Unstable build feedback thread

[NagashUD]

Storyteller: Phoebe
Difficulty: Merciless
Biome/hilliness: Desert
Commitment mode: Yes
Current colony age (days): 98
Hours played in the last 2 days: 2
Complete mod list: None


Ieds traps are now quite balanced for the price; but enemies now turn around every traps, like if they see them.

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[xrumblingcdsx]

Randy Merciless on Sea Ice
Mods: Numbers, Private Hair Style Collection

Chickens of a trade caravan just stole my meals that are located behind doors and in my stockpile.
Also forbidding the door obviously does not work. Do I have to place a wall in front of my doors now, everytime I get a trader?
Sounds like a minor issue, but on Sea Ice that can easily mean death if trader animals now steal food.

Had the same thing happen to me on sea ice a few builds back and I did the same thing you're thinking of I walled in 9 stacks of food for emergencies only. Chickens are a scourge. They eat very often and when all I have lying around are meals they eat me out of house and home.

I really wish we could designate an area for visitors. If it's nice you could get a bonus to relations, if you murder them all... your relations would tank.

On a side note I had a hungry wild wolf on the map go after and kill a yorkie as the animal trader was entering and I got a penalty to my relations from it. Seemed a bit unfair.

[wastelandr]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Rough
Biome/hilliness: Temperate Forest / Small hills
Commitment mode: No, but only reloaded when trying to figure out the tornado generator
Current colony age (days): 204
Hours played in the last 2 days: 6-8
Complete mod list: Progress Renderer
Scenario: Crashlanded
Versions: .1968 - .1987

We launched! OMG! That took so long and the whole ship building process was harder than expected. I hadn't built a ship since A15 and hadn't launched a ship since the first time you could caravan to one. I usually have other goals or endpoints in my games (oftentimes thwarted by the forces of RimWorld) than launching the ship. This playthrough started fairly normally and was even somewhat story free for the early to mid-game. Leopard and Ziggy got married and soon after Artemis and Sexton got married. We survived various raids and even had some successful caravan requests, item stashes, and incapacitated rescue missions. In fact, very early on (in the first half of the first year) we got an item stash quest for an AI Core. We were "ambushed" by 2 melee pawns which were easily dispatched and we carried that critical piece back proudly. Since we had decided from the beginning to get off this planet as quickly as possible, we rushed to ship building research and its prerequisites, ignoring stuff like gunsmithing, turrets, medicine production and other stuff until needed or I was waiting for the multi-analyzer.

The real story started once we built 2 ship structural beams. I measured room for 12 sleep pods but had 14 colonists. Unfortunately Randy must have heard me say, "Well I guess I'll just have to leave a few behind" and he started making those decisions for us. We lost our best researcher, negotiator and original colonist in our first poison ship fight. I considered leaving Alpha behind researching since he had poor shooting skills and was fairly valuable, but figured this was a fight for everyone. Two lancers and 2 scythers popped out of the ship and the first shot of the first lancer hit our beloved Alpha straight in the heart, ripping through his heavy fur duster and flak vest. The incident was so shocking and tragic to us that it was even carved into his sarcophagus. And thus began our seasons of sadness. In response to loosing her friend Alpha, Hermine decided to go on a psychite binge. Hermine was a master crafter and the only one intelligent enough to craft medicine. She was so valuable to the space going efforts of the colony that I had been keeping her out of all conflicts even though she was a level 15 melee specialist. We thought about stopping her but how? She was decked out in a shield belt, thrumbofur duster, advanced helmet with flak vest and wielding a thrumbo horn. She took 1 hit of the flake that Randy had dropped on us (which we ere planning on giving away) and instantly overdosed to death. Oddly, as valuable as she was to our efforts to get off the planet, she must have kept to herself since everyone only got the minor "Colonist Died" moodlet from her death. She was immortalized with an engraving of her finishing off one of the advanced components that she crafted so well.

The next deaths went beyond friendship and finally revealed to me how deeply the family ties ran in our colony. Artemis was felled by a silent infection that did not get the proper treatment it deserved. Her husband attempted to save her with Glitterworld meds but even that miracle medicine was too little too late. Sexton was understandably upset but I noticed Shouta was too. Turns out Shouta is Sexton's father and considered Artemis a friend as well as a daughter-in-law. Only days later we got the good news that Shouta's wife was available for rescue and guarded by only a single enemy. We rescued Duxdabee fairly easily, but failed to bring enough food to wait while she got healthy enough to walk. We had to forage for food while we waited. As we waited, a sapper raid came to the base. I sent Sexton, another master crafter and melee specialist, to lock up the grenade thrower in melee while the rest of the team took shots at the other attackers. Then a lucky shot from an autopistol at nearly max range penetrated the steel helmet he was wearing and removed his brain. Thus Shouta came home victorious with wife in-tow only to discover the tragedy of his son's death. In 2 real days, I had lost 4 colonists. The next 2 days I actually mourned for these digital denizens and mentally berated myself for allowing the deaths to occur. This also got me thinking about those I had lost in real life and this little game created and fostered real emotions in me.

