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Post by skalpadda on May 12, 2024 4:03:13 GMT
I've missed Rimworld. As it's a "story generator" I figured it would be fun to document the story (with text and screenshots). If you're not familiar with it, Rimworld is a bit like a sci-fi Dwarf Fortress, but significantly more approachable.
There have been two major expansions in the two years since I last played it and I only know their basic premises. The first one is Biotech, which adds children and er.. eugenics, apparently? Hm. The second, that came out just a month ago, is called Anomaly. It's all about horror and creepy stuff. That's all I know and I want to find out and hopefully learn as I play. It's bound to go great. This post is all setup and introduction to the starting pawns. I'll post a list of installed mods at the very end, but I'm not using any that drastically alter things. That's a swanky new title screen. Let's get to the premise: Don't worry, I'm not going to write Star Trek fan fiction... much. I just wanted something different to shape the playthrough around. (God damnit, just spotted my typo).
We're settling west of Barra Forest, at the foot of Minbo Peaks. There's a great road network and all the factions, both friendly and hostile, have several settlements nearby. I was going to use this boreal forest tile, but I must have misclicked and we ended up in the grasslands a bit to the south-west. Not a big deal, but caravans will get slightly trickier.
Ideoligion: Yep, we're raiders. I like the Raider meme because it forces you out on the map more, which can be both risky and rewarding. Custom and fluid settings, so we'll get the ability to change or reshape things later. In case you haven't played Rimworld or the expansions, the Ideoligion is the philosophy/religion that your colony follows. It decides a lot about what they can and can't do, what they like and dislike, and the overall character of your settlement. I'm keeping things pretty mild to start out.
Not much to add. I think the theme is obvious. The roles are given to individual pawns and come with abilities and skill boosts, but also drawbacks, like higher expectations (affects mood) and refusing to do some kinds of work. Rituals are social events that can (if they go well) give mood bonuses and sometimes other effects. The relics add quests you can pursue later in the game.
Let's meet our first pawns. Yes, I edited these, but mostly for the theme. I lowered some of their starting skills but handed out a few more interests they can develop over time. And I made sure that they have traits that add both strengths and weaknesses.
Kirk is handsome, steadfast, a misogynist and a psychopath. Sounds about right. Not great at anything, but he has a fair range of interests that can be developed over time. Troi is of course kind and pretty, but she's also lazy (will work slower) and delicate (takes more damage). She has a burning passion for social interactions and a very high skill in it for a starter pawn, so she's our "face" character. Shit at combat, okay at planting and really likes animals, though she's starting with a poor skill in it. She's also going to be our doctor at the start even though she's a bit crap. Let's take a closer look at her backgrounds: And our third pawn:
I swear I didn't edit anything but the name for Lt. Yar. She turned up and I immediately knew who she was. She's a hard worker so she'll put the effort in, but she's also nervous, which makes her much more prone to serious mental breaks. Loves shooting of course, and has a burning passion for art but no skill in it. I'd like to promise she'll get to live out her dream of becoming an artist, but she'll probably spend most of her time cooking. She's the only one not completely terrible at it, and we don't want our pawns permanently incapacitated by food poisoning. Her background: And we can't forget about our best friend Harriet: I made a rough blueprint for a basic base, but unless we get some skilled labour added to the colony it's going to be a long time before even this gets built. Our castaways spend their first day using what little materials they have to make a simple shelter and bringing their meagre supplies indoors. As the sun sets Kirk and Tasha immediately collapse and fall asleep on the dirt floor from exhaustion. Deanna stays up for a while, lies down on the grass outside and looks up at the universe. |
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Post by skalpadda on May 12, 2024 4:05:19 GMT
Mods:
Progress Renderer. Automatically takes screenshots at set intervals.
EdB Prepare Carefully. Used to customise the starting pawns.
ReGrowth core. Adds a few animals and plants, new biomes and weather events. A few visual tweaks, a slightly prettier world map, and lets your caravans make camp out in the wild.
[FSF] Better Camp Loot and [FSF] Better Ancient Complex Loot. Makes it worthwhile to send caravans on certain risky quests and raids.
More Planning. Some tweaks to expand the planning tool (blueprinting).
Quality Colors. Colour codes item names based on quality, meaning you don't have to inspect them to see it.
Door Mat. Slightly reduces the amount of dirt dragged around by pawns that walk over them.
Tilled Soil. Lets you "build" a "floor" with higher fertility. Not sure if I'll use it, but it's an option for more space-efficient farming.
Pocket Sand. Lets pawns switch weapons without having to drop them on the ground first.
Realistic Rooms Rewritten. Slightly reduces room size requirements.
Yayo's Caravan. Just a cute visual effect that shows the pawns and animals of a caravan traveling over the world maps instead of a boring dot.
Pick Up and Haul. Lets pawns use their inventory to haul things.
Numbers. A convenient stat screen to give an easier overview of pawns and some other things.
Misc. Robots. Cleaning and hauling robots you can buy. Rare, expensive and require power, but they can be nice further into the game.
Camera+. Just expanded camera functionality.
Interaction Bubbles. Shows social interactions as little speech bubbles next to the pawns.
Common Sense. Makes pawns behave a little more intelligently. They'll automatically clean a room before doing surgery for example. Cuts down on micromanagement.
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Post by skalpadda on May 12, 2024 21:30:23 GMT
Chapter 1: Raccoon Rumble.
This one's not terribly exciting; we're basically just trying to find our feet, and it's a slow start. I've already played the first year, so I can tease that in the second update there will be murder and kidnapping, and in the third things go a bit lovecraftian.
On day 4 we get our first taste of combat. I don't even bother drafting anyone, just set it to be hunted and tell Tasha to deal with it. I'm sure she can handle a raccoon. Um, Tasha? Really? She finally manages to beat the beast unconscious with the butt of her rifle, but she's taken a crazy amount of damage and needs immediate medical attention.
I set Troi to tame the two turkeys on the map. I figured I could perhaps set up a little bird farm for eggs and meat. Then I realised that both of them are female. Oh well, at least we're having a nice turkey dinner. On day six the first raid arrives. It's a single tribal with a club. We may be crap at combat, but against the three of us he doesn't stand much of a chance. I won't bother including all the raids that happen, we're so poor and underequipped that most of them will look like this for a while.
We get our first quest, from the Exodus Empire. The Empire is the only truly high-tech human faction in the game, and they're by far the easiest route to get psychic powers for non-tribals. They're kind of dicks, but we want to be friendly with them. You always get a very easy quest like this early on to get your foot in the door, and we're accepting it with Troi so she gets the honour from it. Tasha can't even handle a lone rabbit without getting badly scratched up. At least Troi can get her first royalty title. I'm not doing it yet though, because titles come with increased demands and we're already having trouble keeping our colonists' mood up.
