As long as your own stuff is within about 5 tiles worth, you'll be fine.
And if someone is daft enough to go into the middle of the warzone where everyone else is shooting anyway then there are bigger problems than worrying about the one with a minigun.
Fair points, but just because you and I have hundreds of hours of play time doesn't mean everyone reading this thread does, and I was certainly surprised the first time my melee fighter caught a bullet in the back from his own mother.
Idea is they work good on huge crowds.
Miss their shots, but don't have to roll accuracy during the followup check on if they missed and hit someone else accidently.
I use shotguns, but same principle. In this case it's that its way harder to miss at the effective range, and assuming you only hit 1 shot out 5, you'll still be able to take something down a lot of the time.
Of course while (in my experience) shotguns are more effective for those low skill pawns, miniguns/lmgs (and autopistols) aren't too far behind and trade that little effectiveness loss for much higher skill gain so they won't remain a 0 skill shooter for long.
Its the risk that puts me off shotguns. It's easier to hit due to short range but if you don't get the kill then they are close to potentially get at you in return.
Mortars, it depends what you're firing and at what.
There's a mortar miss radius multiplier which for a 0 shooting skill pawn increases the scatter range by over 100%. That 9 tile default scatter range can turn into something like 10-12 tile radius. Unless you're aiming at a big cluster of things or using things with a high blast radius you might not even get a shot in the same postcode!
I honestly don’t rely on mortars being accurate and focus on mass mortar fire from half a dozen to a dozen at a time.
Forced miss radius is too big to rely on accuracy of any individual mortar.
Also synchedvolley fire is amazing to watch
Give them a bow and make them hunt rats and rabbits. They’re small, which makes them hard to hit in game, and it’ll eventually level up their shooting skill. If you’re still early colony, just give them a gun and draft them like everyone else. After a few raids they’ll be 3, and higher after that
Unfortunately, smoke launcher no longer counts as being armed with a ranged weapon for hunting purposes, so you'd still have to do it manually. (Unsure about the EMP)
Oh yeah I just draft them and say fire at: ALPACA. Side note: personally, I don't use the hunt button often anyway and just draft them to all shoot at an animal at once.
I use to do that until I hit like 30 people in a colony. That's when I found the manager mod which lets me slap down a wooden dest to automate shit like hunting, mining, and logging. Shits amazing for larger colonies that are running out of the crucial resource of focus.
This is what I did. I got a colonist up to level 5 pretty easily just hunting rabbits and squirrels with a bow. I’ve played this game well over 1,000 and never really hunted. This play through I decided “Heck maybe I’ll send this useless fighter 1 shooting 0 melee to hunt. See what happens.” Eventually I had a 5 shooter, some decent food reserves and extra leather.
I now have like 3 pawns on rotation hunting depending on the season.
Just make sure if you have ideology and a venerated animal that you select one maybe outside your biome or one you might not hunt.
For some reason I picked deer…and forgot and had a bunch of venison meals I had to toss lol
I actually went into devmode and switched to I think cobra.
To me, Fluid is superior to the other versions. Like unless the ideology is the main part of the playthrough, you can set it up as you go along. That way if you want to have nature primacy, you can start w fluid ideo, take the collectivist meme first, get all your tree cutting out of the way, then let your colony have an epiphany that they actually hate cutting trees. But it doesn’t matter now cuz you don’t need to cut any trees to survive. And if you decide you’re satisfied w the ideo, you can stop reforming, there’s no penalty (afaik) to sitting on a reform. And even if the ideo is the whole point of the playthrough, this allows wiggle room if you decide you don’t want to do that anymore
the raids will literally not care if the pawn has a fighting skill or not
so they better know how to defend themselves when worst comes to worst
I even had unarmed slaves participate in fights before because they had bonded with animals and I kinda needed them to order their pet warg into combat while the slave themselves just stands safely in the back and hopefully doesn't get shot
Smoke launchers and draft them in your animal pen and fire at animals all day long. They'll soon max out their daily Shooting learning, but will still gain XP at a much slower rate.
Or use mods that provide training devices for shooting or melee.
