Unstable build feedback thread

[Chicken Breast]

Small weirdness in an art description:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/973227205249692534/1D93BA3D932284AD45D84929287094FDF38FA793/

The only things Lexi has ever crafted are sculptures, which I guess is what the "minified thing" is??

That's probably my guess. The other thing is that apparatus is spelled incorrectly lol

[Awe]

Now for those of you who are actually wealth managing and ethical players, thus cannot afford the raid point boost from haul-doggos, what is your corpse disposal mechanism? I feel like this and ultra wealth control are the true hallmarks differentiating idiots like me and true masters of the game

Stone room + molotov. 
Or freezer with sleeping spots for hungry doggos, so they can eat just after wake up. But first option is better because you can burn unwanted weapons too.

[Qtree]

Storyteller: Randy
Scenario: Naked Brutality with 'Wanderer join' disabled and start with 'Megasloth wool parka'
Difficulty: It was extreme but I had to switch to savage some time ago because you changed things:)
Biome/hilliness: Ice sheet
Commitment mode: no
Current colony age (days): 650

Hours played in the last 2 days: playing all the time since 1.0 unstable
- I hate mech drops on top of my head, that is really annoying and ruining base layout strategy. Looks like they can drop down over a mountain roof, it is radicoulous.It would be OK if they would land in an empty space/no roof area within my base though. Now it looks like you have no other idea how to make this game harder. Building a base is part of this game, why do you want try to ruin this part of strategy by an unstoppable/not balance part of a software code? If this is an idea to make game harder, please add a way to negate a bit these events.
- Infestations within a base? See above please. They can spawn without any warning and without any cause inside a mountain base only because it has a temperature high enough and there is no way to prevent it. It makes no sense and it is soooo no immersive. There should be a way to prevent random infestations. If you like to make this game harder, think about a different solution, please. I am saying only about these random events, not caused by a player.
- There should be a way to limit or to select what type of food a colonist can eat. Some food is bad for one but it is good for others (cannibalism).
- please add a fix for a 'toggle categorization mode' so when you try to expand a category a screen is not moving to the left the same time one want to expand a category. Probably a list of categories should be moved a little bit to the right so when you hover a mouse cursor over a top of category triangle it does not move a screen as well.
- I have all tribes hostile to me but only handsome attacks are from tribes. Majority are from mechs. Why this discrepancy? I would say it should be more even.
- Why I can't to bribe a tribe (or something) to be more friendly to me by a comms console even if I am neutral to some of them? All options are grayed out only because I am 'Neural'?
- there should be a search feature in 'zone/storage' - even if i played this game hundreds of hours I am still confused what is where.
- Can I request 'wildlife' window to be still open when you select an animal from it? Additionally it would be awesome if I could move a window to other screen corner and have it opened all the time.
- There should be a way to prioritize a deconstruction tasks - now they can wait forever because of other construction tasks (?)
- There should be a way to re-use some of resources from deads. I am playing cannibal now and I have tons of apparel just rotten - it makes no sense. There should be a way to get at least something from these all things they were wearing...
- If I am able to force a colonist to do something I want it to be continued by him/her no matter what is marked in the 'Work Tab'. Now I need to repeat 'a force' many times or to change assignment in a 'Work Tab'
-----> reserved for an additional feedback.
- beds reservation should last even if the owner went on a caravan. now it seems random collonist can take a bed/room due to owner is 'away', please fix

[m44v]

- Turrets need a visual indication if they are holding fire, several times I have run into the situation "Why aren't firing? WHY?!... oh." A way to tell at glance would be helpful, right now I have to either manually check each turret or select them all and toggle the option on and off.

- After dealing with some mad boomalopes I had one of them downed next to a turret, for moving it away the I used the trick of placing an animal sleeping spot somewhere and getting a pawn to "rescue" it. I use the same trick when rescuing pawns and avoiding walking into the crossfire. I feel this should be implemented in a more legitimate way so the player doesn't need to abuse sleeping spots for getting the same effect, like if the pawn is drafted the player can still control where it goes while carrying the injured and you have the options "drop here" when right-clicking in the floor and "rescue" or "capture" when right-clicking in a hospital bed or prison bed.

- Using stockpile priorities can be a big waste of colonists time. I tried to put small stockpiles with high priority of rice next to the stove so the cook doesn't need to walk far. But everytime he grabs rice from the priority stockpile, someone else comes from further away to refill the missing 5 rice. Would be nice to have a settable limit or something so they only refill when a stack is empty or a simple timer may also do the job (after refilling, don't refill for the next ingame hour if it's not an empty cell).

