Rimworld: The Worst Generation (a diary)

Last time we left off at the start of summer in 5506 and since then I've played until the end of 5509. I've mainly been going nuts with genetics, crafted tons of bionics, weapons and armour, done an absurd amount of trading, and a lot of quests. Most of it is preparation for the end game proper and isn't very exciting to write about. I'm also still a little short on time for writing big after action reports. 

I'm going to summarise these years in two (I think) posts before getting back on track. It won't be entirely in chronological order - I'll go through specific things I think are important and throw in a few things we haven't seen before.

I really mean an absurd amount of trading. Except for winter season (when travel is slow and pack animals can't graze) there's been at least one caravan out on the world map at all times. Here Worf is heading off to trade with distant allies while Troi and Scotty are passing each other - Troi on the way home from a trade and Scotty going out to finish a quest.

Pansy and Chekov have hooked up. Chekov has tried to woo every woman in the colony, with no success whatsoever, but now Pansy took the initiative and he's finally in luck.

Countess Wyll has turned 13 and is having her last growth moment. Her skills are a mess but I only care about social and cooking, so it doesn't matter. I also get to give her the tough trait which is fantastic. As a pure psycaster she won't be wearing any armour, so a flat mitigation to all damage will be very helpful.

I want to go over Wyll a bit and what she can do, because she'll be pivotal in how we deal with many threats from now on.

Here's her genetic cocktail. I made her a vampire. Not by having Scotty bite her, but I've managed to extract or buy enough that I can make my own sanguophage, with a fewer of the perks but none of the really bad weaknesses. What I wanted for her was deathrest and those longjump legs, and they require being hemogenic.

There are some genes I want to eventually give to everyone: Fast wound healing, fire resistant, robust and fast runner. The first three help keep pawns alive and moving faster is always good. In addition to the vampire stuff Wyll gets to be super psy-sensitive (more brain juice for psycasting) and I've been able to nullify the bad genes she got from her dad.

The cat ears and furry tail aren't my fault. Many genes come bundled with others and they aren't easy to separate.

Yeah, they'll be turned into a bunch of furries. Sorry, it's not what I had planned, but that's the way it's going to have to be.

Why all this effort? Well, take this breacher raid full of fire breathing impids for example...

They will break our walls and can't be led to our defences, so I send Wyll out there, have her turn invisible and start driving them all mad with berserk pulses.

This works like the insantiy lances we've been using so much. It doesn't last as long, but it can hit multiple enemes. As long as she has enough heat limit left to keep herself invisible they have no idea why their friends are suddenly attacking each other.

These casts cause a lot of psychic heat, but once it gets too high she can use her longjump to get to a safe distance and cool off. In the past I've given casters jetpacks to move around quicker, but with these vampire powers it's not needed. I can give her a shield belt instead to absorb a few stray shots if I mess things up.

The raiders actually made it through the outer wall, but are so severely weaked that the other colonists can easily make mince meat out of what's left. And Wyll has cooled off enough to cause more havoc.

This won't work against every threat, but avoiding serious damage from random raids leaves the colony much better able to defend itself against the really threatening stuff.

After a hard day's work she needs to spend a lot of time meditating to get her focus back up, and she has to refill her hemogen supply. She has an open schedule to meditate as much as she wants, and plenty of legless prisoners in the blood bank/med school/gene farm to nibble at.

Then there's the deathrest she has to do now and then. It takes 2-3 days to complete, but there are perks too. All the devices around her casket give her buffs: Four "glukosoid pumps" increase her movement speed, and four "psychofluid pumps" increase her psychic sensitivity by 25% each.

Her psychic sensitivity is a stonking 444%. It can be pushed a little higher with better eltex gear, but it's more than I've ever seen before. The benefits are a much higher heat ceiling and quicker focus refill from meditation. It does make her equally more sensitive to psychic events though, so it's not all positive. If there's a high psychic drone or other psychic event I may have to feed her all our drugs, or maybe even have the doctors keep her sedated.

The Worst Generation finally has a Captain (cult leader), and of course it's Kirk. As a highly charismatic misogynist psychopath he's perfect for the job. It's another thing I'd just forgotten to do.

Chekov proposed to Pansy, but she turned him down. I get that it's exciting that you finally found someone, but chill, dude. You're still very young. And perhaps not while you're feeding rotting raider corpses to the harbinger trees?

Three years old, paralysed and crashed alone in this forsaken place. She's also lost a hand already.