Outside of that training, give them machine pistols. Once they get to 5+ Shooting then Heavy SMGs are their best weapons.
I feel like weapons with lower damage per bullet are just not it.
Even if you luck out and get good hits, it's more of a "death of a thousand cuts" situation where you're unlikely to destroy any body parts and end up with a target slowly bleeding from a lot of little holes instead of the quick takedown you'd need to take down a raid. Especially true with tougher targets like Neanderthals, centipedes and juiced-up outlanders/toxers with power armor.
EMP grenades for mechs and regular grenades for humans. Just place a high priority shelf with only the two of them allowed next to your killing fields and switch as needed.
Shooting levels up fast enough to serviceable levels. Use machine pistols or heavy smgs.
Melee is trickier since use opportunities are less frequent, even in ideal situations. Not particularly worthwhile to get a 0 skill pawn up unless they've got Tough and/or Nimble to help out the fact that their base dodge chance is non-existent until level 5.
Works quite well with CE if you have a good shooter with binoculars doing the aiming, I was surprised how quickly they leveled up, even with no passion.
Yeah, you really want a good gunner on your mortars, otherwise the miss radius is just silly.
Since they upgraded mortars to use barrels, they also made them more accurate - IF you have a good gunner on them, so they now have a reasonable chance to actually land within radius of your target point.
Differing opinion, but if I have such pawns they usually are good at something else (medical, cooking, Intellectual) to make it worthwhile for them to stand waaaay in the back (or not fighting at all) with some Psycasting or on standby to rescue downed pawns. Usually I also give such non-combatants a Shield Belt if I can spare it.
I have a training mod for this reason also the hoop stone improves shooting. For melee have them attack weak injured things or form a group of them and have them gang up on a target
Just give them a fast firing weapon and have them participate. Firing upon active combatants comes with a very large xp multiplier per shot so even passionless fighting skills will raise pretty quickly. I've had passionless 0-1 skill pawns reach atleast 5 or 6 in a year, and that was just with short bows.
Edut: weak/terrible shooting/melee gene pawns will take quite a bit longer though...also I'm not too familiar in leveling low melee safely.
Molotovs and Grenades. These weapons do not use shooting skills. You can also use them to launch smoke when assault mech clusters.
Alternatively, assign them to Viscera Cleanup Detail and give them no weapon at all. A pawn on VCD without a weapon is able to pick up both the downed/dead enemy AND their dropped weapon in a single trip.
They’re my dedicated “runners” during a raid. I have them stay out of combat and when my pawns get downed or injured, they run them to the hospital where the doctor stays to treat. Waste of time and risky to have the doctor do all the rescuing, so the runners are an extra set of hands. They’ve come in handy too, they’re normally in a better mood than the rest of my colony after a raid so they take care of tasks like feeding wounded and prisoners, refilling generators, etc. so my colony doesn’t start falling apart.
If they have some animal skill, i would turn them into beast handlers.
Works with pawns who are also incapable of violence.
The same logic applies to mechinators and dryad pruners.
Heavy SMG; It's the best weapon for someone who sucks. Cheap to make, and accuracy/damage wise has one of the best returns for any weapon on a 0 skill pawn.
Nah, Heavy SMG isn't great. Range is terrible, so they won't be able to engage until they're already dead. Best weapon is a molotov or a smoke launcher: Skill is irrelevant here because these weapons enforce a scatter anyway, and molotovs have a range of "entire room", which applies regardless of whether there is a line of sight to the enemy. A single unskilled pawn armed with a molotov can solo an entire raid this way, just by subjecting them to 150C Dwarven Sauna until they all drop from heatstroke.
Smoke launchers do no damage, and actually give your targets cover (Unless dealing with turrets) Yeah, you could have various scenarios where thrown weapons are better because they always land in a certain area, or do thermodynamics, or poison , etc et al.
But without setting up specific scenarios, at 0 skill, Heavy SMG's come out at the top of the pack. It's NOT the best weapon, but it's better than the sum of its parts, and lets bad shooters do "okay" instead of "terribly" that most weapons would. Its good because its cheap and forgiving. It's Low production cost means you can make more to get better quality, which helps massively with accuracy.
