Unstable build feedback thread

[Jstank]

Some changes are indeed experimental.

I'll probably bring back predator attacks at higher difficulties only.

Would highly suggest medium and above. I think it should be expected that a predatory creature is a danger to your colonist. I still would like to see a pause notification of the attack. It should really be a raid level notification!

[robno]

Yes, medium and above seems fair.

For caravans, I would like the ability to see what a location will buy during forming a caravan, so I don't have to close the dialog and select what to take all over again. In 'Choose route', when you click on a location, the button for 'show what will buy' should come up.

[Fleurs]

If traps are going to hurt pawn again, i would like an option to disarm them beside the option to re-arm them. So we can only arm them when there is a danger coming, like a raid, there is no reason to keep trap activated all the time if it can hurt our own pawn.
And that will give us a way to make some lure trap for hunting, like a 1x1 pemmican storezone, with a deadfall trap on it or around it, to lure wildlife.

[Greep]

30 days into project killbox.  Randy extreme, boreal mountains(testing middish economy.  Also boreal looks neat 

Main initial goal is to build a very very short term fort on the outside, and mine out the basic perimeter for the end game fort to make sure there isn't any hidden reveal surprises on the map.  Some previous sillynesses and quests were posted before.

Raid #1) 4 extremely ill-equipped raiders which snuck up on me before I got turrets.  They were just... so bad.  I felt bad for them.  None were downed and I was.. thankful to be honest.

#2) a bunch of foxes.  surprisingly hard to hit with turrets, so they nearly took one down.  Run into my fort with a bit of deadfalls which took two out.

#3) A very large all melee raid of about 12 dudes when following a refugee, a very randy raid.  Luckily, a turret exploded in their faces.

#4)  A siege half that size with all short ranged weapons which was just sad.  Had a good shooter manage to take it down with a rifle before the mortar finished.  I somehow missed that one had a frag will sniping them, so he managed to take down a turret when he got too close.

Current fort as it stands below.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[PurpleTonberry]

Tynan, I've been noticing in your changelogs that you have been trying to eliminate unnecessary micromanagement as much as possible. Thank you for that, by the way, a lot of the changes have been good QoL changes. There's been one small thing that has bothered me through many, many updates to this game though, more-so now that the negatives are more severe than ever: Cabin Fever.

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with the existence of cabin fever and its severity, but I never understood why pawns suffering from it don't just take a walk outside in an unroofed area. I'm not keeping them locked up like rats, nor are they restricted to any particular area. In particular, I think that on their next joy activity, they should just prioritize taking a walk outside or stargazing/cloudwatching/sunwatching/etc if they suffer too severely from a lack of going outside (if area restrictions allow, of course).

I've attached a screenshot of a colony I just started a couple hours ago. The debuff doesn't make much sense, but that's not really what I'm going for here (even if the Trapped Underground thing is a bug). I'm not keeping the pawns locked up under a roof (don't let the toxic fallout fool you, they're still set to Unrestricted access to the map) and they have 5 hours a day of dedicated joy time, so just.... go outside! I don't think in this kind of situation that I should have to draft pawns and drag them outside to stand around and do nothing so they can not be under a roof for a few hours when they are perfectly capable of that on their own accord.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[awful-normal]

I just finished my 2nd complete play-through of 1.0

Started with build 1946 and finished on build 1954
Storyteller: Cassandra classic
Difficulty: Medium
Map: Large hills with year-round summer
Scenario: Crash landed modified to start with 4 colonists
Total play time: 45 hours 59 min
Final population: 23 colonists
Colonists killed: 3 + 1 severe brain scar
Left on spaceship on day 358
Final colony wealth: 822,248

A few thoughts:

Starting the ship
-This being my 2nd time through 1.0, the significance of the 15 day onslaught after starting the ship was much more influential in everything I did, pretty much from day 1.  IMO, having to prepare for and (hopefully) overcome this rather difficult final obstacle pretty much completely solves the issue of feeling like the game never reaches a satisfying conclusion.
I love that surviving the 15 day period is legitimately difficult and the possibility of losing everything in one last epic struggle is real.  In all my past play-throughs I just played until I got bored or wanted to try a new base design or try some new mods.  Now the game has much more of a center of gravity.  If you want to survive and get off the rimworld, you need to build a base that is defensively sound and able to ward off a number of different kinds of threats.  Likely all at once and with half your colonists in the hospital at some point.  Both 1.0 play-throughs had me literally watching the countdown clock until the ship was ready and launching immediately as soon as it was.  It felt satisfying like I had earned it and like (for lack of a better term) I "won" the game.  This is such an elegant solution to what I saw as a major problem before.  Awesome!