Looking around at how Sexton's death effected everyone I discovered that Leopard and Sexton where step siblings since Duxdabee was Leopard's mom and Sexton's step-mother. Of the 15 colonists which had lived with us 6 were connected by family bonds of some kind and now 2 of those were dead, leaving us with 11 colonists. Of these 11 we were left with only 1 high-end constructor (Yuna, an original colonist), 1 crafter capable of advanced components (Harms, a brawler) and 1 good artist (also Yuna). Art was the primary way we were converting easily available resources into the nearly unavailable plasteel via trade. I decided that these people and Leopard, my only competent cook, were too valuable for fighting and kept them inside for each raid. We got very lucky and had a meteorite of uranium crash close to the colony fairly early in the game and ignored it until we started needing its resources.

We prepared for the engine startup fight while waiting for the advanced components to finish off the sleep pods. Regular and uranium turrets were placed in strategic locations. Lower skilled crafters worked on flak pants and helmets for all. Finally it was time to startup the reactor. With nearly daily raids we faced challenges and loses. Seven days out from startup a mech raid dropped in the middle of my base, landing directly on Yuna's beloved pet chinchilla, Gizmo. Though it took some micro-management, I actually buried Gizmo next to the other colonists in a place of honor. Then only 3 days away from startup a sapper raid of pure grenade / molotov users attacked. They took the same route into the base as 2 other sappers had before which forced them into a narrow gap between rocks and into a well prepared ambush. I forgot that grenade throwers had no regard for their fellow man. I locked up the first one through the gap with a warrior named Saburo wearing Marine armor (ie Power armor) a shield belt and wielding a thrumbo horn. He took down the first one almost instantly, but when engaging the 2nd one, all the others threw grenades at him. Five frag grenades went off close to each other killing/downing nearly half the attackers but also removing poor Saburo's head. With just 1 more attacker easily killed by multiple assault weapons, they turned tail and left us with a pile of bodies, structural damage, and a headless colonist. He was immortalized by a carving of what he did best, downing an attacker with glee. More raids came, some from multiple sides, some from right on top, but with luck and a lot of micromanaging we repelled them all and took off as soon as the reactor finished starting up.

It was an interesting, stressful, yet fun exercise to actually launch the ship and fight off all the different raid types with different strategies. We even used a tornado generator that we had gotten from a trade request on a siege to great effect. In the future I would not want to launch a ship. The grind for advanced components and either uranium or plasteel is hardly worth it. I would rather play on a harder difficulty and create my own challenges (reach a certain level of wealth, last a set number of years, gain a certain number of colonists, or do a number of trade deals / missions successfully) or play on an easier difficulty and build the coolest base that I can or manage multiple sustainable colonies.



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[Tynan]

I agree. I'm trying to make it more worthwhile to keep animals for things other than defense or hauling.

I totally agree with the goal, once upon a time I did a ton of analysis and balancing to try to make the farming case viable (several alphas ago), but it's hard as hell to actually get all the balance points working. Especially given how straightforward hunting is, and how manhunter packs deliver mass meat/leather. It's hard for raising animals to compete with that without being ridiculous in other ways.

[bobomite]

My deep drills only extract 1 chemfuel per unit...  It's not even worth bothering.  Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?  This is with 0.19.1987

[Tynan]

My deep drills only extract 1 chemfuel per unit...  It's not even worth bothering.  Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?  This is with 0.19.1987

If you start a new game this will be resolved; chemfuel isn't a deep drill resource any more (since you can use the biofuel reactor).

[SchizoidCrow]

Storyteller: Randy
Difficulty: Savage
Biome/hilliness: Temperate forest/mountainous
Commitment mode: Nope
Current colony age (days):  305
Hours played in the last 2 days: 8
Complete mod list: Progress renderer


Is there something going on with the number of resources mined by drill? Like with the chemfuel a few builds ago? I'm getting a ridiculously low amount of uranium and plasteel. It already killed my uranium supplies. If that's intended, it's too little to maintain uranium slugs. I already invested research into the tech, materials into the scanner and drills, spending time drilling, fighting the occasional infestations (which also consumes the durability of the turrets), and presumably getting stronger events for possessing the resources  I don't feel like this amount it's worth all of that.

Edit: Oh, do I have to start a new game too? I think I started this game after chemfuel became unobtainable by deep drill.

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[dearmad]

I agree. I'm trying to make it more worthwhile to keep animals for things other than defense or hauling.

I totally agree with the goal, once upon a time I did a ton of analysis and balancing to try to make the farming case viable (several alphas ago), but it's hard as hell to actually get all the balance points working. Especially given how straightforward hunting is, and how manhunter packs deliver mass meat/leather. It's hard for raising animals to compete with that without being ridiculous in other ways.

As stated earlier, manhunters should be tainted meat or something... they are driven mad by... something, right? Maybe even the fur should be mangled in some horrible way to be not as usable as well. The point of the packs isn't to deliver a boon but to be a sort of violent challenge, right?

[Madman666]

...