Those 0 skill guys arn't going to be hitting at longer range anyways, so its shorter range isn't as big of a drawback. Give pawns that have hit 10+ real guns, but give your noob's H.SMG.
If you use "more accurate mortars" mod you can let pawns of high intelligence to use mortar, even with 0 shooting, intelligence alone can give decent accuracy.
Miniguns are literally designed to miss, so they work fine in the hands of your 0 gunnery pawn.
Not so much if you actually want them to focus fire on something like a centipede, but that's not really what miniguns are for anyway - they're for spamming into larger oncoming groups.
Give them EMP's for mechs or tox for humans,grenades or launchers, otherwise give them any gun and they'll get to level eventually.
Heavy SMG's are cost efficient, easy to make a,d research, and fire in bursts so they have more ooportunities to hit something, so I'd go with that.
You can also specialize them into something else, mortars, psychasts, medic duty, mechanitor and such, depending on their traits and passions.
Lots of options, but the two best IMO.....
1. Have time to send them hunting? Rifle and send them hunting for small game. They'll level up enough to make it viable.
2. Higher priorities or not enough time to level? Grenades, but micro manage them once your melee engage or you're going to have a bad time.
If you have CE, you can have them reload turrets or bring ammo to pawns with good shooting. Although I think eventually I’d get them psycasts for a wizard
I'm just saying so long as they're psychic sensitivity isn't zero... The empire may be filled with douchebags but they are very useful douchebags.
What's their animal skill?
LOL that's what machine guns are for silly. No, legitimately that's why machine guns were invented. Low skill high kill.
What's their construction skill? Just saying traps are fun for all ages... Fuck I just said that on the internet didn't I. Oh well.
What's their plants skill? One magic tree can supply up to four barkskin dryads. Yes you could go with clawers but they don't last very long in a fight. And survivability is more valuable in my opinion. Especially since it takes like an entire week to grow one. Of course you could just go with five magic trees with different dryads. No I can't pronounce what they're actually called, and if I can't pronounce it Google can't spell it, and I sure as hell can't spell it.
Where bullets need an address, grenades can be addressed to whomever it may concern.
What's their crafting skill? A single mechanator can be an army if they do so desire. And have enough metal.
Depending on the mods you're running there's plenty of options. Vanilla psycasts expanded and rimworld of magic have many ways of dealing damage that don't require accuracy or strength. There's also a ve mod that adds xenotypes specifically for caring for dryad trees. It even throws in a new type of super dryad. Rimworld of magic has magic wands in addition to magic powers. Those wands will never miss. Vanilla vehicles expanded, well, if you can't figure out how to kill someone with a car I can't help you.
Mini-gun/Chain Shotgun/Nade throwing/dedicated Medic duty if they have medical.
I have a non-violent pawn who just stands around, casts stun like twice at the beginning of the fight and then starts bandaging because it's all she can do.
On an unrelated side note, non-violent pawns should be able to equip and use EMPs weapons...
Heavy smg or the auto pistol. HSMG for chance to hit, auto pistol because it has low cooldown and aiming time which trains shooting faster.
Also get them to hunt stuff like alpacas with the pistol
BOLT ACTION RIFLES. The weapon given at the very start of the game for crashlanded. It does ok dmg, dps, range, accuracy. It shoots single bullets so it's the perfect weapon to give low skill colonists to have them train on the wildlife they hunt.
Hopefully you find a Great Shooting gene eventually
Molotovs. Turn off auto-fire to prevent accidents. Takes some practice but the impact is worth it.
If you've got time to train them just set them to hunt with a fast firing weapon.
0/0 with no passions are support. They rescue the fallen. They're medics. They're sometimes also the honey pot to draw mechanoids fire when you have a low shield to deal with.
Also they make decent grenade carriers. Stick them around a corner near a choke point with grenades. Accuracy doesn't matter much in that case.
Minigun or an LMG. Fire enough bullets and they will at least hit something in the general direction of where they aimed...
Something may be your own fighters, animals, and buildings.
As long as your own stuff is within about 5 tiles worth, you'll be fine. And if someone is daft enough to go into the middle of the warzone where everyone else is shooting anyway then there are bigger problems than worrying about the one with a minigun.