- Also if someone starts to carry harvested rice from the fields, with priority stockpiles he now only carries 5 to fill the missing 5 rice in the priority stockpile and not 75 and put the rest on the stockpile next to it. Priority piles are nice to order stuff that lies around, but while working it is not very useful.

Yeah, I have observed this as well, though is more an issue of stockpiles getting full than the use of priorities. I watched a hauler get one bar of chocolate from the main stockpile to the shelf in the dinning room, then 5 corn from the "overflow" freezer to the kitchen freezer, then 5 meat ... then 2 beer to another shelf, and it goes on and on because the cook is working and pawns are eating. Meanwhile in the other side of the colony the animals are starving because the hay stockpile is empty and the hay is laying outside deteriorating to 10-20 hp. You have to make stockpiles big enough so they aren't normally full or manually order your haulers around, which is a pain to do with crops.
I don't know how the hauling scheduler works and what priorities uses for choosing what to haul, but I feel it should weight in stockpiles that are empty or hauls where it can carry a mostly full stack, if not that, a tool for designate stuff as priority to haulers, so I don't have to right-click every item.

[bbqftw]

Hi, for people like me that have slight physical problem with mouse accuracy, it would be very nice to type in mood threshold for drugs instead of wrestling with slider

Thanks!!

[anitram]

Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Base builder
Scenario: Crash landed
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest, flat
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 200
Hours played in the last 2 days: ~10
Complete mod list: None

- Pawn stoned on smokeleaf goes bear hunting. Walks straight to the bear's face and starts shooting (manages to do it only once before the bear mauls him). He had an assault rifle.
- Had -caravan ambushed- and -mechanoid raid via drop pods inside the base- at the same time, a couple of seconds only between the start of both events (on base builder difficulty).
- A slight annoyance: two pawns fight, one is downed - he drops his weapon, which is now forbidden - it's very hard to locate, because most of my pawns fight inside of the base, so they're rescued in mere seconds (dogs), and if I don't pause the game in the second he's downed, it takes 20 minutes (real time) to find the weapon. The only solution I have so far is to keep a spare copy of most used weapons, so I can then double-click it while zoomed out.
- "Smart" raiders avoiding traps and turrets - had this happen at least twice - On the right side of my base is a largish deposit of stone. As the game progresses, my pawns mine it, usually drilling a hole - a path of some sort. Raid comes, they "avoid" turrets and go through this path. Which is narrow. And I have pawns waiting on the other side, just taking them out one by one. They basically kill-box themselves. Had they gone straight through the field and to the turrets, they could have done a bit more damage. (I seem to handle mechanoid raids easier than 5ish pirates).
- Friendly factions leaving gifts every time.
- Friendly faction blaming me for the death of their turtle.
- A refugee chased event. Accept, pyromaniac, banish, fight off the chasers. Ten minutes later, incapacitated refugee quest - same dude. I ignore. Again, ten minutes later - same quest, same dude. I ignore. Haven't heard from him since, thankfully.
- I sent my pawns boomalope hunting, so this started a massive, massive fire. The fire then spread out to a pre-built steel structure (it was on the map, closed off from all 4 sides), which burned down to the ground. You can see the problem that could have happened had this been an "ancient danger" structure.

EDIT: one more thing - dogs are starving and won't eat. They are zoned in the base, can enter the fridge, I have both meat and meals, and yet - they starve. This happens most often when a dog is pregnant (so it miscarries), but have randomly observed it in other dogs too. Something happens then, as if they reset, and they continue to eat normally.

[Greep]

Notes on raiding parties. Finally did get an item stash with an orbital targeter and tornado generator.  Have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand it's nice to actually have a reason to do a raiding party, on the other hand, I don't really have any fear of losing my fortress anymore, and I could have solo'd this if I shipped in a bunch of spike traps.  It would be more interesting if the really really big rewards, not serums, but the "nuke the next raid off the face of the planet", had mortars and a bigger fort.  Then again I don't really WANT to lose a fort that's made it to 10 years, though lol.

Additionally, I got drop pod attacked during this, and it smashed some production buildings with a bunch of permanent queued tasks.  I'm not sure of a way to solving this, but I'd like to echo what another player said and resetting these are a pain in the butt.

[5thHorseman]

Additionally, I got drop pod attacked during this, and it smashed some production buildings with a bunch of permanent queued tasks.  I'm not sure of a way to solving this, but I'd like to echo what another player said and resetting these are a pain in the butt.

The game could just remember, without asking, every set of bills on every production building, including destroyed ones. Then when you build a new one you could just import from the list.

Make the list span games and I'll never complain again. About this specific issue.

[Greep]

Might be something a mod can handle since it's QoL, though *shrug*

Also: the ultimate cheeze:

Door peeking turrets below.  Would you like cheese on your cheese sandwich sir?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[bbqftw]

I think its pretty hard to balance the caravan rewards. At the moment I am pretty much only going for the AI persona core or serums.

