Unstable build feedback thread

[anotherrimworld]

Randy rough, naked brutality, flat arid shrubland with yearlong harvest, river in the middle. Loving every change I've seen so far.

First thing to notice is the difficulty. Up until alpha 17(?) I'd always played randy extreme but some changes bumped me down to rough difficulty to enjoy myself. This game started slow which should be expected since you have no food and so much to do but the challenge was great. Most other games I'd always feel well behind what the game had to throw at me with raids. If you started a game only getting things like heat waves and manhunter packs, when a raid finally did arrive it would have 2-3x as many guys with far superior firepower. Attacks now seem far more balanced and I find myself happy dealing with raids, ancient ship parts and manhunter packs knowing I have a fighting chance without having to resort to killboxes and trap tunnels. First time in as long as I can remember not having to build either. I'm reading the complaints about difficulty and I honestly can't understand what people are talking about.

Second thing is electricity. I was quick to notice how good the watermills were with constant power so I quickly got 2 installed. The fact that trees are almost impossible to come by without trade due to 4 back-to-back beaver/fallout incidents balanced out how OP they were for myself but I could see how they could be overused so the updates were needed. They are much needed in the game though. Most of my playthroughs end up with me running multiple colonies and often they would be attacked simultaneously with 100+ raiders. This would lead to necessary killboxes which would take crazy amounts of power and when zzzts happened, the explosions would be huge. This lead to me using a circuit breaker mod as the only way combat this problem. Having another way to get constant power, with the lower electricity requirements and not needing killboxes seems to have eliminated this frustration for me so far. Awesome

Better quest rewards and better map control actually have me excited to get back out in the world where before it just wasn't worth the risk without having a crack team of bionic snipers on the ready to blast to the rescue in transport pods.

Faction relations are more interesting now. Good choice removing donations from the comms console as before I'd have so much silver in that I would just hire out all of my defensive needs as needed. I'm allied with 2 factions but still haven't had them help me at all. I managed to go from ally with one, accidentally capturing one of their men in an escape pod bringing us hostile, to then back to allies. For my super poor little colony to maintain such good relations, again makes me wonder about complaints of the current relationship loss.

Bridges, aforementioned watermills and underwater conduits were much needed as rivers before would just cut your colony in two. With future fishing and hopefully boat attack mods, we just keep getting closer to making cool coastal towns. Since most successful real world cities started near water, I always found it strange that Rimworld would teach you that the opposite was better.

New armor system is great and seeing the occasional bullet bounce off of scythers made things a little more exciting.

Infestations giving you a little time to react was needed. Too many instant deaths before led me to be hyper-vigilant about filling in roofed areas which defeated the fun of caves for me without another counter. I have had both deep drilling and "natural" infestations now and with the prep time and new smaller attack numbers, it was another fun doable attack instead of a Starship Troopers sized bug attack appearing from the corner of a bedroom.

64-bit, adding more bionics to vanilla, copy/pasting bills, controlling who can do each bill, etc. Awesome. Keep up the good work

[Snafu_RW]

Or add a landfill mechanic that will turn shallow water squares bordering buildable terrain into more buildable terrain.

Standard watermill design includes a channel to 'force' water from the source (river) into a suitable chute (& its outflow, natch) to attain max power output; they're not built directly on the river bank. Could this design strategy be accomplished without getting into 'z-level' territory? It would certainly ease placement of w'wheels..

Possibly make the w'wheel building a 2-step processs: first dig your chute appropriately (with miners?), then plop the building b/p?

[TheMeInTeam]

Comes down to base design.  On my stream Saturday/Sunday I held larger raids than you describe with fewer pawns capable of violence.  That's just how extreme is (and was in previous patches too).

You'll have a much harder time since you don't have a setup that lets you isolate some of the raiders, manipulate AI, or get shots w/o them returning fire.

Tynan said that he was rebalancing the game to avoid the killbox only strategy but with this kind of difficulty, if I have to do what you say I might as well create a trap corridor. In all my previous plays I always rush that, a trap corridor that goes into a "killbox" without turrets, just my pawns. But I thought he was trying to make it that we didnt have to resort to cheese tactics.

What differentiates "cheese" from "not cheese"?  I consider it a major boost of confidence that Tynan didn't bring these terms up when discussing strategy/tactic strength, because it's functionally meaningless...often even in the context of one person.

Ultimately, you are in a scenario where by design you need to reliably beat statistically similar attackers that outnumber 2:1, 3:1, or more.  If you are fighting a person with equal ability to yourself, this is impossible.  No matter what, you're going to do something that results in leveling those odds, or you're going to lose.  What makes some ways to do this "cheese" but not other ways?  Most people who use "cheese" or "exploit" as a term don't know...they can't actually define it even on their own terms in a self-consistent fashion.