Well, I said we weren't going to have more kids, but I'm no leaving a three year old child to die. We can cure her paralysis, so she'll be up and learning in no time. She's definitely not keeping the nickname "Poopy" though. Her actual first name is Satsuki, so that's what she'll go by. Welcome to the family.

Weirdly the same night this lady crashes in our animal pens. Doesn't seem to be related to Satsuki in any way. Well we don't want her, so, er, I guess she'll join the legless prisoner club? We can't be infinitely charitable.

Chekov you absolute moron. You're still in a relationship with Pansy and Yar is married with two kids. 

I'm sure we all know guys who try to get with every woman they meet, but then when they finally meet someone they don't know how to handle a relationship. That's Chekov in this colony.

And we have another new colonist: Reginald Barclay. We captured him on a random raid on a worksite and he's really good at combat and has the tough trait, so we couldn't pass him up. That brings us to 16 pawns, and I really don't want to go any higher now. His profile doesn't fit his fictional counterpart very well, but I wanted a Barclay.

I also realised I could go into dev mode and change people's full names (you can normally only give them nicknames and titles), so everyone has their proper Star Trek names now (though Chakotay doesn't have a last name as far as I know, so he's "Chakotay 'Chakotay' Chakotay").

And he almost immediately hits it off with Neelix. I'm very glad, as Neelix has been kind of stuck in the background, spending all her time cooking and not getting much attention.

And Neelix doesn't waste any time tying the knot, luckily with more success than Chekov.

We've gathered all our ideoligion relics - three legendary persona weapons for our three frontline fighters.

The last one goes to Worf. We've been lucky with traits; they can be quite bad, but all our relics have neutral or good ones. This one gives a permanent mood buff and increased movement speed - extra good for Worf since she can't use ranged weapons at all (berserker trait) and doesn't have a jetpack.

Oh well, it was starting to seem kind of inevitable. Chekov is just terrible at girls.

And we end with Barclay and Neelix getting married in our new ritual room, which I set up in the "ancient danger" we cleared out a while ago. Our old one was a bit cramped and crappy, but this is quite roomy. I forgot to fuel the braziers, so they're getting married in the dark.

5th of Septober 5509 - 10th of Decembrary 5510.

There are those moments when you just instantly realise you've fucked up.

So, I reformed our ideoligion and added another relic, which we've been hunting down clues for. The last quest is to investigate this ancient complex, where we've been sent sent by shuttle to hack some terminals. We've done plenty of these and they've mostly been a cakewalk. I did wonder why they asked for a whole 11 colonists, but they've asked for overkill before. I accidentally put little Satsuki on the shuttle, but no biggie, she can just wait there.

We walk into a side room and the ground starts cracking and rumbling as an insectoid infestation starts. Usually not a problem, two or three hives, maybe a dozen bugs. Well, as they start bursting through the floors it's definitely a problem. There's a *lot* of bugs. Chakotay and Barclay are immediately swarmed, and the others have to do what they can to block the doors as they start pouring in from the side rooms.

Shit! I brought Skulk because she's our best hacker, but she's not much of a fighter and I left her close to the entrance to keep her safe. A megaspider and some spelopedes snuck around and went for her, and knocked her down before I even noticed. I can't get anyone else to her now, but she's only downed and we have 11 hours before she bleeds out. It should be fine.

What? No! We had 11 hours! What the hell?

No time for that. The main team are hanging on, but there are even hives spawning outdoors and insects streaming in from outside.

When they finally stop coming we're surrounded by the corpses of 41 megaspiders, 50 spelopedes and 66 megascarabs. And we've suffered our first colonist death. I should have sent everyone back on the shuttle and abandoned this mission right here, but sunk costs...

Oh of course there are mechanoids.

Of course there are centipedes with inferno cannons! We've been using choke point tactics so much, but now we're the ones unable to get at their dangerous ranged units.

Okay, they're still alive. I'm so glad I gave everyone the fire resistant gene and made them devilstrand underpants, or they'd all be incapacitated from being on fire and about to be very dead right now.

They're not immune to fire and heat damage though, and this is an enclosed space.

It's already an oven and they're getting heatstroked.

I get Wesley to break down the walls to the outside. Opening the doors won't drop the temperature fast enough - it has to be a breach. We're almost through the last of them.