Deep drilling
-I had said before that the changes to deep-drill mechanics made things feel like more of a grind.  Since then, deep drills were made re-installable and it seemed like the "to deep" infestations were less (maybe much less) frequent.  I think there were some other tweaks too.  This time through, it felt better.  Still slower than the good 'ol days but reasonable.  This play-through was about 3.5 hours shorter than my previous but I could have wrapped it up sooner if I had really wanted to and the fact that I didn't is a good sign.

Sappers
-These new sapper raids are hard to deal with.  Personally, I love it.  I think this game is at its best when I find myself pausing and staring at the screen for 5 min straight and thinking "how the hell am I going to deal with this?"  These new sappers have me doing that a lot.  I also like how raiders are showing up with different sets of weapons and (I think) a lot more triple rocket/doomsday launchers which meshes well with the longer range of the autocannon turrets.  All-in-all the defensive strategy aspect of the game has improved significantly IMO. 

Sandbags
-I feel like it takes too long to repair sandbags.  Again, just one man's opinion but they take so much longer to repair than to build them.  Just feels bleh.

Crafting quality
-Definitely liking the reduced number of quality levels and the rarity of masterwork and legendary items.  In this play-through I came across a legendary charge lance and legendary power armor.  That comes to 2 legendary items in around 800 in-game days over my two 1.0 play-throughs.  I think that feels about right but I wish they would have been more impressive, given their rarity.  Especially the charge lance.  I feel like for legendary weapons, things like higher damage per shot and shorter warmup/cooldown time could be on the table.  In the end, the legendary charge lance was only marginally better than the excellent charge lance.

Melee
-In the past I very rarely used melee as a strategy at all unless I picked up a brawler who was good at something else that I needed.  This time through I had about 50/50 shooters and melee fighters, mostly to adapt to the frequent drop pods of mechanoids in the base.  Turns out melee fighters are extremely useful in a number of different scenarios... who knew? (probably everyone else).  I'll definitely be using them in the future.  Balance-wise, they felt good if not a little OP once they had power armor, plasteel longswords, and shield belts.  But maybe that's because I've never really used them in large numbers before.

Right on top of you mechanoid raids
-Still felt too frequent to me.  I think they were tweaked recently to have more non-mech raids late-game, but I still got a bunch.  I'd say close to 50% of all mid to late-game raids were of this type.  I'm really not a fan of this raid type because they're basically just an unavoidable resource drain.  No matter how well prepared you are, they're probably going to destroy a bunch of stuff and set you back at least a little (maybe a lot, depending on where they land).  It's not usually a huge deal but it just feels like random punishment for no reason.  The tornado of raid types. 

Quests
-This time through, I went on a number of caravan quests.  I had 3 or 4 with antigrain warheads as a reward which I took to help prepare for starting the ship.  In the end when I started the ship I had stockpiled 22 antigrain warheads.  Guess what?  I put them in the same stockroom as the chemfuel.  If you put the antigrain warheads in the same stockroom as the chemfuel, you're gonna have a bad time.  Juri and Remy sure did...   Anyway, I liked the new changes to caravaning, all of which have made it easier and more of a realistic option.  Still haven't encountered a tornado generator yet though.

1.0
-I know there are apparently a lot more tweaks and changes coming for 1.0, but I would just like to say that if it dropped as-is today, I'd be perfectly happy with it.  Imma build the watermill next time through.  and sniper turrets!?... awww sh*t.

[Greep]

Guess what?  I put them in the same stockroom as the chemfuel.  If you put the antigrain warheads in the same stockroom as the chemfuel, you're gonna have a bad time.  Juri and Remy sure did...

:O  Pics?

"-In the past I very rarely used melee as a strategy at all unless I picked up a brawler who was good at something else that I needed.  This time through I had about 50/50 shooters and melee fighters, mostly to adapt to the frequent drop pods of mechanoids in the base.  Turns out melee fighters are extremely useful in a number of different scenarios... who knew? (probably everyone else)"

They are so nice once you have shield belts!  A bit suicidal before then though, heh.

[awful-normal]

Ugh.. no.. I didn't think about it until it was too late.  Ironically, the recent change to make mortars more damage resistant allowed for Remy to make a heroic last ditch effort to put the fire out before the massive explosion took out about two city blocks of my base.  All I could think was how I should have made a slo-mo video of Remy rushing into the chemical fire and sacrificing himself for the good of the colony with "I will always love you" from The Bodyguard playing in the background.   

[Zombull]

Shouldn't flak armor be better than plate armor given it's farther up the tech tree and is much more expensive to make?


[attachment deleted due to age]

[Kubouch]

Some changes are indeed experimental.

I'll probably bring back predator attacks at higher difficulties only.