Well, shit. As Tasha is out hunting, a hungry cougar suddenly attacks her. Tasha can't even handle raccoons and rabbits, so this will go badly. I draft Kirk and Troi and send them to help her, but she's way out on the edge of the map.
Tasha goes down almost immediately. Predators are extra dangerous because they won't stop attacking when a pawn goes down. We manage, barely, to get there and murder it, but Kirk takes some hits and Tasha is so badly injured that Troi has to patch her up in the field - she would have bled out if we tried carrying her back to base. By some miracle she didn't lose any limbs, but she'll be bedridden for a while. When you have a bigger colony it's not a big deal if one or two pawns get incapacitated, but with just three people it can be crippling. Tasha is our only cook and the only one somewhat competent at shooting, so it's a huge issue for food, hunting and base defence. I make Troi tame some horses. I'd already built a small pen for the dumb turkeys and I'd like some animals around. Horses aren't great early on as they don't give milk or fur, but they're okay pack animals and if they breed we can sell the foals. In an emergency we can of course eat them.
As soon as we get a male and female together they get down to business. I've filled their pen with a dandelion field so they have something to eat while I grow some hay in the garden.
Success!
Base update on the last day before summer: Getting anything done has been a struggle. On a grasslands map there are hardly any trees, so I've had to start building with stone, which is extremely slow. I just don't have the manpower or the materials.
We have a barracks/dining room, a rudimentary freezer, workshop, butcher's table, kitchen and a small storeroom. We're growing some potatoes, healgrass and some hay for the horses outside. Everything is still dirt-floored, extremely ugly and filthy. My pawns hate it.
I just got a windmill built to power the freezer but have no batteries, so it will lose power a lot and be more of a crappy fridge for a while. I haven't been able to craft any gear or do any research, which is very bad.
People are starting to get upset about not having any ideoligious leaders. Mood is becoming a huge issue and Tasha is constantly on the edge of having a breakdown, so a -5 isn't something we can afford. The Ship's Counselor is obviously going to be Troi. This gives her some social abilities; she can now calm people's moods and try to convert people with different ideoligions to ours.
Troi is trying to flirt with Kirk, but he's just not interested. Not only is he a misogynist, but as a psychopath he doesn't get much impact from social interactions, so no matter how kind and socially skilled Troi is it's hard to form relationships with him. It's the third day of summer and Yar is having her first proper mental break. I forced her go out in the pouring rain and hunt boomalopes all day, and it made her snap. She's decided to take it out on Kirk. Insulting his jawline was a step too far.
Pawns don't use weapons when social fighting, thank god, but it can still go very badly. I've had one pawn punch another's head clean off with his bionic arm in the past. Kirk and Tasha are both pretty crap at melee so they just rough each other up a little. Kirk now considers Tasha his rival though, which could lead to bad things in the future. And that's where spring ends and summer begins. At least we're still alive.
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Post by skalpadda on May 12, 2024 22:24:31 GMT
To anyone reading: Is this update length okay? I'm trying to stick to one in-game season for each, but it will probably accelerate over time. I don't want to spend too much time on mundane or repeating stuff, or go in-depth on nerdy mechanical things, but I also want to cover some of the way the game works to keep it from being confusing. Not sure how those should be balanced.
Is the text readable in the screenshots? I'm trying to crop things to focus on relevant bits and not have the whole UI in everything, but I don't know how it looks on different screens.
Also, if anyone has a good naming scheme for the dogs and other pets, feel free to suggest it.
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Post by Destria on May 13, 2024 15:20:20 GMT
Firstly, thanks for this. It's a fun read. From my perspective, this length is fine.
I don't have the creativity to suggest a good dog-naming scheme. My go-to for naming pets (cats, in my case) is usually to have a common link between the names of the various multiple pets (in my case, vaudeville performers... my wife's idea!).
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Ulythium
Full Member
Lily-livered
Posts: 7,092
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Post by Ulythium on May 13, 2024 15:32:29 GMT
Firstly, thanks for this. It's a fun read. From my perspective, this length is fine.
Agreed. (It's hot, and Destria had already put it perfectly - this is as useful as I can be right now!) |
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Post by skalpadda on May 13, 2024 22:48:30 GMT
Chapter 2: All your chairs are belong to us.
Last time Yar had a mental break and now it's Troi's turn. It's my fault. I've been forcing them to work and not letting them relax enough, but we're too short-handed and they would literally starve if I let them off the leash. Pigging out on food is a really bad break at this point. The pawn will eat everything they can get their hands on, usually until they pass out, and we don't have a lot of food. You can't control them at all when this happens. While Troi is having a meltdown another raid arrives. It's a single raider with a knife. I think another raccon would have been a bigger threat. I wanted to show her stats though, because it shows a problem we're having. Normally the game hands you a pawn or two in your first season to get you going; quests, crashlandings, wild people you can "tame", or someone just wanders in and joins you. In this playthrough there's been nothing so far. The other way you normally get more pawns is by capturing enemies, throwing them in prison, and having your warden gradually turn them to your side. Sera here has none of the skills we need and her traits are a disaster. All the raiders have been like this so far and capturing them would only give us useless mouths to feed.
Anyway, as we get Kirk and Yar ready for murderizing, Troi - still having a fit - stumbles out of the kitchen in a daze and gets herself stabbed in the hand. I think the game might actually hate me. A few days later we finally get a break. In exchange for hosting a nearby tribesman for 18 days we can get one of their kids to join us. A season in Rimworld is 15 days, so this is actually a long time, but we should be able to set Oyster to work in the meantime. We don't know anything about Vitaly, but I'll take anything at this point.
Oyster arrives and he isn't completely terrible. We don't need the skills he's good at, but he will haul and clean and can do a little cooking in a pinch. Welcome Oyster. (All those squares are floor tiles I haven't been able to build yet).
It's time for our first raid. Two work sites have appeared nearby and we're going to go steal their shit. One is a hunting site with leather and the other a mining site with some iron. Sending out raids is a bit risky at this point. You want to send decent fighters, and for us that means Kirk and Yar, but we're leaving the base with only Troi and Oyster defending it. A raid on our base now would be very bad. We're bringing the horses as well, as they can carry stuff and speed up travel.
The hunting site has two pig people guarding it. They have auto pistols we'd quite like to get our hands on, but their stats are as garbage as all the other enemies we've met so far.
They go down easily enough. Humans usually break and try to flee when half their forces are gone, and with just two of them we only have to kill one before the other becomes easy pickings. We plunder their leather and all their chairs. Chairs are weirdly valuable early on and not terribly heavy, so they're worth taking. It's not uncommon to get more for the chairs than the loot you came for.
Pawns get a big "low expectations" buff to their mood when out on the world map and some of their other demands and expectations go away, so as long as they have food and get to sleep you generally don't need to worry about mental breaks. It can even be a good idea to send a pawn out in the wild for a while if they're doing particularly badly, just to prevent them going bananas. Since we have the Raiding meme in our ideoligion we even get a small mood boost from pillaging places.
