My animal game is no very strong, but I’ve seen and read of people who make massive barns of terriers or other small, seemingly worthless animals, and use them during sieges. While they don’t do a lot of damage, they take a lot of the fire off your colonists.
If you do use “drop on floor” make a one tile stockpile with low priority on the spot the items normally drop. Otherwise the items won’t count toward what you have in stock. So until someone hauls it, it doesn’t count toward “until you have X” type orders.
As you’ve seen, minimizing travel distance is the key to production efficiency. My current kitchen requires almost zero movement. I could probably pull the bench back one tile and make it really zero movement. Meat and veggies are in high priority stockpiles directly next to the workbench (the meat in a single tile wall fridge in this case). They get continually replenished during daytime by my animal haulers. In this setup I’m not using drop on floor since via rim fridge I have my meal storage also right next to the bench.
Notice the freezer is broken into two zones, an important one close to the door and a preferred one for the rest of the freezer. With the help of animal haulers this ensures material is always close to the door.
If I wasn’t using rim fridge I’d just move the stove adjacent to the freezer and put the meal storage in the tiles on either side of the door.
With this setup, and a few capable cooks so there’s almost always someone available when meals are needed, I have orders to keep just 10 simple and fine meals on hand, resetting once the count is down to 5.
OOPS they rot in 60 days dammit. Maybe I need to put a roof on it. Will check. Nope, doesn’t help. Oh man!! I guess they need to be indoors.
While this is still viable, it’s been a bit nerfed in 1.0 since animals require occasional re-training. Previously once an animal, even a wild animal, was trained you were done. You just need to keep it fed and it’s yours forever. You could, for example, train every squirrel that ever appeared on the map and keep them fed on the natural grass outside the base by using area restrictions. They’d basically maintain themselves and be ready to call on when needed.
Raising a squirrel army is still possible, but it’s no longer a nearly maintenance free proposition.
My people spend a lot of time tending to the livestock. Especially the bears and megasloths. In retrospect I’d have not tamed the mega-sloths. I got lucky with the first one, not realizing that even my guy that was great with animals only had a 2.5% chance. I realized that when I attempted to tame a mate for him and my animal handler got mauled practically to death. To contrast, for bears he had a 20% chance. That higher wildness also means that the sloths require a lot more retraining than any of my other animals. But they are cute and are great haulers. Now I’ve got a family of four. While I haven’t let them bond with anyone I’ve grown quite attached to them and enjoy seeing them wandering around the base.
How do you keep the dirtiness in check?
It’s not indoors, hay needs to be frozen like any other food.
Shelves prevent “outdoor” decay for anything placed on them, and eliminate the negative beauty a pile of stuff gives. So they are useful outdoors for things like storing grenades outside near a wall for emergencies. Indoors they are useful for keeping stockpiles next to production benches while maintaining a beautiful and impressive workshop.
Mainly through priorities. Once a colony gets large enough someone I often set someone to clean as their main job. Before that every once in a while I’ll bump someone to a 2 in cleaning, or reduce the priorities in front of cleaning to increase the time they spend cleaning. Once I have a few animals to haul, I reduce the hauling priority of all my guys which also makes more cleaning opportunities. There’s usually so much to haul around your guys will never get to cleaning with the default priorities.
I also do some spot cleaning in the kitchen and hospital. Often if I see or hear someone working in the kitchen I’ll glance over and see how dirty it is and either interrupt the cooking to clean up the area first or queue a clean after the current meal they are working on. If I order a operation on someone, or I have incoming wounded, I manually order someone to clean up first.
I turn my hay into silage which does not rot as long as it’s undercover, roof. It’s a vegetable mod but the cost is it requires a lot of hay and vegetables so not a total cheat really.
Hmm, it doesn’t looks like you can load batteries into caravans or drop pods anymore. You can still pack turrets, but I guess I’ll have to quickly build a generator if I want to set up a defense when attacking outposts.
Thank you. Just to see what happens, I reformed the caravan and headed home. During the walk, my downed pawn fully healed (which I thought was odd, but worked for me).
I hadn’t run into this yet because i’m still early in my current campaign, so this changed in 1.0?
I didn’t play any B18 so I’m not sure if it was changed there or 1.0.
While it’s a lot more weight to pack, bringing enough steel and components to build a generator worked out. The pirates didn’t attack right away so I was able to build small camp before engaging them.
I did have to savescum this encounter as at first I accidentally moved a couple of my guys off the map as I was shooting and retreating around my little encampment at the edge of the map. Oops.
Doesn’t that single door freezer make temperature quite unstable? Every time someone opens the door the inside gets warmer such that day time the food is refrigerated at best. This seems mitigated by adding an entryway room with autodoors.
