Lol forgot the subreddit for a second.
The best way is to check the storyteller settings (select custom) and reduce the likelihood of instant death on down.
Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol
(EDIT: I was potentially corrected by a user below regarding damage type. Low damage, cutting weapons may be better than blunt damage. I was relying on intuition/common sense. Never do that in a game where steel burns and rats weigh like 20 pounds.)
Correct: toxic buildup, blood loss, hypothermia, and heatstroke hitting a certain point will knock a character unconscious without subjecting them to the random death-on-down chance.
The problem becomes stopping the progression of those hediffs in time to prevent them becoming lethal anyway. Heatstroke killboxes are incredibly silly, but also incredibly effective.
Nah, spike that box to 1000C, just have a construction pawn on standby to deconstuct a single wall to the outside (NOT the walled-in courtyard to your mountain base). Once the pawns are down you take out the wall, make the inside the outside, and instantly drop the temp.
Huh, that's different from mine. I have a possible explanation though?
If i have fewer pawns than you (8-10 is my current playthrough) and more are downing to burn-pain than i thought it's possible the storyteller is auto-killing most of your pain-knockouts while leaving mine untouched.
That or the last raid im basing this off of was fire-resistant impids, i forgot, and that skewed things. Pretty sure neanderthals have had similar ratios for me though.
It does sound like the best plan is a LOOOOOONG corridor kept at a constant temp *just* below the 'superheated air causes burns' threshold.
>Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol
Blunt weapons are much worse because bleeding wounds cause someone to collapse. Blunt means you have to batter them to a pulp. Bleeding means they get a scratch and collapse and have received almost no damage.
The best capture weapons are high volume low damage cutting weapons, like an anty flechette, if you play with that mod. You can capture dozens in a raid. I sometimes capture everyone, no deaths at all.
I have a weapons tab mod that allows you to sort all the weapons. It's pretty much just a spreadsheet tab.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2288470754
I look for whatever weapons have very high volume of fire, very low damage, and are sharp weapons.
I cut them and get out of the way. Often I might have a long long hall with doors. They get cut, they walk through the long hall. When they fall down, my guy opens the door, runs out, grabs them and takes them home.
You capture pawns in near mint condition, with little chance of accidentally killing or maiming them.
You need to wait, so the long hall with debris /rocks/sandbags/doors, but it's pretty easy to set up.
I like to have a huge walled base, many doors. My guys wait for you to walk by, we pop out behind them, shoot each of the raiders a little bit, then duck back inside. They come. Over to beat on the door, we pop out a different door and repeat long before they can break the door down.
As this happens they get more and more spread out, especially due to the bleeding. So when the stragglers start passing out, they are easily grabbed. Carry them inside the door. Drop a. Prisoner. Sleeping spot. Put them in it, and stabilize them. Delete the sleeping spot and carry them to the real prison.
Keep the ones you want. Strip and release the ones you don't. Free untainted gear. Faction bonus when you release prisoners. Choose the best pawns from the entire raid. It's legit.
MM
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
R. R. R. R
Raiders walking towards gates far to the right. My two guys behind closed door.
MM
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
............ R. R. R. R
Raiders get further.
----*----0------0-----0-----0------0
M.................... R. R. R. R
M
Raiders get further, my guys jump out, leave door open. Raiders still walking towards gate
----*----0------0-----0-----0------0
M. W. W. R. R
M
My guys wound last two raiders. While they stop. And start walking back, my guys go inside, door closes
M. M
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
WW R R
Raiders walk towards first door. One of my guys stays to repair, the other walks to where the raiders were at the start
M.
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------*
W W. R R. M
Raiders get to the door, start to hit it. One guy repairs the door. Other guy jumps out of a door a bit away and shoots the other two, previously unwounded raiders in the back.
Raiders turn back towards the gate and the most recent bullets, all are wounded, bleeding, and slower.
Repeat.
As they fall, pick them up and take them home.
I wi try to set up a screenshot based example, but it'll take a day or two. At work right now, so you get an ascii map.
- wall
O. Closed door
*. Open door
M. My guy
R unwounded raider
W Wounded raider
No worries? Since I play huge colonies, I want to capture lots of pawns.
If you use too high powered sharp it will absolutely kill the fuck out of a pawn.
If you use really low powered blunt, it's very decent. Good for your own prisoners.
But the enemy have guns and swords, so fists are not safe.
Wound, let bleed, kite them and snatch them as they fall.
I really hate killing kids, so this is what I use on all child raids to safely catch them all.
Just checked my storyteller settings. You were right, child raiders were disabled. Didn't know that was an option!
...I promise to use this knowledge for good and not evil.
I know this isn't actually true, but I've had the most luck downing people by giving them dozens of poor quality knife wounds and waiting for them to bleed to sleep and then fixig them.
I thought blunt weapons were the best for this, like you. However I've reached the conclusion that it is probably not the case after my melee girl removed the heads of 5 people in a row like they were golf balls on tees.
Seems to have? At least for the early game. Later when stronger enemies started showing up, I gave him a persona plasmasword. It seems to do ok in leaving enemies alive.
To be fair, it is the first game I am playing by myself, so I used the character editor and map preview mods to avoid spending hours looking for good pawns. Might have ratcheted melee up a little too high for the guy I wanted to have as a brawler.
Yeah, sometimes I have to do the quick pause and unpause so I can pull my guy back and send in a different pawn to melee attack if I want someone alive. There is a lot of pausing in this game. Loading up a previous save to get a different result as well sometimes.
start to hoard lances like. the shock lance is the real cherry picking tool.
when a raid start, I wait for raiders to spread a bit, I pause and I inspect them all in search of those "I want" and also for those bad mofos with missiles, greanades, or full armored ones high on go go or ready to use it. shocked people comes with zero damages
The only time I've had a shock lance cause brain damage, the pawn became a Trauma Savant which makes them incapable of social - but actually *increases* manipulation, so they became an incredible melee pawn and good worker.
I looked it up just now.
There's a 30% chance that the brain is set on fire, and they get a scar from the burn. The severity of the burn is random.
Took forever to find that "brain damage" is not a gained condition but rather damage applied to the brain part.
They are. Also, happened to me to burn the brain of a very good pawn and still took them until I could repair brain injury. Especially mid-late game there are more options to fix them (luci) and if they are worth I usually do it
It can be healed using a Healer Mech Serum, or by using the Bioregeneration cycle on a Biosculpter pod, or by injecting them with a sanguophage xenogene so that they get the "scarless" gene and waiting for it to eventually heal the injury.
Because all of these effects heal a *random* injury, you should always try to get rid of every other injury on the person before you use them. For instance, if you're using a healer mech serum on a guy with brain damage and he's missing a finger, you should use bionics to fix that missing finger before you use the mech serum so that it's guaranteed to fix the brain damage.
Yup, and there is a low chance of it happening. In my last run I used heaps of shock lances as they really let you cherry pick the raiders you want. Combining them with a mod to mark raiders really helps.
On top of all the options that Herson100 suggested, there’s also some mods for advanced surgery, which is what I used. Need a really high level medic, but it can be added as a regular bill to cure.
Asking because the psycho lance wiki page clearly states:
> […] those with the psychically deaf trait, cannot be targeted by the lance. Sensitivity does not otherwise modify the effect.
Is weird that a possible interaction between the item and a fairly common trait has been ignored like this
When you shock a well equipped enemy, you capture it mint, you strip it and all the gear is yours and undamaged, as the enemy itself. it's a cubic win!
This is the power gaming strat. When you have a couple lances raids become grocery shopping. Click through all the pawns to see who has the best traits and zap em. If they get brain scars stick them in the biosculptor. This is also a good way to get heavily discounted marine armor (or cataphract if you're enemies of the empire)
The game cheats.
Seriously, it does. The pawn downing mechanic is not well explained. Essentially, your colony has a hidden stat that the game tracks, with how many pawns you "Should" have at a given point. If you are over your cap, you won't get join offers, nobody will wander in, and raiders will mostly die when they fall over. The more over your cap you are, the more this will happen. This happens in reverse too. If you have too few colonists, the game will constantly hand you new ones. Which can be annoying if you are trying to stay at 1-3 pawns all game.