Meanwhile back at the base, Harriet the labrador has somehow managed to catch both the plague and the flu at the same time. Animals are thankfully a bit sturdier than humans when it comes to diseases and will almost always make it as long as they get some medical attention. Harriet is our only pet though, so I'm letting Troi use some of our precious herbal medicine just in case. I send the caravan to sell their ill-gotten chairs at a nearby outlander village and as luck would have it they have a psychic shock lance in stock. This is one of the best ways to capture enemies; there's a 50/50 chance you'll set their head on fire and give them brain damage, but if it works you just knock them out and can take them prisoner without having to beat them to a pulp (probably killing or seriously maiming them). It only has two charges, so it's a bit pricey, but a pawn can be invaluable. We also buy a telescope, which will help with recreation and mood back at the settlement.
We turn the caravan around and go attack the mining site.
This one is also guarded by two piggies, Butters and Stog. They have a turret preventing us from charging in.
Butters is as crappy as everyone else, but to my utter gobsmacked shock Pikub 'Stog' Welpoinopp isn't absolutely terrible. Not great, but not completely awful. We're totally kidnapping her. Pignapping her? Whatever.
We fire off our shock lance and she goes down, and her head didn't even burst into flames! Butters tries to flee but we hunt her down and shoot her all over until she falls over.
How to deal with turrets: The easiest way is to take out the battery and/or the power source, if you can reach them. In this case we'd have to tunnel through the mountain, which isn't an option. The second is to simply shoot them from outside their range. Pretty easy with a sniper rifle, but the hunting rifle Yar has can make it as well, just barely. We're on the clock since Stog won't stay down forever, so once the turret dies we immediately locate the steel stash, grab the battery and head out. Alas, no time to search the camp for chairs.
Back at base I realised that the window to hold our ideoligious festival, "Ten Forward Party", would close in just a few hours. So I started it with just Troi and Oyster. Have fun guys.
For some reason I loaded Butters into the caravan as well. I don't know why. She's extremely badly wounded and neither Kirk nor Yar are any good at medicine, so their incompetent tending immediately gives her two infections. Pawns are weird in that when you've just downed someone you can beat them to death with no negative consequences, but abandoning a prisoner from a caravan makes everyone sad for some reason. We're literally dragging her unconscious body back home.
I forgot to screenshot this, but we've built a prison cell with two beds for our pig prisoners. Butters somehow survived and healed up (at least we got got a little medical practice). I just let her go. Stog stays locked up of course and Troi sets to work, first converting her to our religion before we can try to make her join up (it's easier to convert them before recruitment). The two-man party was, somehow, a success. Troi and Oyster get a mood buff, we get some ideoligion development points, but more importantly: Someone wants to join our colony! Hell yes, we'll take you in! I don't care how crap you are at this point, as long as you have hands and feet. You have hands and feet, right?
Table walks onto the map. He has hands and feet. I'm extatic when I see his stats. He can shoot, he can hit stuff, he has 13 construction with a burning passion, and he can do a bit of crafting. No terrible traits. Oh hell yes! And then I see his age. He's 96 years old. I don't think I've ever seen a pawn that old before.
Hearing loss and asthma. That's not too bad. Really old pawns usually have at least a bad back and some heart problems. We can work with this. There are ways of fixing his ailments: Lung transplants, bionic eyes, and he could even be de-aged if we had a bio-regenerator. We're a long, long way from that though. You may not be with us for long Table, but you're very welcome here. His true name is not Table of course. Say hello to Scotty. Sometimes the game throws you a bone. In exchange for killing four rabbits we can get either of these rewards, which are all really good. I'm picking the books. They're new with the Anomaly expansion and I'm not entirely sure how they work, but pawns can use them for recreation and you can never have enough of that. There are novels which just give recreation, textbooks that teach some skill up to a certain level, and schematics that advance a particular research topic. The latter two are slow, but "free" since the pawns do it during their downtime. There are also tomes, that have something to do with occult research, but I haven't even started that yet. I send Kirk alone on a trade caravan to a nearby village and they have a male labrador! I'm absolutely buying him to keep Harriet company, and with any luck we'll have some puppies. Oh yeah, we also took some guy named Reindeer prisoner at some point and we're selling him into slavery.
Autumn is ending, Oyster leaves, and "Vitaly" joins us. His true name is Chekov. He's thirteen years old and I must say that's an impressive beard for someone at the early stages of puberty. He's not good at anything. We don't really need a miner or another animal tender. I suppose he could grow to be an okay medic, and he has a minor passion in shooting, but it's going to take a long time. A cannibal can be a problem. They get unhappy if they don't get to eat people now and then, but normal colonists get extremely upset when you butcher humans. We're Raiders though, and we don't care if Chekov wants to eat someone. We can even make him some clothes out of human skin for his 14th birthday. Harriet and Labrador 1 meet and immediately hit it off. Puppies! Some visitors wander by and one of them is... Kirk's son? His name is Gnugfur and he's a gigolo. Have you been to this planet before, Kirk? Stog, whose real name is of course Worf, finally joins us. What clinched the deal was Troi asking her about her genitals. A great start to a great friendship. After a rough and slow beginning we've suddenly doubled our population and should - finally - be able to get some stuff done.
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ekz
New Member
O_o
Posts: 696
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Post by ekz on May 15, 2024 7:05:48 GMT
I am *really* grateful that you've started this thread. There used to be an author on one of the gaming sites that did rimworld journey journals and it was one of my favourite things.
There was even (voodoo, or vortex? Sorry! I can't remember now) who did tarkov diaries and it was the best content on here outside of the dating thread and Uly's game reviews.
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Post by Destria on May 15, 2024 8:04:40 GMT
Seconded. I love reading these things, ever since stumbling upon the infamous Boatmurdered Let's Play.
I'm feeling like I should give it a try, but I expect I'll either bounce off it (like I did with Dwarf Fortress) or become dangerously obsessed (like I did with <insert pretty much any game here>).
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Post by skalpadda on May 15, 2024 14:04:04 GMT
I used to love when RPS did game diaries and I read some screenshot LPs on Something Awful back in the day, so this is kind of trying to combine the two. I'm not a good writer, so I'm trying to stay away from writing any horrible prose.  Destria it's significantly easier to get into than DF, but yeah, it's a dangerous game and you can plow infinite time into it. |
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crashV👀d👀
Junior Member
not just a game anymore...
Posts: 3,856
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Post by crashV👀d👀 on May 15, 2024 14:44:11 GMT
Loving this. Some of my favourite content is reading people's experiences and emergent gameplay wierdness on a play through, usually the more random the better.
I did think of starting a random acts of gaming madness thread to try and collate some of this into one place but wasn't sure on the traction so decided to just do my ownt thing in the Tarkov thread instead.
