RimWorld the sci-fi colony sim Catch-All

Oh, I'm liking mountainous already! I fired up a new game with this map and already see a bunch of choke points for defense. I am going to kick raider butt!!!! Charge!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/eiCvUzS.jpg)

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Oh, I'm liking mountainous already! I fired up a new game with this map and already see a bunch of choke points for defense. I am going to kick raider butt!!!! Charge!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/eiCvUzS.jpg)

I look forward to hearing about this one...

Lots of rich soil there too, bonus!

Care to post your seed and starting location? Might be cool to dual-play and see how differently it turns out

Anyone run into any weird bugs with growing zones? I've got an indoor farm (not hydroponic, I literally built walls and a roof around two growing zones and put sun lamps and a heater inside) and I tried to erase and redraw the growing zones. They now always register as a single zone even though there is a row of space in between them.

I've noticed that zoning areas can be fiddly, esp. when trying to edit them. But I haven't run into any roadblocks to what I was trying to accomplish.

When rezoning I've found that it's easiest to just press Pause and simply erase an entire area that I'm trying to restructure. Then I simply start zoning from scratch, remembering to reallocate the types of growth that I want along the way.

I also noticed that it's possible to rename zones after they've been laid down. I wonder if the game gets confused if you try to expand an existing zone, separating it into two discreet names? In those scenarios I simply highlight the new, larger zone and rename it. Seems to hip the game to what I'm trying to do.

Feegle wrote:

Anyone run into any weird bugs with growing zones? I've got an indoor farm (not hydroponic, I literally built walls and a roof around two growing zones and put sun lamps and a heater inside) and I tried to erase and redraw the growing zones. They now always register as a single zone even though there is a row of space in between them.

Highlight the zone you're trying to select and press the multiplication key on your number pad. It will cycle through all the items in the cell you're clicking on, one of which will be just the connected growing zone.

omni wrote:

Lots of rich soil there too, bonus!

Care to post your seed and starting location? Might be cool to dual-play and see how differently it turns out :)

Sorry for the slow reply - real life stuff got in the way yesterday.

I just checked and don't see a way to see what the seed was now that I've started the game. I just kind of clicked through it during generation. I'm also not sure how to see the starting location information again either.

But...

I like the idea of a group of people all starting with the same starting conditions and seeing what happens. That could be fun.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:
omni wrote:

Lots of rich soil there too, bonus!

Care to post your seed and starting location? Might be cool to dual-play and see how differently it turns out :)

I like the idea of a group of people all starting with the same starting conditions and seeing what happens. That could be fun.

Yes! Maybe if someone shares a save file right after touchdown we will have the same everything.

Sounds like a plan. Obviously everyone has different play-rates, but it would be interesting indeed. We'd have to agree on starting people/skills, or just go entirely random for more challenge. Also, would we play on the same difficulty level? some are more experienced than others! (hides from anything above difficulty 2 currently)

omni wrote:

Sounds like a plan. Obviously everyone has different play-rates, but it would be interesting indeed. We'd have to agree on starting people/skills, or just go entirely random for more challenge. Also, would we play on the same difficulty level? some are more experienced than others! (hides from anything above difficulty 2 currently)

This is an appealing notion; perhaps let the proposal percolate a bit? I imagine with ~ 6+ folks there would be an awesome Rimworlds spread of everything from 'Bob ate the dog' to 'the dog ate Bob'. Personal opinion is a shared save where the starting castoffs were 'planned'. A middling banned of no super stars but nothing so haphazard such that it's likely to sink half the participants the same way.

I'm in, and would be up for any difficulty or whatever. Random starters, random location, optimized starters, good starting location, anything works.

For maximum fun for all, though, it might be a good idea to have a modest or easy difficulty setting, unless there is a way we could just pick our own difficulty level.

Recreational Villain wrote:

Personal opinion is a shared save where the starting castoffs were 'planned'. A middling banned of no super stars but nothing so haphazard such that it's likely to sink half the participants the same way.

I like this line of thought.

Could we just create a scenario and upload it to the Steam Workshop?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Could we just create a scenario and upload it to the Steam Workshop?

This is where my head was going to when reading the past number of posts.

Ankh-Morpork: Early Days

We scratch ambitious building plans in the dirt for the plains in front of us. Surrounded on three sides by thick mountains, the area should be perfect for defense. As a bonus, a swath of rich soil on the eastern half should provide for excellent farming. We can tuck living quarters in the northwest corner. Along the open southern side we'll build a wall that funnels to a choke point on the eastern side. It all sounds so wonderful, but planning is easy, action is hard.

