The pro's and con's of this game

[Niknud]

  First off let me say I love this game.  I was very skeptical on the price having been burned on small development teams in the past.  I must of watch 20+ hours of people playing before I broke down and bought the game.  Now I come to the crux of my problems as well as the points of my enjoyment.

  My biggest problem is how easy it is to keep your colony fed.  Food grows way to fast and with a lack of any kind of actual season it is always going to be growing season.  Wild edibles are as big of a culprit as indoor and outdoor farms.  I don't even have to build a farm in some biomes since the berry bushes seem to always be in constant bloom.  I know some of this stuff is still in development with different types of biomes (possibly different seasons) but it frustrates me to think I play this more like a tower defense and less like a colony survival game.

  Ideally I would like to see more options for food management along the lines for long term survival and possibly a better option for food storage like a meat locker or walk in cooler.  I would also like to see water become a vital resource.  With the addition of water to the game last patch I would like to believe we are going to have to start worrying about if we have enough for our colonists to drink. 

  My favorite part about this game is building.  I started this game probably like everyone else and simply built square buildings of various sizes.  I now experiment with odd zig zags and cross shaped structures.  I would like to see more options for say a curve in a wall  or a 45 degree slant just to give us more options then just straight from point a to point b.


Overall I really like this game and I am really looking forward to what it is going to be like on full release.

[Tynan]

Well, food should be pretty plentiful in temperate forest. Is it that easy to get in the desert, though? If others agree, I'll definitely take a look at balancing this again.

[Ykara]

Yep, it's pretty easy to get food in the desert. There are too many areas you can grow food, I didn't even research the hydroponics a whole year.
But I don't think that this is a huge problem, that crashed ship event with the mechanoids is my biggest problem with the game. I really enjoy killing dozens of raiders, but that event is absolutly overpowered. There are way too many mechanoids and the psychic drone thing makes it even worse. One of these events can kill my whole colony because my colonists suffer from permanent mental breaks, mortars never hit and centipedes are way too bulky to kill them fast enough before reaching the extreme stage of the psychic drone thing.
But besides that I really enjoy the game. I've spent so many hours in building the perfect colony and it's still not boring. I really like the new injury-system, now I actually care about my colonists. Alpha 6 is the best update yet imo.

[_alphaBeta_]

Regarding the food availability, I'm inclined to agree that it's too easy to acquire in the temperature forest. Acquiring more raw food for cooking is usually as mundane as dragging the "harvest food" tool over your courtyard every once in a while. I don't think I've ever had to venture more than 20 spaces away from the front door of my main colony to find enough food from trimming natural plants. Only reason I build farms is to grow potatoes for selling. There isn't a whole lot of strategy surrounding this system in this biome at the moment.

Quickly considering the problem, the quantity of edible plants, the harvest quantity per plant, and the rate at which they grow are all factors. All things considered, I'd probably reduce their growth rate first and observe. This will at least force the players to venture a little farther from their base to harvest food, unless they invest the space and time into a managed farm.

[DarkMyau]

I don't really agree. Except for water being a thing.

Food is hard enough to grow these days. Especially compared to earlier alphas.

[Niknud]

Well, food should be pretty plentiful in temperate forest. Is it that easy to get in the desert, though? If others agree, I'll definitely take a look at balancing this again.

The thing is it is only plentiful at certain times of year.  I spent a lot of my teens and twenties playing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire which is a temperate mountain region.  Your berry picking starts in late July and runs through August (blackberry, blueberry boysenberry).  I will not get into things like apples and the like since there are not currently fruit trees in game.  In the winter months food is pretty scarce and having to travel through the cold and snow it makes it much harder to get. 


  I really enjoy survival type games and this game starts off like one.  You crash land on a planet and have to get a shelter up and start looking for food.  The problem I have is it switches from a survival game to a tower defense where I am building mazes to focus the 200 invaders into tight quarters with turrets.  That isn't to say I don't enjoy this aspect of the game because I do.

There is a survival game I have played a lot of over the last several years Tynan and you should check it out.  The game is called Unreal world.  This is a rogue like survival game that takes place during the Iron Age of Finland which is mostly covered in a temperate conifer forest.  Out of all the survival games I have played this is probably the best.  The game is free to play you can find the download on their website.  There are also some Youtube videos.

I don't really agree. Except for water being a thing.

Food is hard enough to grow these days. Especially compared to earlier alphas.

I have no idea why you are having a hard time getting food.  I have played on every biome and the only time I have run out of food is when most of my colony was killed by mechanoids and my last remaining colonist is laying in bed with no legs from a earlier attack. 

[Tynan]

There is a survival game I have played a lot of over the last several years Tynan and you should check it out.  The game is called Unreal world.  This is a rogue like survival game that takes place during the Iron Age of Finland which is mostly covered in a temperate conifer forest.  Out of all the survival games I have played this is probably the best.  The game is free to play you can find the download on their website.  There are also some Youtube videos.

Thanks, I'll definitely take a look at it.