Yes. That’s why I have two coolers for the relatively small space and I set them to -5C. It may not be efficient but it works. Things stay frozen except in extreme circumstances like the peak of a heat wave or when a bunch of lancers drop podded right into my f&@king freezer. In this particular game I have plenty of power.
Oh I see - I didn’t realise that it could be mitigated with a second cooler. I have plenty of power of well so I will have to try that!
Seriously, these bastards dropped right into the middle of my base. Thank god there was nobody recovering in the new hospital (built out of what was the storage space north of the freezer in prior screenshots).
This is a shot during the battle.
After dropping one of my stockpiled turrets into the freezer and waiting a second for the lancers to target it, Adrian shielded up and ran in. My shooters followed right behind and took up position. The hope was that between the distraction of the turret and my trusty basher the lancers wouldn’t get many shots off before our fire overwhelmed them. The plan worked well and injuries were manageable, until we moved on to take out the last one in the hospital. As per the plan Adrian again rushed in to draw fire while the gunners took up position. He had already taken some cracks and bruises from his earlier macework on the mechanoids. His bionic leg was showing damage and this lancer, who was obviously schooled in the cobra kai, swept the leg and destroyed it.
If only we had kept the original leg (like the have for the hearts of the colonists whose pumpers have been upgraded, it’s a sentimental thing).
Fortunately we had recently traded for some advanced components and we were able to fabricate a new leg. He didn’t have to hop for more than a few days.
Setting the temp well below what is required is also key. The area around the door heats up a bit, but not enough to get above freezer temps.
Mechs inside the base are a nightmare
My first official game of Rimworld is underway. I decided to go with Phoebe on medium difficulty. I just accepted the 3 default colonists rather than look at the reserves.
Nix is my workhorse. She’s me dr, animal handler, hunter, grower, plant cutter, smith, tailor, crafter, cleaner.
Queenie is my builder, hauler, researcher and backup cook.
Danger is a pain in the butt because he refuses to do any ‘dumb labor’. He is also incapable of caring and being social. He is my cook, miner and artist. I also realized he has an alcohol problem (didn’t even know I had any) when he walked off his cooking job at a time when I really needed food.
I started off by building a barracks with 3 beds, a torch lamp and wood stove. Nix and Queenie both want private bedrooms but that would have to wait. Then I built a storage shed and sang bag area. I needed a lot of wood, so I started chopping trees. My rations wouldn’t last forever so I planted some rice.
After a while I figured there had to be a way to plant some trees to keep the wood supply going and found the research item. That prompted me to built my workshop with research, butcher, sculpture, stone cutter and tailor tables. Hunting brought in some needed food.
To help with happiness i added a horseshoe pit and chess table, but I don’t think anyone has played chess even though they are intellectual. My barracks was also fitted with a table and chairs to make eating more pleasant. A dresser helped make the barracks a little more pleasant. I noticed that the heat was making my people less happy, so passive coolers were installed. Danger doesn’t do much, but his art significantly boosted the barracks and my workshop.
Nix really wanted a private bedroom, so I built one with it’s own art, cooler, dresser and shelves. She also got my first custom floor instead of walking on dirt.
During this time I had a couple invasions by a single person which were pretty easy to handle. Nix and Queenie are both decent with guns. Danger guards them with his knife in case the enemy gets close.
My biggest hurdle was food, because my builder (Queenie) didn’t have a high enough skill to build a refrigerator. I just couldn’t get ahead. I had to get her building some more floors and such just to get her skill up. It took a while. Then I ran out of steel. I found an old wall to salvage some from along with some compacted steal to mine. Finally I was able to build a winder generator and cooler to keep my food cold. It was sporadic, so I needed to research batteries to get a more reliable power supply.
Colder weather was coming so I got some cotton planted, hoping I could use it for warmer clothing. I also had some animal skins and furs from hunting. In her spare time, Nix started making jackets and parkas. I also added potatoes as another source of food.
It is now the 13th of Septober. I made it through a cold snap that saw sub 0 temps. It has since hit the 50s again. I wish I had hunted more of the large buffalo things that showed up because I didn’t realize they would leave. I’ve found some smaller animals to hunt but they just don’t bring in the food the big guys do.
I’m having a pretty good time with this. It is a bit more open ended than games I typically play. I tend to like things with more concrete objectives. It’s why I never stick that long with games like SimCity. But I am interested to see where this game goes. I doubt I will start a second right away though.
Okay I figured out the pig room. It’s a barn made out of dead wood.
Corpses go on the refrigerated left (-1 Celcius)
Right zone is heated to 0 Celcius. This is enough to offset frostbite and within pig comfortable zone.
(The default 21 C is bad because two thermal zones fight each other as the pigs walk back and forth)
Both rooms are the pig zone.
