RimWorld the sci-fi colony sim Catch-All

Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

The problem with this game is that I lose all track of time playing it. I decided to play it for an hour before I had to start work, next thing I know it is lunch.

Seriously who designs games where you lose track of time +-<;-)

Is that an ascii art depiction of a Nudist Cannibal Clown?

I'm terrible at this game, but am enjoying being terrible at this game an awful lot (at least, the bit I've been able to carve time out to play it).

omni wrote:
Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

The problem with this game is that I lose all track of time playing it. I decided to play it for an hour before I had to start work, next thing I know it is lunch.

Seriously who designs games where you lose track of time +-<;-)

Is that an ascii art depiction of a Nudist Cannibal Clown?

The pope is a cannibal... (in a sense)

There's lots of RW tutorial videos out there, yet I found this one particularly educational.

Hope this guy continues producing tutorial content.

Aaron D. wrote:

There's lots of RW tutorial videos out there, yet I found this one particularly educational.

Hope this guy continues producing tutorial content.

He streams a fair bit(daily?). Very into tactical games(I started following him through DayZ). https://www.twitch.tv/sacriel

omni wrote:

This game, guys... THIS GAME. Seeing lots of people adding it to their wishlists, which is nice and all, but there should be more people buying it and playing it \o/

You make an overwhelmingly compelling argument.

Glad I could be of service.

Stressful stretch of life this past week. I decided to relieve some of it by spending more money. I got this game.

Nothing beats personal stress like watching little digital people slowly go insane from starvation or failed relationships and such.

Kinda gives you perspective and just makes 'ya feel better.

merphle wrote:

You make an overwhelmingly compelling argument.

RPS: "The story of Min, a pop star with a privileged upbringing, who is about to come crashing down to earth."

You're welcome.

Aaron D. wrote:

Nothing beats personal stress like watching little digital people slowly go insane from starvation or failed relationships and such.

Kinda gives you perspective and just makes 'ya feel better.

You are so right. This game made me feel so much better.

I jumped right in and started a regular game with three colonists. I've got AJ, a 44-year-old female medieval lord who won't do any labor. Next is Scottish, a 31-year-old male hedge fund manager who refuses to fight. Lastly, Orr, a 17-year-old castaway who is incapable of anything intellectual or social. A fine team if I've ever seen one!

It didn't help that I had no idea what I was doing, and everyone spent the first couple of days wandering around and sleeping in the rain because I ordered them to build steel walls without having any steel. Well, they had some steel, enough to make about five wall sections, but not any enough to do anything useful. I hope we don't need that steel later. Eventually we got that sorted out though, and the walls and roof went up. In typical guy fashion, I made a sleeping room and a room for stuff. I mean, what else would they need?

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/EakTViZ.jpg?1)
Dark, wet, and clueless

Somewhere around the third day a rabid racoon showed up and chased AJ around the world for several hours, with Orr chasing behind trying to shoot the thing with his pistol. After a few hours of this futility, Orr gave up, returned home, took his shirt off, then tried to resume the hunt. But he lost the trail. All the while AJ was fleeing for her life from the raccoon. Finally I figured out that I had to draft her in order get her to fight the raccoon. That solved, she promptly killed the thing, only taking a few scratches in the process.

On the plus side, everyone was totally unhappy from sleeping in the rain for two days, but the excitement of the day-long raccoon chase brightened them all up! Violence and fear for the win!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/j7kz9ZN.jpg?1)
The great raccoon chase.

Sometime around here I got to name my planet. I chose Pithole, because well.

I was wondering about the long term future of the colony with only one aged female in the settlement, but my fears appear to have been unfounded. Around the fourth or fifth day a wanderer showed up and joined the colony. She is Emmie, a female former sex slave. She showed up completely naked and incredibly happy. She also "lacks a bionic body part," which sure produces more questions than it answers. But whatever! Topping it off, she's a heck of a cook, which might help me figure out what to do with all the dead animals that have been piling up.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/Prafxem.jpg?1)
The arrival of Emmie.

As we look to the future of this fledgling settlement, many questions abound. Is the continuous game warning of "YOU NEED A VIABLE FOOD SOURCE" important? And how serious is the message, "YOU SHOULD EXPECT RAIDERS SOON, SO BUILD SANDBAGS." I'd take this more seriously if I knew how to get sand.

