[Gaming] RimWorld

GasBandit

Staff member
Funnily enough, I just did have to turn a luxury bedroom temporarily into a prison cell, because the brother of the leader of a hostile faction crashed in an escape pod outside my colony... I'm debating whether to harvest his organs or send him home. I don't think it'll give me any bonus faction points for him being the faction leader's brother...
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Coming close to my quote in Kags' signature about day old kittens getting into the beer.... is what just happened to me in this game.

A cute husky puppy getting struck by lighting in the head, blowing its head clean off.

:(

1658874764483.png
 

GasBandit

Staff member
There's a stargate mod for Rimworld, and I recommend it. It adds a very interesting twist to gameplay. Plus it makes multicolony games have a nice feature as well - you can stargate between them. And it's very balanced - it's much more common to "find" a stargate and have to haul it home with a huge convoy than it is to build your own (though you can do the latter at great expense), and there's lots of research required to do so. And if you don't want surprise visits, you need to research and build an iris for your stargate.

The funniest moment so far was I decoded a stargate glyph tablet to learn a new destination code, and when I dialed it, apparently there were a bunch of pirates at the other end waiting to ambush somebody coming through... thing is, they apparently didn't watch SG1 because they were crowded around in front of the gate in melee range. Like... real close.

So all but two of them died instantly when the toilet flush swirly thingy flew out of their gate. The remaining two shat themselves and ran for the hills.

But one word of warning... the series kinda played fast and loose about being able to travel both ways on an open stargate. This one is much more strict. Anybody who tries to go into a gate with an open incoming wormhole gets atomized (same thing for any objects you try to put through it).

Found that out the hard way.
 
Last edited:

GasBandit

Staff member
The Stargate mod does have some unfortunate situational disadvantages.

In a normal raid, I can use psychic shock lances to incapacitate relatives of my colonists who are on the opposing side, then either release them or convert them.

But if an enemy faction tries to raid me by Stargate, and I close the iris.... splatsplatsplatsplatsplatsplatsplatsplat

Yeah, my colonist with the "tortured artist" trait now has some new inspiration from when her parents came to raid her settlement and got converted instantly into a molecule-thin paste on the business-side of my gate iris.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I'm slowly in the process of moving from one Colony to another.

My initial Colony was just below the treeline of the north pole, for the added challenge. It literally has a 10 day growing period, so early game food was a heck of a struggle. But fortunately, running the Androids mod, I was playing the "exiled mad scientist" scenario, where you drop with a Battledroid and two regular droids. (Droids are different from Androids, they are soulless automatons that perform decently at tasks but cannot learn, grow, or socialize).

So, At the start I only actually had to feed one person, but I had to VERY quickly scramble to get an electrical grid up and going. Which I just barely managed to do with a combination of wind and solar into a couple batteries. I had to make sure those batteries stayed topped off because whenever a droid hits 50% charge he goes to "eat" from the local powergrid, which gobbles about 300wh out of batteries attached to that grid. And one battery only holds 600wh. So I had to have enough generation to supply the requisite 900wh/day for bot recharging plus whatever I needed to stay warm and cook.

And staying warm was a real challenge. The first winter killed off all the trees in the map because it got down to -60 degrees F (-51 C), and it never got warm enough again for long enough for new trees to grow. So... no wood. No fires for warmth or cooking or light, much less burning in a generator. The sun barely shown during the winter, but the wind blew like crazy, so usually I was able to get what I needed. Every structure had to be double-thick granite, though - it was the only building material, and single thickness wasn't enough insulation.

It took years to get any real traction going, but droids were a godsend. They don't care about temperature (they can't even be set on fire, which has come in handy a couple times), they don't need to sleep, they don't need to eat. So really, they make ideal ice sheet colonists. Every so often I'd get a wandering colonist who'd join, but about half the time they'd get eaten by a polar bear or something. Sun lamps in giant stone greenhouses got me fodder for animals, and fortunately one of the joiners who DID survive had high animals skill, so I ended up taming some muffalos and yaks. That's wool and milk sorted out, so a stable source of food and clothing. And there was lots of metal to dig out to make into droids.