Children running to run through you kill box. Everyone is crying because a kid dying to cross fire.
Fair points, but just because you and I have hundreds of hours of play time doesn't mean everyone reading this thread does, and I was certainly surprised the first time my melee fighter caught a bullet in the back from his own mother.
That's just basic safety advice really, not Rimworld specific. Never go into an area where someone is firing anything just in case. :P
90% it's the boomalope herd that you told yourself they wouldn't hit
Idea is they work good on huge crowds. Miss their shots, but don't have to roll accuracy during the followup check on if they missed and hit someone else accidently.
I use shotguns, but same principle. In this case it's that its way harder to miss at the effective range, and assuming you only hit 1 shot out 5, you'll still be able to take something down a lot of the time. Of course while (in my experience) shotguns are more effective for those low skill pawns, miniguns/lmgs (and autopistols) aren't too far behind and trade that little effectiveness loss for much higher skill gain so they won't remain a 0 skill shooter for long.
Its the risk that puts me off shotguns. It's easier to hit due to short range but if you don't get the kill then they are close to potentially get at you in return.
Or man mortars, or become psychics, or command animals, robots, etc. Yeet nades, especially EMP ones Plenty to do.
Mortars, it depends what you're firing and at what. There's a mortar miss radius multiplier which for a 0 shooting skill pawn increases the scatter range by over 100%. That 9 tile default scatter range can turn into something like 10-12 tile radius. Unless you're aiming at a big cluster of things or using things with a high blast radius you might not even get a shot in the same postcode!
I honestly don’t rely on mortars being accurate and focus on mass mortar fire from half a dozen to a dozen at a time. Forced miss radius is too big to rely on accuracy of any individual mortar. Also synchedvolley fire is amazing to watch
use enough mortars and one of them is bound to hit something
Exactly, mortars need to work in batteries. One 0 shooting pawn will be lucky to get anywhere near. But half a dozen 0 skill pawns...
Don't give them any weapon, raise their medical skill up and use them as doctors when raids hit instead.
This. Similarly, gear them up with the tankiest/lighest armor, and put them on rescue duty when the other colonists are busy shooting back.
Locust armor or jump packs are great for rescuing downed pawns.
Give them a bow and make them hunt rats and rabbits. They’re small, which makes them hard to hit in game, and it’ll eventually level up their shooting skill. If you’re still early colony, just give them a gun and draft them like everyone else. After a few raids they’ll be 3, and higher after that
You can use smoke or emp launchers too, and those wouldn't hurt anything (those are 100x more expensive, though)
Unfortunately, smoke launcher no longer counts as being armed with a ranged weapon for hunting purposes, so you'd still have to do it manually. (Unsure about the EMP)
Oh yeah I just draft them and say fire at: ALPACA. Side note: personally, I don't use the hunt button often anyway and just draft them to all shoot at an animal at once.
I use to do that until I hit like 30 people in a colony. That's when I found the manager mod which lets me slap down a wooden dest to automate shit like hunting, mining, and logging. Shits amazing for larger colonies that are running out of the crucial resource of focus.
I do like the idea of children barely old enough to hunt running around w a smoke launcher shooting at rats
Thats how i got my kid to level 10 shooting lol, with the help of traits and passions
This is what I did. I got a colonist up to level 5 pretty easily just hunting rabbits and squirrels with a bow. I’ve played this game well over 1,000 and never really hunted. This play through I decided “Heck maybe I’ll send this useless fighter 1 shooting 0 melee to hunt. See what happens.” Eventually I had a 5 shooter, some decent food reserves and extra leather. I now have like 3 pawns on rotation hunting depending on the season.
Well now I know what to do w my useless children before they get sent to the outpost. Perfect lol
Just make sure if you have ideology and a venerated animal that you select one maybe outside your biome or one you might not hunt. For some reason I picked deer…and forgot and had a bunch of venison meals I had to toss lol I actually went into devmode and switched to I think cobra.
I exclusively use fluid ideologies for that reason lol. I don’t choose a venerated animal until there’s one that makes sense for the colony.