They're still alive. Night is falling and they're all hurt, exhausted, hungry and in a foul mood. I set down a few sleeping spots so Troi and Pansy can patch them (and each other) up, and I dump the food and drugs we brought on the floor so they can ease the hunger and misery. But I can't let them rest. The colony is almost completely undefended and Satsuki is still waiting alone in the shuttle. We have to move.

The rest of the complex is empty, and everyone fans out to hack the terminals and open containers.

As the last hack completes another infestation triggers down by the mech ambush, but it's just one hive and a few bugs.

Outside though, a raid of 85 impids is coming for us.

After what we've been through today some tribals seem like the least of our troubles, even if they outnumber us 8:1. Troi has recharged enough to throw out a few berserk pulses, and while they're busy puking fire at each other the team lays waste to them from range.

Only a handful of them make it to Worf and Chakotay before they break ranks and flee. Taking out the last few insectoids is almost an afterthought, and we can finally get in the shuttle and leave this place.

We've located our last relic and we got some good loot from the complex, but it wasn't worth the cost.

Wyll buries Skulk in one of the sarcophagi in our ritual room. We never converted her to our ideoligion so we can't hold a proper "To absent friends" burial for her, but she gets a place of honour and we'll remember her fondly. I suppose I should be relieved it was Skulk. She came to us unbidden and she was a creepy weirdo, but she also saved us and got us back on track with her amazing research skills, and I was starting to warm to her mad ramblings.

We almost made it ten years without a colonist death and I was starting to entertain the idea that maybe I could get everyone through to the end.

It also cost us materially. Everyone's gear got absolutely shredded - Chakotay's power armour literally fell apart just as we came back home. You can't repair equipment in Rimworld, so we have to make new kit for everyone, and cataphract armour is hideously expensive.

A few days later Satsuki turns 13 and has her last growth moment. She's probably the most ridiculous kid we've raised yet, with the possible exception of Wyll. She's getting double passions in both shooting and melee. Her traits are "tough", which I've already gone on about, "sanguine" giving a permanent +12 mood offset, and "nimble" which gives her +15% dodge chance in melee. 

Once I get her some xenogenes, a suit of power armour and train her skills up she'll be a second Chakotay. But also good with guns. I'm getting her a few psy-powers too, because why not?

It's time to call in the next mech boss - the war queen.

Again, the escort is pitiful. I think I figured out why, though.

The chips they drop when they die are used to research more advanced mech tech and build some gear and other mechanoids. If you want to unluck everything you have to summon them multiple times, and each time they get more powerful. So, instead of scaling to your colony progress like everything else, these scale to your mechanitor's progress, and I've been leaving it until end game.

Just a moment later, as if to prove my theory, the game sends a random mech assault at us...

Yeah, two war queens, thirteen centipedes and a handful of other fodder. That's more like the raids I expect at this point in the game.

And we take out the third boss, the apocriton, which unlocks the last of the mech tech.

I'm not building a mechanoid army, but I do want to figure out how it works. All mechs need a "subcore" as a brain. The little cleaners and haulers just need a small one you can craft with regular components. The bigger combat mechs require a "high subcore", for which you have to scoop out someone's brain in this ripscanner.

We're obviously using prisoners for this.

You can even make your own war queens and diaboli, though I'm not sure how useful they'd actually be.

I ended up making two of these legionaries, mid-sized mechs that provide a shield. The shields are very weak and they can't do much damage, but I figure they might be a bit useful for point defence and soaking a few hits.

I was going to test them against this mech raid, but then our "allies" from the Empire turned up to "help" us. Their idea of "helping" is apparently to all run into the killbox maze and block the exit for Labrador retriever 65, so now the mechs have set our dog on fire and he's definitely going to die.

Yeah, have fun charging bravely at flame thrower mechs in single file through a tight corridor. Pricks.

Half of them decide to go outside and get annihilated by centipedes instead.

We dig a grave for Labrador retreiver 65 and bury him by the tree grove behind the throne room.

Here's the kryptonite to high level psykers. Negative effects get multiplied by their psychic sensitivity, and Wyll's is at almost 500% now.

-157 mood. Even with all the positive moodlets we have stacked she'll go mad and start chaining major mental breaks within an hour. I have her strip off all her eltex caster gear, put on a tinfoil hat (it reduces sensitivity by 90%) and tell her to raid the entire drugs cabinet. Even then she's just barely out of major break risk. She won't be much use, but it's that or have her anaesthetised for several days. Or take off her legs and let her suffer I suppose, but we're definitely not doing that.