While we can draw on a lot of experience given our current wealth / pawn situation to intuit how threatening raids will be on the main map, there's far less experience to assess the risks for caravaning (especially early-mid, when you have little to no pawn redundancy).

The variance bands seem pretty out there, from item stash ambushes for "no known threats" at 3-4x your numbers (I've heard from others of 6x+ cases), to 3 guys with sticks trying to 'ambush' 3 power armored + bionic pawns with combat animal support. Then you have the question of raid possibility on the main base while your caravan people are out of town (generally comprising of at least one good fighter).

Then there's the issue of plague / other disease while on caravan. On the main map we can precisely control the tends. On the caravan map god knows what your pawns will do - I remember caravan times where to my horror, glitterworld was happily used to massage some arm bruises while infects remained undealt with. That's in addition to the lack of good beds further decreasing effective immunity gain. Is the design intend that you must caravan with glitterworld lest you get storytold by plague? Or maybe you should only caravan with luciferium addicts? Unless you are big reroller/lucker, odds are at the 5-6 pawn range you will have only one doctor that can do plague tends reliably. In such a situation, you are effectively either taking a game-losing risk by sending your doc out, or risking zero counterplay storytelling death on your caravan members.

Same concept with recreation and pawns entering encounter maps at mental break range.

Overall, unclear risks and genuinely high risks combine to make an unappealing mechanic. So I end up typically over-preparing on both ends, and only caravan for insane rewards. Which means caravaning practically only during late game, when I can spare gojuice/shield belts/triprockets/glittermeds for any contingency.

[Greep]

Yeah the main issue it's there's a lot of invisible things going in the background: for instance, lump threats seem to be half the size of site threats and caravan walk events seem proportional to the caravan instead.  So when you se a known threat: none, and you don't know the code/ experience, you will have no idea what to experience.

The other of course is a bad hit on a caravan can mean everybody dies.  So, you basically end up only going to safe things.

And then finally, things like wooden armor (excellent) aren't even worth the drop pods

[dogthinker]

Now for those of you who are actually wealth managing and ethical players, thus cannot afford the raid point boost from haul-doggos, what is your corpse disposal mechanism? I feel like this and ultra wealth control are the true hallmarks differentiating idiots like me and true masters of the game

I get the impression that haul-doggos are far cheaper than using colonists to haul. One bionic limb ~= 5 doggos, I think. I wouldn't skimp on the bionics, but the doggos are an even bigger multiplier to the colony's overall efficiency. I think armour (and excess weapons) is probably the most obvious thing you can skimp on, although I've recently decided that my colony is going to have to invest in ~4 suits of power armour, to beef up the melee frontline (after a disaster story described earlier in this thread.)

On that note, I'm a little disappointed at how fragile archotech limbs are. From the description I thought they'd be extremely durable. Lost my first archotech leg, and powerclaw, to a scyther in the very first fight since fitting them. It was a bit underwhelming, for something so expensive, to say the least.

Corpse (and unwanted equipment) disposal, are simply stockpiles (near to the most common combat areas), surrounded by a 3 tile concrete firebreak, and a molotov cocktail. If the fight's particularly big I might set all the colonists to (priority 1) haul for a bit to get the corpses piled up, otherwise the colonists (priority 1) clean the blood off the streets while the doggos do the hauling. It's ok if the colonists to see a few corpses while they haul - they're probably already corpse debuffed from the battle itself anyway. If they get too stressed, then they can always have a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

[Greep]

Well the thing about haulo-dogs is that 5 haulodogs is ~100 raid points, and an installed bionic arm is 0.  So if you're at a point where you can't afford things but can stand the raid, the dogs make sense.  But usually it's the other way around.

[dogthinker]

Well the thing about haulo-dogs is that 5 haulodogs is ~100 raid points, and an installed bionic arm is 0.  So if you're at a point where you can't afford things but can stand the raid, the dogs make sense.  But usually it's the other way around.

Really? I (incorrectly?) assumed it was based on wealth? A pawn with installed mods is worth a *lot* more than a pawn without. i.e. One of my pawns has an archotech eye. In wealth terms, she has value comparable to ~20 dogs. Are you sure that doesn't translate to raid points? If not, then I clearly need to invest a lot more in making supersoldiers.

[Greep]

Yup.  To be clear, wealth is the main factor.  It's just bionics/organs and flooring don't count towards wealth.  And combat animals and pawns also have their own additional factoring that has nothing to do with their actual market value.  Except animals where part of that is their market value (), and part of it isn't.  It's why even though sculptures are better for room beauty, if you just want extremely impressive, silver flooring is not a bad option.