Well, my RW is broken again. Had to restart the trial & error process to see which combination allows drop pods to land.
So, I’m still slowly adding mods and testing the mod list by creating a new default scenario colony every few additions. Imagine my surprise when, right after landing, my latest test notified me that a pawn is pregnant; I didn’t even know that was possible with the default scenario!
Got added in with the Biotech expansion.
Yeah, I knew babies were added; did not know pawns could start pregnant.
Ahh, understood.
Got tired of working forward from a known good set of mods and continually encountering maps which don’t render properly after adding stuff; started working backwards from a set of mods which did work properly at one point and went about removing stuff.
Should’ve done that to begin with.
No time for more experimenting tonight; need to head to one of HQ’s tech depots in the morning to get my laptop fixed.
Looks like I got the combination of mods I use back into a playable state. I just hope nothing breaks again.
To give you an idea how many I use, I’ve timed how long it takes to go from clicking “Play” to seeing the main menu. Some 45 minutes on my old computer; playing on my new computer – which I primarily bought to play Starfield – cut that in half.
I found another useful mod for 1.4 & 1.5: Custom UI Scales allows the player to set the scale to virtually any percentage, including smaller.
I have mine set for 90% because the Furniture menu became too large again.
After playing Norland for a bit, it made me want to play Rimworld (which will inevitably lead to me to jumping back into Dwarf Fortress soon)…
My colony turned out to be three older women (mid-to-late 70s); I just didn’t pay much attention to anything other than skills when I started it.
Anomaly adds various occult rituals, so I’ve been having fun de-aging my colonists by stealing youth from various prisoners… My starting colonists are all in their 40s-50s now!
Steam tells me I bought Rimworld 7 years ago and have played 1,000 hours. I have since tried many in the base/village building genre, including:
- Stranded: Alien Dawn (most Rimworld-like)
- Patron
- Anno 1800
- Manor Lords
- Palworld
- Dwarf Fortress
- Clanfolk
- Grounded
- Ostriv
- Settlement Survival
- Banished
- Foundation
- Going Medieval
Plus lots of more city or first-person types, like Workers & Resources and Valheim.
I keep coming back to Rimworld. Not only that, but despite having purchased most of the DLC, I am largely running vanilla, with some QoL mods like Wall Lights and Silent Doors.
Just yesterday I started with my largest mod yet: Hospitality. It’s concept fits well with my under-mountain base, as I have a tremendous amount of unexplored/unmined area. I turned a bit of that into a dorm, rec center, dining room, and retail shop, and after two successful visits I can see it was worthwhile - for the delight and entertainment, if not profit.
All the games I mentioned are quality products, but for me Rimworld has just the right level of management. Some of those are too on-rails (“build this, now assign someone, now build that, now assign someone, assign someone else to move things from the first place to the second place…”) and most require finer, more constant management than I enjoy.
Stranded: Alien Dawn comes the closest to the Rimworld feel, but turned to 12, with lovely 3D graphics and rich characters. Still, I find Rimworld the easiest/quickest to get in/out of.
Hey, thanks, I might check out Stranded: Alien Dawn (knowing I’ll come back to Rimworld).
Great mod. If you haven’t looked at them, check out the various Oskar Potocki “vanilla expanded” mods. Lots and lots of modular additions but all with the specific intent of keeping everything feeling like the base game.
Currently, I have no colony established enough to take advantage of it but there is a Spaceport ( Original for 1.3 & 1.4 and Continued for 1.5 ) mod which will increase visitor traffic.
Also of interest is Biomes! Fossils – your pawns can add a natural history museum to their hotel.
ETA: unlike others in the Biomes! series, this does not actually add any new biomes; just fossils, amber, and museum-related objects in a new Paleontology build menu.
Those sound really cool!
Thanks, I’ll check them out.
Spaceport is really cool; I had two landing pads in my most established 1.3 colony. They were mostly used for services like refueling and stuff but some visitors will stay longer.
I created a 1.4 version and started a new colony after work. Got far enough in to be prompted to name the colony then something bugged out, most workbenches stopped allowing bills and the storage options for all the pre-existing shelves no longer allowed changes.
Tried reloading earlier saves and encountered the same bug so I quit to desktop and reloaded. The bills & storage bug had corrected itself but now all the natural walls are gone!
Weird.
And the workbench bug has a small presence in other colonies as well. I guess a very minor QOL mod which I recently subscribed to, before starting the new colony, was the culprit. Disabling that not only restored the missing walls but the affected workbenches can be disassembled and rebuilt, then they work properly.
No, that wasn’t it. Something must be causing any pre-existing storages shelves on my maps to bug out after a while, taking certain workbenches with them. Loading an earlier save or a save for a different colony doesn’t help but deconstructing those shelves before building any of those workbenches apparently does.
And there go some of the natural walls again … starting over with a new colony; this time, I’ll try to removing any shelving already on the map before they can bug out.