These minor details aside, the future of Pithole looks incredibly bright!

Helpful tip, unless it's been changed your rimmers will get a mood boost for rooms 6x6 or above. So I always try to make every room that large.

Also, it's telling you that you don't have a viable food source because you don't have a production table to turn you raw food into a meal.

Is that 6x6 for the interior space, or 6x6 including the walls?

Sigh.

I swore off new game purchases. Never heard of this game before. Read the ravings about it from you guys. Went to Steam and read similar ravings in the review section.

OK, no buying new games starting tomorrow.

Sigh.

Well, it turns out that only one of the dire messages was actually a dire message.

B12n11w00t's tip got Pithole on the right track for solving the whole food shortage. First we found a source of hardened steel to mine. This allowed us to get a butchering table going, then a stove, then a generator, and even a cooler (which doesn't seem to do anything). Emmie, who is an excellent cook, got busy with meals and soon the whole food problem took care of itself.

Well that might be a bit of an exaggeration, as they did have to resort to eating the corpse of a sole raider that the pet warg killed as things were looking a bit bleak on the food front. But a few days of cannibalism are all part of the fun in Pithole.

With that things took a turn for the better, and plans were made to expand the living quarters. They even started making chairs, tables, and a research station, to learn new things. Yes, things were looking pretty good for Pithole.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/vZMhPZ5.jpg)
Waiting for battle.

But then they weren't. Two more raiders showed up in the middle of the night. All four colonists gathered behind their solid sandbags and prepared for battle. Note to self, do not position a pacifist hedge fund banker in front of a 19-year-old kid who can't shoot straight. Turns out that Orr can't shoot at all. He ended up hitting the banker a half dozen times, and nailing the sex slave with three other shots. I'm not sure he ever hit the enemy raiders. Fortunately, AJ, the medieval lord, is a pretty good shot. She ended up killing one of the raiders, which sent the other one fleeing.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/S7JgMeR.jpg)
Scottish the banker gets caught in the crossfire.

But one of the bullets went through the lung of the banker, and no amount of rest will keep that alive. Heroically, he got up out of his death bed to treat the wounds of Emmie the sex slave and save her life, before falling back into his own bed. As I write this, he is on the verge of death, and when he goes, so goes the entire medical skill gene pool of Pithole.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/k603dOC.jpg)
Sleeping quarters turned hospital

Love reading other people's disaster success stories!

I got this yesterday and rolled my eyes at it for being DF light and then it was three hours later and i needed to go to bed so bad but i didn't have enough steel in storage.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Well, it turns out that only one of the dire messages was actually a dire message.

I love reading these stories. Reminds me of the Stellaris thread.

Thanks for patching them together, GB!

Couple things I noticed on the food production. You said you found an steel deposit that you mined which allowed you to make a butchers table. You know you can make that out of wood, right? It's not real evident, but a lot of furniture items and crafting tables can be constructed with a variety of materials. Once you select what you want to make, the pic of the specific item on the bottom row has an additional drop-down menu lets you select various material to craft with. I start making everything (walls, beds, doors, etc.) out of wood. Saves on the valuable metal materials, which I use for more complex machinery.

On the cooler, did you install it correctly and hook it up to a power source? You have to put the cooler in a wall and then rotate it so the extending blue square is in the room (cooling the space) and the red square outside (removing heat). Once it's hooked up to a generator or battery (the lightning bolt on the unit will disappear), you then have to manually set the temp. Click on the cooler and you'll see adjustment dials at the bottom of your screen. For food storage, set the temp to 9 Celsius or -13 Fahrenheit. This will keep your veggies and meat (prepared or not) frozen so they will never spoil. Make sure you Zone your cooler room for food and animal corpses only. Zone it and then click the little tab to specify food, veggies, prepared meals, meat, animal corpses, etc. Finally, to keep hot air out as your colonists pass in and out of the room, make a vacuum hallway. this is simply two sets of doors separated by 4 or so squares of hallway (outside door > hallway > cooler-room entrance). This will maintain frozen temp.

So yeah...words.

Aaron D. wrote:

For food storage, set the temp to 9 Celsius or -13 Fahrenheit.