Anyway, more of this please
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Post by Destria on May 15, 2024 19:17:02 GMT
The only thing it’s missing is an inset video of the author gurning at the camera
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Post by skalpadda on May 15, 2024 23:57:10 GMT
I had to look up what "gurning" means. Feel free to put this video of me at the bottom of your screen while reading.
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Post by skalpadda on May 16, 2024 19:46:48 GMT
Chapter 3: The Distress Call
And here's the danger with sending your best fighters out on caravans early in the game. Three pigmen raiders show up and our people left at the base aren't well geared or skilled at fighting. Chekov doesn't even have a weapon. One of the invaders has grenades, very scary against unarmored pawns, so we have no choice but to rush him in melee. We down him fast, but Scotty gets surrounded and shanked by the other two pigs. Worf luckily manages to hold his own.
Scotty is extremely badly wounded. Two hours until death might not seem bad, but that's about 80 seconds in real time. He's also lost a finger, which isn't too bad, but for a builder/crafter it permanently reduces their effectiveness a little.
We get our first lead on one of our ideoligion relics. Nothing we can actually do yet, we just know of it's existence.
I only got one screen of this, so it will have to be text:
Two thrumbos walk onto our map. They're some of the most dangerous wildlife in the game, but their fur and horns are extremely valuable. It's always tempting. I was tempted.
I had a plan. A bad plan, but I had one. You can barely see it in the top right, but I'd built a small trap corridor as a rudimentary defence. There are two doors leading outside. The idea is that our pawns can take some potshots at enemies and then retreat into the base, closing the outer door behind them but leaving the inner one open. Enemies will then path around and walk through the traps to get to us, and they'll be forced to come in one by one.
There's no chance some wood traps could kill a thrumbo, but maybe soften it up just a little.
Just one problem: I forgot how fast they are. All my shooters went out and fired a few volleys at it, then hightailed it back with the angry thrumbo following. And it gained on them. And gained. The pawns just barely made it inside, but the door didn't have time to close. Worf was waiting behind the wall and valiantly tanked it as the rest desperately peppered it with bullets.
By some miracle we knocked it unconcious. Somehow Worf survived. His head and chest were trampled, his right arm nearly torn off. It was a dumb risk. It paid off, but still dumb.
Well, this is new. I don't know what a "fleshbeast" is, and I don't want to find out just now.
Jimmy and his axe-wielding henchmen.
Worf is still hurt from the thrumbo, but out ranged team take out the axe murderers.
And Jimmy is too busy with his ritual to put up a fight. No fleshbeasts today.
We haven't managed to convert Chekov from the religion he came with. He's some sort of tribal treehugger, so he's extremely miserable about chopping down every mature tree on the map. He also wants slaves and thinks we're racist (my pawns don't care about xenotype, so no idea what that's about). We really need to get on with converting him.
Here's another thing I've never seen before. Very creepy.
The camp is very close by and I'm sending everyone with a gun. I stop just outside to let them eat and sleep. Not knowing what to expect I want them at their best.
Something's gone very wrong here. Corpses are strewn around and there's masses of some fleshy substance breaching into the buildings.
What's a fleshbulb?
"These fleshbeast organs store and refine nutrients for surrounding fleshmass. The chemical process generates a soft bioluminescent glow."
Sounds like something we should definitely shoot.
So these are the fleshbeasts. They shoot some sort of spines, but they go down easily to concentrated fire. Luckily there are only four on the whole map. We turn our attention to the buildings.
In the first there are two books, one legendary and one masterwork. And a "flesh sack".
"A swollen lump of flesh with something inside."
Yeah, we're shooting that. No monsters pop out, but there's a "shard" that's apparently useful for... something? I have no idea, but we're taking it.
We go from building to building and clear out the fleshmass. There's not much more here, but we find some sort of seed that can apparently be grown into a corpse-eating tree. Is it a good idea to plant it back home? I don't know but I'm going to. We load up the books and the other stuff and hurry back home.
Someone wants to join us, but we know nothing about her. I'm accepting because we still need more people.
She wanders onto the map and oh boy, 11 crafting with a burning passion and we could train her to be a backup cook. No bad traits. Welcome! Your name is now Ro Laren.
Tasha has been a bit sad lately so I'm letting her make some sculptures. Her first one is rather bad. I like the art descriptions, they're usually about something that's happened previously.
Ro Laren (I forgot to change the name) called someone a bat and now they're trying to kill everything in our tile. Toxic events are extremely bad, because they'll kill every living thing that's not under a roof. Well, it's guarded by two rabbits. I send a caravan, we kill them and destroy the machine. I'm a bit worried about how easy things have been lately.
Well, there we go. The new year begins and to get us started a mech cluster lands on our doorstep. It's not a big one - three mechs and three turrets - but mechs are nasty.
It's dormant, but it's right outside the base. There's a proximity sensor that triggers if anyone gets close, and a psychic droner that will drive pawns insane. We'll have to deal with it quickly.
I almost forgot: Here's a little timelapse of the base for the first year. It's in shit-o-vision, because I forgot to change the screenshot resolution.
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Post by Destria on May 17, 2024 13:48:54 GMT
That’s cool. Love the time lapse.
What’s the white thing in the bottom right building in the last 20 seconds? Is that a thrumbo?
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Post by skalpadda on May 17, 2024 14:49:56 GMT
Yup, that's the freezer and I kept the thrumbo on ice over winter to save space. When you butcher them you get several stacks of fur and meat and storage space is at a premium, especially in the freezer. While it's unbutchered it only takes up one tile no matter how big it is.
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Post by skalpadda on May 17, 2024 19:08:26 GMT
Sidebar: Base and mechanics talk.
There is no narrative in this post, I just want to blab about some plans and go over a few important mechanics. It's long and very text-y, so feel free to skip it entirely if you don't care. Overview after year 1:
 I don't think I've ever had a start as slow as this. In large part because we've been understaffed, but I also lowered some skills of the initial pawns, so they've been working slower than what's normal. Now that we have some more hands on deck it should be easier to get things done, but we're way behind. Here are some things I want to prioritise: - 1. I've started walling in our fields and power production. Those are things that raiders like to smash and set fire to, so they're important to protect. Eventually I want to wall in the whole base. There are lots of ways enemies can get past walls, but it helps against many normal threats.
- 2. We ran out of all vegetables and most of our stored meat during winter. We also didn't have enough hay for the horses. We weren't at risk of starving because there were wild animals to hunt and in a pinch you can trade for food, but both production and storage will have to increase.
3. We need more reliable power. Our two windmills generate plenty of electricity when it's windy, but we're relying on batteries when it isn't, and they're not enough. A solar panel or two will be a good complement, but they need to be researched.
We actually have a bit of luck with the map here: That hole next to the animal pen is a steam geyser. I think you always get two or three of these, but they spawn in random places. Having one inside our base is great. We'll eventually be able to put a geothermal plant there (very reliable energy) but we're far from researching it or having the materials to build one.