Eventually I managed to make an Android printer, and had the resources to create some darn-near-perfect beings. They each took half a year to print because I went in for ALL the bells and whistles - Naturally I made them physically perfect (35%+ boosts to every activity), spring for the plasteel-hyperweave skin upgrades to that they could deflect bullets even naked, added software proficiencies for just about every task, Vanometric power cells so they don't have to recharge (or even eat), nanite self-preservation systems that self-treat wounds in minutes, and I even paid the extra resources for SEVEN traits (normally colonists can't start with more than 3) - those traits naturally being Beautiful, Fast Learner, Great Memory, Fast Walker, Industrious, Nimble, and Quick Sleeper. Each of them took about FIFTY SIX advanced components, hundreds of plasteel and hyperweave, and of course a generous amount of steel and organic components (mostly ending up being corn and muffalo meat), and a year later, my perfect Uberbeings came into existence.

I named them Hyperion and Perfection. It was truly a proud mad scientist moment. They were superior to humans in every way, and they fell in love with each other within a week. They zipped lightly around the compound making the regular droids look as slow as the droids made humans seem.

Then I got curious. There was one upgrade I didn't spring for... and that was in using an AI Persona Core for a brain instead of growing an AI Neural Net from scratch. Basically giving Ultron his body. So I said, what the heck, saved my game, and created Overmind. To date, he hasn't tried to take over the world, but he does get a 300% bonus to all intellect-based activities such as researching and scanning. Which definitely comes in handy. But Overmind started paying attention to Perfection, and I didn't want a love triangle going, so I created one more android - Serenity, and part of her programming was to be romantically obsessed with Overmind. I was in a rush and couldn't dedicate the full six months to her printing, so she didn't get all the universal aptitudes her three predecessors got, but she still excels at all things social, and most importantly, keeps Overmind happy and out of trouble.

The main problem with my starting point, however, is that it had a big river running through the middle, which meant that I had to build very close to one edge of the map. This made defending from raids that came in at that edge very problematic. So I knew I'd have to move house.

I sent my androids as a caravan far to the south. Fast forward several weeks of caravan searching, a year or two of building a rudimentary outpost and finding a stargate to snatch and drag over to it, and then another year or two of fleshing out the new colony into a full-on fortress with enough room to move everybody there... and now I'm just barely getting to the point where I can relocate everyone and everything down south.

It's been a tough journey, mostly littered with the exploded shrapnel of robot drones (they tend to explode spectacularly when shot with a charge lance, and if you have them standing within 5 tiles of each other, say, for example, in a firing line, you're gonna have a real bad time). Fortunately Overmind's quick scanning ability has me in more steel and components than I know what to do with, so making a jillion soulless automata to do all the gruntwork and act as (highly volatile) cannon fodder is no problem. And unlike real colonists, nobody gets sad when a base droid gets killed. And that's good, because there was a close call when a mechanoid hive raid on my south base happened simultaneously with a pirate raid on my north base. I only had 5 battle droids and needed them all to fend off the mechanoids, so the laborer droids had to grab AR-15s and try to hold the pirates off as best they could until reinforcements could arrive via stargate. I did not spot until it was too late that one of the pirates brought a Doomsday Rocket Launcher, and I lost almost all my northern droids in one massive explosion. Fortunately, the remaining two held on long enough to keep the pirates at bay until the cavalry came through the gate. Amusing anecdote - one of the two droids collapsed because a coolant line rupture had finally drained it dry, and the pirates tried to "kidnap" the "downed colonist" and were rather dismayed when it overheated and exploded.

Once I decommission the old north pole base and finish fortifying the new southern base to make it impregnable... I'm not sure what I'll do. Probably put Rimworld back on ice again until I find another mod that tickles my fancy.

I'm still mightily bummed that there's not enough processing overhead alloted to mods to run both the Androids mod and the Zombieland mod simultaneously in the endgame.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
"Hi, I'm Avery, I've come to visit your colony. I have a few things to trade!"

Oh, like what?

"Well, I've got some hyperweave, that's useful, and some components, everybody wants components..."

Ooh, yeah, good stuff, what else?

"Two hundred and fifty four used condoms...."

...

Ok, just because I'm impressed that you decided to cart 28 pounds of used condoms through the wilderness, believing someone would want to buy them from you... I'll take them. The incinerator is right over here, if you could just drop them next to it...

1660424879855.png
 
Top