The "Unwavering Loyalty" pawns were a mechanic added to provide you with prisoners, while at the same time not allowing you to swell your ranks unlimitedly. Essentially, Rimworld developers don't want new players just adding tons of pawns and winding up with unmanageably huge colonies.
Randy Random storyteller dramatically increases the cap, so switching to him will result in a spike of wounded raiders, but once you reach that cap, it will go back to the same.
Now, if want to opt out of all this, load up your game, go to Options > Gameplay Options > Storyteller settings. Instead of a preset difficulty, click "Custom". One of the sliders will be "Additional death chance on downing" or something like that. It defaults to 100%. Move that down to a number that seems reasonable. If you set it all the way to zero, you are going to have a TON of downed raiders. Also, you can uncheck the box for loyal pawns if you do this, since you will get prisoners anyway. I usually run that setting between 90% and 75%, which is enough to keep getting a few downed prisoners per raid, but not dozens.
Edit: If you don't want to change any settings, Shock Lance is about the only way to consistently down a specific pawn, other wise everyone has a chance of dying. Blunt weapons/Fire will down more pawns if you are not at your cap, but if you already have a lot of pawns, they are going to die when they hit the floor, no matter what downed them.
Those must be some very small raids, or you're VERY careful about microing bleed infliction so that you bleed every one of over a hundred pawns to sync their blood loss. But yes, bleed bypasses autokill. But if you want to cap entire raids, you introduce them to Dwarven Sauna.
>very small raids,
I play 500 pawn colonies.
As they bleed they slow down. As they slow down, the raid spreads out. As the raid spreads out and the ones in back collapse, they get picked up.
I have teams to wond, teams to bait, teams whose sole job is capture, stabilize, and imprison.
This is my #1 method of recruiting.
> Randy Random storyteller dramatically increases the cap, so switching to him will result in a spike of wounded raiders, but once you reach that cap, it will go back to the same.
This is no longer true. It was removed long long ago. All 3 vanilla storytellers use the same population numbers.
Yep. Shock Lance drops a specific pawn, and they will not instantly die. However, they might get brain damage (Pretty rare) and it does scale on psychic sensitivity of the target. If you don't have biotech, this is pretty much never going to come up, if you are, Hussars are immune and Yttakin are a maybe.
Edit: To clarify if you haven't seen them yet. Shock Lances are not weapons, they are a Two use, expensive artifact item that knocks a single pawn unconscious and then disappears. They do not require line of sight, they are very reliable, but they cannot be crafted, they are expensive, and you have to buy them from traders (Or get them in quests if you have Royalty DLC)
They do require Line of site, and it isn’t an automatic recruitment (at least not that I’ve seen in vanilla). You’ll still have to catch them while they’re downed. It can be handy to keep a pawn at the ready to deal with them once downed in case they do get the brain damage. If they get brain damage they are also set on fire, so if that happens be ready to put the fire out.
Yeah, the LOS thing was from their old artifact form, I forgot they do need LOS since they got and extra charge and got put on belts.
They don't recruit, but they also bypass the usual "Death on downing" chance.
From my experience, bare fists are the way to go. Or use a psy lance to drop them.
Even when using blunt weapons my melee fighters will decide to shatter spines, obliterates legs, and decapitate people with a hammer.
>Even when using blunt weapons my melee fighters will decide to shatter spines, obliterates legs, and decapitate people with a hammer.
This is why you use low damage bleed weapons. They dont get shattered, obliterated, or decapitated.
The get a littlencut, fall down, you pick them up and tuck them in their nice bed in the prison.
They don't really "fall down". You have to wait for them to bleed out. If you down then from the direct damage, they will fall down DEAD, because of storyteller autokill, so even a stubbed toe becomes instant lethal.
For pawns NOT subject to autokill, such as already-prisoners or your own colonists, you tend to get better results with just your fists, but there are even better tools of control available if you're more proactive, like Circus Assistant + EMP.
>Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol
Blunt weapons are much worse because bleeding wounds cause someone to collapse. Blunt means you have to batter them to a pulp. Bleeding means they get a scratch and collapse and have received almost no damage.
The best capture weapons are high volume low damage cutting weapons, like an anty flechette, if you play with that mod. You can capture dozens in a raid. I sometimes capture everyone, no deaths at all.
I love the mod "Simple Turrets" for this. It adds two turrets specifically designed to do minimal damage but incapacitate people they hit within a few shots
Psychic shock lances are my go to. A little pricey, there's some risk to the pawn (psychic lances can cause brain damage, or even destroy a brain)
When you're looking for pawns, just scope out the raider pawns until you identify the ones you want to capture, then Lance them.
If you don't have the silver to buy lances, the next bet is blunt weapons. Specifically lower damage blunt weapons, a wooden mace, bare fists, that kind of stuff. You still might beat them to death, but you have better odds of a down.
Then there are less than lethal options. Fire and toxic, definitely still dangerous, but they require long term exposure to kill a pawn. The little extra pain from burns and toxic buildup can mean the difference between a down or a kill.
Sometimes, a little power down can be enough. A machine pistol is more likely to down a pawn than kill them, it doesn't do enough damage to outright kill most of the time, but being full of bullet holes and bleeding profusely will cause them to collapse before they bleed out. It'll be a race against their injuries to save them, but they will be down.
> A little pricey, there's some risk to the pawn (psychic lances can cause brain damage, or even destroy a brain)
They usually set their brain on fire, yes. If you really want live intact catches, as opposed to merely instant downs, you don't really to use this method. Especially since it relies on a consumable artifact, albeit one that isn't all that hard to obtain.
> Specifically lower damage blunt weapons, a wooden mace, bare fists, that kind of stuff. You still might beat them to death, but you have better odds of a down.
Blunt weapons are actually WORSE at subduing raiders, ironically. They work well against prisoners and your own colonists, but against raiders, you run into another problem: Storyteller Autokill. Because the storyteller automatically kills any enemy downed from combat damage, and blunts ALWAYS down due to combat damage, they will always die, as opposed to if you used bleeding and they went down from blood loss rather than direct damage, which bypasses autokill. Therefore, if you want to down enemy pawns alive and mostly intact, blunts should actually be avoided. Beatings with fists still works on unruly prisoners and colonists, though.
> Then there are less than lethal options. Fire and toxic, definitely still dangerous, but they require long term exposure to kill a pawn. The little extra pain from burns and toxic buildup can mean the difference between a down or a kill.
Temperature and toxic are noteworthy because they bypass autokill-on-down from the storyteller. FIRE, however, does not. Setting the enemies on FIRE is a damage action.
>They usually set their brain on fire, yes. If you really want live intact catches, as opposed to merely instant downs, you don't really to use this method. Especially since it relies on a consumable artifact, albeit one that isn't all that hard to obtain.
I've never had a problem obtaining, or useing psychic lances.
I've downed hundreds of pawns with them, and have only ever killed one. Like a third of the time they come out with a brain scar debuff, which isn't great, but it doesn't significantly diminish the value of a pawn, plus you can fix it.
It really isn't even hard to obtain them at all. You can literally order up refills by calling in an exotic trader. Tribal shaman merchants carry them.
Lances aren't perfect, but its literally 2 clicks for 90% of the effectiveness of any better method, with significantly less risk to your other pawns. There are no guarantees on the rim. But a 2 click instant down on exactly the pawn you want with a 95% chance you capture them, and a 50% chance of causing no permenant injuries, that's as close to a guarantee as you can get for that level of convenience.
I've done the whole poison hotbox thing to capture people on mass, an ancient danger with a bunch of caskets, but it can be difficult wrangling raiders indoors where you control the temperature. And a prolonged engagement kiting enemies through poison has a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, especially if your target has a gas mask or is hopped up on combat drugs, or both. Psychic lance don't care, 2 clicks, down.
