[1.0] What the Hack?! v1.2 - last update: May 30, 2019

[Madman666]

Couple points to add - research experience is actually endless, cause you can use a Long Range Mineral Scanners to train researchers . I kind of agree that double skill requirements might be problematic to deal with. I always worry that crappy crafting skill on my lead researcher can lead to a fatality and i sure ain't ready to risk my lead crafter with godly crafting skills, when he has measly 6 research...

On the point that mechs are only useful in combat - well they're kinda of murderbots as you yourself said. And one centipede can tank a whole raid for a reasonable amount of time, usually you can rek them all in during that time. Against sapper raids centipedes play turret role of redirecting fire away from your squishy colonists (that get oneshot like every third hit thanks to tynan's buff to weapons and nerf to organs) and stoppin the raids advance long enough to dispose of it. With colonists being incredibly whiny (mental breaks during draft time - easy!), squishy (still oneshot vulnerable even in power armor) and disease prone - i for one would take 3 centipedes over 6 useless colonists any day. And incendiary centipedes can stunlock half a raid to death with 1 lucky shot (good luck fighting resulting fires late though...). They're incredible as tanks and crowd controllers.

I second the maintenance option request - it d be incredibly useful to be able to set a treshold for when guys go get mechs maintained.

No point comparing mechanoids to animals, especially modded ones like horses, that have crazy 8 tile speeds.  Animals have their own problems in form of diseases, food upkeep, trainer labor times and etc. Upkeep for mechs IS and should be pretty steep (way more expensive over animals), because couple belt controlled centipedes can negate a sizable sapper raid like nothing. Between equipping my colonists with better weapons and armor and letting them be hit and sticking nigh invulnerable murderbots to be shot at, while my people in cotton shirts shoot from behind without any worries - i choose the latter. Pirates always seem to prioritize shooting mechs that are in the open over colonists in cover anyway.

[Ser Kitteh]

That's fair, I forgot about the LRMS. But as I recall, Roolo did say that it's better to have a high level crafter and a minimum level researcher. I understand the logic behind it, that if you're smart AND good at crafting you should be able to hack mechanoids better. But as no playthrough of Rimworld is ever the same due to the RNG, it can come off as a hassle. One colony I have all the mechanoid guys I need and another I have none.

Like, horses aside, even something as riding muffalos is a huge boost on its own. Like sure you gotta work hard to make a proper cattle farm, but for the purposes of just riding? Some food and a good handler completely negates that.

I kinda don't get the idea of colonists in cotton t-shirts because if you already have your mech workshop set up, chances are you also have a proper armory set up as well. I can see a good centipede or two be a good tank against sappers however, as that's more or less exactly what I used centipedes for.

[Roolo]

@Ser Kitteh.

Thanks for the review, i was an interesting read for me. While you don't seem entirely convinced, your review actually is an indication for me that the mod strikes the balance that I intended. I don't like the idea of creating a "free lunch", as that would overshadow other alternatives and it wouldn't make the mod vanilla-friendly. Madman666 has some nice points I agree with, so I'm not going to repeat that. There are still some things that I would like to point out. You say the following:

1 bench
1 charging platform
3400 research points It's actually 1000, the workshop is optional
1 downed mechanoid
4 mechanoid parts to heal (assuming minimal damaged) I'ts actually more than 10 parts, you need 10 parts for each hacking attempt.

Yes, this is a somewhat high initial cost, but take in mind that you get most of the mechanoid parts basically for free. Mechanoids raid your base anyway, and they're a by-product of these raids, something you basically get without putting any extra effort into it. Now my point: You have the cost above only once. If you invested it, you can keep using the facilities indefinitely, so after your initial investment you get almost completely free mechanoids for the entire game (not entirely free since the risk of activating them can be considered a cost, and you have the power cost). Besides that, the only real cost is when you run out of parts, and have to buy some extra, but even that cost can be avoided completely by just deactivating your mechanoids.

So the idea with the mod is that if you really want to take all out of your mechanoids, you can choose to invest more in them, by upgrading, getting extra parts etc, however, if you don't do this at all, they are still a very good addition to your base. I've seen a lot of people assuming that the unmodified mechanoids are useless, but I strongly disagree with this. I think people think this because they mis-use them. I've seen streamers just activating them at the moment a raid arrives, resulting in 2-3 mechs getting wrecked by a group of 25 raiders, and then thinking, well this was useless. They don't realize that even without any direct control options, you actually have a lot of control over your mechs. If you make sure you nail the time of activation, or correct it by activating/deactivating them, you can almost always get your mechs to join in at exactly the right time (the right time being when they are supported by colonists and/or turrets).

@Madman666 and @Ser Kitteh

I second the maintenance option request - it d be incredibly useful to be able to set a treshold for when guys go get mechs maintained.

Right now it's set to 50% by default. I see that making it tweakable would give a bit more flexibility, but to be honest, I wouldn't see myself using that feature a lot. At 50%, it'll still take 3-5 days until maintenance gets to very low levels, so what difference would it make when you'd but the threshold higher, besides that your colonists will be more occupied? I can only imagine it to be useful in crisis situations where you aren't able to perform maintenance for multiple days, but I never really experienced a situation where none of my colonists were able to perform maintenance for such a long time. I get it still would be an improvement, but there are so many things for which I feel my time would be spent better.