We haven't seen these assholes for years. Last time they almost killed Worf and could have wiped us all out. Want to abduct someone, do they? Sorry Neelix, but we're going to kill your sister today.

That's a nice little ritual circle you have there. Looks to be about the radius of a doomsday rocket explosion. Let's send InvisiWyll out to test that hypothesis.

Slightly too large to get all of them, but it certainly stopped their ritual. I get Troi and Scotty to daisy-chain invisibilities so Wyll can spend all her psyfocus on driving them mad.

Refuse all you like, but you're going right back to killing your friends.

Little Wesley Crusher only just turned 17 and already charmed his way into Pansy's heart. Far better pickup lines than Chekov.

It's nice to be able to end on a sweet note, and I hope this one lasts.

13th of Jugust - 13th Decembrary 5512.

That's not what you want to see when you start up the game.

A bit uncalled for, Pansy.

Our sickbay and doctors are top notch, so Scotty will be okay for now, but this is my fault again.  Vampires have two special genes - "ageless" and "non-senescence" - that stop ageing and age-related health issues. I replaced his default vampire genes to get rid of the pyrophobia and fire weakness, but I didn't have non-senescence at the time. I can fix this, but in the meantime he'll be getting our best glitterworld meds and Laren is making him a bionic heart immediately.

And yeah, everyone now has bionic eyes, arms, legs, a reprocessor stomach to reduce food consumption, and detox lungs that make them immune to toxins and lungrot.

We're still on our long march into darkness, this time literally. Before that can properly kick off though, Worf finds something very disturbing.

Hm, in our adventure in the grey labyrinth there was that floor etching...

I don't recall coming across anyone named Rivers, and I have no idea who could be an impostor. Wesley and Kirk will investigate and I'm keeping everyone close to home for now, but I can't start arresting people at random.

We do have a bunch of captives though, so I set all of them to be interrogated, just in case.

In the meantime we have a more immediate problem.

I've lit up the base as well as possible, but everywhere else has turned almost pitch-black. The three pillars, "noctoliths", have fallen at the edges of the map and are giving off a low glow. We have to go out and destroy them.

As soon as the pawns go outside they start taking damage from something unseen.

We've crafted some flares and the psykers have a power called solar pinhole that can create temporary light in an area. I'm bringing everyone except Wyll. She's unarmoured and I have no idea what to expect, so I'm not risking her.

We throw flares ahead and rush from one pool of light to the next. As soon as we reach the first noctolith and damage it, a swarm of glowing eyes light up all around...

There's no way to retreat, the only thing we can do is form a ring around the weaker ranged pawns and stand our ground.

These things - noctols - deal high damage, but the light seems to slow them down significantly. We're lucky to have five very strong melee pawns to take the brunt of the assault and protect the others.

The darkness wavered for a moment when the first noctolith was destroyed, but it quickly returned.

There aren't enough flares to light a continuous path, so we keep sprinting between the small safe zones we can make.

The next attacks are slightly larger, but with the brawlers taking point and psykers skipping enemies away as fast as they can, we can just about manage.

When the last noctolith crumbles the light finally returns, and everyone can return home for a well earned dinner and a nap.

Monster jail is filling up. It now has powered security doors, walls made of uranium, bioferrite flooring and a ton of suppression devices to keep the subjects from breaking loose.

One of our wookie prisoners is infected. I should have immediately been suspicious of this, since he hasn't been out of bed for about eight years.

Doen is not the original carrier.

And everything goes wrong. Clouds of blood explode from not only Doen, but also another prisoner and Pansy. Pansy has the deathless gene, so she can only die from destruction of the brain, but her skull is down to two hitpoints and she's horrifically injured. But there are more alerts going off...

Pansy was patient zero. She got it from some random fleshbeast, spread it to Wesley while sleeping together, and the two of them have been infecting prisoners when doing surgery and wardening.

Wesley was working the mineral scanner out by the animal pens and has also gone down, writhing on the ground as something is cutting its way out of him.

I scramble everyone I can to contain the situation and rescue the victims.

I didn't get a good screenshot of the metalhorrors or the fights, so here's a picture of one from the wiki:

Everyone lived, even the prisoners, but Pansy's head nearly burst and she'll be down for days. That was *horrible*, and now I'm going to be extremely paranoid every time we have to fight anomaly entities.

A few days later, a big ball has turned up just outside the gates.