- 4. We need a better defensive position. That little trap corridor has helped with a few early raids, but it won't do a thing against more dangerous threats. I'm not going to build elaborate kills boxes or a "burn box"*, but we need something for crowd control that lets our pawns shoot from cover.
(* You can build mazes into your base where you can start a big fire at the end as enemies enter. The rising temperature will eventually kill them by cooking them alive. It's a lovely game.)
But most importantly we have to get production of clothes, armour and weapons going. I've started making simple steel helmets and Kirk has a flak vest, but everyone else is completely unarmoured. Our weapons are just some pistols and a bolt action rifle, which is pitiful. This is why even the paltry threats we've faced so far have almost killed people several times. Pretty much anything bigger than a capybara can kill an unarmored pawn in a hit or two, and it's a miracle we've had no deaths and just some lost fingers and toes. That won't last. I've tried to trade for this stuff, but haven't had much luck. We're going to have to make them ourselves.  Here's the research screen. You start with a few things like electricity and air conditioning, but virtually everything you can build or craft has to be researched first (by a pawn at the research bench). In the first year we've only gotten batteries done (which in hindsight was a bit of a waste because we've been able to plunder some when raiding camps). The progress on solar panels is actually from a book we found. It's very slow but "free" research, since the pawns read for recreation. That's a new mechanic and a very welcome one.
We're working on machining, then flak armour, and making our way to gas operation. That will get us some basic body armour and heavy SMGs. Not enough to feel safe by any means - there are plenty of things that can one-shot pawns even in late game power armour - but it's a good basic loadout for early-mid game.
 I want to explain rooms, since they're important for several reasons. Here's the very first one we built, which has been serving as our barracks, dining room and rec room. The numbers represent the "beauty" of all the objects in the room. Virtually everything you build has a beauty stat depending on what it is, what material it's made of, and what the quality of the item is (from awful to legendary). The quality in turn depends on the skill of the pawn that made it, but is always slightly random.
The beauty then gets combined with other things into a total score for the room. Pawns are happier when they're in impressive environments. Making dining rooms, rec rooms and workshops as nice as possible is a good idea, since they spend a lot of time there. You also want plenty of light; pawns don't like being in the dark and it kills both mood and productivity. Here's our storeroom, and it's awful. The dirt floors and all the items lying around are considered filthy and very ugly. The pawns hate it. We eventually want to make it nicer, but it's not a priority since they don't spend much time there. Also a note on floors: Not only are dirt floors bad for mood, but they slow down your pawns as well. Wood floors are quick and cheap to build, but they are of course flammable and we haven't had enough wood anyway. Stone floors have no downsides, but they are very slow to make. Given all that it might seem like making your base super pretty with nice floors and beautiful items is a given. There's good reason to be conservative early on though: It all adds to your wealth. Here's the wealth screen. Every item, every building, every pawn and their gear, animals, prisoners, and even just random stuff lying around on the map tile (even corpses) counts towards your colony's wealth. The first effect of wealth is that it increases your pawns' expectations. They want nicer accommodations, more luxuries etc, or their mood will suffer. The second effect is the most important: The game's "storyteller" uses overall wealth to decide the strength of threats.
When any event happens the storyteller uses wealth and some other factors to make a combined score. It then rolls a random number within a range of that score to decide things like the number of enemies, enemy type, weapons and armour they have, and so on. Our wealth is rising faster now, so things will get more dangerous. The dips in the graph are from sending caravans to raid or trade, btw. The pawns, animals and items get subtracted while they're away.
Managing your wealth becomes rather important on higher difficulties. A common beginner mistake is to build too fast, overproduce, and stockpile everything early on. That leads to threats you can't deal with. Rising wealth isn't necessarily a problem, but you want a significant chunk of it to go into combat power and defenses. Things you don't need should be destroyed, dumped outside your tile, or if possible traded for something useful. Excess animals should be slaughtered or sold. Corpses can be burned.
 A quick explanation of mood: The bars to the left represent basic needs. If they're not satisfied the pawn begins to suffer mood penalties. There are also many events and other factors that affect mood, both positive and negative. If the main mood bar goes below the notches on the left they start risking mental breaks, which can be very bad (everything from wandering aimlessly to outright murdering other colonists). Pawns with some traits (like Tasha Yar being "nervous") can have a much lower threshold for mental breaks.
Kirk here is doing amazingly, but you need to keep an eye out and manage anyone who gets low, because it can spiral very quickly. Don't know where he got smokeleaf from, I certainly haven't made or bought any. I guess some raider must have dropped it.
And lastly, I forgot to include the difficulty in the first post. The game has three storytellers: Cassandra is the standard one and will send a steady mix of challenges at you. Phoebe is the "easy mode" storyteller; she ramps up slowly, gives you more positive events, and time to recover after threats. Randy is completely random and will just throw anything at you, good or bad. Each storyteller then has a difficulty level that adds multipliers to threats or enables/disables certain challenges.
I'm playing on Cassandra Classic, Strive to Survive. Tweaked to increase the threat scale slightly, but not as much as Blood and Dust. I suppose it's hard, but not hardcore mode. I didn't want to overdo it since I have no idea what threats the expansions add or how to deal with them. I considered Randy, but every time I've tried him in the past it's been pretty boring.
Regular programming will resume once I've sorted through another 200 or so screenshots...
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Post by skalpadda on May 19, 2024 22:34:25 GMT
Chapter 4: M'lady.
From here on I'll start skipping more and more and focusing on things that are interesting/important or new. "And then we got our 34th tribal raid and we killed them all" is neither fun to write nor read about.
Anyway, for Christmas this year we got our first mechanoid cluster. Thanks, Cassandra.
Clusters are little tactical puzzles. These things just drop onto your map and are pretty random, but follow a similar pattern: Dormant at first, always have defences, and there's always some threat to prevent you ignoring them. In this case it's a "psychic droner" that increases in strength over time and drives everyone crazy.
It has three mechs and three turrets. All the mechs are types I've never seen before. The aptly named scorcher has a flame thrower, there's a little militor with a minigun, and a tesseron with whatever this thing is:
Attacking head on would be suicide. We don't have good ranged weapons so we can't lure the mechs away. My plan is to use the big psychic droner as cover from the turrets and get the rest to come to us. I picked up EMP grenades at some point (no idea where, but I'm sure glad I have them) and I gave them to Chekov. If we can lure them around the corners, we can hopefully keep them stunned with EMPs on one side and trap any on the other in melee so they can't fire their weapons.
We do *not* want anyone set on fire, because burning pawns start running around in panic. Not great when there are turrets around.
Stage one of the plan goes pretty well, but the tesseron runs away for a bit and won't come to us, so I have Kirk and Yar take potshots at it.
It gets one shot off at us. An AoE fire weapon that nearly kills pawns in one hit? As if I didn't hate mechs enough already.
There are still the turrets left to deal with.