Our three colonists get to work. The immediate goals are crops in the ground and shelter over our heads. Our first day goes moderately well. We get the fields sown with rice and heal root. The second goal suffers from the ambitious nature of our plans and the lack of focus of our builders. It's pretty much like an ADHD convention, as colonists randomly work on various sections of the structure, never quite finishing one room before starting something else. We end the first day sleeping in the rain, miserable.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/yXId8cI.jpg)
Fields sown, portions of the main structure in place.

Things improve over the next couple of days. As we reach the end of the third day, the majority of our main living complex is complete. Our three settlers will sleep with a roof over their heads.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/8ltyBHK.jpg)
The main building takes shape.

With the majority of lodging construction in place, we start planning our defense. The general idea is to build a sort of Trump Wall along the southern edge of the plain. Rather than defending the width of the wall, we'll set a narrow corridor through it on the east. With luck, raiders will head straight down that corridor. At the far end, we'll build a temporary wall of sandbags. If all goes well, we can pummel the raiders as they march down that corridor. Eventually, we hope to switch human defenders for automated turrets.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/3UAi1Zw.jpg)
Defensive vision

Looking forward, after we get a rudimentary defense up, our next plans are to build a meal production system and a power system. Full speed ahead!

Ankh-Morpork: Build Build Build

Over the next few days, Ankh-Morpork continues to make steady progress. We get a wind turbine and a solar generator installed. Batteries and power lines soon follow. Before we know it, we've got a cooler in place and an electric stove up and running. As our last survival meal runs out, our first crop from the garden is ready for harvest and we start producing simple meals on our stove. Nice.

Even better, a female wanderer named Goodman shows up and joins our colony. She brings a mediocre skill set, but excels in melee. Our population is up to four!

With the additional labor, "KK", our builder extraordinaire, makes great progress on the Trump Wall to the south. He gets the main length done, and starts working on the choke point walls next.

In our first colony, every event was a catastrophe. Even the first rabid animal attack was an adventure in chaos. Comparatively, Ankh-Morpork has things under control. When we get our first enemy raid, we dispatch two colonists, who take the guy out easily and capture him. We're now trying to convince him to join our cause.

As we end this segment, things are shockingly calm. We've yet to even have a colonist drop into a bad mood. If there is any dark cloud on the horizon, it's that all our colonists suck at shooting. They either can't do it or next to useless at it. Two of them love melee, and don't even want to arm themselves for ranged combat. We try to improve things by having Daisuke, who has a shooting skill of zero, try to learn how to hunt. His slow progress is rather entertaining, although the only accomplishment so far seems to be punching holes in the Trump Wall.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/xgjSj7g.jpg)
The complex gets more complex.

Looking to the future, our next goals are to research then build turrets. Turrets are the key element in our Trump Wall defense, and the quicker we get those in place the better we'll sleep, especially seeing as we can't hit anything with a gun.

*chomping down popcorn*

Keep 'em coming! I'm loving this thread and really want to buy this game!

Can the communal save file start include characters named after the major thread contributors :D?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

The immediate goals are crops in the ground and shelter over our heads.

I don't know why, but I first read this as "and shave our heads". I was very confused for a moment.

So, say i have a lot of crops lying on the ground and everyone has "higher priority" task so they are not hauling them. Apart from manually assigning someone to haul them, is the only other way to untick everything above haul in my jobs list? Even that won't solve that they could be hauling other stuff at the time.

Also, why are my batteries at 50% efficiency all the time?

Are using the check-mark system in the Work menu or the advanced 1-4 number system? I'm using the latter as I find it easier to micromanage colonists, playing to their skill-set strengths. If I have something come up that needs special attention from everyone, I simply change priority on that activity to 1 across the board and that typically gets everyone up and running. Though you may have to tick down activities to the Left if they're listed on 1 as well.

My question for the peanut gallery, how are you guys dealing with worn out items? I've got some fresh clothes that I left out in the rain too long which consequently dropped their condition to below 50%, making them pretty useless. I don't see a "destroy, disassemble" toggle for them when I highlight these useless items and now they're taking up space in my new covered Storage pile. I don't want to waste space in there but I have no idea how to lose these items. Any ideas?