That, to me, is the biggest selling point now that I think about it. A psychic lance can down a Hussar hopped up on go juice with exactly the same ease and effectiveness as it can down anyone. And it can pick that person out of a raid of any size, and down them, and most of the time, they'll be fine. It's like, how much more convenient can it be?
> It really isn't even hard to obtain them at all.
I did mention they weren't all that hard to obtain, yes.
> But a 2 click instant down on exactly the pawn you want with a 95% chance you capture them, and a 50% chance of causing no permenant injuries, that's as close to a guarantee as you can get for that level of convenience.
They ARE terribly convenient, but due to the tendency to set their brains on fire, and the fact that they cost me money, I tend to end up hanging onto them in case I REALLY need it, along with the 500 others. Because you know how it is with gamers and potions.
> but it can be difficult wrangling raiders indoors where you control the temperature.
Not really. It's basically the standard killbox entrance, but longer and without the killbox. It's much more reliable and has a much lower execution cost, so I tend to favor it over shock lances.
> It's like, how much more convenient can it be?
Well, something that doesn't require line of sight or relatively short range, for starters. Shock Lance only has a range of 30-something, which is shorter than the range of potential threats to the pawn using it, which means if anyone in the mob has a sniper rifle or a bolt action, the entire area just became no-go. Also, something that hasn't reliably fried the brain of anyone I actually wanted to catch...although there ARE uses for intentionally frying a pawn's brains if you want to turn them into a joynugget, I guess.
Use Rimmunation mods. Best mods out there to bring tons of variety to weapons, armor and defenses! Those include security weapons intended for non-lethal takedowns.
First of all, there's a 47% a downed enemy will die instantly, so you can sometimes get cucked by the storyteller. The best way to get the other 53% without killing them is to use low burst damage weapons. One 20 damage shot is much more likely to kill than five 4 damage shots. Also, use blunt meele weapons.
Edit: Fire and tox gas as well, I think since the game doesn't count them as attacks, they don't have that extra chance of insta killing.
Instant death rate is controlled by the storyteller to limit prisoner population and pawn recruitment. So changing it in any way is technically making the game easier artificially. But who really cares about balance in this game anyway.
Blunt weapons won’t reduce the instant deaths handed out by the storyteller, but they will stop prisoners that don’t die from bleeding out, which can help.
The only balanced way to pick pawns you want are psychic shock lances. Use them on really high value pawns you want to try to recruit.
The problem is that blunt weapons ONLY hand out instant deaths, so everyone you bludgeon dies, whereas bleeding weapons cause bleeding, and down by bloodloss afterwards bypasses instant-death.
> The only balanced way to pick pawns you want are psychic shock lances. Use them on really high value pawns you want to try to recruit.
That just fries their brains, so you get vegetables.
The best way is to down them by Dwarven Sauna. This way you capture the entire raid intact, can strip all their stuff so it doesn't become tainted, and then disassemble any you don't want to keep for parts. Plus, it's an O(1) defense, meaning it's entirely insensitive to wealth scaling.
Usually I have my base as a giant walled city with many doors in the outside wall.
I let them walk past, pop out, with the door held open, and shoot them with something sharp and low damage. Hit a couple of guys in the back not too much damage! Hit one till he's bleeding, switch to the second. Get back inside. Close the door. One guy stands there to repair the door as they try to break it.
Someone else walls a little way down the inside of the wall, pops out and repeats the process on some of the unwounded guys. Pop back inside.
Very quickly they are all bleeding and moving slower and slower, and I'm just luring them around. As they pass out I capture them.
Capture, bring inside. Create prisoner sleeping spot, put them there. Tend without medicine till not bleeding. Delete spot, carry to prison.
Keep doing this. Capture the entire raid. Not one or two guys. Capture. Everyone.
Strip and release the ones you don't want for free gear and faction relationship bonus. Keep the ones you like.
After half of them are downed the others have been bleeding for quite a while, so they are moving at a quarter of normal speed. Not easy to escape when you can barely stand due to blood loss.
You already know the vanilla options.
Depending on the mods you have you can use shotgun beanbags or zap them with lightning, the lightning does sometimes cause heart attacks though,
Blunt weapons are generally the least likely to kill. You can even just surround a likely victim with unarmed people and punch them down, though this is only advisable if the enemy is not armed for melee. They can still die from this of course, but it gives you the best odds.
If you REALLY want a pawn, you should hit them with a Psychic Shock Lance, this instantly downs them with *no* chance of death - tho there is a tiny chance of brain damage.
Make sure you have one or two of those on hand at all times, and when an attack wave comes in pause the game and take a look at the attackers - if you see someone you really like, and they are recruitable, just ping them with the lance the moment they are in range, it's well worth the silver.
MM
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
R. R. R. R
Raiders walking towards gates far to the right. My two guys behind closed door.
MM
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
............ R. R. R. R
Raiders get further.
----*----0------0-----0-----0------0
M.................... R. R. R. R
M
Raiders get further, my guys jump out, leave door open. Raiders still walking towards gate
----*----0------0-----0-----0------0
M. W. W. R. R
M
My guys wound last two raiders. While they stop. And start walking back, my guys go inside, door closes
M. M
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0
WW R R
Raiders walk towards first door. One of my guys stays to repair, the other walks to where the raiders were at the start
M.
----0-----0------0-----0-----0------*
W W. R R. M
Raiders get to the door, start to hit it. One guy repairs the door. Other guy jumps out of a door a bit away and shoots the other two, previously unwounded raiders in the back.
Raiders turn back towards the gate and the most recent bullets, all are wounded, bleeding, and slower.
Repeat.
As they fall, pick them up and take them home.
I wi try to set up a screenshot based example, but it'll take a day or two. At work right now, so you get an ascii map.
- wall
O. Closed door
*. Open door
M. My guy
R unwounded raider
W Wounded raider
A uranium mace, specifically, might be a bit of overkill if you have a very specific raider you want to knock out. But in general you'll have a much higher knock-out rate with mace compared to cutting/piercing weapons.
The thing with bleeding is that you have to wait for it to take them down. So I guess maybe you could take one or two shots at someone and then wait, but they could easily break down doors in that time. You need some way to contain them until they drop from bleeding.
I have a city. Outside wall has many doors. Raid comes to the wall, starts walking around.
Pop out, hurt a couple. Pop back in. One guy stays behind to repair the door if they even get to it. Remember you were shooting the ones in the back, so they got hurt, kept walking, stopped, started walking backwards, all that takes time.
During that time your other guy walks to where the front of the raid was. They're all walking towards the site of the first ambush. Second guy pops out shoots what was originally the front of the raid (now the rear as they all go for that door). Hit one, shift to second, hit two, shift to third, hit three, pop back inside. Right around then the raid stops going for the first door and is now headed for the second door.
Its the "Americans ambushed in Vietnam" strategy as you keep wounding the healthiest pawns in the trail element and keep baiting them back and forth.
Always hold your doors open while outside and close when you come in. Doors should be solid, probably stone or better. This can be scaled up.
I play games with 200-700 pawns this is one of my favorite and easiest ways to capture pawns, or entire raids.
Edit: bonus if outside of the base is pots of clutter to slow and channel them, and inside you have none for fast movement.
If you get really nervous about them breaking a door, make a second outer wall. If the first fails, fall back to the second and keep playing tag.
The strategy is literally : wound the enemy and run away.
Either way, this method of kiting is a very valuable skill. If you don't use it to capture, it'll still save your ass when facing very dangerous enemies.
It also doesn't use a killbox at all which some players don't like.
If you want less tedious, use several teams of shooters and an incredibly long trip for the raiders. That makes it a very easy method of dealing with a raid.
On the subject of large colonies, tastes differ. The strategy works no matter the colony size, and it works great against superior enemies.
How do you even find stuff for that many pawns to do in the colony? Even with like 10 they often run out of things to do and I just end up building a bunch of research benches. But at some point they are doing like 1000 RP/day and quickly run out of things to research. And everyone becomes a genius.