We safely EMP and destroy the first, but Chekov can't get an angle on the other two without entering line of sight. Kirk has the best armour, so I send him out to draw fire and take cover by some barricades...
...letting Chekov poke around the corner and start EMPing. Once stunned they're easy kills.
And then we just shoot the psychic droner until it explodes. We took some burns and bruises, but no permanent damage.
I've set Scotty to expand the freezer and somehow he managed to wall himself in. He spent the whole night in there before I noticed, but is somehow still in a pretty good mood. He may be a 96 year old half deaf asthmatic, but he's a cool guy.
Some impids from the Vurovi tribe are turning up to raid us. I don't entirely know how this genetic stuff works yet, but different xenotypes have various positives and negatives. Some can be inherited, so you can crossbreed and try to make kids with certain combinations. All our pawns are baseline humans without any special traits, except Worf who is a "pigskin". That gives her the ability to eat almost anything, but also trotter-hands and a pigsnout (she's clumsy and non-pigs think she's a bit ugly).
Here are the impid genetic traits. Apparently there's some way to extract traits and put them into adults as well. I have no idea how it works, but I wanted to show that it's a thing.
Anyway, I like the look of Sossox. He'd make an okay medic to free up Troi, and doesn't have any terrible downsides.
They're poorly armed tribals and there aren't many of them, so we charge them in the field and shock lance Sossox (luckily without frying his brain) for an easy capture.
I've started doing conversion rituals to get everyone on board The Worst Generation train. At this point only Ro Laren has a different ideoligion, but converting them is a pretty lenghty process. You could actually arrest them as it's easier to convert a prisoner, but that also makes them unhappy and they can't work while locked up.
It's finally time to give Troi her first royal title: Acolyte of the Exodus Empire. The Bestower and his extremely well armed and armoured guards come down in a shuttle to hold the ritual. They don't seem to be taking us very seriously, as the Bestower keeps chatting about porcupines the whole time.
And this is why I haven't done this sooner. Titles come with a bunch of demands: Troi now wants special noble clothing, a fancier bedroom, and a damn throne room. She also won't do cleaning anymore. And this is only the second rank; if you keep going you eventually end up with a Count/Countess who will refuse to do almost all work and only wants to sit on their throne all day and be fed chocolate and insect jelly.
Her throne room will have to be our rec room for the moment. We'll build her something eventually.
The main perk of titles is that they give you easy access to psycasts. They're essentially spells, and you get a random one each psylink level. Troi got Burden as her level 1 cast, which is a good one. The second is Waterskip, which is okay for putting out fires but not much else. You can buy trainers to add more later if you didn't get the ones you wanted randomly.
There are also two new mechanics: Psyfocus, which is "mana" and has to be maintained through meditation, and neural heat, which limits the number of casts you can perform in a day. Both can be increased with special equipment, but those come with serious downsides as well.
We have two prisoners; Sossox who we'd like to recruit, and Dovov, who we're keeping around... just in case (dun dun dun...).
Scotty is throwing a random party in Ten Forward. Scotty is such a cool guy.
And that's it for spring of 5501. It's been fairly calm and our time has mostly been spent catching up on stuff around home. There's still lots to do and I'm sure summer will be lovely.
Thanks Cassandra. |
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Post by Destria on May 20, 2024 7:43:19 GMT
Uh oh  |
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ekz
New Member
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Posts: 696
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Post by ekz on May 20, 2024 10:04:39 GMT
Loving this.
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Post by skalpadda on May 21, 2024 19:34:35 GMT
Chapter 5: Truly, Farmer of the Night.
I've been listening to the soundtrack while writing these to set the mood. It's excellent; part spaghetti western, part sci-fi, part everything under the sun. Here, have a listen.
Welcome our newest colony member, Beverly Crusher.
Yeah, for some reason I didn't realise Beverly was a man until much later. We already have a gender-bending Worf, so whatever. He'll be our main doctor to free up Troi, and it's always good to have more than one person with decent medical skills. He's an impid meaning he can breathe fire, and that minor passion in shooting is nice as we don't have great combat pawns.
The body modder trait is one that's a bit bad at the start of the game, but good later. They want artificial body parts, and sure, you could give them a peg leg or something, but that has serious downsides. Once you can stick bionics on them it's a pure advantage, since those function better than organic parts.
We still haven't managed to convert Ro Laren. She tries to turn Chekov to her religion and he gets pissed and throws hands. Good on you Chekov. I approve of this violence.
Chekov's cannibalism is quite handy for us. He gets a massive +20 mood boost from eating raw human meat, and we made him some pants out of human leather for his birthday, giving him a permanent +4. As raiders we don't have a problem keeping some mystery meat in the fridge, so it's a pure positive.
Oh yeah, there's that sun blocker we have to deal with. It's on a tile not far away (our base is the light blue little house in the top left of the hexagon). I send Kirk and Yar over to sort it out.
Well, pants. I should have sent more people. There are four mechs and three turrets, and only two of us. With crappy armour and not great weapons. I could send reinforcements, but that will take another day at least.
My plan is more or less the same as for the last mech cluster. Kirk has EMP grenades, so he'll stun as many as possible. There's only Yar to do damage then, but there's a turret in there and those explode, so maybe I can take a few of the mechanoids out with it.
Just as I'm about to throw the first grenade I realise I'm being stupid. They're all dormant, no proximity sensors or anything. The sun blocker machine is in the wooden building, so we can break a wall, destroy it, and walk off the map. So we destroy it and turn to leave.
But then that dumb part of my brain takes over again. Where's my sense of adventure? Is it really any fun to just sneak off into the night? Like cowards? Like cheesing cowardly cowards?
Back to plan A. This really is stupid. There's no glorious honorable combat in this game. It's deeply unfair and tries to murder you at every turn. Trying to be "fair" gets you killed.
Well, the first EMP hits the turret and the two militors. I'm worried about the lancer just behind them, because it has a charge lance - those things can one-shot pawns in power armour. Yar manages to quickly take out the turret, which explodes and takes out the three mechs around it. Four mecha-birds with one hellcat volley!
There's just the pikeman at the far left, and it gets a few needle shots off at Kirk before we fall back to force it to come closer.
Kirk got a toe shot off before the pikeman went down. Sorry Kirk, my bad. There are still two turrets to take out.
Yar shoots a breach in the wall so Kirk can lob EMPs while staying out of line of sight, and once stunned they're easy to 'splode.
And it's done. I suppose a toe was a small price to pay for my folly. That's quite a few toes and fingers we're missing now.
Back at base we get an interesting quest.
We can fight a vampire and potentially make one of our colonists a vamp as well. I don't really know how this works (it's from the Biotech DLC), but three things catch my interest. Ageless. Deathless. Can heal any injury. Scotty is 97 years old now. Really old pawns are a big risk; not only can they just suddenly get a heart attack and die, but every year they have a high risk of getting some seriously debilitating ailment like frail, bad back, or alzheimers.