It goes in monster jail for study, of course.

That sounds... somewhat useful? So what are the horrific downsides?

There we go - it's a ticking time bomb. About what I expected. Guess we'll have to deal with that when the time comes.

We may be a bunch of raiders, cannibals, war criminals and many other things, but I don't feel like dark occultism really fits our colony. Still, we need to discover several more entities before we can move the monolith on to the next stage, so we've started holding these void provocation rituals. Throwing rocks into the abyss to see what crawls out.

What came out this time was a ghoul. Singular. We haven't seen any of these before, but unless it's carrying a nuke or something I don't think it's a great cause for concern.

Yeah, Spider killed it instantly. Have you gone all soft on us, Cassandra?

Back to poking the void in the eye.

This seems more like it.

That's.. a lot of fleshbeasts.

13th of Decembrary 5512 - 11th of Jugust 5513.

Last time Cassandra opened a "pit gate" in our backyard, which regurgitated a massive horde of fleshbeasts. At least they're polite enough to walk into our defences, and between spike traps, IEDs, flame throwers and good old fashioned shooting and bonks on the head, they all die eventually.

There's still the matter of that big hole.

I'm making everyone jump in, except Wyll who gets to stay home and meditate.

The caves below are, to nobody's surprise, all fleshy and gross.

We have to cut our way through the fleshmass to progress. There are some random fleshbeasts milling around, and more crawl out of the walls now and then, but nothing too dangerous at first glance.

This seems more worrying.

We've found the mothership. A big monster that splits into other monsters that split into even more monsters. These things know what they're about.

We make quick work of them though, and with the big beastie dead it's time to Indiana Jones it out of here as fast as we can.

We only got to explore about a quarter of the caves, but I can't imagine there's anything down here that would be worth the risk of staying. A few hours later the pit collapses, and there's only a bit of rubble left on the surface.

Chekov's pick-up lines are as awful as ever, but it seems he's finally found someone who's into that sort of thing.

And then there's a plague outbreak. Diseases aren't a big threat at this point, as long as everyone is otherwise healthy and gets time to rest. The main issue is the drain on medicine and the lost productivity.

Proposing to his new girlfriend after just three days, while they're both stuck in bed, suffering from the plague. Yet another mystifying display of romance from young Chekov, but somehow it's another unexpected success. 

Then I get an alert that someone's having an affair...

Kirk... and Troi... have both been in marriages this whole time? I don't think we've run into Rada or Wolverine, but they must be somewhere on this planet. I first thought we were going to have drama and breakups, but nobody in our colony will care about this. Phew.

That all three of our starting pawns were secretly married to outsiders (you may remember the accidental killing of Tasha's pigman husband) explains the lack of romance in the first year or so.

On the last day of spring, blood suddenly starts raining from the sky. Exposure to it sends living creatures into a rage, so everyone has to stay indoors and roof over all the corridors again. The wild animals outside are all going berserk, but the grisly downpour only lasts for a day.

Plague, then flu...

A mech cluster! Haven't had any of these drop down since we started messing with the monolith. Not a terrible one, we could just mortar the turrets and mop up the remains, but I think it's time to try something new.

Let's send our ball of pain out to play.

Dropping it in the middle of the hive seems as good of a plan as any.

The hateball certainly puts on a show, flinging explosive fireballs and teleporting itself around.

The mechanoids seem to be resistant to most of its attacks though, and they eventually grind it down.

It would have been more effective against organics, but I can't say I mind being rid of it. That thing breaking loose in the base would be a disaster.

I don't think we've wronged any Israelites, but with the darkness last update, water turning into blood, pestilence, and swarms of locusts mechs it's all starting to feel a bit biblical.

The Empire wants to send us... something. This is how we got that weird Chekov doppelganger corpse earlier.

But this time it's a mysterious golden cube. It does seem to be a Chekov thing again, though.

We stick it in the storeroom for now, and hope Wesley can figure it out.

Chekov is acting a bit strange. Every now and then he stops what he's doing to build sculptures of the cube from random junk.

He's not much of an artist.

And the plagues continue.

Chekov is spending a lot of time in the storeroom looking at the cube, and telling the other pawns about the cube.

Every now and then I spot him carrying the cube around the base. 

But the cube will have to wait. We've encountered enough entities that we can finally move the monolith to the final stage.

Everything kicks off pretty much immediately.