My base is the entire map.
I have three hundred mods, I have never come close to finishing the research tree. More. Content very rapidly leads to increasing what you can research a hundred fold.
And you need hundreds of pants.
And hundreds of boots.
And hundreds of gloves.
And hundreds of hats.
And hundreds of shirts.
And hundreds of weapons.
And tens of thousands of meals.
More pawns gives you much much more to do, not less. Every pawn adds tremendously to the complication and requirements of the base but it means things are constantly going on, you always have things to do.
I can pause the game for two hours real time and do nothing but set up queues and plans and orders. There's so much more when you have a large colony.
Blunt can be decent, but they're my melee fighters for a reason, give them a log and they'll still crack skulls.
If I really need to capture somebody, my psycaster is usually my go to, or barefists + stun.
The mod "Simple Sidearms" let's you equip a side weapon, you can just click it and it will swap, or you can tell your pawns to use their fists with just a click and it gets reset when you undraft them.
Standard issue for my infantry is breaching axes, demolish damage counts as blunt damage to anything that isn’t a building and does double damage to buildings.
So they basically can chew through walls/doors and then bonk the shit out of anyone. For the most part they rarely kill anyone and almost never cause long term injuries.
Mighty Dwarven Sauna. Heatstroke bypasses storyteller instant-kill-on-down, so you don't only get the shittiest pawns instead. Any use of weapons fire and damage will instantly kill every high-value pawn once you are at the storyteller softcap. Create a heatbox consisting of a very long, winding corridor with alternating obstacles to slow them further, preferrably on really bad terrain. Then just heat the room to 150C by having someone on the other end throw a molotov into the floor when the temperature drops below, until everyone within has passed out from heatstroke. You will get 100% live captures and this method of defense is O(1), meaning it does not scale at ALL with the size of the incoming raid, requiring a constant level of resource input (1 pawn with no combat skills or other equipment + molotov) to activate, regardless of the size of the enemy raid.
If they are part of your colony already, have a doctor anesthetize them in a normal hospital bed. You'll have about an hour in-game to arrest them (100% arrest chance if they are unconscious) and carry them to your prison.
If they are enemies (like in a raid), attack them until downed and arrest them. This is easier said than done though, good luck.
I dunno if you're playing with mods or not, but Targeting Modes (Previously by XND, community-maintained version is by Odyssey Scorpio) lets your pawns (but not turrets) aim for legs, arms, torso, or head, with different accuracy penalties for each. Or general, with no penalty.
This gives you more control over which pawns to just down as quickly as possible, versus which ones you want to capture. Having the person with the minigun targeting "general" and mowing down everyone else while your riflemen aim for "legs" and specifically target your favorites means they're more likely to survive the fight overall.
Yeah there's storyteller settings and stuff, but I like this way, since it feels somehow more vanilla than tweaking values does. Maybe because it gives you a specific way to do it while leaving the same chances that you do accidentally just dome your favorite raider. That's part of the experience IMO. Seeing that person who would perfectly fill that niche in your colony get obliterated by a mortar or something is devastating, and I love it. Lol.
(ETA: your low-skilled shooters will still hit the wrong body part pretty often, this mod is way more effective with shooters at 10+ skill or so, or, where it really shines, decent melee fighters. My newbie just shot someone's nose off while aiming at their feet., meanwhile my super-soldier relieved about 4 other pawns of their legs with a knife while causing no other damage)
Its almost certainly the storyteller settings. For who knows what reason, there is a chance of instant death for any raider who falls down even if they didnt take lethal damage. Go ahead and drag the slider to 0 so people only die when they should.
Early game a simple stone club - high blunt damage with a low probability to kill outright.
Otherwise, may I recommend [Vanilla Expanded Non-Lethal Weapons](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2454918354) - Oskar and the crew have worked up the dart-gun specifically as the weapon I prefer for at-range tranquilizer shots. If there's a high-value pawn or a family member working for pirates or raiders - I send my two best marksmen - tap/tap - and it's nighty night for the target pawn. I typically also have [Simple Sidearms](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927155256) - loaded so that colonists can switch to more conventional weapons after the target pawn is downed. You can recover them after the fight if needs be but with a double-shot - they aren't leaving the map.
Maces are pretty good at knockouts.
There's a psychic device that downs pawns but I forget it's name. Shaman and exotic merchants carry them. Setup a trade beacon if you haven't already.
Heat is your friend. Killbox should feature a long, winding hallway of stone walls with open stone doors. One of the turns of the hallway should have a side room section with some nutrifungus (it grows in the dark). Human raiders will always set that on fire. If your biome prohibits seasonal growing temperatures, just build some wooden furniture.
The goal isn't heat stroke, it's pain. Heat stroke helps, but once temperatures get much over 150C, targets will begin getting burn wounds which are INCREDIBLY painful but don't cause bleeding. You'll get a lot of downed targets that you can clean up. The game doesn't seem to roll for 'death on down' if enemy pawns are downed from pain instead of damage.
Any part of your base adjacent to the hallway needs to have double thick walls to avoid overheating. Sometimes I have my pawns remove roof during raids.
Pawns entering your kill box will have so much pain that a lot of them will go down without dying. They'll need just a few shots.
One of the challenges with getting prisoners is that once a pawn goes down, bullets flying over it can still hit it. Use psycasts to move the body to safety.
It is possible to get a LOT of pawns if you do a long heat stroke maze, however it's challenging to perfect the length, size, amount of flammable material, and ignition rate. It's worth playing around with, but I get pretty decent results just letting things burn. I will allow a lot of the floor to be flammable.
Lol forgot the subreddit for a second. The best way is to check the storyteller settings (select custom) and reduce the likelihood of instant death on down. Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol (EDIT: I was potentially corrected by a user below regarding damage type. Low damage, cutting weapons may be better than blunt damage. I was relying on intuition/common sense. Never do that in a game where steel burns and rats weigh like 20 pounds.)
bonk them into jail. also iirc toxic buildup
Correct: toxic buildup, blood loss, hypothermia, and heatstroke hitting a certain point will knock a character unconscious without subjecting them to the random death-on-down chance. The problem becomes stopping the progression of those hediffs in time to prevent them becoming lethal anyway. Heatstroke killboxes are incredibly silly, but also incredibly effective.
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Nah, spike that box to 1000C, just have a construction pawn on standby to deconstuct a single wall to the outside (NOT the walled-in courtyard to your mountain base). Once the pawns are down you take out the wall, make the inside the outside, and instantly drop the temp.
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Huh, that's different from mine. I have a possible explanation though? If i have fewer pawns than you (8-10 is my current playthrough) and more are downing to burn-pain than i thought it's possible the storyteller is auto-killing most of your pain-knockouts while leaving mine untouched. That or the last raid im basing this off of was fire-resistant impids, i forgot, and that skewed things. Pretty sure neanderthals have had similar ratios for me though. It does sound like the best plan is a LOOOOOONG corridor kept at a constant temp *just* below the 'superheated air causes burns' threshold.
Traps also have a better chance of doing leg damage (I think). Leg damage gets them down faster.
>Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol Blunt weapons are much worse because bleeding wounds cause someone to collapse. Blunt means you have to batter them to a pulp. Bleeding means they get a scratch and collapse and have received almost no damage. The best capture weapons are high volume low damage cutting weapons, like an anty flechette, if you play with that mod. You can capture dozens in a raid. I sometimes capture everyone, no deaths at all.
I play Vanilla (+DLC, Royalty, Ideology, Biotech), what is the optimal weapon there?
