(Looking for comments from everyone knowledgeable of the game.)
The Sims is one of my favorite games, so this comment intrigues me. I tried playing Dwarf Fortress, but the dwarves were too stupid for my taste in games. (They basically starve to death once the initial food runs out.) How much autonomy do Rimworld pawns have? Does a colony require constant managing by the player, or will the pawns mostly take care of themselves?
The gameplay I’m most interested in is controlling one character while the others are autonomous. For example, in The Sims, other characters mostly stay alive if left alone. Or in Fallout 4 Settlements 2, some basic setup of an outpost lets the settlers mostly survive.
I’m sure I’ll try to this game in any case; just trying to set mine expectations.
Well, it’s less that they’re smarter and more that the game is a bit simpler and a lot of the tools are much clearer, so setting things up to where they’re gonna mostly function and identifying and fixing problems is easier.
And when it comes to direct control, you can do much more than Dwarf Fortress, ordering them to do a particular task, or drafting anyone at any time to issue combat orders.
Question about all the vanilla faction extended type mods. If I just don’t include any of that faction on planet generation, I’ll get everything that comes with that mod but not have to deal with the raids or quests of that faction, right? Sort of like the Empire and the Royalty DLC?
The random dangers pretty much always require micromanagement. A lot of the stuff, like farming, is semi-autonomous, but sometimes there’s blight that you have to deal with. Raiding parties can be partly dealt with with traps, but you still need to manage defenses. Various random events like poisonous fallout require some degree of care (like changing priorities so your pawns stay indoors). Harvesting resources like wood or steel needs some manual input. Etc.
In contrast, in ONI, absolutely everything can be automated. It takes a while to get there, but you can reach a point where you can just walk away and let it run indefinitely, with your dupes staying healthy and well-fed.
Four hunters just showed up on my map. They went up to a herd of elephants and started blasting. One was killed, a second downed, and a third injured and fled. But they killed all three elephants.
The fourth then shot a Camarasaurus and died. The sauropod then charged my base, where my pawns were having a Purim party. Fortunately, I don’t have any alcohol yet, so even though it’s meant to be a drinking party, my fighters were sober. So I stepped outside and gunned down the Camarasaurus.
That’s quite a bit of free meat for my perpetually low on food colonists. And a bunch of Biolocked weaponry too, which I hope I can sell despite the biolocks?
I’ve also continued to go wild with mods, now that I know I can control how impactful they are by choosing factions on worldgen. I’m up to around 145 mods. The latest addition: door mats! I don’t want them tracking filth everywhere inside.
For a pittance, yes, unless you can find a way to remove them. I know I’ve seen mod(s) which can do that but I can’t recall the name(s). The one I’m thinking of adds a workbench which can be used to decode/recode those weapons.
Things were going well for a while - until they weren’t. I’ve had 3 strangers staying with me (Sam’s Strangers) and helping out for a while now. Their leader, Sam, asked to join us. I said yes.
Then the other day a dino got the plague. I quickly killed it and thought that was that. But then 7 colonists got the plague all at once.
As I’m treating them (this left me with 2 healthy colonists plus the two guests), they betrayed me. One was riding a stygimoloch at the time, and he decided to try and kill it. Big mistake - he ended up dead. But the other one nearly stabbed my rabbi to death and then set the fields on fire.
Some of the plague victims had to get up to try and help put out the fire. It’s burned most of my crops. I think I’m safe from it burning my main building but I’m not sure. And it’s spreading faster than I can fight it.
ETA: OH THANK GOD! I unpaused the game from posting this and got a ‘torrential rain’ notification.
2 healthy people
5 adults with the plague
A 6th adult with the plague who is also bedridden with temporary paralysis
A prisoner from a mission I decided to recruit instead of keep imprisoned. She is also bedridden with the same type of temporary paralysis.
A child with the plague
So that’s two healthy people trying to care for eight sick ones.
Oh, and one lady is a sickly xenotype and is having a mental break that prevents her from STAYING IN HER DAMN BED so she will most likely die
As if that wasn’t enough, we had a raid by some lizard dudes who demanded I pay them 600 silver (I don’t have that much). There were like, 8 of them on the map, in a few groups. We managed to kill them, but they somehow snuck someone into the town and kidnapped our little kid, who just aged up from baby.
And as the battle raged outside, 3 of our colonists (including one of the original 3) died of the plague.
Really sad: the starting colonist who died of plague was the daughter of the starting colonist who was pregnant at the start and whose kid got kidnapped. So she lost both her kids at once.
I started a new game with The Rich Explorer and decided to stick with a single-person colony. So far it’s going quite well, and I don’t plan on adding any other pawns. Not even when my own son crash-landed nearby.
The most annoying bit though is the poor priority planner. 1-4 aren’t granular enough. Plus, the fact that a high priority task always overrides a lower-priority task is irritating. I’d like a way to tell a pawn to spend at least some time on all tasks. Plus, I’d like to tell it to spend a minimum amount of time on all tasks unless there’s really nothing else to do, or there’s some super-priority task like putting out a fire. Are there any mods that improve this?
I also installed a Prisoner Swap mod. If I take the Saurids alive rather than finishing off the downed ones, I might get an offer to trade my kid back.
It would also be nice if priorities could be set based on conditions. For example, I have 50 meals in the freezer. But if I eat one, my pawn immediately makes a new one, because I have the “do until X” bill set. That’s annoying and inefficient. I wish I could say to bump the priority when I only have 30 meals, so that he cooks until there are 50 again, at which point the priority decreases and I can do something else for a while.
I think I’ve solved my missing vegetation problem. The trees I had been seeing were from Vanilla Christmas Expaneded and only in colder biomes; nothing in warmer biomes. Changing the load order so that’s after all biome mods may have fixed the issue.
No, it was something I disabled; tried loading a different list and putting Christmas at the bottom. Got ground cover but no trees other than the Anima.