While I despised having my colonists killed by a hungry polar bear that appeared on the ice sheet all the way across the map, and I definitely save scummed quite a few times due to it, if you bring it back please just give somne sort of warning flag before hand.  That's really the only part that made is ultra terrible.   We get a warning for a mad animal, a hungry hunter is basically the same thing and keeping track of every single predator on the map is a bit of a silly expectation for a player to have.

Exactly this. I think predator attacks are a good thing. We just need to get a warning (white popup text at the top is enough) at the moment when the predator goes into "Hunting colonist/tamed animal" mode.

[Sig]

The jungle is still barren.

1.0 freshly generated jungle: https://i.imgur.com/zTpSrC9.jpg
0.18 freshly generated jungle: https://i.imgur.com/UJqgPNO.jpg

In the older version, every fertile tile was occupied by some kind of vegetation. Now, no less than half is just bare. In fact, flora density of current jungle is somewhere around that of 0.18 boreal forest: https://i.imgur.com/KF91JoC.jpg

I've also noticed this. A tropical swamp used to have vegetation everywhere, but now even at regular temperatures, the dirt is much more noticeable.

[Mehni]

Lower vegetation density has been reported previously, as was closed with the following comment:

Actually it's from a fix to a bug that was introduced around A17 that caused plant and animal density to become 2x what it was supposed to be.

So this isn't a bug - it's a bug fix.

[shaw6622]

First time posting.  I've played 401 hours and love the game (clearly). 

My current playthrough I'm on Phoebe Medium, Naked Brutality, just into my 2nd Spring.  Mountains and a huge river.  I won't report on my playthrough in detail as I've done lots of restarts when changes have happened and haven't really tried combat/caravans etc that much.  So just some observations and comments on what I have noticed.

- When I right click and choose 'prioritise' for a task, I have to then watch to make sure the pawn actually completes it - if it's far away, or it's their usual bedtime or they feel like some recreation, they wander off and do something else. 

I'd love it if telling them to prioritise means they'll see it through to the end, even if they drop from exhaustion - if we really need that steel mined or that turret built, I don't want ot have to baby sit them to make sure they do it, reclicking on prioritise every so often, and having to change their work priorities and/or change the restrictions tab, is a real pain.

- I didn't mind predators hunting colonists - added an element of danger to leaving the base, and makes more sense than them ignoring the colonists.

- For me skills seem to be learned at a decent rate.  Crafting I do find hard to train up, especially at first, but so far we've only wanted to get some basic equipment so not a huge problem - when I played at higher difficulty it was more of a concern though as my pawns only had awful bows against raiders armed with all sorts of guns. 

- I like the balance of traits, makes for some interesting characters.  I have a careful shooting psychopath with a chemical interest, a gay ascetic, an annoyingly voiced sickly person, and an indoor-loving pyromaniac.

I have to say that though I like the trait, I dislike the term 'indoorsman'.  Sounds clunky and awkward.  Maybe something like 'homeloving' or 'unadventurous'.

Also I really dislike that everyone insults pawns who are disfigured or 'ugly', but are more likely to like the 'beautiful' people.  I think you'd be much more likely to want to be friends with the best shooter or the person who can fix things, or the cook, regardless of how they look.  People are much more likely to be valued for what they bring to the group, and whether they pull their weight.  You'd gravitate towards someone who seemed steady, confident, likely to keep their head in a crisis, rather than the person who spent ages getting their hair to look good.

I'd prefer an 'unkind' trait where just those pawns would pick on the disfigured.  And a different trait that made people more likely to like/dislike them, instead of ugly/beautiful - maybe something like 'inspiring' versus 'complainer'.   Sorry if this counts as 'theory crafting' - I'm a bit vague about what that term means.

- I love the new difficulty level descriptions.  I realised that I kept playing a difficulty too high for my play style and then getting frustrated, because I was choosing the one that said it was for players with experience and I was too proud to choose the one suitable for new players.

- I'm also loving that traps don't hurt friendlies now - I used them once early on, one of my pawns got hurt so I never bothered again.  Having to make complex maze-like entrances to my base doesn't interest me, I just like setting up very simple defences - sandbags, turrets, cover for my shooters, a strong wall all around as soon as I can to keep out wild animals.  So having a few traps around will be a great addition.

Sorry this ended up a lot longer than intended, hope some of it is useful.

Keep up the good work. 

[Syrchalis]

I really liked higher density of plants. Trees were a bit too dense in A17/B18, but especially grass seems really scarce now. I would prefer some vegetation level between the buggy A17/B18 and the fixed 1.0.

[Madman666]

Same. In fact i really enjoyed the density of both plantlife and animals in A17 and B18. It actually felt like a temperate forest\jungle. Now it doesn't. The only problem to fix there was regrow times, so that after a poison ship\toxic fallout\winter it wouldn't take forever for the map to not look like a desert.