaway from this last run is that Marine Armor is the bomb and IEDs are better than I thought they were.

[cactusmeat]

Scenario: Rich explorer
Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest, 40/60 growing season, large hills no river
Commitment mode: nope.
Current colony age (days):
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~8?

I lost a caravan because my boars would not attack anything. made a new game to test, still happened. they just flee from combat even though they were set to release, properly trained, master was on map.

Still bothers me that the caravan demands are always everything and the clothes on your back instead of something like all your silver, or just your weapons, something an actual highwayman's demands would be. Good bandits intimidate to get stuff, trying not the bring it to fighting terms, especially when outnumbered.

Also it's so easy to get the stranger in black I think it should be disabled on higher difficulties. If a colony should be doomed I would rather not have this happen.

I've been thinking that wealth as the main factor for raid size is not ideal, and judging from how the people on this forum are playing it has become metagamey. It would make sense that raid sizes are affected by

• distance to closest enemy faction base (see mod:safely hidden away)
• recent relations with faction, their messengers
• climate
• wealth
• how vulnerable your colony is (# of turrets/colonists and how well armed they are), as determined by their scouts (which may or may not even appear on your map)

Any good war effort has scouts, messengers, generals, etc. these things are simply missing from the game and ruin my immersion in the story. You could send a letter saying that an allied faction or your own colonists spotted a scout, and to expect a raid soon.
Messengers could appear on your map with a ? dialogue like traders do. you could kill or capture them to start a war, setting faction relations to -100, or talk to them for some options. of course the pirate messengers would extort your colony, pay them, they raid less, or give them slaves or whatever. other factions may ask for food, livestock, weapons. I don't think they should require you to caravan to complete, instead have some visitors of that faction come pick up the items and leave.

Currently most raids appear in numbers not great enough to absolutely destroy a colony and take it over, which makes little sense. If their force is small they should aim to steal or kidnap or just start fires to reclaim their territory instead of suicidal attacks against an obvious deathtrap. A lot of the difficulty in this game is entirely mitigated by abusing their bad AI.

I like the idea that faction bases don't like when you settle too close, extending upon that they should have increased patrols and caravans within their borders, meaning that their enemies are much less likely to have bandits in that area, so you can caravan through safe routes instead of always the same shortest path.

All those things would make the factions feel more alive. Of course I understand this is a big wish.

I liked the new component textures, really like the changes to chemical interest.

A bunch of stuff from the mod "better workbench management" has been in 1.0, but a bunch is missing for some ungodly reason. copy all bills, drag and drop bills, and default drop on floor. I've wasted so much time microing silly things just because those are missing.

Still have a question though: why only sci-fi bullet barrier shields and not wooden or metal shields so you can fight in melee without getting stabbed in the chest by a scyther and die? I seriously do not recommend trying to melee scythers. It's super weird to me that the best brawlers dodge all their hits instead of locking swords or parrying.

[CakeOrDeath]

My colonist with broken pelvis always stays alone in the hospital. I wont be able to move her to her room without destroying all medical beds.

Could you configure it so that incapacitated colonists stay on their room? That would make more sense, specially if they have a partner there.

Can you try undesignating all other hospital beds and then uninstalling the one she's on? Then make sure she is assigned to where you want her and they should take her there. Then you can re designate the other hospital beds and reinstall the one she was on. Hopefully they won't take her back there.