I can't see how simply making lots of walls/doors everywhere and beating down raiders one at a time with melee could possibly be construed as "cheese" for example.

Also be careful - armor rework has non-trivial implications for the utility of deadfall traps.  That might not be something on which you can rely to carry vs these numbers.  Micromanagement adjustments to the AI changes will be consistently the most robust/rapidly adaptive .

[Gfurst]

What differentiates "cheese" from "not cheese"?  I consider it a major boost of confidence that Tynan didn't bring these terms up when discussing strategy/tactic strength, because it's functionally meaningless...often even in the context of one person.

Well deep down everyone knows whats "cheezy", for example building a door at the edge of map and having roof falldown kill raiders.
For me it is if something is sensible and intuitive, as if a completely new player to Rimworld would think of that, as opposed to only veterans of the game know about them from hours and hours of playing the game with every possible strategy. So I think it comes down to, if you're only able to survive using these cheezy techniques then something might be wrong.
And believe me I had my time doing wild trap mazes that lead to some sort of killbox, and I rather not have to rely on them. And in current state of the game, even if a raid goes terribly wrong it barely means game over, since they just steal somethings or someones and go away.

Standard watermill design includes a channel to 'force' water from the source (river) into a suitable chute (& its outflow, natch) to attain max power output; they're not built directly on the river bank. Could this design strategy be accomplished without getting into 'z-level' territory? It would certainly ease placement of w'wheels..

Possibly make the w'wheel building a 2-step processs: first dig your chute appropriately (with miners?), then plop the building b/p?

Talking about realistic waterwheel would need some realistic water flow simulation, which believe is something really non-trivial. And believe the word you were trying to use is "funneling the water". It would also mean some form of terraforming which implies much more balance issues.
So I think it should just be like a regular windmill, having variable output, but much slower fluctuation through the seasons.

[TheMeInTeam]

Well deep down everyone knows whats "cheezy"

No, they don't.  They really don't. 

If you tried to give a list of criteria that defines future cheese in a way that separates it from standard gameplay, you'd fail.  You'd violate your own standards, either by defining playing the game as cheese or not actually discriminating tactics.

In 1.0 (and every previous iteration of the game I've played) it's possible to kill a centipede within the first few days of the game and take no damage whatsoever.  Without building anything.  Is that consistent with your "intuition"?  I'd love to see the criteria you'd come up with that would properly separate the requisite actions as "cheese", still play the game yourself, and not be incoherent in the process. 

But if you can't list that criteria, offhand right now, then you don't know what cheese is.  Not even on your own terms.  That goes for anybody else who believes they know it intuitively too. 

That's no way to balance a game or make it play well.  I'm grateful, very grateful given my experience elsewhere, that Rimworld's development has not fallen into this trap.

[Snafu_RW]

Standard watermill design includes a channel to 'force' water from the source (river) into a suitable chute (& its outflow, natch) to attain max power output; they're not built directly on the river bank. Could this design strategy be accomplished without getting into 'z-level' territory? It would certainly ease placement of w'wheels..

Possibly make the w'wheel building a 2-step processs: first dig your chute appropriately (with miners?), then plop the building b/p?

Talking about realistic waterwheel would need some realistic water flow simulation, which believe is something really non-trivial

That's fairynuff, but as z-lvls aren't to be considered (& considering the many other examples of simplification already extant) I feel it's more lore-consistent than having such a huge building effort be an easy escape from the 'power trap' early on.

And believe the word you were trying to use is "funneling the water"

Tks; that was the phrase I was searching for.

It would also mean some form of terraforming which implies much more balance issues.

Hence my suggestion(s) above to avoid this..

[jchavezriva]

I find it odd how the temperature can go all the way to 47 °C on a place so close to the ice sheets.

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Aj5haUV-egFFkT7DOqnZhX4urDXP

Screenshots show just 43 but i saw a 47 °C later.

[Namsan]

I played unstable build for 10 days, and I think It's very improved and nice.
Early-game raid is noticeably easier, and late-game raid is more harder. I like this change.
And thanks for nerfing deep drill. it was so OP, honestly.
Also, I really liked new caravan UI and mechanics like foraging while traveling.

Suggestion:
I think masterwork/legendary firearms deserve increased damage output or/and less cool-down time, because they are now more special and harder to get.