He's been a really nice presence at the colony, in addition to being by far our best constructor. If we can keep Scotty alive and healthy it would definitely be worth it. We're calling that shuttle down.
They attack immediately. My new defences aren't finished yet, but at least we have some pillars for cover. The vampire master is an impid and breathes fire at us, which is funny considering sanguophages are pyrophobic and take 400% damage from fire. Worf goes absolutely berserk on him and brings him down fast.
I want to get all the thralls down too, preferably alive as they have some good weapons and flak vests. One has wandered off to the south of our base so I send Yar off to stun lance her, while Worf goes and thrumbo-horns the last one across the ears.
Our vampire prisoner's name is Truly and he's a Farmer. How nice. Apparently we can't get his sanguophage genes until he's completely downed, so I send Worf in to hit him with the thrumbo horn again until he's properly passed out.
We implant the genes in Scotty, who immediately falls into a coma for two days. Truly is in "forced deathrest" for a few days as well.
We captured one of the thralls, Beryl, as well. She's not very good, but I'm tempted to recruit her purely for that burning passion in cooking. Yar has been doing all our cooking so far, and I'd like to free her up for other things.
We just have to wait for Scotty to wake up now. I'm hoping his vampireness will let him get rid of the asthma and hearing loss, as well as regrow his missing finger.
There's another mech cluster, this time with just turrets. The green thing between them is an unstable power cell. I'd love to get my hands on it because it gives a small amount of infinite power. They explode violently when damaged though, and we can't pick it up while the turrets are active, so no chance.
We do more or less the same thing again, and I wouldn't even bother mentioning this one if it wasn't such a good example of how easily you can screw up and lose pawns. I'd forgotten how big the power cell explosions are. Chekov was just a little too close and nearly lost both legs and an arm. If I'd had more pawns there I'd very likely have lost someone.
A drop pod raid. They're some of the scariest ones the game can throw at you, because they usually crash through your roof and immediately start murdering people and destroying your base from inside.
You can hover over the event to get indicators showing where it is. This time we were lucky. The drop pods target the position of one of your colonists, and this time it was someone just about to enter the base, so they actually dropped outside.
It's still a tough fight. There are seven of them, and six are melee fighters. If they make it to our shooters they won't be able to fire, so I have no choice but to send Worf forward. He quickly gets surrounded and badly beaten, but Beverly saves the day by breathing fire on two of them, which sends them running.
Yet again we barely scrape by. I'd give Worf a beer if we had any, she's been an absolute trooper lately.
And with that our second autumn has begun. Here's a timelapse of the base for the first two seasons. Now with extra glitches, because one of my mods is causing edge icons to be drawn all over, but only in the automatic screenshots. I didn't notice until another year had passed. Grr.
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Post by Destria on May 21, 2024 20:42:00 GMT
Cracking update as ever. I don’t think you’ve lost anyone right? Is that normal at this stage?
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ekz
New Member
O_o
Posts: 696
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Post by ekz on May 21, 2024 21:31:19 GMT
The glitches in the video just make it look like a vintage documentary, pretty cool tbh (on mobile at least)
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Post by skalpadda on May 21, 2024 21:58:53 GMT
No deaths or even any serious permanent injuries so far. Just a lot of missing fingers and toes. Quite a few very close calls though, and I'm amazed everyone still has all their major limbs and organs. That's not common in my experience.
There's always a lot of luck and every time you get into a fight someone might get a bullet to the brain, heart or spine and immediately die. The game is set up so you can never feel completely safe. That cougar hunting Yar in the very first update was just seconds from killing her. Pure luck that she's still with us.
I haven't even mentioned food, diseases and temperature, but those are things that kill a lot of people's first colonies.
It's entirely possible I'll get the whole colony wiped out at some point, due to bad luck, mistakes or something from the DLCs that I don't know how to deal with.
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Post by skalpadda on May 22, 2024 9:26:52 GMT
Chapter 6: Leg day.
2nd of Septober - 2nd of Decembrary, 5501.
Sorry if I'm spamming, but I got a little carried away and played a whole year and a half in advance. I'd like to catch up a bit so I can play the game some more. This one gets a bit dark. I hope you're okay with crimes against humanity. I don't really know what to do with Truly the vampire. I don't have any real use for him, and Worf apparently took off both his legs. They'll grow back I suppose, but I just install some wooden peg legs and let him go. We have our first prison break, Dovov and Beryl tries to run away. Or well, Dovov tries to hop away, since he's also lost a leg. I don't want to kill them, so I send a squad to punch them into submission. We somehow punch Beryl's toe off. Damn, I want to recruit her and she's already maimed. Half the colony is missing toes and fingers already, so I suppose she'll fit right in.
While the prison break is happening Bug here crashes in a transport pod. She's crap and belongs to a hostile pirate faction, but I send out Beryl to capture her anyway.
We also have another prisoner named Orange. We destroyed both his legs as well. He belongs to a tribal faction that's hostile at the moment, but could be befriended. Healing prisoners up and releasing them gives a little bit of reputation.  I don't think I've shown it before, so here are the factions in our current game. There are seven of them, plus the Empire. The pirates and savage tribe will always be hostile, but the neanderthals and pigskins can be befriended with enough effort. We stick some peg legs on him and let him go. Bug still has her legs, but she gets peg legs anyway.
Dovov's right leg is destroyed, so - you guessed it - peg leg. On his left leg.
And then we remove it again. We take Bug's peg legs too.
See... Scotty needs hemogen. Truly dropped some blood packs, but we're down to our last one. I'm not going to let him feed on the other colonists, so, er, I'm using the prisoners we don't want to recruit. As we've seen, they sometimes try to escape. Gonna be hard without legs though. We also have two doctors that need training, so while they're here anyway we can practice surgery by repeatedly attaching wooden hands and removing them. Look, I never claimed to be a nice person!
I'm having Scotty build some more bedrooms and he's managed to wall himself in again.
The outlander pigs get in touch and want to parlay. I'd like them as trading partners, so I send Troi and Kirk for a chat.
Troi does a really good job. 63 rep is great, but not enough to make us neutral yet.
Chekov and Yar get malaria. While they're in hospital Chekov puts the moves on her, by "boasting about his own stylishness". Real smooth. She's not interested.
I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of lovin' in our colony. We have 4 men and 5 women now, but nobody has hit it off yet. Maybe I can get Troi to play matchmaker.
And we have a new recruit: Beryl the cook! If she was any good at social she's be Guinan, but she's crap, so she's Neelix. That cooking skill of 4 isn't going to cut it though. That's in food poisoning territory and she can't make fine meals.
Luckily we just did a trade run and managed to pick up a skill trainer. These are extra good for people with a burning passion since the effect is multiplied by 150%.
She immediately goes from an amateur 4 to an expert 12. That's a massive improvement.
Doctor Beverly got hurt in a random raid, but I got a present for her too.