I didn't get an "establishing shot" here, but there are two void structures crashing down, one just inside our outer wall and one outside. They're both surrounded by a large number of metalhorrors.

And the monolith itself has caused a fleshbeast raid. They're bursting up from burrows all over the map.

We have to deal with the ones inside the walls first, but luckily we have this nice defensible little antechamber room to shelter in.

The main horde of enemies come in through the killbox, but they were slowed enought that we can deal with one threat at a time and keep everyone together.

Even with all the traps, flame throwers and everything else the, there's no way to keep it from turning into a giant melee.

After the initial wave of fleshbeasts and metalhorrors is put down, we immediately activate the first void structure.

It immediately triggers a wave of 66 gorehulks and over a hundred regular shamblers to attack.

As usual they spread out and start chomping on the walls, so I have to split the pawns into teams and methodically clear them out. On the one hand this makes shamblers less dangerous, as we can deal with them in smaller groups...

...but on the other hand there's no way of getting around fast enough to stop some of them from turning the walls into swiss cheese and wandering into the base, where they attack the dogs and destroy even more things.

I don't know what that means, but I'm sure it's not good.

Great. I probably should have dealt with this thing before starting a showdown with eldritch horrors, but too late for regrets.

The shamblers didn't cause too much damage, but as soon as they die the map starts to darken. Everyone is exhausted, so I let them get some food and sleep, and try to patch up the walls.

The next morning it's time to activate the second structure.

The darkness intensifies.

And we're under siege again.

This time it's devourers and gorehulks. At least they won't chew up the walls, and they're not immune to psycasts, so Wyll can do her thing.

Not the time for that, Chekov!

Thankfully he goes to build his little sculpture out of dirt in the garden. I was worried he'd wander outside and get himself eaten.

We've slowed them enough to make it manageable, and I'm taking the risk of putting Wyll up front to slow them more as they come in. The killbox is an utter mess though.

And then the darkness comes.

Three more void structures are appearing, and even the unlit areas inside the base are now unsafe. Luckily I had put lights almost everywhere last time, so no important areas are completely cut off.

I've locked the outer doors to stop anyone wandering outside, and set up a new zone to keep them in the light. Small numbers of gorehulks and noctols have started spawning in the dark and are roaming around, and the void structures are surrounded by more metalhorrors. They're not immediately attacking, but we're going to have to go out there soon.

5th of Septober 5513 - 1st of Decembrary 5514.

This will be a bit longer than usual and a little rambly. If you get bored, scroll down until you see the header "How to build a starship". That sets the stage for the ending, and some extra self-imposed rules I'm giving myself.

There are a couple of end game scenarios we could go for, with a few more more added in the DLCs. We're going to build a spaceship, the original ending the game released with. It seems like the best fit for this playthrough. 

This update covers the aftermath of the last, and then a summary of what is (if all goes well) our last year on this planet. Things have been fairly calm as I've been planning and preparing, but there are some loose ends to tie up before all hell breaks loose again.

Now, where were we?

Still just at the moment where Scotty returned. I'm keeping things paused for a moment. 

The entire map is a complete mess. Corpses litter both the outside and inside of the base. There are several breaches in the outer walls and a few in into the base proper. The void structures killed all plants in an area around them, and fires have ravaged quite a bit more.

But the material damage can be repaired, and more importantly: Everyone is still alive.

Well, Wyll died... a bit, but she'll return to us after a few days' napping in her deathrest casket.

The corridor where the most desperate fighting happened is packed with dead gorehulks and shamblers. More got into the throne room and the raw material storage next to it. There are also two dead labradors, somewhere under the zombie corpses, that we'll have to find and bury.

There were more shamblers making it inside from other breaches. They're all rotting and spreading "rot stink" throughout the base. All our pawns are immune now, but the dogs and prisoners aren't.

All the blood out front is from Wyll making the monsters fight each other. She saved us many times over.

The wildfire is still raging outside.

We also have some visitors. Imagine going to say hello your neighbours and finding all this. Just be glad you didn't arrive ten minutes ago.

Cleanup and repairs are taking several days. The Harbinger trees are turning out to be extremely handy. Normally you have to burn corpses (either in an incinerator or by making a bonfire), but dumping them all here and letting the trees eat them is much less work.

With all that out of the way, the golden cube is still a problem. The mental breaks are getting more frequent.

Tasha and Chekov have this "cube interest" condition, and it's increasing in intensity. While I am curious what would happen if it reaches 100%, I just want my pawns back.