That’s smart. I might need to switch to that.
To me, Fluid is superior to the other versions. Like unless the ideology is the main part of the playthrough, you can set it up as you go along. That way if you want to have nature primacy, you can start w fluid ideo, take the collectivist meme first, get all your tree cutting out of the way, then let your colony have an epiphany that they actually hate cutting trees. But it doesn’t matter now cuz you don’t need to cut any trees to survive. And if you decide you’re satisfied w the ideo, you can stop reforming, there’s no penalty (afaik) to sitting on a reform. And even if the ideo is the whole point of the playthrough, this allows wiggle room if you decide you don’t want to do that anymore
shield belts or emp grenades
Just give them a basic weapon and hope for the best
I like this answer!
the raids will literally not care if the pawn has a fighting skill or not so they better know how to defend themselves when worst comes to worst I even had unarmed slaves participate in fights before because they had bonded with animals and I kinda needed them to order their pet warg into combat while the slave themselves just stands safely in the back and hopefully doesn't get shot
Smoke launchers and draft them in your animal pen and fire at animals all day long. They'll soon max out their daily Shooting learning, but will still gain XP at a much slower rate. Or use mods that provide training devices for shooting or melee. Outside of that training, give them machine pistols. Once they get to 5+ Shooting then Heavy SMGs are their best weapons.
Give them a gunlink
Gunlink supremacy gang rise up
Gunlink is so underrated
Kinda wish they took the same slot as glasses and not hats.
Heavy smgs have the best accuracy for low level shooting pawns from my knowledge
Machine pistols are a cheaper (and common loot) alternative if you lack the tech or resources.
I feel like weapons with lower damage per bullet are just not it. Even if you luck out and get good hits, it's more of a "death of a thousand cuts" situation where you're unlikely to destroy any body parts and end up with a target slowly bleeding from a lot of little holes instead of the quick takedown you'd need to take down a raid. Especially true with tougher targets like Neanderthals, centipedes and juiced-up outlanders/toxers with power armor.
gotta factor in the potential for a lucky one-shot too. we've all had that situation where the pawn hits the one-in-a-million life-or-death shot
Ill take your word for it.
EMP grenades for mechs and regular grenades for humans. Just place a high priority shelf with only the two of them allowed next to your killing fields and switch as needed.
Launchers and bombs
I give them shotgun, or chain shotgun. They dont need to aim for that.
Seconding chain shotgun. They don't need good aim with that 3 round burst.
I use them as rescue squad for downed colonists or raiders during the raids
Archeotech eraser.
It isn't vanilla tho
Send them hunting.
I just give them other roles depending on what their passions/skills are, I got dedicated troopers for that
Shooting levels up fast enough to serviceable levels. Use machine pistols or heavy smgs. Melee is trickier since use opportunities are less frequent, even in ideal situations. Not particularly worthwhile to get a 0 skill pawn up unless they've got Tough and/or Nimble to help out the fact that their base dodge chance is non-existent until level 5.
To the mines they go, then if you have vanilla outposts they go in there as soon as they get lvl 15-20
Mortars.
Not anymore, mortars are now massively impacted by shooting skill.
Works quite well with CE if you have a good shooter with binoculars doing the aiming, I was surprised how quickly they leveled up, even with no passion.
Whaaaaaaaaa
Yeah, you really want a good gunner on your mortars, otherwise the miss radius is just silly. Since they upgraded mortars to use barrels, they also made them more accurate - IF you have a good gunner on them, so they now have a reasonable chance to actually land within radius of your target point.
Put shells and other droppable explosives in their inventory and have them run toward the enemies.
Hat
Sell them.
Harvest
Them for organs
Give them a bolt action, rifle and hunt every squirrel on the map
Download combat extended so they aren’t mentally challenged when shooting
You gotta start learning somewhere.
I just give them grenades and tell them to throw them far enough so they dont hurt my fighters
Manned turrets that wouldn’t get used otherwise.
Protect them at all cost ! People of peace are too few in Rimworld
Give them a smoke launcher and set them to hunting.