It's a bionic arm, and we install it right away. With her body modder trait that will make her very happy.
A bionic arm is 25% better than a normal fleshy one, so it will slightly boost her manipulation, making her better at both surgery and shooting.
I get an alert that a surgery has failed. Someone's cut off Bug's fingers and stabbed her a bit all over. Guys, we need that arm for surgery practice! Which one of you did this?
Apparently Beverly thought it was a great idea to operate while still injured and woozy from anesthetics. I admire the dedication to your craft and all, but I'm taking you off doctoring for a few days.
All the local boomrats have gone crazy and want to murder us. Scotty was outside and is being chased. Boomrats aren't strong at all, but there are lots of them and as the name implies they explode when they die. Scotty the Vampire is pyrophobic (runs in panic from fires) and takes 400% fire damage.
I try to run him back inside, but one of the rats catch up to him and explodes. One of Scotty's toes gets blowed up. Welcome to the club, I guess. At least he's a vampire so it will grow back with time.
He has a steady supply of hemogen to munch on now.
Bug tries to escape during the night. She gets halfway out of the bed and is violently sick on the floor. Look, don't worry, Bug. You're helping us advance medical sciense and I promise I'll take care of you. I'll make you some nice art to look at. Maybe I'll even get a TV to keep you entertained.
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ekz
New Member
O_o
Posts: 696
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Post by ekz on May 22, 2024 10:02:56 GMT
Don't apologise for enjoying the game! I'm enjoying the posts, so have at it.
It was a very handy story which made me weak at the knees.
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Post by rhaegyr on May 22, 2024 10:10:17 GMT
Keep it up, love reading these posts seeing as I find the game incredibly interesting but it's far too overwhelming for my to actually play.
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Ulythium
Full Member
Lily-livered
Posts: 7,092
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Post by Ulythium on May 22, 2024 10:12:15 GMT
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Post by skalpadda on May 22, 2024 10:17:06 GMT
Aw shucks, thanks for the encouragement. I enjoy writing it anyway, but I was a little worried I'd be playing to a crowd of myself, so I'm very glad others enjoy it too. |
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Post by skalpadda on May 23, 2024 20:51:57 GMT
Chapter 7: Lockdown. 4th of Decembrary 5501 - 5th of Aprimay 5502. A quest pops up with some juicy rewards. A masterwork sniper rifle would be great for Tasha Yar. Up to excellent quality weapons get more accurate, which is good, but masterwork and legendary ones also get a damage boost. The spear is okay but tribal weapons just aren't great at this point, a second telescope can be sent with caravans, and you can never have too much plasteel. 25 timber wolves though. That's a lot of wolves at this point, and Tasha (our best shooter) and Troi (the only psycaster) are out on a caravan.
Well, here they come. Still not done with our defences, not that they're designed for big animal attacks anyway. I've built wooden spike traps with all the wood we had to prepare. Steel or stone would be better, but we can't afford it.
At least they're being funneled in, but it quickly becomes clear we'll be overwhelmed at this rate. Two of the pawns still have autopistols and Neelix has a machine pistol. Low damage weapons with short range. I start firing off every insanity lance and shock lance we have. It's burning thousands of silver, but it's that or someone (or everyone) dies. Once the tide of wolves is finally stopped, Worf is terribly wounded again and about two minutes from bleeding to death. She had to tank 7 wolves in this fight. I really need to get her better armour, and hopefully I can find a melee friend so she doesn't have to tank everything by herself.
I let Neelix make a statue and, well, it's better quality than what Tasha has made, but she did one of our thrumbo battle and this one is about Chekov shooting some random raccoon. Lame.
The rewards arrive by drop pod.
That doesn't sound good.
I've never seen shamblers before and we have two people away again.
I don't want to deal with this. I switch everyone's zones to keep them indoors and lock all outer doors. We have plenty of food. The caravan is diverted to a nearby town. I take a look at their stats. They're pretty slow so they could be kited, but Yar and Troi aren't here, so it would probably take ages to kill them, and still be risky. The shamblers stop just north of our base and well, shamble around a bit. Is that a little kid? Fucking hell, game, I don't want to shoot kids, even if they are zombies. Some feckless visitors are passing through our map and head straight for the undead. Two of them are having a conversation about makeup. At least we get to see what shamblers can do. The outlanders are armed with knives and some pistols. I don't rate their chances very high.
They get torn apart. Nelson here is still alive and tries to drag himself away, but he's so injured he doesn't make it far before collapsing. The sun rises on a grisly scene. I'm glad I took the cowardly route for a change. The next evening they start to fall over and disintegrate. The horror theme continues. We get another one of these fleshbeast maps. There are other types of fleshbeasts here: Fingerspikes, trispikes and toughspikes. No idea what they do, but I bet it has something to do with spikes. I've sent six pawns this time.
Yar starts blowing them to pieces with her new sniper rifle, and they pop into satisfying showers of blood. She's becoming a bit of a beast. By far our best shooter, she has the sniper for long range and a hellcat rifle (basically a weak assault rifle that can shoot flame bursts) for closer range. There are lots of them though, and we quicky get in trouble. I fire off some hellcat charges and they're effective, but I only have two per rifle. I can't recharge them either because it needs a material I don't have and don't know how to get yet. In perhaps the worst tactical move ever I've put Troi at the frontline. The trispikes split into three fingerspikes when killed. We're alive but have a lot of injuries.
We started a great big brushfiire, but it's not like we care if this place burns to the ground.
By the time we've cleared it all out it's midnight, everyone is hungry, everyone but Yar is injured and they're all miserable. Luckily all the corpses around have dropped food, and there's even some beer to help us avoid mental breaks. Last time we found two awesome books, this time a burka. Er, no use for that, but I guess we can sell it. The corpses lying around have some decent stuff though, and there are quite a few chairs. After dumping the garbage on our neighbours, I decide to investigate an ancient compled on the way back. This has been here a while, but I've just ignored it.
Rimworld has a bit of a backstory, or at least the suggestion of a backstory. At some point in the ancient past this was a fairly advanced industrial world and you see little traces of it everywhere. A big war broke out between the humans and mechanoids, which seems to have wiped out everyone. Now the population is either tribals or outlanders who have crashed here. The insectoids (which we haven't seen yet) may have been involved too.
These ancient complexes are old industrial sites and they're essentially little dungeons. There are traps and enemies to deal with, usually mechs or insectoids. I'm not too worried about this one since it popped up quite a while ago, when we were much fewer and poorer. I sweep the building and only find some small mechs and ancient turrets.
For our trouble there are five hermetic crates and we get two great books, some gold, medicine, serums and a nuclear stomach. That's very good for such a low level encounter. There's also a comms console we can use, so we do.
Some crap drop onto the map, I don't even remember what, and three raiders turn up. Since we have six people they're not much more than a nuisance. A new year has started and there's a lot of work to do, so it's time to head back home.
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