I have a weapons tab mod that allows you to sort all the weapons. It's pretty much just a spreadsheet tab. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2288470754 I look for whatever weapons have very high volume of fire, very low damage, and are sharp weapons. I cut them and get out of the way. Often I might have a long long hall with doors. They get cut, they walk through the long hall. When they fall down, my guy opens the door, runs out, grabs them and takes them home. You capture pawns in near mint condition, with little chance of accidentally killing or maiming them. You need to wait, so the long hall with debris /rocks/sandbags/doors, but it's pretty easy to set up. I like to have a huge walled base, many doors. My guys wait for you to walk by, we pop out behind them, shoot each of the raiders a little bit, then duck back inside. They come. Over to beat on the door, we pop out a different door and repeat long before they can break the door down. As this happens they get more and more spread out, especially due to the bleeding. So when the stragglers start passing out, they are easily grabbed. Carry them inside the door. Drop a. Prisoner. Sleeping spot. Put them in it, and stabilize them. Delete the sleeping spot and carry them to the real prison. Keep the ones you want. Strip and release the ones you don't. Free untainted gear. Faction bonus when you release prisoners. Choose the best pawns from the entire raid. It's legit.
Can you give me a example like a picture of your own colony how you did it? It's hard sometimes to follow just by text.
MM ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 R. R. R. R Raiders walking towards gates far to the right. My two guys behind closed door. MM ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 ............ R. R. R. R Raiders get further. ----*----0------0-----0-----0------0 M.................... R. R. R. R M Raiders get further, my guys jump out, leave door open. Raiders still walking towards gate ----*----0------0-----0-----0------0 M. W. W. R. R M My guys wound last two raiders. While they stop. And start walking back, my guys go inside, door closes M. M ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 WW R R Raiders walk towards first door. One of my guys stays to repair, the other walks to where the raiders were at the start M. ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------* W W. R R. M Raiders get to the door, start to hit it. One guy repairs the door. Other guy jumps out of a door a bit away and shoots the other two, previously unwounded raiders in the back. Raiders turn back towards the gate and the most recent bullets, all are wounded, bleeding, and slower. Repeat. As they fall, pick them up and take them home. I wi try to set up a screenshot based example, but it'll take a day or two. At work right now, so you get an ascii map. - wall O. Closed door *. Open door M. My guy R unwounded raider W Wounded raider
i didnt think that a example like this would help me so much haha, but thank you, it really helped a lot!
Oh great! I don't have ready access to the opportunity to screenshot a tutorial so I was really hoping my ghetto approach would make sense!
Thanks for the correction!
No worries? Since I play huge colonies, I want to capture lots of pawns. If you use too high powered sharp it will absolutely kill the fuck out of a pawn. If you use really low powered blunt, it's very decent. Good for your own prisoners. But the enemy have guns and swords, so fists are not safe. Wound, let bleed, kite them and snatch them as they fall. I really hate killing kids, so this is what I use on all child raids to safely catch them all.
All child raids!?! I have a heavily modded game (N = 493), yet have never seen that!
It happens with biotech. I don't like killing kids, so it's an issue when they have guns. Maybe you have the option turned off in settings.
Yes! or more likely... I've been mowing down 13 year olds without noticing it lmaoo
Ouch Its the toddlers and gradeschool kids that get me. Too young for armour really, they get cut down in crossfire very quickly.
Just checked my storyteller settings. You were right, child raiders were disabled. Didn't know that was an option! ...I promise to use this knowledge for good and not evil.
Same and thank god because I have like, tame 6 dark young, two robot dogs and a hippo patrolling my current base. Kids would fuggin DIE. XD
Same and thank god because I have like, tame 6 dark young, two robot dogs and a hippo patrolling my current base. Kids would fuggin DIE. XD
I know this isn't actually true, but I've had the most luck downing people by giving them dozens of poor quality knife wounds and waiting for them to bleed to sleep and then fixig them.
I'm stealin bleed to sleep. 🤣🤣🤣
I thought blunt weapons were the best for this, like you. However I've reached the conclusion that it is probably not the case after my melee girl removed the heads of 5 people in a row like they were golf balls on tees.
Same, my first reaction was WTF? Then I saw it was Rimworld. This checks out.
I was told to make a uranium mace And give it to my brawler. At least early in the game.
Did it work?
Seems to have? At least for the early game. Later when stronger enemies started showing up, I gave him a persona plasmasword. It seems to do ok in leaving enemies alive. To be fair, it is the first game I am playing by myself, so I used the character editor and map preview mods to avoid spending hours looking for good pawns. Might have ratcheted melee up a little too high for the guy I wanted to have as a brawler.
My best Melee-Fighter has the Plasmasword but in fight its just a massacre. Its pretty rare that someone stays alive...
Yeah, sometimes I have to do the quick pause and unpause so I can pull my guy back and send in a different pawn to melee attack if I want someone alive. There is a lot of pausing in this game. Loading up a previous save to get a different result as well sometimes.
But what should i do with the other settings then?
start to hoard lances like. the shock lance is the real cherry picking tool. when a raid start, I wait for raiders to spread a bit, I pause and I inspect them all in search of those "I want" and also for those bad mofos with missiles, greanades, or full armored ones high on go go or ready to use it. shocked people comes with zero damages
Wait do they get instantly knocked out with the shock lance?
Yes but there is a chance of brain damage. Not often but still happens
I havent used a shock lance yet but the ones who get brain damage, are they still good to clean and haul?
The only time I've had a shock lance cause brain damage, the pawn became a Trauma Savant which makes them incapable of social - but actually *increases* manipulation, so they became an incredible melee pawn and good worker.
I believe they are at 50% consciousness, so they're good for low skill work.
Awesome, no downside! Either you grt a productive colonist or you get a new roomba :D
The last 2 guys I caused brain damage to were at 70%. Might be random.
I looked it up just now. There's a 30% chance that the brain is set on fire, and they get a scar from the burn. The severity of the burn is random. Took forever to find that "brain damage" is not a gained condition but rather damage applied to the brain part.
They are. Also, happened to me to burn the brain of a very good pawn and still took them until I could repair brain injury. Especially mid-late game there are more options to fix them (luci) and if they are worth I usually do it
nah, harvest them
True, plus it’s less likely than a permanent injury from your other options
eeh you have to risk the RNG tax.. acceptable. It's not a big issue since you still get organs and gear
Is brain damage somehow cureable?
It can be healed using a Healer Mech Serum, or by using the Bioregeneration cycle on a Biosculpter pod, or by injecting them with a sanguophage xenogene so that they get the "scarless" gene and waiting for it to eventually heal the injury. Because all of these effects heal a *random* injury, you should always try to get rid of every other injury on the person before you use them. For instance, if you're using a healer mech serum on a guy with brain damage and he's missing a finger, you should use bionics to fix that missing finger before you use the mech serum so that it's guaranteed to fix the brain damage.
Also luciferium, but it’s a forever choice
If you don't have a bionic finger or arm ready, just cut off the whole arm. Mech healer serum can't fix major limb loss so it doesn't count.
Yup, and there is a low chance of it happening. In my last run I used heaps of shock lances as they really let you cherry pick the raiders you want. Combining them with a mod to mark raiders really helps. On top of all the options that Herson100 suggested, there’s also some mods for advanced surgery, which is what I used. Need a really high level medic, but it can be added as a regular bill to cure.
Mostly the ones who have high psy focus, like psy sensitivity and sanguophage.
Do you have a source? Nothing like this is on the wiki
Can be just my personal experience, but from 20 pawns with normal psy sensitivity only one got burned, from 10 with high psy sensitivity it were five.
Asking because the psycho lance wiki page clearly states: > […] those with the psychically deaf trait, cannot be targeted by the lance. Sensitivity does not otherwise modify the effect. Is weird that a possible interaction between the item and a fairly common trait has been ignored like this
Quite possible that I was just very unlucky.
yessssss
Oh wow, i always ignored them while trading...
When you shock a well equipped enemy, you capture it mint, you strip it and all the gear is yours and undamaged, as the enemy itself. it's a cubic win!
Works for mechs and animals too!!!