[Ser Kitteh]

On the crafting situation:

The problem in regards to crafting/smithing/tailoring atm is that pawns have a terrible tendency to begin work, stop halfway, go to sleep/eat/otherjob, return to their benches only to work on a new thing entirely. This results in half finished projects lying around the workshop and productivity being a complete problem.

If I were to hazard a guess of why this is, is that pawn AI prioritises doing the next job instead of completing the current one. I told my best crafting to make two power helmets, and rather than finishing one, she started on both and alternates between the two. Sometimes she goes on the other side of the colony to craft a bunch of flak pants! Didn't help she was a good doctor and grower too.

This is a bigger problem as the number of crafters increase, and you want your best ones to make the power armor while the lower levelled ones makes bionics, components, and other stuff that doesn't have quality. There is no elegant way to do this, even assigning your preferred crafter to the preferred projects does little to mitigate this issue.

Then apply this to ALL benches, with the only exception being stone bricks because stone bricks does not become a "unfinished X", and the confusement of what is smithing and what is crafting and what the drugs lab is and you get the player to micromanage the hell out of their workshop.

My suggestions on how to fix:
1. Make each bench be VERY clear on what kind of job they are (crafting, smithing, etc)
2. The ability to better assign who does the quality crafting. Sometimes I want my best crafter to pump out the power armor while other times I don't mind if the third best start doing the clothes. The crafting slider allow this to a degree, but it still an inelegant situation.
3. Improve pawn AI so they priotise finishing their previous job.
4. Some products have a minimal crafting requirement (components need , so there's no real need to have the slider go to 0 for it.
5. The whole drug labs thing needs a serious rethinking. It's very easy to have a pawn that's a great crafter or a great researcher but unable to do either because they lack the minimum requirement to craft medicine.
6. Smelting and stonemaking should give SOME levelling, no matter how small. It is quite the chore popping out 50 bows just so my researcher has the minimum crafting to make medicine.

[Greep]

Also be careful - armor rework has non-trivial implications for the utility of deadfall traps.  That might not be something on which you can rely to carry vs these numbers.  Micromanagement adjustments to the AI changes will be consistently the most robust/rapidly adaptive .

Out of curiosity, I tried a mountain town again with the usual single deadfall spam entrance, and this has been my observation as well.  Worse, sappers are now grenading traps, which I don't remember them doing.  Deadfalls do work as a nice stopgap to get to turrets, though, and as an impromptu defense for stuff like psychic ships.  Although now that you can move mini turrets maybe it's better to just build powerlines everywhere lol.  Autocannons are seamingly like the best long term defense now.

[Boboid]

On the crafting situation:

The problem in regards to crafting/smithing/tailoring atm is that pawns have a terrible tendency to begin work, stop halfway, go to sleep/eat/otherjob, return to their benches only to work on a new thing entirely.

That's... very strange and really caught my eye because I've never had that be an issue with an individual crafter unless I've changed the priorities while there's an unfinished piece.. Even then pawns handle the situation just fine - Finishing incomplete work first assuming that there is any for the currently highest priority bill.

This is a bigger problem as the number of crafters increase, and you want your best ones to make the power armor while the lower levelled ones makes bionics, components, and other stuff that doesn't have quality. There is no elegant way to do this, even assigning your preferred crafter to the preferred projects does little to mitigate this issue.

Erm.. You can do this quite easily for each individual bill. Under Details you can select which pawns do which jobs and if there is no designated crafter you can set a minimum and maximum skill.
If you don't want your competent crafters to make components then set the maximum skill for that bill below that of your most competent crafter.
If pawn (A) is assigned to do a bill then under no circumstances will pawn (B) or any other pawns do that. It's not a preference system at all.

1. Make each bench be VERY clear on what kind of job they are (crafting, smithing, etc)

You can quite easily see which jobs correspond to which work type by going to the Work screen and mousing over the tooltip for each one. For example Crafting covers "Work at Refinery, Synthesize Drugs, Make stone blocks, Smelt items".

2. The ability to better assign who does the quality crafting. Sometimes I want my best crafter to pump out the power armor while other times I don't mind if the third best start doing the clothes. The crafting slider allow this to a degree, but it still an inelegant situation.

As mentioned above there are two systems that can be used to determine who does what job.(3 if you count work priorities)
If no specific individual crafter is assigned to a bill then the slider does what you're requesting.
Additionally you can just assign an individual to a bill and they will be the only person who can do that task.

5. The whole drug labs thing needs a serious rethinking. It's very easy to have a pawn that's a great crafter or a great researcher but unable to do either because they lack the minimum requirement to craft medicine.
6. Smelting and stonemaking should give SOME levelling, no matter how small. It is quite the chore popping out 50 bows just so my researcher has the minimum crafting to make medicine.

