[Gaming] RimWorld

Obviously the seventeen hydraulic vaginas are now ON THE LOOSE and WILL NOT BE TAMED and now Tom Savini and David Cronenberg are watching Ñogoler with interest and taking notes.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
That moment when you realize that transport pods can be fired into the same map you launch them from.

Which means if pirates are setting up somewhere to attack you with mortars on the map, you can drop a tamed boomalope in the middle of them, and they will shoot it... and burn out their own area.

WHY have I not been DOING this before now?!

Also I saw a very informative video that made me realize IEDs are actually really useful if you set up honeypots. Arrange a few chunks into what looks like a good cover position to attack your base, build a single wooden wall and a circular roof portion expanding out as far as you can from that single roof... then put an IED in the cover. IED blows up (doing damage to the attackers), destroys the wall section, roof collapses on the attackers for even more damage.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So I've made a lot of headway again. I actually moved my people to an entirely new colony and abandoned the old one just so I could do a redesign from the ground up with a better base layout than "I started with one big room and just kept adding to it. Now I've got inner and outer walls with embrasures on the outer walls and I'm pretty much toxic-fallout-proof and everything's so fancy now that all my colonists have the "sky high expectations" mood debuff which makes them harder to keep happy but amazingly enough I'm doing it.

And then a defoliator ship crashes nearby... with FIFTEEN centipedes armed with a mixture of heavy pulse blasters and inferno cannons.

This is what is commonly known as a "game-ender."

But I steeled myself to make it through this without losing a single colonist. I shelled them with mortars to loosen them up and destroy the defoliator, and then they came for me. I am on excellent terms with almost all my neighbors, so I called my most technologically advanced neighbor for backup, and they sent some drop pods with random cannon fodder.

Incidentally, you know what the secret is to fighting an overwhelming force of mechanoids with top tier weapons? It's pay-to-win, with payment in advance. The things you buy are Psychic Insanity Lances (and to a lesser degree, Psychic Shock Lances). Despite being artificial life forms, psychic weapons still work on mechanoids. One psychic insanity lance gets two shots and has the same range as a sniper rifle and NEVER MISSES. Zip Zap your enemy is now blasting his friends and they have to deal with him, especially if he's a 50m centipede armed with full auto armor-piercing charge blasters.

So things are progressing, occasionally one of the centipedes manages to shoot an inferno bomb through one of the holes in my embrasures and some of us get a little singed, but as we're wearing power armor it's not life threatening.

But then another group of my allies shows up of their own volition. 70+ tribals. I never call tribals for backup because they always say "we can't get there in time" but these guys came on their own. Their numbers wash over the mechanoids like a wave and many tribals die quickly and horribly but the number of targets keeps the mechanoids so busy that I send a fire team out to concentrate on them one by one and have no problem killing them all.

Now here's the complication. My first ally squad is enemies with the tribal allies who showed up later.

Soooo a war then broke out on my doorstep.

It doesn't take too long for the tribals to swarm the allied colonists. There aren't many left... and then, as the sun goes down, the zombies are starting to come into the map... 80+ and counting at the time of this writing.

And the mechanoids DID manage to punch a hole in my wall before they went down, and half my soldiers are in the hospital getting their burns tended.

This is gonna be interesting.

Pictured below: One of the industrial ally colonists is apparently Snuffles' sister, so when she got downed by tribals I sent him out there to rescue her. He's got a bionic leg so he runs fast.

 

GasBandit

Staff member
The end-all-be-all of chemical recreation in this game is a substance called Insect Jelly. It's extremely rare, hella-expensive, and highly sought. You get this from - you guessed it - insectoids. Which are usually pretty dangerous. I've lost a lot of colonies to insectoid infestations that killed everybody and ate them.

But a window of opportunity opened for me when I broke into an ancient cryptosleep casket chamber on my colony's map, and after dispatching the mechanoids guarding it, I opened the caskets to find a half dozen megascarabs that were not hostile. Not friendly, but not immediately trying to eat my colonists and suck out their guts.

And by this time, I had a pretty hefty bank of animal specialists - so I took a risk, and it paid off. My colony successfully tamed the insectoids.