I'll think about the 5 crafting /5 intellect requirement, but from an immersion point of view it doesn't make a lot of sense that an "Utter Beginner" in either crafting or intellectual would be able to hack a mechanoid, so making it 1/1 would take it a bit too far I think. I've even had people requesting to increase the minimum requirement for the reason of immersion. Maybe i'll make it 6 intellectual/4 crafting, to decrease the burden if you have bad luck with the colonists you get, but I won't take it much farther than that.

About the giddy-up discussion. Giddy-up adds extra uses to animals, which are already useful on their own, and also have a vanilla mechanic for costs built in. What the Hack in contrast adds an entirely new facet to the game and requires extra measures to be balanced well. They are just different things. Comparing them is like comparing power armor to animals, which isn't a useful comparison and only distracts from the topic.

[Roolo]

I have a request to the community.

Since 1.0, the save game that I used broke due to mods in it not being updated. For testing purposes I need a fairly late-game save with not too many mods in it (preferably not more than 30). Could anyone help me with this?

[Ser Kitteh]

I'm gonna reply to your post in a sec, but will an old B19 mod with partially updated mods do? Less than 30 mods.

[Roolo]

I'm gonna reply to your post in a sec, but will an old B19 mod with partially updated mods do? Less than 30 mods.

Only if it runs in 1.0 without too many issues.

[Ser Kitteh]

I have a modless run from B19, but all my other runs are pretty mod heavy with mods not yet updated (because I do them all manually). Will this do? If not, sorry bud.

[Roolo]

I have a modless run from B19, but all my other runs are pretty mod heavy with mods not yet updated (because I do them all manually). Will this do? If not, sorry bud.

Yes, a modless run will very likely be useful. This reminds me, I completely forgot about a nearly modless run I have fom early B19 experimental i which I launched the ship, I'll try that out too. I'm still very interested in your B19 vanilla save though.

[Ser Kitteh]

Sure thing!

Uh, how do I do that again?

[Roolo]

You can find your saves in C:\Users\ %username% \AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld
Then you need to upload it somewhere where I can access it, for instance dropbox, or google drive. You can PM me if you don't want to share it with everyone.

[conkikhon]

My cute centipede have a shredder turret mounted, it fight with 7 raiders and got hit by a lot of molotov cocktail. Fire couldn't burn my centipede, but it made shredder turret went boom. The problem is the centipede still treated as it have a turret mounted in heath tab, so I couldn't replace the broken one. i hope his problem will be fixed in the future.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Jiro]

Any chance of adding a research node that reverse-engineers mechs and allows you to build your own from scratch? So that your hackers can trade not having to maintain the mechs anymore with a bigger price tag.

[Roolo]

My cute centipede have a shredder turret mounted, it fight with 7 raiders and got hit by a lot of molotov cocktail. Fire couldn't burn my centipede, but it made shredder turret went boom. The problem is the centipede still treated as it have a turret mounted in heath tab, so I couldn't replace the broken one. i hope his problem will be fixed in the future.

Hmm, this shouldn't happen. I'll see if I can reproduce it. Here's a temporary fix you can apply to make sure your centipede can have mounted turrets again:
- Go to options, and tick "enable development mode" there (or something like that).
- Now you see a few icons appearing in the top of your screen. Hover over them to find the debug commands. In there, click "remove hediff..", and use this command to remove the "turret mounted" hediff. This should fix it for you. 

[Roolo]

Any chance of adding a research node that reverse-engineers mechs and allows you to build your own from scratch? So that your hackers can trade not having to maintain the mechs anymore with a bigger price tag.

I won't do that. It's not worth the effort for me and it would introduce balancing issues. In the end, creating mechanoids is just a more grindy way to get them than hacking, and there should be enough parts for maintaining a reasonable amount of them. Even with a high initial cost, mechs without any maintenance would be hard to balance, since nothing stops you then from creating a huge swarm of them, without any costs (except power) to maintain them, completely trivialising other combat options in the game. If you want unfair gameplay, you can just disable the maintenance mechanic in the mod options (and change many other balance altering settings). More options to get the parts will be added in the near future.

[Jiro]

While I respect that the idea itself is not in your interest, I disagree that the issues you outlined are really issues.

>creating mechanoids is just a more grindy way to get them than hacking
Not necessarily. You can make a choice between expensive production with greater control, or cheap hacking with less control. You can also have varying quality of mechanoids when you create them, just like objects.
>nothing stops you then from creating a huge swarm of them, without any costs (except power) to maintain them
You will still need manpower and resources to repair the mechanoids. Moreover if you are using Combat Extended (which, if you're going as advanced combat as hacking mechs, is a little crazy) you need to manufacture or buy ammunition for the mechanoids' weapons.
>trivialising other combat options in the game
Not quite, you still need backup infantry in case of something like EMP weapons. Even then, I don't see how trivializing lower-tech weaponry is even a problem, since nobody really uses bows or spears after they've acquired a good arsenal of firearms. Moreover, even in real life we are seeing more and more of our military become obsolete due to automation, as well as other technology.
>If you want unfair gameplay, you can just disable the maintenance mechanic in the mod options
There's no need to become aggressive, fair gameplay is one of my biggest concerns with mods. No weapon is overpowered as long as your enemy potentially has access to the same technology.
>More options to get the parts will be added in the near future.
What do you mean by this?