[_alphaBeta_]

We should probably make a distinction here. It has "felt" like growing specific crops in farming zones has slowed in recent builds (it may just be my imagination). Regardless, it does take a while, perhaps too long, for crops to crow in this manner. What grows too fast IMHO (and what my previous post was really speaking to) are the wild crops and bushes on the landscape. They can be harvested quite often, in large quantity and distribution on the map, and yield a large amount per harvest. The distinction may be that once harvested, the base plant remains presumably with some growth already there. When using the farming zone, the entire plant is removed. I haven't studied this close enough to see if this is a factor, namely whether additional yield comes out of the entire plant being removed or not.

[Raufgar]

The distinction may be that once harvested, the base plant remains presumably with some growth already there. When using the farming zone, the entire plant is removed. I haven't studied this close enough to see if this is a factor, namely whether additional yield comes out of the entire plant being removed or not.

This is likely due to the fact that the wild plants in Rimworld are currently modeled from certain fruit-bearing plants, where you harvest only the fruit, not the whole plant. When foraging one, it cuts out the replanting step required for normal farming crops but resets the plant to zero for harvesting.

Crops for farming in Rimworld consists of potatoes and strawberries. With potatoes the real world premise is that you harvest the whole plant. Current real world strawberry harvesting methods also remove the whole plant. So one could surmise that having to replant potatoes and strawberries after every harvest cycle is fairly realistic, if realism is the goal.

As of Alpha 6, only potatoes (or to be precise, excel-potatoes, since the plants are supposed to be going through accelerated growth) are tradable, so the potato has been relegated to be more of a cash crop than a food source.

[MajorFordson]

Don't forget, they're advanced sci-fi food crops, engineered to produce food in as short a time as possible! Or at least they should be, if they're survival kit seeds.

I found it hard enough to get food on a desert map, several colonies have starved. But perhaps I just didn't lay out enough farmland.

When there are more aspects to growing food it will be much better. Alternate play styles is a great thing.

For example, players on a desert map might find it much easier to grow unpalatable foods (like a type of cactus?) then use the nutrient paste so that colonists can eat it. I think meat should be the same, colonists shouldn't be happy with beetle and iguana meat. Which gives the player more choices. Do you farm water intensive crops to feed your colonists, or make them put up with nutrient paste so they can survive?

If desert is the "hard" area when it comes to food, then tundra should be the "extreme" challenge. With no source of surface-grown food (or very very slow growing lichen?) so the player either has to hunt animals (which could migrate through tundra, instead of sitting around on the map all the time) or grow food indoors.

[UrbanBourbon]

Ah. UnReal World.

UnReal World looks pretty mad. I've had my eye on it for months but haven't played it. Why? Because it seems perfect. I don't want to spoil the mental image by playing it. It seems to have a good range of skills and you learn by doing. The real pull of the game, IMO, is that you can use just about any object for any task. Try fishing with a cup. Cut a tree with a butter knife. Skin an animal with a spoon. Spread butter with an axe. AFAIK, you can attempt all of those things. Mad freedom. Then there's temperatures and climates. You could freeze to death. Major survival aspect. I don't even know half of it, but I've watched an hour or two of letsplays. It looks ugly as hell though (primitive) by modern standards but being pretty was never the point. In my books it's right there with Dwarf Fortress in terms of legends. It's so legendary and holy that I haven't had the audacity to touch it! And I'm no stranger to sacrilege or blasphemy.

[w00d]

re: food

in the desert, food is annoying rather than bad, after all you can at a pinch eat raiders or anyone who comes to your colony.. no my main issue is that
1. i lost more colonists to random hunting accidents than to raiders
2. blood splatters all over the place, despite the constant storms, rain etc, the map looks like an abattoir.

In the temperate forest, i only hunt occasionally as micro managing them from not murdering each other while hunting is a pain.

[Raufgar]

With the implementation of water bodies on the map, I can't wait until the use of water for crops is put in. Sadly, since Ty isn't working on adding z-levels to the game yet, this might only be in limited ways, unlike the convoluted methods I had to come up with to irrigate my farm plots in DF (mushroom plots that rely on a series of water gates from a underground, stone lined dam that is filled by a river nearby. The dam doubles as my weapon of last resort for use on my nobles).

[Rahjital]

Yes, food is not that hard to get, even in a desert, but is it really that bad thing? If you had to spend most of your time scrounging up food, you wouldn't have much left for expanding your colony and building defenses, researching better food types, mining and crafting resources and other things needed for your colony to live. Temperate forests should have plenty of food, that's their purpose in the game. Deserts should be worse, but since there's absolutely nothing that prevents players from rushing hydroponics or pumps, they would soon have no problems getting food even if there was absolutely no soil to grow crops at in the beginning.

I agree that water should start playing a role in the game. I don't think the game is anywhere near ready for having water as a crucial resource, but irrigation and fishing would already make good addition to the game.

[stefanstr]

Maybe adding a separate "blight" event that affects berries would solve this to some extent?