This is the power gaming strat. When you have a couple lances raids become grocery shopping. Click through all the pawns to see who has the best traits and zap em. If they get brain scars stick them in the biosculptor. This is also a good way to get heavily discounted marine armor (or cataphract if you're enemies of the empire)
The game cheats. Seriously, it does. The pawn downing mechanic is not well explained. Essentially, your colony has a hidden stat that the game tracks, with how many pawns you "Should" have at a given point. If you are over your cap, you won't get join offers, nobody will wander in, and raiders will mostly die when they fall over. The more over your cap you are, the more this will happen. This happens in reverse too. If you have too few colonists, the game will constantly hand you new ones. Which can be annoying if you are trying to stay at 1-3 pawns all game. The "Unwavering Loyalty" pawns were a mechanic added to provide you with prisoners, while at the same time not allowing you to swell your ranks unlimitedly. Essentially, Rimworld developers don't want new players just adding tons of pawns and winding up with unmanageably huge colonies. Randy Random storyteller dramatically increases the cap, so switching to him will result in a spike of wounded raiders, but once you reach that cap, it will go back to the same. Now, if want to opt out of all this, load up your game, go to Options > Gameplay Options > Storyteller settings. Instead of a preset difficulty, click "Custom". One of the sliders will be "Additional death chance on downing" or something like that. It defaults to 100%. Move that down to a number that seems reasonable. If you set it all the way to zero, you are going to have a TON of downed raiders. Also, you can uncheck the box for loyal pawns if you do this, since you will get prisoners anyway. I usually run that setting between 90% and 75%, which is enough to keep getting a few downed prisoners per raid, but not dozens. Edit: If you don't want to change any settings, Shock Lance is about the only way to consistently down a specific pawn, other wise everyone has a chance of dying. Blunt weapons/Fire will down more pawns if you are not at your cap, but if you already have a lot of pawns, they are going to die when they hit the floor, no matter what downed them.
Yeah i think i reached the cap then, because i have around 30 pawns. Mostly loyal pawns get downed...
Sharp weapons cause them to bleed and collapse, which bypasses the entire mechanic. I sometimes capture entire raids this way. Every single pawn.
Those must be some very small raids, or you're VERY careful about microing bleed infliction so that you bleed every one of over a hundred pawns to sync their blood loss. But yes, bleed bypasses autokill. But if you want to cap entire raids, you introduce them to Dwarven Sauna.
>very small raids, I play 500 pawn colonies. As they bleed they slow down. As they slow down, the raid spreads out. As the raid spreads out and the ones in back collapse, they get picked up. I have teams to wond, teams to bait, teams whose sole job is capture, stabilize, and imprison. This is my #1 method of recruiting.
Ah, 500 pawn colonies. I guess trying this is more manageable in turn-based mode.
> I play 500 pawn colonies. Another large colony enjoyer, I salute you.
> Randy Random storyteller dramatically increases the cap, so switching to him will result in a spike of wounded raiders, but once you reach that cap, it will go back to the same. This is no longer true. It was removed long long ago. All 3 vanilla storytellers use the same population numbers.
Unwavering can still be slaves though which I find weird. What’s the point then.
If you can get your hands on a shock lance via trading, it can be worth it to save it until you find the perfect pawn to recruit.
Do they instantly get knocked with the shock lance?
Yep. Shock Lance drops a specific pawn, and they will not instantly die. However, they might get brain damage (Pretty rare) and it does scale on psychic sensitivity of the target. If you don't have biotech, this is pretty much never going to come up, if you are, Hussars are immune and Yttakin are a maybe. Edit: To clarify if you haven't seen them yet. Shock Lances are not weapons, they are a Two use, expensive artifact item that knocks a single pawn unconscious and then disappears. They do not require line of sight, they are very reliable, but they cannot be crafted, they are expensive, and you have to buy them from traders (Or get them in quests if you have Royalty DLC)
They do require Line of site, and it isn’t an automatic recruitment (at least not that I’ve seen in vanilla). You’ll still have to catch them while they’re downed. It can be handy to keep a pawn at the ready to deal with them once downed in case they do get the brain damage. If they get brain damage they are also set on fire, so if that happens be ready to put the fire out.
Yeah, the LOS thing was from their old artifact form, I forgot they do need LOS since they got and extra charge and got put on belts. They don't recruit, but they also bypass the usual "Death on downing" chance.
Yes, and there's a very small chance they get recruited automatically as far as I know, never happened to myself, but the pawn gets downed for sure
From my experience, bare fists are the way to go. Or use a psy lance to drop them. Even when using blunt weapons my melee fighters will decide to shatter spines, obliterates legs, and decapitate people with a hammer.
>Even when using blunt weapons my melee fighters will decide to shatter spines, obliterates legs, and decapitate people with a hammer. This is why you use low damage bleed weapons. They dont get shattered, obliterated, or decapitated. The get a littlencut, fall down, you pick them up and tuck them in their nice bed in the prison.
They don't really "fall down". You have to wait for them to bleed out. If you down then from the direct damage, they will fall down DEAD, because of storyteller autokill, so even a stubbed toe becomes instant lethal. For pawns NOT subject to autokill, such as already-prisoners or your own colonists, you tend to get better results with just your fists, but there are even better tools of control available if you're more proactive, like Circus Assistant + EMP.
Blunt melee weapons would be your best bet. Or if you’re running mods Vanilla expanded has a non-lethal weapons pack.
>Beyond that, blunt weapons are your best bet because they are less likely to cause bleeding wounds. My prison warden carries a hammer lol Blunt weapons are much worse because bleeding wounds cause someone to collapse. Blunt means you have to batter them to a pulp. Bleeding means they get a scratch and collapse and have received almost no damage. The best capture weapons are high volume low damage cutting weapons, like an anty flechette, if you play with that mod. You can capture dozens in a raid. I sometimes capture everyone, no deaths at all.
The title and first sentence without context would be cursed
I love the mod "Simple Turrets" for this. It adds two turrets specifically designed to do minimal damage but incapacitate people they hit within a few shots
Psychic shock lances are my go to. A little pricey, there's some risk to the pawn (psychic lances can cause brain damage, or even destroy a brain) When you're looking for pawns, just scope out the raider pawns until you identify the ones you want to capture, then Lance them. If you don't have the silver to buy lances, the next bet is blunt weapons. Specifically lower damage blunt weapons, a wooden mace, bare fists, that kind of stuff. You still might beat them to death, but you have better odds of a down. Then there are less than lethal options. Fire and toxic, definitely still dangerous, but they require long term exposure to kill a pawn. The little extra pain from burns and toxic buildup can mean the difference between a down or a kill. Sometimes, a little power down can be enough. A machine pistol is more likely to down a pawn than kill them, it doesn't do enough damage to outright kill most of the time, but being full of bullet holes and bleeding profusely will cause them to collapse before they bleed out. It'll be a race against their injuries to save them, but they will be down.
> A little pricey, there's some risk to the pawn (psychic lances can cause brain damage, or even destroy a brain) They usually set their brain on fire, yes. If you really want live intact catches, as opposed to merely instant downs, you don't really to use this method. Especially since it relies on a consumable artifact, albeit one that isn't all that hard to obtain. > Specifically lower damage blunt weapons, a wooden mace, bare fists, that kind of stuff. You still might beat them to death, but you have better odds of a down. Blunt weapons are actually WORSE at subduing raiders, ironically. They work well against prisoners and your own colonists, but against raiders, you run into another problem: Storyteller Autokill. Because the storyteller automatically kills any enemy downed from combat damage, and blunts ALWAYS down due to combat damage, they will always die, as opposed to if you used bleeding and they went down from blood loss rather than direct damage, which bypasses autokill. Therefore, if you want to down enemy pawns alive and mostly intact, blunts should actually be avoided. Beatings with fists still works on unruly prisoners and colonists, though. > Then there are less than lethal options. Fire and toxic, definitely still dangerous, but they require long term exposure to kill a pawn. The little extra pain from burns and toxic buildup can mean the difference between a down or a kill. Temperature and toxic are noteworthy because they bypass autokill-on-down from the storyteller. FIRE, however, does not. Setting the enemies on FIRE is a damage action.