But here's the thing - insectoids only produce jelly when they breed. They can breed one of two ways -
1) the hive way, which was off the table because these guys didn't come from an infestation that generated hives, they were free agents.
or
2) the way that the "mod that shall not be named" introduces, which is they can use humans as incubators, in which they oviposit, then fertilize, eggs into... handy orifices... and a by-product of all this is that when the eggs come out, Insect Jelly comes out too. The human being used is wrapped in a cocoon that keeps them immobile, heals their wounds, protects them from temperatures (minimum -50 C and maximum +50 C) and even feeds them nutrition to keep them alive. In an earlier colony, I learned this because a pirate fleeing from a raid-gone-bad ran into an insectoid cave, and I got to watch as he was hacked down, then cocooned up, and then kept by the insectoids for the next few years until some mechanoids showed up and inferno-cannoned everything, human, insectoid, and other. Kill it with fire, right?

Anyway, back to my current playthrough - There's been a tribe, called the Blue Mesa Clan, that has been raiding me often and refusing all overtures to peace. The game says they are a "blood and honor" type culture with whom diplomacy is impossible. They have a settlement within 2 days travel of my colony.

I was getting pretty tired of them anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone - wipe out a source of raids, and maybe snag a few living incubators for my nascent Insect Jelly factory?

I sent my best equipped soldiers on a raid to the Blue Mesa settlement, and... well, to summarize, it was so one sided that it kind of felt like a war crime. The worst injury my soldiers got was a bruised shoulder, whereas I mowed down upwards of 20 tribals with space-age pulse guns, sniper rifles, and of course, made sure to use psychic shock lances to get myself 3 or 4 living captives because at this stage of the game, you pretty much never give anybody a survivable wound who isn't wearing power armor - tribals in cloth and rudimentary metal plates die like small mammals fed into a thresher. So we gunned everybody down, kicked in the doors to the buildings, took everything of worth and put the rest to the torch, leaving the dead for the vultures and hauling the survivors home in chains.

And if that sounds bad, you won't like what comes next.

Returning to my colony, I had my tamed megascarabs already set up in a fortified room with industrial rollers and pullers going through the walls (Industrial Rollers is a very handy mod that lets you set up Factorio-like conveyor belt systems to move things from one area to another, I highly recommend it, saves SO much hauling time, and can automate your kitchen so you never have to open your walk-in-freezer).

So I just chucked the captives in and locked the door.

It's a horrific nightmare, what goes on in there, but as far as my colonists are concerned, they now have a stone box that they feed kibble in one end, and insect jelly comes out the other.

But if anybody ever opens that door, hoo boy.... my last count I was up to 34 megascarabs, 20 spelopedes, and one megaspider. I actually did let the spelopedes and megaspider out of the box because they're actually intelligent and large enough to be trained to haul, rescue, and fight for the colony.

But yeah, if any hostile force breaches that box, they're going to get a face full of angry, chittering, scuttling death and psychological horror.

I used to use captured raiders as diplomatic bargaining chips, or recruit them, or sometimes even selling them to allied factions as slaves. Not any more. Now they go in the box.
 
Last edited:

GasBandit

Staff member
Just when you thought this story couldn't get any more nneyyyghhahhghhhbbllkkk...

So, I ended up with WAY too many insectoids. We're talking, 50+ megascarabs and spelopedes approaching 40. I don't even keep that many chickens. The insectoid box got OUT of control. The amount of food necessary to feed the insectoids was getting ridiculous.

So, I decided, fuck it, they're just livestock (extremely chitinous, slicey, stabby livestock), let's slaughter the extras and turn them into kibble for the smaller, more manageable population we keep.

So I queue up the slaughter and conversion.

Suddenly a large number of my male colonists are having mental breaks.

What's going on, guys?

1638323843507.png


Uh... oh. Oh. OH.

So, apparently, I had not noticed that the lock on the door to the Box was more of a conceptual forbidding than an actual... you know... lock.

So, a number of my male colonists have been taking surreptitious trips INTO the box... the blood-spattered, knee-deep-in-amniotic-fluid-and-reproductive-gunk box.... and just helping themselves to the cocooned captives. Sexually. And it turns out, human semen fertilizes insectoid eggs just as readily as insectoids do themselves. And because the insectoids stuff those eggs everywhere, no form of orifice-related copulation is more "safe" than any other in this regard.

So a number of these insectoids are actually direct line descendants of my colonists.

And I just ordered them slaughtered by the literal dozens. So not only are these colonists going through the grief of losing dozens of children and grandchildren, but they believe their fellow colonists killed them in cold blood.

Uh... this... this could be bad.

I mean it IS bad. Obviously the moral and psychological implications here are horrifying.

But it is going to be getting worse in a GREAT big hurry.

Normally, if I have a colonist lose a loved one, if the grieving spouse or immediate family is TOO bereaved to function, I put them into cryptosleep for a month. The grieving timer elapses while they're frozen in carbonite. Handy, that.