You could set up a "Critical" stockpile zone for items of any quality with less than (whatever) 40% hit points.

Or set up a bill at the incinerator for the same criteria...

Interesting.

Haven't unlocked an incinerator yet, but that seems like the ticket. Didn't even know that was an option. Thanks.

I do think the tech tree could use some fleshing out. New Research "kinda" indicates what each branch will yield upon completion, but a lot of it feels like groping in the dark. I would like more transparency with tech trees so I can set long-term goals early.

Oooh. i didn't know about the 1-4. Now i get to play with that!

It's really a game-changer.

I wish that was the default system vs. the check-mark one. The number-system is light years more effective for workload management.

dibs wrote:

So, say i have a lot of crops lying on the ground and everyone has "higher priority" task so they are not hauling them. Apart from manually assigning someone to haul them, is the only other way to untick everything above haul in my jobs list? Even that won't solve that they could be hauling other stuff at the time.

Also, why are my batteries at 50% efficiency all the time?

You could set a stockpile for harvested crops and set it to a higher priority than the rest of the stuff your guys are hauling around? I have no idea about the batteries though, I didn't even realise there was an efficiency number, just thought there was capacity...

Ankh-Morpork: Growth, Blood, and Heat

As spring morphs into summer, we're faced with a pressing need for air conditioning. As we work to research the technology behind building turrets, our colonists concentrate on expanding our power system and getting coolers in our living quarters. Work is slower than I'd hoped, as our best builder is also our only effective miner, and we now need to mine all our steel and components. Still, progress lurches forward, and we're hopeful we'll get cooling systems in place before any summer heat wave hits.

Our population grows as well. Xavin, who we captured during the first raid on the colony, finally joins our group. This took forever mainly because none of our colonists has any social grace: our highest social attribute is a 3. Our population is now up to 5!

There are setbacks, however. A ferocious explosion wakes us one night. One of our batteries blew up, knocking out and setting fire to our electrical system. We succeed in containing the damage, but lose valuable time repairing things.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/7KxyMCp.jpg)
Things go boom in the night.

We get an infestation of alpha beavers, which forces Daisuke, our best shooter (at a 1 rating, sigh) to go on long hunting missions to clear up the problem. Another colonist, Goodman, treks out to haul in the fresh corpses for cooking. Apparently Daisuke never attended his Hunting Safety 101 classes, because rather than waiting for Goodman to clear the area with a beaver corpse, Daisuke opens fire on other live beavers close by. Of course he misses the live beavers and drills Goodman twice with the high-powered rifle. We manage to patch up Goodman with no permanent damage, but it doesn't inspire confidence.

On a more ominous note, raids start to pick up in intensity, and our Trump Wall Defense System fails its first test. I had put a door along the face of the wall and a trap in the long choke point corridor, but instead of coming down the corridor, the raiders break down the door and bypass the corridor. D'oh! We manage to survive the raid with only minor casualties, but it forces some rethinking of the basic premise behind the defense system. To adjust, we move our door to a spot along the corridor, which will allow us access to the area beyond our wall, but should encourage raiders to still come tromping down the corridor through the traps. In a second raid, the system works much better. The raiders come straight down the corridor and the first one gets seriously injured by the trap.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/3M1HXsK.jpg)
Our defenses hold, but the corridor system fails its first test

Still, we've living dangerously here, as our reliance on melee fighting instead of shooting makes me think it's just a matter of time before a stronger attacking force overwhelms us. To counter this, we pour all our energies into building an Omni Turret Defense System at the end of the choke point. As we head into the middle of summer, we crack the secrets of building turrets and our colonists devise a blueprint for the system. All our efforts focus on getting this defense system up and running as quickly as possible.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/xHJn3tu.jpg)
Omni Turret Defense System Blueprint, Stage 1

The future at the moment is simple: Turrets.

\o/

Can't wait to see how it works out!

Ankh-Morpork: Omni Turret Defense System

Over the next few days, we scramble to get our Omni Turret Defense System in place. We get a good workflow going, with KK mining steel and components, and Xavin eagerly putting together the defense system. Summer temps stay surprisingly cool, we see no raiders, and progress is brisk. Fortune shines on us even more as partway through the build some chunks of a spaceship crash to the surface nearby. I realize we can break these down into steel and components, which solves the component shortage we were facing for our turrets. Most excellent!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/GlS9cQW.jpg)
Xavin working overtime to get a third turret in place

Still, there is a lot of work to be done. Turrets require a good number of components and steel, and we also need to run power lines from the complex out to the system. And then, with the worst possible timing, everything happened...

