Please help, I can't stop recruiting colonists!

[BladeOfSharpness]

I can't resist, each time a colonist with some nice perks is around (a downed bandit, a guest, a quest giver, anyone), I try to recruit him.

I'm now at 27 colonists, but I know I'll not cease recruiting them until Rimworld explodes and my computer too, haaalp!!!

[Kirby23590]

Okay, Just i will tell many things...

I can help slap you out of it... All you have to do is stop. Like yes, and instead of recruiting them. Harvest their organs or just kick them out when they are fully head and get free goodwill instead if they were not from a pirate faction.

I mean i recruiting a lot of colonists also increase the size of the raiders and the danger the more colonists you got. I mean i rather make the guests happy and keep getting goodwill, and not get a pawn with good stats from a faction that i'm allied too and heal them up and let them go...

It's not easy, but i rather keep a personal cap of 12 or 20 colonist max instead of something like 100 or the computer gets memory slow downs. And yeah i also have a prisoner ransom mod that let's you ransom prisoners get tons of silver there's that. But i rather heal them up and let them out and get goodwill and not accumulate wealth like that.

[Canute]

Just create a caravan with all these people you currently don't need and let them have an outdoor picknick.
If you let them rest at the right spot they can feed themself with berries.
And once one of home-pawn's die you can send a replacement back home.

[Limdood]

What's the problem?  Large colonies work just fine....as long as you can make things for the extra colonists to do....huge growing zones, repetitive and never-ending crafting bills, frequent raids on your enemies' settlements, etc. 

If you've got 27 colonists and you have like 10 idle all the time, then there's a problem.  But you keep recruiting and do it in a directed fashion...it slows down the process but makes sure that each new colonist is valuable.  Analyze what job you could ACTUALLY use another pawn on.  For me, it's often cooking, but if i only have 2 colonists who are great at shooting and animals together, and i'm consistently trying to clear-hunt a temperate forest, it could be shooting and animals.  It could be just animals if you have a fishing mod.  It could be plants if you are turning your base into a gigantic plantation, or crafting if you've GOT a lot of resources, but those dusters/drugs just aren't getting made fast enough, it could be you're suddenly realizing 2 good doctors isn't enough for 27 pawns.

Whatever the case, find the skill your base MOST needs at any given moment to keep up with it's expanding population and focus solely on recruiting pawns with THAT skill.  For me, I try to get 2 cooks for a 6-8 person colony....as I expand, those 2 cooks are good enough...until I get to around 11 pawns, then I find I need more in the kitchen to keep up with the influx of dead animal carcasses, so I look for cooking skill pawns.  I tend to use crafting just for my own pawns and for fulfilling trade offers and drugs...I don't craft apparel to sell - so I try to get a pair of crafters until I've got about 10 colonists, then I'll grab a 3rd until around 14-15 colonists, and grab a 4th (and final) crafter after that.  I like a 6+ skill doctor per 5 pawns, and a 10+ skill doctor per 10 pawns.  A decent plants skill pawn (8+ skill) per 5 colonists.

In that way, I'm able to keep expanding more and more and more, but I'm recruiting pawns that will service my growing population, rather than sit idle as I recruit my 12th construction skill pawn.

[fritzgryphon]

Even if your colonists have good stats, there is always a worst colonist. 

Brutalize that one to keep the game's adaptive difficulty down.  When the colonist becomes too broken to be useful, let them die in the next raid to further bring the difficulty down.  Then do this to your next-worst colonist and repeat until reaching your target population.

Note: Friendly-fire downing no longer affects difficulty. It has to be enemy damage (I think).

[B@R5uk]

You always can transport pod any useless pawns to friendly settlement as gift. This method is humane and profitable at the same time. High standing allows you to summon friendly raid to counterattack some dreadful centipede swarm. Just try it once and you will pleasantly surprised at their abilities.

[Kirby23590]

Yeah i also have 25 or 30 colonists... But like that they can be more idles just eating the food storage and even some of the good colonists can be unnecessary and just do nothing or their bad traits start to outshine them like going in food binges or their mental breakdowns...

Just nothing something ridiculous like having 70 or 80 colonists is like way too many IMO. If your computer starts to slowdown with too many colonists then start giving your guys that you don't like a vacation to banishment and happiness or what B@R5uk said, putting them in a transport and launch to existing friendly faction for a new home for em'...

@B@R5uk i will try that one, and kick out jimmy the pyromaniac or joey the hated jerk abrasive to the friendliest outlander neighbor, for some goodwill since i mostly summon my allies for help when large raids come or calling in their caravans.

