Cold Snaps NEED to be reduced.

[ShadowKatt]

I've beent thinking about this for a long time and I've finally had enough to the point that I made an account just to put it out there. I love Rimworld, I have nearly 2000 hours into the game, and while there are plenty of things that frustrate me (It can be a frustrating game), THIS makes me angry.

I am tired of getting hit with a cold snap or heat wave nearly every single game. In earlier editions, the heat waves were an automatic dead colony unless you were tribal. Getting a heatwave in the first three days was impossible, but this has been fixed. What hasn't been fixed is cold snaps. Now, full disclosure, I do play with Randy exclusively, so I know the options are out there, but I have kept track of my games and in a full 83% of them I have been hit with a cold snap in the first five days. THis is not even enough time for RICE to grow. All plants die, most of the animals leave, and the colony scrounges for food before they even had a chance to try and establish. It is one of the most singularly frustrating and demoralizing events in the game to start a colony, build and plant, then get a cold snap on day four, watch all the plants die and the colony follow. And THEN to start a new colony and get hit by the SAME THING.

I get cold snaps. I don't think they're bad. If you have a chance to prepare for them, they're easy to deal with, and if you're growing long term crops like corn or 'shrooms it's frustrating. But to play five games in one day and lose four of them to a cold snap that happens in the first week is beyond the pale.

Either the probability of a cold snap should be reduced to make it more rare, or there should be a window of relief for a new colony. As it stands now, a cold snap is just a cold death for anything in the first week.

[dragonalumni]

You get basically get a cold snap and heat wave every year they are fairly easy to deal with by building a couple of fires or natural coolers in a vented base and you will be ok. (In addition to running heaters and air conditioners if you have them)

[scorlew]

Heat waves and cold snaps are severe but not extinction events usually and are RL analogs.  Toxic fall out is a bitch, however.

[ShadowKatt]

You get basically get a cold snap and heat wave every year they are fairly easy to deal with by building a couple of fires or natural coolers in a vented base and you will be ok. (In addition to running heaters and air conditioners if you have them)

I agree, for colonists, heat waves and cold snaps are much easier to deal with. But that's not the point I was trying to get across. In my experience, the game consistantly throws a cold snap at you right at the beginning of the game if you live anywhere that isn't a desert or tropical forest. And that cold snap at BEST delays your growing season and at worst takes it away from you entirely. You can't put campfires in a field to keep crops alive, and building a greenhouse in the first week of the game is pretty well impossible unless you're the rich explorer and are skilled and lucky enough to pull it off. A cold snap in the first week of the game often forces you to go without growing of any kind for the first year and a half to two years of the colony. And while that is technically not impossible, it's so improbable that I give up anymore. It's horribly unbalancing, no matter the difficulty.

[5thHorseman]

Do you play only in the arctic or something? I've never had a cold snap ruin an entire year's worth of growing, little alone *two*. I've started many, many colonies and have had major food problems like twice. One of those was due to a cold snap on top of a volcanic winter on top of toxic fallout, and the other was due to my terrible mismanagement of a base-moving caravan on top of toxic fallout and there was no cold snap at all.

I don't know if there truly are cold snaps in over 3/4ths of all games' first years, but I can tell you this: They don't cause nearly the problems you're describing if they do exist. The mere fact that I don't know offhand how many there are show how inconsequential they are to my colonies.

[scorlew]

Full disclosure:  I don't play Randy and hearing your story I'm not likely to any time soon.

In my current game I got a crop blight mid-summer after first planting, followed by an early Autumn cold snap that killed everything that the blight didn't get.  Then winter came and killed off everything my guys planted in late Autumn (40/60 growing season).

I hunted the entire local map clear of all wildlife and picked every berry bush until mid-spring when the first harvest came in.  Pain in the ass to manage when I needed to be building infrastructure and finding ore veins, but everyone survived.  Well, not everyone, one got the plague and another got stomped by a rhino, but the weather had nothing to do with those.  Challenging but not insurmountable.

[vzoxz0]

I think if you have a very short growing window, then yes, cold snaps are particularly punishing. It's why a lot of such colonies have indoor growing rooms with heaters.

It's annoying when it happens but it isn't really a game ender for me -- I mean, you harvest what you can of the crop (force a harvest of uncompleted crops) and then accept that life is hard.

[AileTheAlien]

I have been hit with a cold snap in the first five days. THis is not even enough time for RICE to grow.

Rice only takes 3 days, or less if you're planting in rich soil. Plus, three of the four starting scenarios give you several days worth of food, to tide you over until you can harvest some crops. Plus, there's animals to hunt, unless you're playing on one of the harder biomes. (But that's player choice. Temperate forests and arid shrublands have more than enough animals for new players.) So, I don't think that cold snaps need to be adjusted. As anecdotal evidence, I've played many games (I also use Randy), without them really being much of a problem.

[vzoxz0]

I think a lot of players are unaware they can harvest their crops before the coldsnap kills the plants.