We got our fourth turret in place and powered, only to realize that our power supply isn't sufficient to power all our coolers and our turrets. Our batteries are dead, the power cuts out to the turrets, and the lights in the complex start flickering and shorting out. We hurriedly lay down plans for more wind turbines and solar batteries, but before we can make any progress on them: RAID! Even worse: "These raiders are particularly clever." Crud! We've got functional turrets in place but no power reaching them! The raiders are attacking immediately, and there is no time to increase our power supply before the attack.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/I0oC6BK.jpg)
My kingdom for a full battery.

We scramble our four fighters to the sandbags, and call back Xavin, our non-fighter, to the base to turn off every powered item in the complex. Lights, stoves, research tables, coolers, everything is set to be turned "Off".

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/4248VOj.jpg)
The colony scrambles to defense, sans power support.

Our fighters arrive at the sandbags, take cover, and peer over the top. From the far side of the wall, we can hear three raiders marching toward the corridor. Our turret system sputters the occasional spark, but shows no signs of meaningful life. Back at the base, Xavin races from electrical device to electrical device, turning things off. Will it be in time?

The first raider comes right down the corridor, trips the dead fall, and takes damage. He keeps coming forward and starts straight across for our sandbags. With action-movie timing, the turrets jump to life, spin around, and open fire! The crossfire is brutal, and the first raider is down within seconds. The second raider retreats down the corridor to the far end to begin sniping at our colonists behind the sandbags. We fall back from the sandbags to draw him forward through the corridor. The plan works, and soon the second raider is clear of the corridor. After a few seconds the turrets cut him down as well. Seeing this, the third raider concedes the battlefield! Omni Turret Defense System 2, Raiders 0!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/fTOMvU7.jpg)
A sputtering Omni Turret Defense System and the results of its work.

Woohoo! The Omni Turret Defense System saves the day! Our only casualty is a bullet wound to Anastasia, our pet Arctic Fox. Two raiders dead! The colonists are exhilarated and party well into the night.

Good going! I've been trying to aim towards a split in the power distribution, with a switch or two so that if needed, I can divert all power functionality to only defence and cut off all lights/workstations when required, that way you only need someone to interact with a single point, rather than each individual electrical item.

Not so much of an issue now that I have two Steam generators and a lot of batteries though, but just trying to get myself into the habit.

How easy is it to get large amounts of metal and other materials? It would seem that with the lack of z-levels you will eventually mine the entire map dry.

Mining is a lot slower/less important for me in this so far than in other similar games. It's only when you come to the 'end game' of building the space ship that you really need to go search-mining for specific materials. You can always trade for those materials though, if you have an abundance of something else.

I haven't got far enough to need vast amounts of a specific material yet, I always seem to have enough/easily find enough. Maybe that will change later in the game..

omni wrote:

Mining is a lot slower/less important for me in this so far than in other similar games. It's only when you come to the 'end game' of building the space ship that you really need to go search-mining for specific materials. You can always trade for those materials though, if you have an abundance of something else.

I haven't got far enough to need vast amounts of a specific material yet, I always seem to have enough/easily find enough. Maybe that will change later in the game..

On my second game in the plains, I seemed to have to be traveling a ways out to mine steel and component pretty early in the game. In this game in the mountains, steel is sufficient and component is a bit of a hike.

But like omni said, it's not like minecraft, where you have to mine a ton of stuff to build something. Things seem to take 1-3 "squares" of steel to build, which isn't very much. I get a sense there are other ways to get the materials you need if you run out of mining options, like falling spaceships, trade, smelting, etc.

omni wrote:

Good going! I've been trying to aim towards a split in the power distribution, with a switch or two so that if needed, I can divert all power functionality to only defence and cut off all lights/workstations when required, that way you only need someone to interact with a single point, rather than each individual electrical item.

Not so much of an issue now that I have two Steam generators and a lot of batteries though, but just trying to get myself into the habit.

D'oh! A switch! I didn't even realize those existed. Thanks for the idea. That's probably smarter than what I've been doing, which is to build a whole boatload of power sources so I can keep everything powered at once.

I'll post an update later, but I'm about halfway to geothermal power now, so I imagine that will help some too.