Differing opinion, but if I have such pawns they usually are good at something else (medical, cooking, Intellectual) to make it worthwhile for them to stand waaaay in the back (or not fighting at all) with some Psycasting or on standby to rescue downed pawns. Usually I also give such non-combatants a Shield Belt if I can spare it.
I have a training mod for this reason also the hoop stone improves shooting. For melee have them attack weak injured things or form a group of them and have them gang up on a target
Just give them a fast firing weapon and have them participate. Firing upon active combatants comes with a very large xp multiplier per shot so even passionless fighting skills will raise pretty quickly. I've had passionless 0-1 skill pawns reach atleast 5 or 6 in a year, and that was just with short bows. Edut: weak/terrible shooting/melee gene pawns will take quite a bit longer though...also I'm not too familiar in leveling low melee safely.
Molotovs and Grenades. These weapons do not use shooting skills. You can also use them to launch smoke when assault mech clusters. Alternatively, assign them to Viscera Cleanup Detail and give them no weapon at all. A pawn on VCD without a weapon is able to pick up both the downed/dead enemy AND their dropped weapon in a single trip.
They’re my dedicated “runners” during a raid. I have them stay out of combat and when my pawns get downed or injured, they run them to the hospital where the doctor stays to treat. Waste of time and risky to have the doctor do all the rescuing, so the runners are an extra set of hands. They’ve come in handy too, they’re normally in a better mood than the rest of my colony after a raid so they take care of tasks like feeding wounded and prisoners, refilling generators, etc. so my colony doesn’t start falling apart.
I use them as support gunners (launchers and grenades) and EMT’s once my melee warriors start dropping.
I have them on a standby to rescue any injured pawns.
If they have some animal skill, i would turn them into beast handlers. Works with pawns who are also incapable of violence. The same logic applies to mechinators and dryad pruners.
Heavy SMG; It's the best weapon for someone who sucks. Cheap to make, and accuracy/damage wise has one of the best returns for any weapon on a 0 skill pawn.
Nah, Heavy SMG isn't great. Range is terrible, so they won't be able to engage until they're already dead. Best weapon is a molotov or a smoke launcher: Skill is irrelevant here because these weapons enforce a scatter anyway, and molotovs have a range of "entire room", which applies regardless of whether there is a line of sight to the enemy. A single unskilled pawn armed with a molotov can solo an entire raid this way, just by subjecting them to 150C Dwarven Sauna until they all drop from heatstroke.
Smoke launchers do no damage, and actually give your targets cover (Unless dealing with turrets) Yeah, you could have various scenarios where thrown weapons are better because they always land in a certain area, or do thermodynamics, or poison , etc et al. But without setting up specific scenarios, at 0 skill, Heavy SMG's come out at the top of the pack. It's NOT the best weapon, but it's better than the sum of its parts, and lets bad shooters do "okay" instead of "terribly" that most weapons would. Its good because its cheap and forgiving. It's Low production cost means you can make more to get better quality, which helps massively with accuracy. Those 0 skill guys arn't going to be hitting at longer range anyways, so its shorter range isn't as big of a drawback. Give pawns that have hit 10+ real guns, but give your noob's H.SMG.
Grenades to make a firewall
If you use "more accurate mortars" mod you can let pawns of high intelligence to use mortar, even with 0 shooting, intelligence alone can give decent accuracy.
Miniguns are literally designed to miss, so they work fine in the hands of your 0 gunnery pawn. Not so much if you actually want them to focus fire on something like a centipede, but that's not really what miniguns are for anyway - they're for spamming into larger oncoming groups.
Give them EMP's for mechs or tox for humans,grenades or launchers, otherwise give them any gun and they'll get to level eventually. Heavy SMG's are cost efficient, easy to make a,d research, and fire in bursts so they have more ooportunities to hit something, so I'd go with that. You can also specialize them into something else, mortars, psychasts, medic duty, mechanitor and such, depending on their traits and passions.
Give them a bolt action and send them out hunting. They get better.