I mostly disagree but I can offer you some useful advice : Given that there's no speed or quality increase for creating drugs or medicine literally anyone with the requisite 4 in crafting and research can do those tasks equally as efficiently as someone with 20 research and crafting.
Literally any random chump with 4/4 is fine for the task.


One important thing which you may have overlooked is that if pawn (A) starts say.. a Jacket, it's theirs. Nobody else will work on that Jacket. When pawn (B) comes along and looks at a bill with 2 jackets on it he will take pawn (A)'s jacket, put it on the floor, and start on his jacket. Unfinished jackets don't count towards the the bill's completion so if pawn (C) now comes along and starts a jacket and finishes it then pawn (A) finishes their jacket, pawn (B) will have an unfinished jacket that he will never work on because there's no more demand for jackets.

As mentioned earlier you can circumnavigate this by setting specific crafters to each bill. This will completely prevent the aforementioned problem because only the selected pawn will ever make jackets.

[NagashUD]

Quest spawning rate :

Quests are less spamming now, but appear still very often, not time to do a quest, an other spawn already, maybe reduce still a bit the spawning delay ?

Flak pants :

Hmmm souldn't be some Flak legs protection ? like some legs armor over the pants as the flak vest : https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1YbG2OVXXXXa0XXXXq6xXFXXXT/Police-Anti-Riot-Suit-Full-Body-Armor.jpg

mid game, pants become useless, makes it sad.

[Tynan]

New build. Raw changelog:

--------

Remove unnecessary meta file.
Reversed def directionality of comms console to make sense and match B18 again.
Reversed def directionality of dresser.
Fix: Ship engine graphic reversed east/west.
Fix: Comms console has chair graphic on interaction spot but doesn't use it.
Plate armor research cost 1800 -> 1400. Plate armor armor rating reduced ~3%.
Relations shifts over time are a bit slower (0.25/day -> 0.20/day)
Exclude Photoshop .psd files from VSCode.
Armor rebalance: Double armor of devilstrand, hyperweave, thrumbofur. Increase other leathers' armor ratings. Reduce flak pants/jacket to 40/10/10. Thrumbo now has natural armor, but reduced health (thus fewer permanent injuries over long-term use).
Changed Thing.SpecialDisplayStats from a property to a method.
Costed up autocannon turret and made it no longer stuffed.
Royal bed gold cost 10 -> 50
Fix: Some armor can be made on the wrong table.
Reset the minimum ticks until mental break upon mental state recovery. MinTicksBelowToBreak 1500 -> 3000.
Improve transport pod contents output to show stack counts and combine same-def items.
Display manhunter chance even if it's zero.
Less heart attacks for young people.
Adjusted pyro and gourmand special mental break rates. No longer related to mood.
Add special requested name to get around tech problem on website.
Settlement -> SettlementBase, FactionBase -> Settlement
Escape ship map is now considered a PlayerHome.
Fix: Ship quest's computer core is disconnected from the rest of the ship.
Fix 3459: Randomly-generated player faction name is invalid
Fix 3466: Obedience-training an animal doesn't auto-assign master
Fix 3467: Pawn faces the opposite direction when burying a corpse
Fix 3470: ToWild bullets can damage conduits that are underneath walls
Fix 3461: Escape pod notification befriending text is still present if there's a pirate inside
Fix 3468: Back compatibility-related errors with new joy boredom state.
Fix 3464: Exception filling window for Verse.Dialog_InfoCard: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an

[NiftyAxolotl]

(Previously: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41766.msg413765#msg413765)
Things are looking up for the Muffalo Mob. Two caravans* sold some junk for a thousand vegetables and other goodies**. I've got about 400 total nutrition saved up for the long winter, and there's still about 2k meat worth of wildlife walking around. The Mob has expanded slightly to 29 animals, and we are catching up on training.

*The caravan experience seemed fine to me, but the 2% trade price bonus was insulting. I would actually rather not have it. The opportunity to sell whatever I want plus the extra chance at rare goods could be motivation enough. For a price bonus, I'd rather see some kind of delivery premium based on weight.
**A telescope! I always liked buying them for aesthetic reasons, but I didn't think they were any good. Now I see that a new recreation type translates directly into extra colonist time. Nifty!

[East]

deepdrill also does not boost comfort. You should change the chair icon like comms console.

Can not desktop icon created with steam icon creation run in 64 bit?
You can get 64-bit from the game folder, but many people just think they will run and complain.
Is there a way to verify that the game is 64-bit after running?
Does running in 64-bit really work to reduce game delays?