I think anything below 0 Celsius freezes food in Rimworld. I usually set my cooler to -5. If you have more than one cooler for a large freezer, offset them by one degree (e.g., -5 and -4), so one will go into low power mode when not needed (i.e., in winter).

Yeah, thanks.

I got my temp. numbers all screwed up.

Thanks for the info, Aaron and ebarstad!

Regarding production, the "wood, silver, steel" thing is what messed me up with building the walls. I didn't realize you could switch materials. It also appears that if you have zero of a material, that material doesn't show up in the dropdown menu. That's why I think I built some of my manufacturing tables out of steel; at the time I didn't have any wood. I've since been trying to add wood so that it becomes an option in the dropdown again.

Thanks for the awesome info on the cooler. I got about halfway through that on my own, but had no clue on the rest of the stuff. I got the cooler installed and powered up correctly, but none of the food in the room it was cooling was listed as "refrigerated." I think the room is too big—and I'm guessing here—but I bet it wasn't a good idea to put the furnace/generator in the same room that I'm trying to cool. Do you know how big the cooler room can be for one cooler to cover it?

Last night I started building a second cooler to try some new ideas (smaller room, no heat blasting furnace inside it), but that got a bit delayed. I'll probably scrap that project and start over based on what you guys have posted.

Thanks for all the information!

I have a pretty large freezer/food-prep room - "air-locked" (the vestibule suggestion), with 2 coolers set for about -10C (I'm in the desert with heat waves breaking over 50C). It keeps the room at -5C-ish most of the time.

I do think there's diminishing returns on using a single cooler in increasingly larger rooms.

One other thing I wondered is if your food storage room has a roof. If not, all your cool air is escaping through an open ceiling.

Colonists will roof-off a finished room only after the 4 walls are completed. If there's any gaps in the wall, they won't start on a roof. I've messed this up a couple times when mining out a space where the corner of a room pokes outside the mountain a bit. Putting up a wood wall "corner" fixed the problem.

The roof does not cost any materials, but when being constructed, you'll see the colonist putting up what looks like corrugated metal sheets that then disappear. You'll know a room is roofed as it takes on a darker, "shadowed" color when complete.

merphle wrote:

Is that 6x6 for the interior space, or 6x6 including the walls?

6x6 interior, so 8x8 including the walls. I'm going to create some rooms of that size this evening when I mess around to see if it's still there.

Pithole Teeters on a Hot Edge

As expected, while Emmie, AJ, and Orr watch helplessly, Scottish the hedge fund banker bleeds out, goes unconscious and dies. Everyone is saddened by the tragedy, especially since it was Orr who put six of the seven bullets in Scottish. To atone for his errors, Orr digs a graveyard where we bury Scottish and the fallen raiders. The colony of Pithole has seen its first death.

Making this even more tragic is that shortly after Scottish's death, I figured out that all we had to do to save him would have been to designate someone else to be the colony doctor. D'oh! Sorry about that Mr. Hedge Fund Banker! My bad!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/dQ0P5Qw.jpg)
Scottish resting in peace.

After Scottish's death, things kind of settle down for a while. Emmie's mood actually improves after his death, as it turns out she didn't like Scottish at all. As spring winds toward summer, the colony enjoys a stretch of productivity. Orr builds like crazy. AJ, who still refuses to do any labor, spends most of her waking time researching stonecutting, which will allow us to build better walls and buildings. Emmie, who enthusiastically digs into any new project, makes great progress with the potato farm, meals, and cleaning. The colony even fights off a couple of ineffective raids with no casualties.

But just as I thought things might be turning a corner, summer arrived, and with it a stultifying heat wave that highlights just how fragile our ecosystem was. Emmie snaps first from the stress and heat. She goes into a pyschotic state, strips off all her clothes and gear, and wanders about the wilderness until she passes out from exhaustion.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/FkWnSoi.jpg)
Emi cracks first.

Without her food production, AJ and Orr's moods worsen. With the heat wave still smothering our energy, things get even worse. Orr gets ill with muscular parasites, a debilitating disease the requires frequent treatment with our dwindling medical supplies, and leaves him largely exhausted and unable to work. As Emmie returns from the wilderness and crashes into a deep sleep, Orr cracks and heads off into the wilds to the south of the settlement. He too strips off all his clothes and wanders around until he passes out. He too makes it back, but the stain on the colony while he's away is clear.