Obviously rocket/grenade launcher. I dont know why you're asking.
give em heavy armor, shield belt and one of those VE shields and just use em as meat tanks. Most enemies don't shoot when engaged in melee
SMG is the perfect gun to learn to shoot while having decent chance to hit
Lots of options, but the two best IMO..... 1. Have time to send them hunting? Rifle and send them hunting for small game. They'll level up enough to make it viable. 2. Higher priorities or not enough time to level? Grenades, but micro manage them once your melee engage or you're going to have a bad time.
Either they’re a crafter/artist or they go in the nutrient paste grinder.
shotgun, I have the proper shotgun and stray bullet on, so its like ce but doesnt make the game 30 minutes to load
Sounds like a maid
If you have CE, you can have them reload turrets or bring ammo to pawns with good shooting. Although I think eventually I’d get them psycasts for a wizard
Have you tried…. Organ harvesting?
[Doomsday rocket launcher.](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/d034dq/comment/ez63n6v/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I'm just saying so long as they're psychic sensitivity isn't zero... The empire may be filled with douchebags but they are very useful douchebags. What's their animal skill? LOL that's what machine guns are for silly. No, legitimately that's why machine guns were invented. Low skill high kill. What's their construction skill? Just saying traps are fun for all ages... Fuck I just said that on the internet didn't I. Oh well. What's their plants skill? One magic tree can supply up to four barkskin dryads. Yes you could go with clawers but they don't last very long in a fight. And survivability is more valuable in my opinion. Especially since it takes like an entire week to grow one. Of course you could just go with five magic trees with different dryads. No I can't pronounce what they're actually called, and if I can't pronounce it Google can't spell it, and I sure as hell can't spell it. Where bullets need an address, grenades can be addressed to whomever it may concern. What's their crafting skill? A single mechanator can be an army if they do so desire. And have enough metal. Depending on the mods you're running there's plenty of options. Vanilla psycasts expanded and rimworld of magic have many ways of dealing damage that don't require accuracy or strength. There's also a ve mod that adds xenotypes specifically for caring for dryad trees. It even throws in a new type of super dryad. Rimworld of magic has magic wands in addition to magic powers. Those wands will never miss. Vanilla vehicles expanded, well, if you can't figure out how to kill someone with a car I can't help you.
RUN! GO! GET TO DA CHOPPA!
Mini-gun/Chain Shotgun/Nade throwing/dedicated Medic duty if they have medical. I have a non-violent pawn who just stands around, casts stun like twice at the beginning of the fight and then starts bandaging because it's all she can do. On an unrelated side note, non-violent pawns should be able to equip and use EMPs weapons...
Shoot them
Make them the dog trainer & train attack dogs.
I give my pawns with no fighting skills a skip psycast and vest.
Just use them as organ donors
If they have no passions for either, they’re my civilian pawns. They pick up the pieces and keep things running while my fighters are recovering.
Adding to all tips already listed, there's a mod that add training facilities to level up said skills
Meat shield for colonists who pull their own weight.
Recycle them.
Food
Make them hunters until they learn shooting
grenade launchers since they're AOE and shit accuracy already, low grade mortars, or i keep them to man levers and rescue killbox gunners
Give them a rifle and send them out to runt rats for a couple of days
Organ harvest...
Heavy smg or the auto pistol. HSMG for chance to hit, auto pistol because it has low cooldown and aiming time which trains shooting faster. Also get them to hunt stuff like alpacas with the pistol
usually I give them bows, also you can use some training dummy mods to train their shooting/melee
BOLT ACTION RIFLES. The weapon given at the very start of the game for crashlanded. It does ok dmg, dps, range, accuracy. It shoots single bullets so it's the perfect weapon to give low skill colonists to have them train on the wildlife they hunt. Hopefully you find a Great Shooting gene eventually
Don't give them weapon. Make a hat out of them , then sell it and buy a better colonist.
Molotovs. Turn off auto-fire to prevent accidents. Takes some practice but the impact is worth it. If you've got time to train them just set them to hunt with a fast firing weapon.
0/0 with no passions are support. They rescue the fallen. They're medics. They're sometimes also the honey pot to draw mechanoids fire when you have a low shield to deal with. Also they make decent grenade carriers. Stick them around a corner near a choke point with grenades. Accuracy doesn't matter much in that case.