After a little more study, Wesley has figured it out. We can destroy it, but it will send the affected pawns berserk, which is a bad mental break. (Oops, I forgot to crop this one, sorry if the text is illegible).

I first have the doctors sedate them both.

And then tell Wesley to go destroy it.

Sleeping like wee bairns. When they wake up they're both back to normal. The event was fairly trivial in itself, but I really should have dealt with it before setting all hell loose.

And now we can destroy all the shitty cubes they built.

We're performing one last ritual. Scotty is a goddamn hero, and I'm giving him his youth back.

Starting at 96 years old, this takes a few goes...

It's evil, but we're doing it anyway.

We're still getting raids and other threats of course (pictured: 100 manhunting cougars), but it's all stuff we've seen before, just in greater numbers.

Scotty is a young man again.

And as it turns out, not being geriatric helps with the ladies. Scotty's medical skill is 0, by the way.

I'm making everyone's bedrooms really nice, with extra luxury for the royal pawns and the colony leaders. Satsuki is laying some fine floors here, while Kirk and Troi... well I suppose a lack of modesty is the least of our concerns.

We got a new quest: Two vampires want to hold a powwow in our base. The rewards were good, so why not? I inspected them out of curiosity, and one has an interesting background trait: Human computer. I know I said I wouldn't do this, but I just have to...

Please welcome Data to the colony. I gave him a new gene cocktail and he turned out a bit too purple, and he has cat ears of course. The pyromaniac trait is normally a total dealbreaker because it makes pawns randomly break and start fires everywhere. It happens even if you keep them happy enough to make normal mental breaks impossible. It turns out the vampiric pyrophobia completely negates it, though.

We don't really need another high intellect pawn, the entire research tree is finished and Wesley can handle anything that might come up, so Data will just be tasked with running our drug lab.

And he quickly hits it off with Satsuki! That's all the pawns paired up now, except Worf. We've had a lot more women than men for most of the playthrough, but it's evened out. Worf sadly won't get into a relationship. Since she's a klingon pigskin the non-pig people find her less attractive and we haven't recruited any others of her kin (their genetics are awful).

Autumn has come. The pawns are as good as I can realistically make them. We've finished our last trade runs and our stockpiles are full. It's time to build the USS Enterprise. 

Building a starship takes a lot of work and and ungodly amount of materials. The bare minimum you have to build is three engines, a reactor, a sensor cluster, and a computer core. Each pawn then needs a cryptosleep casket. Caskets have to be attached to a structural beam, but other than that you can put things together in any way or configuration you like.

I made one last timelapse of the construction process.

It took fourteen days, the whole autumn season, but on the last day of Septober our Enterprise is complete. She's not quite ready for takeoff just yet, though. We have to start up the reactor, and that's when things will kick off. I built traps all around and mini turrets in each corner. I haven't used turrets at all so far, because they're crap, but they'll at least be a distraction. The big worry is drop pod raids and the computer core getting destroyed, because we only had one and they're very rare.

We're going to get attacked. A lot. You actually don't have to build the whole ship at once; you can build and start the reactor on its own (and wall it in), then construct the rest of the ship around it once the onslaught is over. That's much safer, but it just seems less fun and a bit cheesy.

And I have another plan to make things a little more interesting. There's a "threat scale modifier" in the difficulty settings that decides the size and power of threats. At the start of the game I bumped it up from 100% to 125%. As the game has gone on I've increased it to 150%, then 175%. The highest preset difficulty you can choose, "Losing is fun", has a threat scale of 220%, and that's the highest I've ever played at. However...

If we go into the custom storyteller settings the slider can be pushed all the way up to 500%. This is the most powerful group of pawns I've ever had and this last year hasn't offered anything nearly as exciting as the ending of Anomaly. We've also been doing extremely well overall; only one pawn has died, and I've never made it to the end without losing several before.

So I devised a little game: I'm starting at 200%, but for every raid I beat easily I have to bump it up by another 50%. Is it dumb? Probably. Will it be fun? No idea, but it should at least be interesting.

Enough procrastination.

It's the 1st of Decembrary 5514. On the first day of the new year, exactly 15 years after we began, our Starfleet officers will leave this planet and start a new adventure in space. If they make it that far.

There's maybe two or three updates left. Before that (today or tomorrow) I'm going to make a final little side update on the base, but I'll try to keep it short. And I have to play the game, of course.