But I don't have enough cryptosleep caskets, and even if I did, the colony couldn't take a productivity hit of this magnitude. The next raid would certainly overrun us.

I think this might be the beginning of the end.
 
Last edited:

GasBandit

Staff member
The thing that chafes me about it, too, is I had finally put the finishing touches on a REALLY nice base.

1638325229591.png


Look at that, it's magnificent. Ample space, great defenses, well lit, fireproof, toxic fallout proof, volcanic winter proof, way more electricity than I need, well laid out, highly automated.... capable of supporting lots and lots of colonists safely...

I mean, sure, it's not exactly a garden spot... see all those brown and green dots lining the periphery? Those are zombies. About 500 of them at this particular moment. But the turrets usually do a pretty good job of keeping them from clumping up at the walls, and I can send a half dozen guys with autoshotties or heavy SMGs to whittle them down if they start to form into hordes and threaten to beat down doors (which are made of plasteel and can take quite the beating)....

Maaan... I guess that's what I get for trying to find a fast, easy, ethically reprehensible way to farm insectoid jelly.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Discovery of the day:

EMP cannons are a lot more useful than I thought they were, because you can use them to let your colonists target practice on your own tamed animals without harming them.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Francis John has also recently been doing this absolutely fascinating project of trying to colonize a combat tile (IE, a conquered tribal settlement). New enemy "reinforcement" waves show up every 24 game hours, and are typically 300-400 members strong.

 

GasBandit

Staff member
Here's the post-op of the above playthrough, or "How I became a bloodthirsty cannibal death cult that built a murder cathedral literally out of the melted weapons of my enemies, festooned with their skulls, furnished with their tanned skin."

 

GasBandit

Staff member
Somebody on Imgur must have recently discovered Rimworld. It did make news this week when it suddenly got banned from Australia for some reason. Anyway...











Randy, be nice to me


 
They look happy, because that's Phoebe Chillax, Randy Random, and Cassandra Classic. The three AI who control your fate by throwing you a mech raid while everyone is in bed because of dysentery. ;)
I wondered if they were the storytellers after seeing some of the memes.
Ah well.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So here's me back on my Rimworld bullshit again. Yes, I'm still playing with all the same mods as before.

I tried making a cannibal psychopath colony, but I didn't stick with it because it was just too darn easy. Raids become food deliveries. And despite the apparent crime against humanity that went into making them, humanskin leather goods sell REALLY well to passing merchants.

So I tried again with something else - attempting to make the perfect underground "survive the zombie apocalypse" colony. Basically building my own fallout vault.

It's still a work in progress - I can't completely seal off from the outside world yet because if you can't get outside you can't trade with merchants, either the caravan or spaceship variety, and too much stuff requires things like advanced components to build which you can basically only get from merchants.

The area is so mountainous that it forms a maze almost on its own just to get to my front door. This means half the raids sent against me get overwhelmed by zombies before they even make it to my defenses. Which is kind of neat, but also a bummer because then there's all this weaponry and other sale-able and smelt-able merchandise just rusting in the rain out there, and it would take my colonists basically forming their own raid party to spend an entire day fighting their way back out through the maze to recover the merch - and I can't spare the manpower.

But I figured out I can buy dogs from merchants and train them to haul and zombies don't care about dogs so they're able to slip in and out of my base without drawing attention. I make sure to only buy male dogs because I don't want a puppy explosion eating up all my food.

Speaking of population explosions, I'm also now running one more mod that makes it so having children is a lot more realistic - babies are now... babies. And there's cribs and toys and all kinds of stuff which makes it feel a lot more "The Sims" and (like most mods) is a great improvement on the general framework of Rimworld to flesh out the experience. But this time, none of my colonists has high enough medical skills to surgically implant IUDs.

I thought "well we can have a few kids and then by then I should be able to" but I DRASTICALLY underestimated the horniness of my colonists... and the fecundity. One baby born, hey great, happy day everybody. Another born a little later, grats to the happy parents. Next... TWINS born. Oh my, how unexpected. Well, I guess we can have one more, and then we should be ok. TRIPLETS. We now have more babies than adults. You have never seen me research something as fast as I then researched the manufacturing of contraceptive drugs. And because this is Rimworld, they are unisex. And I make sure EVERYBODY is on the pill, male and female, because we cannot be having any more babies.

A year goes by, and I get notification that a colonist is now visibly pregnant. Whaaat? Well, I guess the pill isn't 100% and everything, but the math made it so that there should only have been a 1% chance of pregnancy! Wait, that colonist isn't in a relationship... oooh drama! Who is the father? Fortunately my doctor is high enough skill to do a paternity test.