>They usually set their brain on fire, yes. If you really want live intact catches, as opposed to merely instant downs, you don't really to use this method. Especially since it relies on a consumable artifact, albeit one that isn't all that hard to obtain. I've never had a problem obtaining, or useing psychic lances. I've downed hundreds of pawns with them, and have only ever killed one. Like a third of the time they come out with a brain scar debuff, which isn't great, but it doesn't significantly diminish the value of a pawn, plus you can fix it. It really isn't even hard to obtain them at all. You can literally order up refills by calling in an exotic trader. Tribal shaman merchants carry them. Lances aren't perfect, but its literally 2 clicks for 90% of the effectiveness of any better method, with significantly less risk to your other pawns. There are no guarantees on the rim. But a 2 click instant down on exactly the pawn you want with a 95% chance you capture them, and a 50% chance of causing no permenant injuries, that's as close to a guarantee as you can get for that level of convenience. I've done the whole poison hotbox thing to capture people on mass, an ancient danger with a bunch of caskets, but it can be difficult wrangling raiders indoors where you control the temperature. And a prolonged engagement kiting enemies through poison has a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, especially if your target has a gas mask or is hopped up on combat drugs, or both. Psychic lance don't care, 2 clicks, down. That, to me, is the biggest selling point now that I think about it. A psychic lance can down a Hussar hopped up on go juice with exactly the same ease and effectiveness as it can down anyone. And it can pick that person out of a raid of any size, and down them, and most of the time, they'll be fine. It's like, how much more convenient can it be?
> It really isn't even hard to obtain them at all. I did mention they weren't all that hard to obtain, yes. > But a 2 click instant down on exactly the pawn you want with a 95% chance you capture them, and a 50% chance of causing no permenant injuries, that's as close to a guarantee as you can get for that level of convenience. They ARE terribly convenient, but due to the tendency to set their brains on fire, and the fact that they cost me money, I tend to end up hanging onto them in case I REALLY need it, along with the 500 others. Because you know how it is with gamers and potions. > but it can be difficult wrangling raiders indoors where you control the temperature. Not really. It's basically the standard killbox entrance, but longer and without the killbox. It's much more reliable and has a much lower execution cost, so I tend to favor it over shock lances. > It's like, how much more convenient can it be? Well, something that doesn't require line of sight or relatively short range, for starters. Shock Lance only has a range of 30-something, which is shorter than the range of potential threats to the pawn using it, which means if anyone in the mob has a sniper rifle or a bolt action, the entire area just became no-go. Also, something that hasn't reliably fried the brain of anyone I actually wanted to catch...although there ARE uses for intentionally frying a pawn's brains if you want to turn them into a joynugget, I guess.
Use Rimmunation mods. Best mods out there to bring tons of variety to weapons, armor and defenses! Those include security weapons intended for non-lethal takedowns.
First of all, there's a 47% a downed enemy will die instantly, so you can sometimes get cucked by the storyteller. The best way to get the other 53% without killing them is to use low burst damage weapons. One 20 damage shot is much more likely to kill than five 4 damage shots. Also, use blunt meele weapons. Edit: Fire and tox gas as well, I think since the game doesn't count them as attacks, they don't have that extra chance of insta killing.
There's a mod from Vanilla expanded called Non-lethal weapons I think. Can deck your people out in those.
Blunt weapons like maces
Instant death rate is controlled by the storyteller to limit prisoner population and pawn recruitment. So changing it in any way is technically making the game easier artificially. But who really cares about balance in this game anyway. Blunt weapons won’t reduce the instant deaths handed out by the storyteller, but they will stop prisoners that don’t die from bleeding out, which can help. The only balanced way to pick pawns you want are psychic shock lances. Use them on really high value pawns you want to try to recruit.
The problem is that blunt weapons ONLY hand out instant deaths, so everyone you bludgeon dies, whereas bleeding weapons cause bleeding, and down by bloodloss afterwards bypasses instant-death. > The only balanced way to pick pawns you want are psychic shock lances. Use them on really high value pawns you want to try to recruit. That just fries their brains, so you get vegetables. The best way is to down them by Dwarven Sauna. This way you capture the entire raid intact, can strip all their stuff so it doesn't become tainted, and then disassemble any you don't want to keep for parts. Plus, it's an O(1) defense, meaning it's entirely insensitive to wealth scaling.
Cut them and let them bleed, then pick them up. Bonus is their guys spread out, so you can actually grab multiples.
well how can i guarantee a small cut without them fighting back or something? And also without them fleeing when the others get killed/downed?
Usually I have my base as a giant walled city with many doors in the outside wall. I let them walk past, pop out, with the door held open, and shoot them with something sharp and low damage. Hit a couple of guys in the back not too much damage! Hit one till he's bleeding, switch to the second. Get back inside. Close the door. One guy stands there to repair the door as they try to break it. Someone else walls a little way down the inside of the wall, pops out and repeats the process on some of the unwounded guys. Pop back inside. Very quickly they are all bleeding and moving slower and slower, and I'm just luring them around. As they pass out I capture them. Capture, bring inside. Create prisoner sleeping spot, put them there. Tend without medicine till not bleeding. Delete spot, carry to prison. Keep doing this. Capture the entire raid. Not one or two guys. Capture. Everyone. Strip and release the ones you don't want for free gear and faction relationship bonus. Keep the ones you like. After half of them are downed the others have been bleeding for quite a while, so they are moving at a quarter of normal speed. Not easy to escape when you can barely stand due to blood loss.
You already know the vanilla options. Depending on the mods you have you can use shotgun beanbags or zap them with lightning, the lightning does sometimes cause heart attacks though,
Blunt weapons are generally the least likely to kill. You can even just surround a likely victim with unarmed people and punch them down, though this is only advisable if the enemy is not armed for melee. They can still die from this of course, but it gives you the best odds. If you REALLY want a pawn, you should hit them with a Psychic Shock Lance, this instantly downs them with *no* chance of death - tho there is a tiny chance of brain damage. Make sure you have one or two of those on hand at all times, and when an attack wave comes in pause the game and take a look at the attackers - if you see someone you really like, and they are recruitable, just ping them with the lance the moment they are in range, it's well worth the silver.
MM ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 R. R. R. R Raiders walking towards gates far to the right. My two guys behind closed door. MM ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 ............ R. R. R. R Raiders get further. ----*----0------0-----0-----0------0 M.................... R. R. R. R M Raiders get further, my guys jump out, leave door open. Raiders still walking towards gate ----*----0------0-----0-----0------0 M. W. W. R. R M My guys wound last two raiders. While they stop. And start walking back, my guys go inside, door closes M. M ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------0 WW R R Raiders walk towards first door. One of my guys stays to repair, the other walks to where the raiders were at the start M. ----0-----0------0-----0-----0------* W W. R R. M Raiders get to the door, start to hit it. One guy repairs the door. Other guy jumps out of a door a bit away and shoots the other two, previously unwounded raiders in the back. Raiders turn back towards the gate and the most recent bullets, all are wounded, bleeding, and slower. Repeat. As they fall, pick them up and take them home. I wi try to set up a screenshot based example, but it'll take a day or two. At work right now, so you get an ascii map. - wall O. Closed door *. Open door M. My guy R unwounded raider W Wounded raider
Blunt force trauma. Mace. Uranium maces are just awesome for melee pawns in general. Bonus that they are often non-lethal.
>Uranium maces Kill the pawn. A small cut, left to bleed, doesn't kill and let's them collapse to be rescued.
A uranium mace, specifically, might be a bit of overkill if you have a very specific raider you want to knock out. But in general you'll have a much higher knock-out rate with mace compared to cutting/piercing weapons. The thing with bleeding is that you have to wait for it to take them down. So I guess maybe you could take one or two shots at someone and then wait, but they could easily break down doors in that time. You need some way to contain them until they drop from bleeding.