[Bozobub]

@Limdood:  Why do you need so many cooks?  I know you're a better player than me, but I only need 2 not-terrible cooks to crank out pretty ridiculous amounts of surplus; 15 colonists is easy-peasy.  Do you only cook Fine meals, maybe?

If not, I guess it's your base layout?  Anyway, I'm curious .

[Limdood]

I cook a LOT of pemmican, which is significantly slower than meals.

I also DON'T have fluffy's work tabs installed, so I have no way to assign butchering a higher priority than cooking, and I'd like that to be the case.  When I don't have 2 cooks in the kitchen 24/7, the carcasses tend to pile up, as the cooks prioritize the stove over the butcher table. 

I also make absolutely nonsensical amounts of surplus food.  I tend to tell my colonists to make simple meals until I have 50-100, fine meals until i have 200-300, and pemmican until I have 6000-12000 (I use stack mods so I don't have 100 stacks of 10 or 75 food all over).  It's excessive, and I certainly get punished in the form of larger raids, but it's a hard habit to break.

So maybe i'm not a better player

[Pangaea]

Why do you need that much food? And more generally, do people actually manufacture stuff 24/7?

Generally I make some hats and dusters/parkas now and again, and sell off a bunch when a trader drops by, or I take a rare caravan (for instance due to quests). But if my crafters and artists were producing stuff non-stop, I'd very quickly run out of storage, and I do have quit a lot of storage.

Okay, being able to store 500 meals in one tile or something would help, but presumably you can't store e.g. hats in one tile even with mods, so storage will become an issue. And ofc wealth. And if you sell stuff all the time, won't you just end up with oodles of silver?

Tbh, I just sell off surplus raw material instead, even food. A ship comes by, and we can sell off a couple thousand alpaca fur or something like that and free up some storage room.

As for colonists, it's hard to NOT recruit good people, but try to only restrict yourself to people who are a true benefit to the colony. Bad traits? I'll let you bleed out, thank you. One-trick ponies? Bleed. Can't fight? Drown in blood.

Give me lots of tiny fires on their profile and some high skills, and I'm much more likely to take them in.

If you are stuffed to the rafters with colonists, you can always use them as target practice for the enemy. If you're lucky a big raid downs them and carry them off, or kill them. Or I suppose you can parachute them into a friendly colony like suggested above. I've yet to build a transport pod so not sure how that would work out

[Canute]

I agree to him. Far to much meals for just 15 pawns.
Special since you can't sell regular meal's anymore, you should just made a stock for 2 days 15 pawn * 2 meals * 2 days.
Ofcourse that don't count for pemmican, since you can sell that and need it for caravans and when the cook for ill/wounded.

I rather would let the cook brew some psychite tea instead.

[Limdood]

1) it's my own personal preference for playing.  I'd rather have oodles of food handy, so a toxic fallout happens?  who cares!  I have 300 meals stored up and another 20 days of pemmican!  I do regularly stockpile and sell off pemmican. 

2) which brings up "if you sell it, don't you have oodles of silver instead? and that impacts wealth!"  Well....yeah.  But a) you sell things for less than they're worth and buy them for more than they're worth, so turning a few thousand pemmican into steel through a trader WILL bleed off wealth, and b) That money doesn't sit around.  I constantly request traders and upgrade my base.  I craft high end armor and weapons in the late game, replace steel traps, constantly sell off food and other renewable products to buy out traders of their steel and plasteel.  I DO reinvest the constant and constantly increasing influx of wealth into new constructions, projects, equipment, and defenses.

Is it the most efficient way of playing?  absolutely not!  But -to me- it's much more fun than penny pinching every resource item, damaging my own weapons and furniture down to 1% to cheese the wealth mechanic, and ending up getting inconsequential raids because i "beat" the economic and hidden rules game.

[Pangaea]

True. Nothing wrong with that, I just wondered. What's so awesome about sandbox-y games like this is that we can play however we want.

I also prefer to have a backup of pemmican, though I've stuck with 2000 for 12-15 pawns. Nice to have if you get toxic fallout of both cooks get their limbs blown off. I also like to play the game mostly vanilla, though, so even 2000 pemmican takes up a decent chunk of room, and I don't want to start adding oodles of mods that inevitably unbalances the game.

[Gadfly]

I recruit everyone even the bad ones, soon I can trade over the entire world.

Then once I can build the ship I build multiple ships over time, and send off the bad ones first.

[Limdood]

I recruit everyone even the bad ones, soon I can trade over the entire world.

Then once I can build the ship I build multiple ships over time, and send off the bad ones first.

That's cool.  I've never considered building ships as a "release valve" for the poorer colonists and continuing playing.