Manhunter packs are the last home map threat event type, that brings at least some kind of reward for beating it (instead of hiding from it) aside from maybe crashed ships, that still do give those AI cores (i wonder for how long it will stay that way). I just cannot understand people, that actually ask for removing last bit of rewards from threat events. Raids give you tons of corpses to burn through and be disgusted of, a whole bunch of dirty tainted rags to dispose of and some cheap weaponry, that takes more storage space than its worth for sale. Mech raids after severe dissection nerf now give tiny scraps of plasteel, while still being deadly and extremely annoying to get rid of. Most other events that bring danger with them, don't reward you with anything for pulling through (blights, drones, heatwaves, cold snaps etc).

And now instead making other challenges more rewarding, so that player will be excited about trying to deal with them, you want to just make manhunters be poisoned (which are affected by psychic drone that happened somewhere actually, not poisoned), so that at every event in game player's reaction will be something like:"Ffs, not again!". Thats kind of amazing, well done. Keep it up. A game, that rewards you for overcoming a challenge only with letting you survive until next challenge is incredibly fun to play indeed. Keep it up, guys.

[zizard]

Even better, make meat and meals from them have a chance to make animals go mad and colonists berserk. Do not add anything that lets you automatically process these corpses separately. Increase player interaction to forbid or cremate them manually. This form of player engagement is consistent with current human meal mechanics.

Also make meat from animals killed by drafted pawns have a chance of lead poisoning or bullet fragments that cause internal bleeding and stomach damage. That would reward proper use of the hunting job. To buff raising animals, make a common trait for colonists to only like to eat meat from tame animals that have been ritually slaughtered. Wild meat should have a chance of causing parasite diseases.

[Madman666]

^ This needs to be in the game.

I'll chime in - add in a chance for inexperienced butcher to leave some bullets in the meat, if the animal wasn't killed in melee. A meal cooked from such a meat will have a chance to break pawn's teeth upon eating, which causes constant moderate pain moodlet. Can be healed only with healer mech serum.

[5thHorseman]

But the tainted pelts and meat should be worth 10x what regular meat is worth and never rot or degrade. And nobody actually buys it.

Getting back to being serious though, manhunter packs do give a lot of meat - sometimes enough to forego hunting entirely for a long time. If they somehow gave less I wouldn't really mind. Especially if that meant I could get more plasteel and advanced components from psychic ships.

[5thHorseman]

Should this thread not be renamed to "Unstable build 0.19 available" and the first post edited? And maybe something said on Steam? People are getting sad wanders and berserks over it.

[Broken Reality]

As stated earlier, manhunters should be tainted meat or something... they are driven mad by... something, right? Maybe even the fur should be mangled in some horrible way to be not as usable as well. The point of the packs isn't to deliver a boon but to be a sort of violent challenge, right?

No. Just no. The event is fine as it is. Differing risk levels based on animal and differing levels of rewards as well. As others have said it is the last event that has a decent reward sometimes for taking the risk. You don't have to fight manhunters, they can be totally ignored. but you can take a risk and get a reward. I don't want to fight mechanoids if I can at all help it the risk v reward of confronting them is really bad. Manhunter packs sometimes I want to take the risk other raids are risk with little reward for overcoming them and I only fight them because you are forced to.

[bbqftw]

Honestly the animals dropping meat is only a problem because the corpses are not taxed appropriately by the wealth IRS that decides how many centipedes to pod into your base. This should be remedied.

On related note, one of the decisive parts of year 1 is how many BAR / mid-tier weapon raids are sent, since such weapons are very nice to have for the month 3-6 special threat encounters. However, I think this sort of dubious progression goes against the spirit of the game. As Mssrs. dearmad and polder point out, why should a raid be a boon?

However, its not easy to solve this problem. The most apparent idea to affix a tainted designation to weapons as well (I noticed that the tainted malus was increased in this patch, probably in response to people killing prisoners in power armor to lower their wealth value!!! great job.) However this would remove a large skilltesting component of later game raids, since tainted destroys market value. This skilltesting component is the decision of whether to burn the weapons or smelt them at obscene time cost for scraps of steel, since a 75-100 man pirate raid can easily drop 50k of weapons that cannot be liquidated at anywhere near accepted market values, so if you don't want IRS to punish you, you better come up with a solution.

I would instead suggest that any non-colonist downing / death immediately downgrades all items worn by two quality levels. This would also promote ethically sourced clothing and weapons, which require fabrication tables, research (see below), etc. Otherwise you're kind of cheating the wealth control system. Yeah I said it.

Alternatively, you could just make tainted modifier only affect sell value and not market value (I can't take credit for this one, my brain is not big enough)

Furthermore, in line with eradication of most traditional progression metrics, I would point out that research points are fundamentally not taxed by the raid algorithm. They have infinite utility/wealth ratio! I suggest that research points also are included in the raid point calculation. This would have the benefit of also challenging tribals more for their research, reflecting historically typical troubles of a society attempting to industrialize.

But the tainted pelts and meat should be worth 10x what regular meat is worth and never rot or degrade. And nobody actually buys it.

Very good. I think this would further promote fire utilization, which is one of the three skills that fundamentally distinguishes mediocre and great players.