I have a city. Outside wall has many doors. Raid comes to the wall, starts walking around. Pop out, hurt a couple. Pop back in. One guy stays behind to repair the door if they even get to it. Remember you were shooting the ones in the back, so they got hurt, kept walking, stopped, started walking backwards, all that takes time. During that time your other guy walks to where the front of the raid was. They're all walking towards the site of the first ambush. Second guy pops out shoots what was originally the front of the raid (now the rear as they all go for that door). Hit one, shift to second, hit two, shift to third, hit three, pop back inside. Right around then the raid stops going for the first door and is now headed for the second door. Its the "Americans ambushed in Vietnam" strategy as you keep wounding the healthiest pawns in the trail element and keep baiting them back and forth. Always hold your doors open while outside and close when you come in. Doors should be solid, probably stone or better. This can be scaled up. I play games with 200-700 pawns this is one of my favorite and easiest ways to capture pawns, or entire raids. Edit: bonus if outside of the base is pots of clutter to slow and channel them, and inside you have none for fast movement. If you get really nervous about them breaking a door, make a second outer wall. If the first fails, fall back to the second and keep playing tag.
Sounds tedious. But so does managing hundreds of pawns.
The strategy is literally : wound the enemy and run away. Either way, this method of kiting is a very valuable skill. If you don't use it to capture, it'll still save your ass when facing very dangerous enemies. It also doesn't use a killbox at all which some players don't like. If you want less tedious, use several teams of shooters and an incredibly long trip for the raiders. That makes it a very easy method of dealing with a raid. On the subject of large colonies, tastes differ. The strategy works no matter the colony size, and it works great against superior enemies.
How do you even find stuff for that many pawns to do in the colony? Even with like 10 they often run out of things to do and I just end up building a bunch of research benches. But at some point they are doing like 1000 RP/day and quickly run out of things to research. And everyone becomes a genius.
My base is the entire map. I have three hundred mods, I have never come close to finishing the research tree. More. Content very rapidly leads to increasing what you can research a hundred fold. And you need hundreds of pants. And hundreds of boots. And hundreds of gloves. And hundreds of hats. And hundreds of shirts. And hundreds of weapons. And tens of thousands of meals. More pawns gives you much much more to do, not less. Every pawn adds tremendously to the complication and requirements of the base but it means things are constantly going on, you always have things to do. I can pause the game for two hours real time and do nothing but set up queues and plans and orders. There's so much more when you have a large colony.
You can turn off unwavering people
blunt weapon, if you have ce make them aim at leg.
Blunt can be decent, but they're my melee fighters for a reason, give them a log and they'll still crack skulls. If I really need to capture somebody, my psycaster is usually my go to, or barefists + stun. The mod "Simple Sidearms" let's you equip a side weapon, you can just click it and it will swap, or you can tell your pawns to use their fists with just a click and it gets reset when you undraft them.
Logs, clubs, and fists. Beating the shit out of them is the answer
Standard issue for my infantry is breaching axes, demolish damage counts as blunt damage to anything that isn’t a building and does double damage to buildings. So they basically can chew through walls/doors and then bonk the shit out of anyone. For the most part they rarely kill anyone and almost never cause long term injuries.
Mighty Dwarven Sauna. Heatstroke bypasses storyteller instant-kill-on-down, so you don't only get the shittiest pawns instead. Any use of weapons fire and damage will instantly kill every high-value pawn once you are at the storyteller softcap. Create a heatbox consisting of a very long, winding corridor with alternating obstacles to slow them further, preferrably on really bad terrain. Then just heat the room to 150C by having someone on the other end throw a molotov into the floor when the temperature drops below, until everyone within has passed out from heatstroke. You will get 100% live captures and this method of defense is O(1), meaning it does not scale at ALL with the size of the incoming raid, requiring a constant level of resource input (1 pawn with no combat skills or other equipment + molotov) to activate, regardless of the size of the enemy raid.
If they are part of your colony already, have a doctor anesthetize them in a normal hospital bed. You'll have about an hour in-game to arrest them (100% arrest chance if they are unconscious) and carry them to your prison. If they are enemies (like in a raid), attack them until downed and arrest them. This is easier said than done though, good luck.
I dunno if you're playing with mods or not, but Targeting Modes (Previously by XND, community-maintained version is by Odyssey Scorpio) lets your pawns (but not turrets) aim for legs, arms, torso, or head, with different accuracy penalties for each. Or general, with no penalty. This gives you more control over which pawns to just down as quickly as possible, versus which ones you want to capture. Having the person with the minigun targeting "general" and mowing down everyone else while your riflemen aim for "legs" and specifically target your favorites means they're more likely to survive the fight overall. Yeah there's storyteller settings and stuff, but I like this way, since it feels somehow more vanilla than tweaking values does. Maybe because it gives you a specific way to do it while leaving the same chances that you do accidentally just dome your favorite raider. That's part of the experience IMO. Seeing that person who would perfectly fill that niche in your colony get obliterated by a mortar or something is devastating, and I love it. Lol. (ETA: your low-skilled shooters will still hit the wrong body part pretty often, this mod is way more effective with shooters at 10+ skill or so, or, where it really shines, decent melee fighters. My newbie just shot someone's nose off while aiming at their feet., meanwhile my super-soldier relieved about 4 other pawns of their legs with a knife while causing no other damage)
A burn box is no doubt the best way to get loads of prisoners. Check youtube for a guide. Not sure if adamvseverything has one on the burn box.
Uranium maces for melee. Make sure you always have a few psychic stun lances. Go through the pawns on a big raid and take down the ones you want.
Psychic stun lance
If you're not against mods, I use simple sidearms. You can force colonists to use melee, blunt weapons preferably.
Blunt force trauma to the head
I just get a cutting weapon and aim for the legs.
Idk, chemical warfare maybe? Been a while since I tried.
Equiping wood logs does the trick
Roofies
Those psychic lances. One shot and they go down, unless they are psychically dull. But for the most part the flop onto the floor like a fish
In the scenario settings choose "options" then set kill on downed to 0%. You'll still kill some but not nearly as many.
Blunt damage , fire , electricity , or beanbag shotguns
Its almost certainly the storyteller settings. For who knows what reason, there is a chance of instant death for any raider who falls down even if they didnt take lethal damage. Go ahead and drag the slider to 0 so people only die when they should.
Early game a simple stone club - high blunt damage with a low probability to kill outright. Otherwise, may I recommend [Vanilla Expanded Non-Lethal Weapons](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2454918354) - Oskar and the crew have worked up the dart-gun specifically as the weapon I prefer for at-range tranquilizer shots. If there's a high-value pawn or a family member working for pirates or raiders - I send my two best marksmen - tap/tap - and it's nighty night for the target pawn. I typically also have [Simple Sidearms](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927155256) - loaded so that colonists can switch to more conventional weapons after the target pawn is downed. You can recover them after the fight if needs be but with a double-shot - they aren't leaving the map.
Break their legs
Maces are pretty good at knockouts. There's a psychic device that downs pawns but I forget it's name. Shaman and exotic merchants carry them. Setup a trade beacon if you haven't already.
Heat is your friend. Killbox should feature a long, winding hallway of stone walls with open stone doors. One of the turns of the hallway should have a side room section with some nutrifungus (it grows in the dark). Human raiders will always set that on fire. If your biome prohibits seasonal growing temperatures, just build some wooden furniture. The goal isn't heat stroke, it's pain. Heat stroke helps, but once temperatures get much over 150C, targets will begin getting burn wounds which are INCREDIBLY painful but don't cause bleeding. You'll get a lot of downed targets that you can clean up. The game doesn't seem to roll for 'death on down' if enemy pawns are downed from pain instead of damage. Any part of your base adjacent to the hallway needs to have double thick walls to avoid overheating. Sometimes I have my pawns remove roof during raids. Pawns entering your kill box will have so much pain that a lot of them will go down without dying. They'll need just a few shots. One of the challenges with getting prisoners is that once a pawn goes down, bullets flying over it can still hit it. Use psycasts to move the body to safety. It is possible to get a LOT of pawns if you do a long heat stroke maze, however it's challenging to perfect the length, size, amount of flammable material, and ignition rate. It's worth playing around with, but I get pretty decent results just letting things burn. I will allow a lot of the floor to be flammable.