Creating outdoors in the middle of the mountain.

[TheSpaceMan]

Haven't had time to test this, but it would be possible right to just blow up a large enough area, to get the ceiling to collapse and be able to place solar panels in the middle of the (previous) mountain.

I am considering this since I never find steam vents for the geothermal when I dig around, and my solar powerplants allways get burned down by raiders. So If i place them in the mountain they would be safer.

[Grimreaper1704]

Yep i have test it i have faild over 6 games or so^^ its really hard when you know nothing  about the game^^ but i learn it more and more

to your questing yes you can do it dig a lage area out of the mountai and than you will get up a massage the roof is falling or something than you see some rock bebris on the ground and you can haul them away and play an solar generator inside.

i have now the problem with alot mental breaks my peoples killing themself

[TripleZero]

Thats odd, i always find thermal vents on my maps, i always wall them in and the raiders ignore them. You should always have atleast one otherwise youre royally screwed during an eclipse (unless you have ALOT of batteries)

[Semmy]

Get enough batteries and your not screwed during an ecplise

Also you can find open patches within the mountains. Even geysers can be found

[Tynan]

Mouse over the square. If it says "roof (thin)" you can collapse it away. If it says "roof (thick)" you can collapse it but it never goes away; it's like hundreds of feet of rock.

[nnescio]

Here's my old colony on a previous version. I had to build my solar panels indoors as Randy Random kept throwing waves of 30+ raiders on me and the other two steam vents are near the edges of the map and not rather defensible.:



Relevant section:



Yeah, I kinda overdid it with the digging. In the end I only needed six solar panels. Note that solar panels still work even if half of the tiles it occupies are shrouded in darkness. You only need 8 tiles to be in light for them to work.

Oh and here's my pot-- uh... potato farm.



I actually drew up a blueprint while designing my farm:



Light blue indicates lit areas, dark blue indicates brightly lit areas (which we want), red indicates the stockpile, and green indicates hydroponics tables. Black indicate standing lamps -- note that each section of the farm has two standing lights placed in cardinally adjacent tiles. Ignore the grey (yeah, I know it's kinda confusing), they just indicate tiles adjacent to the lights.

Purple indicates the two necessary supports to avoid the roof coming down in an indoor grow area. The bottom right support can be shifted two tiles diagonally downwards. I didn't bother to indicate the walls at the sides, as my farm is dug inside a mountain.

I walled off my indoor farm later so my growers can concentrate on growing indoors without walking back and forth between the two grow areas and daylily pots. The outside growing area was my former main farm. It now doubles as a place for fighters to idle away their time between raider waves and acts as a staging area when the raiders come when I turn off the lights for the sweet, sweet 40% miss chance in darkness.

Oh and I placed some extra hydroponics tables for raiders to take cover behind. Apparently colonists/raiders will take cover behind hydroponics tables even if they don't actually grant any cover. I found it out the hard way when I lost a couple colonists in a previous attack.

I'm not sure if hydroponics tables no longer grant cover in the newest version. I haven't tested it yet.

[Orch]

I built in the middle of a clearing right off the bat because there was a geothermal vent right next to my landing point and I hate solar power. I built my buildings compacted and when the raiders finally came (about 15 of them) I had a line of sandbags with three turrets, and about 6 people. I only lost one person. They didn't grenade my turrets either for some reason. Also, I was playing on Randy Random.

In my opinion,building in the open is viable, and also quicker.

[nnescio]

I built in the middle of a clearing right off the bat because there was a geothermal vent right next to my landing point and I hate solar power. I built my buildings compacted and when the raiders finally came (about 15 of them) I had a line of sandbags with three turrets, and about 6 people. I only lost one person. They didn't grenade my turrets either for some reason. Also, I was playing on Randy Random.

In my opinion,building in the open is viable, and also quicker.

I started with two steam vents visible. Both are out in the open near the edges of the map (hence far away from my starting stockpile, and near to potential raider drop zones) with no nearby cover in sight.

Randy Random pretty much threw repeated waves of raiders at me before I could get adequate defenses up (20+ vs 4~5 colonists). I had to deal with, I think, 15 waves in 20 or so days, with a couple solar flares occurring on some of the waves. I was losing a lot of metal trying to hold my geothermal plant before I said sod all this and moved most of my base into the mountain after my miners managed to find the third steam vent inside. Eventually, of course, the single geothermal plant wasn't enough to generate the power I need so I mined in another direction until I found thin roofs and collapsed them to make way for my solar panels.

Yeah, sometimes, you get bad luck with the placement of the steam vents, and Randy Random is, well, random, and can sometimes throw ridiculous amounts of raiders at the player.

Of course, this just makes it all the more FUN.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Mouse over the square. If it says "roof (thin)" you can collapse it away. If it says "roof (thick)" you can collapse it but it never goes away; it's like hundreds of feed of rock.

That never stopped my dwarves when I wanted to make an indoor wind farm.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Oh and I placed some extra hydroponics tables for raiders to take cover behind. Apparently colonists/raiders will take cover behind hydroponics tables even if they don't actually grant any cover. I found it out the hard way when I lost a couple colonists in a previous attack.

I'm not sure if hydroponics tables no longer grant cover in the newest version. I haven't tested it yet.

Oh, now that is worth knowing. I had been placing sandbag bunkers for the bastards to bunch in and get blown away by blasting charges, but that really expensive really fast, so I just revamped it into an open killing field, but now they tend to scatter out a lot.

I also need to demolish the lights in the pillbox my guys are firing from! Or at least turn them off until it's time to clean up... But set up those hydro tables under a shed roof so they're in darkness, then remove most of the walls so it can be fired into, but put up just enough lamps that they won't grow anything but as to illuminate the bad guys.

[hwoo]

Mouse over the square. If it says "roof (thin)" you can collapse it away. If it says "roof (thick)" you can collapse it but it never goes away; it's like hundreds of feed of rock.

That never stopped my dwarves when I wanted to make an indoor wind farm.

"Can't build a windfarm in a mountain they said! Crazy they said! I sure showed th-*Entire cavern collapses*