This sets off a devastating cycle of stagnation. Plans to build a dedicated cooler for food storage grind to a halt. No one cooks, so the only food is raw potatoes. We can't even think of building coolers for rooms to help with the heat problem. Our medical supplies grow sparse treating Orr's parasites, and we have no idea how to replenish the supply. Raiders are becoming more bold. AJ manages to fight off one raid single-handedly, but it's obvious that our luck will only last so long if we only have one able fighter in the colony. At one point Orr cracks again, and once more wanders off into the wilderness naked and starving. He eventually makes it back, but his absence only drives home how bad things are getting. The only joy holding everyone back from the abyss of total mental collapse is a solitary horseshoe pit that gives them fleeting moments of pleasure in the long hot days.

Lastly, despite the heat, winter must be coming, and I can't imagine we're ready.

I'm interested, but the talk of the installing a cooler makes it sound like I'd have to do way more consulting wikis than I like to actually play.

(imo) It's all pretty self-evident.

The only thing I still have a hard time with is the difference between (and skill involved with) things like: growing, harvesting, plant cutting, smithing, crafting, smelting. I wish there was just a bit more in the tool-tips regarding those...

PS: if you click on your cooler - it shows blue over the area affected. Too large an area might not "blue up," I'm not sure, but I've seen it in hallways...

I haven't looked up a wiki yet, but Iwill admit to picking up a bit from Let's Play videos and twitch streams. The game is much more - play how you would expect things to work, and then wiki if it doesn't work that way. Sure, you won't instantly jump into 100% efficiency in all factors for your colony, but really, I don't think anyone is capable of that in a game they haven't played before

It's a cracker of a game though.

Thanks for all the added info on the coolers! I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure everything has a roof.

I think it's got to be the generator in the room that's producing a lot of heat, so I'm going to rebuild things when I get a chance to play tomorrow. Well, if there is anyone still functioning well enough to build stuff.

Chaz wrote:

I'm interested, but the talk of the installing a cooler makes it sound like I'd have to do way more consulting wikis than I like to actually play.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I didn't even realize there was a wiki and look how well things are going for my colony.

Pithole: Final Installment

With the relentless heat still bearing down on the colony of Pithole, raiders strike once more. A fierce firefight ensues. The raiders are beaten away, but all three colonists take multiple gunshot wounds. The battle in 105-degree weather also sends everyone into varying degrees of heatstroke. Emmie never recovers, dying from stroke the next day. Our settlement is down to two.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/3Ru05GG.jpg)
Midsummer Firefight

After Emmie's death, the heatwave only gets worse. Temperatures soar to 122 degrees in the nighttime rooms. Orr can barely function, just able to keep the cooler functioning, and too weak to move the beds to the room for cooler nighttime sleeping. AJ fairs no better. She drops into a psychotic state and wanders around the settlement naked.

And then...

A settler offers to join our settlement! The catch: he's being chased by members of an enemy faction. We'll have to fight them off if we want to keep Norbert. What choice do we have? We welcome Norbert and put all hands on deck, even AJ, who is once again suffering from serious heatstroke.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/VyG0LcR.jpg)
The second summer raid kicks off.

Norbert joins the colony and grabs a gun just as the three-person raiding party arrives. Orr gets taken down from distance by a well placed rifle shot. Norbert gets in a prolonged duel with one raider, which ends in Norbert incapacitated and the raider closing on AJ, who miraculously killed a different raider in vicious hand to hand combat. AJ gets drilled with pistol shots but takes out a second raider as she falls. She will never get up, as mere minutes later she dies.

The last raider aborts the raid, leaving AJ and Orr dead, and Norbert struggling to rise from a pool of his own blood. Raiders also set fire to the generator, which quickly spread through other areas of the kitchen.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/OKx7mPc.jpg)
The bloody aftermath of the second summer raid.

It takes two days for Norbert to bleed out and die. In a cruel twist of fate's knife, the heat wave breaks with thunderstorms the day after the second raid. Temperatures plummet, and Pithole's short and brutish story ends with fog swirling over the Norbert as he breathes his last.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/d22IcJh.jpg)
The end