"Soandso is pregnant, and DoctorColonist has determined that the father is Labrador Retriever 2."

What.

HOW DID YOU EVEN THINK TO TEST AGAINST THE DOGS' DNA

So apparently the increased demands on my attention made by this personal-set challenge made me not scrutinize the activities of my colonists as closely as I usually do, meaning this particular colonist, who has been lonely and horny because all the other ones paired off and she was the odd lady out, started taking the fetch-dogs to her room when I wasn't looking. And of course I had not thought to put the dogs on a contraceptive regimen or neuter them since there aren't any female dogs in the colony. So the conception chance was 10% instead of 1% (the drug caps a pawn's fertility at 10%), and she'd done this often enough that she developed the Zoophiliac trait... which then of course drove her to do it even more.

MFW I've inadvertently created another sexual deviant colony.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Slightly less horrifying but very humorous, the zombie mod author did not take into account the size limitations imposed by modded clothing, such as baby onesies.

Quite frequently in this playthrough, my colony has spotted full-grown zombies among the shambling masses sporting the ragged remains of baby onesies.

I know from a programming standpoint how this happened, but an in-universe lore description of what has happened means that either a human squeezed into a onesie before succumbing to the zombie virus.... or zombies have started attempting to put on toddler clothes post-mortem.
 
Slightly less horrifying but very humorous, the zombie mod author did not take into account the size limitations imposed by modded clothing, such as baby onesies.

Quite frequently in this playthrough, my colony has spotted full-grown zombies among the shambling masses sporting the ragged remains of baby onesies.

I know from a programming standpoint how this happened, but an in-universe lore description of what has happened means that either a human squeezed into a onesie before succumbing to the zombie virus.... or zombies have started attempting to put on toddler clothes post-mortem.
Or they continue to grow after becoming zombies!
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I kept having things disappear out of their containers and thought it was either a bug or my dogs were getting into them and eating them.

Turns out, you really need to childproof your colony. 5 year old Rimworld children have only a transitory respect for area assignments (they will VERY often path outside their assigned area if they see want something outside it), and to them, things like birth control pills and penoxycyline look like fun happy candy. And they'll happily munch on any psychedelic mushroom they find growing in an unused corner of your underground colony.

IT'S TOO REAL. Thank goodness I don't keep things like Go Juice (Combat PCP) or Wake Up (Meth) handy like a lot of Rimworld players do (for combat emergencies)... much less Flake or Yayo (Crack and Cocaine).

Gonna have to keep a REAL close eye on the beer and smokeleaf though.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So when you get a man-eating megasloth raid in the middle of the night of the living dead, who wins?




Spoiler: the zombies kill and eat them all.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
BTW, I have discovered that using the Zombieland mod and the Androids mod simultaneously is a good way to bring your rig to a crawl, when your colony gets big enough to start really attracting large groups of zombies. Which kind of confuses me as I'm not pegging either CPU or RAM in my task manager... plenty of both to spare. Must be some artificial ceiling cap imposed in Unity.
 
Could also be due to swap and/or drive thrashing, running out of VRAM (that can actually matter now with textures and some AI moving to GPU). Might be a good time to start profiling, find out some 32bit vampire has been limiting you to 3GB Or something stupid like that.

—Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Could also be due to swap and/or drive thrashing, running out of VRAM (that can actually matter now with textures and some AI moving to GPU). Might be a good time to start profiling, find out some 32bit vampire has been limiting you to 3GB Or something stupid like that.

—Patrick
I got the performance monitor mod, and nope, there's definitely a speed limit being placed on the API hooks for mods to use. And it's aaaaaall being gobbled up by Zombieland, and to a lesser degree, Androids.

But I suppose that can't be helped when I'm running a colony of 30 residents that is being attacked by 300-500 zombies every night.

I started over with a new game, without the Zombies. I really enjoy the challenge the Zombieland mod adds to the game, but it makes the endgame literally drag.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I had no idea the developers would put in an API rate limiter.
I'm sure they had their reasons.

--Patrick
Just one guy with one vision. A lot of Rimworld's greatness is despite Tynan, and only some of it is because of him. I could NEVER go back to playing unmodded Rimworld now.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
So here's a bit of interesting trivia... the wood burning generator and chemfuel generator are the only two structures in the game that block line of sight while still being able to be walked across.

That means if you set up the entrance to your base like this...

1658641935227.png

(Barricade important because it won't let them "stop" in the hallway

... and then you put five melee-skilled pawns here using drafting (or more using area assignment)....

1658642014398.png


You get the following ridiculously overpowered defense

 
Top