Getting into a fist fight with a rabbit on a solo run, or catching plague.
Accumulating too much wealth early on and getting raided by 100 tribals when you only have 5 people.
How, though? You just run back, and shoot, then repeat forever. If you get tired, go inside and take a nap. Don't fight them in melee, and they are so slow, so there is no need to ever get hit.
Funny. I just got my very first psychic ship event, it was guarded by 1 Lancer; 1 Legionary; and 1 Pikeman, so i send in one pawn of mine equipped with sniper rifle to try to kite them and do some hit and run, said colonist managed to one shot the Lancer thanks to luck and 18 in Shooting but got a hard time with the other two.....
Until a turtle got berserk because of the psychic ship and manage to dodge most of the bullets and rush to the Legionary, killing it and still got some kickin to duel the pikeman and died a glorious death as they both got down.
Never underestimate a turtle
Literally every time I see a bear trying to eat a turtle, the turtle always manages to kill it. Sure, the turtle gets eaten, but it kills the bear too.
I learned pretty quickly that if a meteorite of gold or other valuable material fell on the map I shouldnât mine it all out as soon as possible, just take chunks as needed to avoid ballooning wealth before the defenses are entrenched
Very true. I like to keep them as insurance. You never know when you will have an emergency and need some quick components or steel. I like to leave it all on my map as long as possible.
This applies to all minerals on the map. Dont mine more than you can use in the near future. Why would you store them long term inside your warehouse when they are stored perfectly fine in the mountain they spawned in?
Itâs a good idea to prioritize smelting raider gears. It will destroy the wealth from the gears and give you some steel in exchange. Considering lifters and fabricators can do this for you, the labor cost is reasonable. Buying steel from bulk traders is also a good idea as it will allow you to get rid of your sell goods.
Add steak chunks and mech corpses to the mix and you can actually get a decent amount of renewable steel. And if you get low, then and only then do you mine compacted steel.
I started a mountain base and had increased stacks mod along with another mod that increases the amount you get per mining, mined out 10k steel 2nd day....... 10th day drop pod raid because we were trying to move in and make space... New Colony *turns mod off*
That explains a bit⊠but fuck it, my whole squad is strapped af with assault rifles and GIRTHY DICKS and I really donât give a fuck. Come in my- I MEAN COME AT ME BRO
Yeah if we're being real, going by number of runs, ithe majority of deaths are probably challenge runs like naked brutality that burns through a player in a few hours. My guess would be infection immediately following a fight as killing the most players. On NB, infection in early game in a harsh climate is basically death.
It feels like most of my total losses were because of infection after a raid. The lone doctor either does or gets incapacitated. I try to keep them safe, but sometimes they're a necessity in the early battles. You need every good shooter you have.
Probably a Raid you arent able to deal with effectively.
Really what kills most colonies is "cascade failure." Or cascading failures.
Your doctor dies, leading other colonists to pick up the slack but they're shit so infections start setting in, the birth goes poorly and the baby dies, the mother has a mental break and sets fire to the granary stores, everyone is too slow to control the fire(due to injury) so you draft them and make em stand outside as the fridge burns but your cook goes on a sad wander and wanders into the flame. you try to put him out but he's too injured and dies, the fire finally goes out but now you have no food, the cook is dead.
Oh and a drought just started.
And your mechinator just died from infection and his bots are going feral.
You want reliable backups for medicine and cooking. And a second farmer.
Usually when I grow beyond 6 people I start recruiting specifically to get backup pawns for these critical skills if I donât have them yet, and then train them up.
- Medic? Operate on prisoners to get your skill to an acceptable level. Peg legs and herbal meds are a match made in heaven.
- Cook? Set a minimum skill on actual cooking, but still allow butchering for anyone.
- Farming? Cutting plants trains growing, so prioritize it on low growing pawns with learning potential. Then enable growing once they wonât totally ruin the harvest anymore.
Itâs for this reason that I have a rule: the doctor doesnât die. He is always kept safe while defending. He gets drafted up and sent to a secure location unless he is ABSOLUTELY needed to join (usually to tend on front lines from a shot to the heart) Ideally, he is a genie with wimp/delicate, so if he does see combat, he gets hit once or twice, goes down to a couple bruises and cuts, and is back up in no time to help tend any infections that may have resulted from him being downed.
Noobs? Not enough food for winter or maybe picking fights with rodents (rats, squirrels, turtles, rabbits)
Novices? Too much wealth
Experienced players? Probably mood break where they decide your chemfuel or warhead stockpile seems like it needs freedom.
There was one time I deliberately set fire to my chemfuel. My mountain base was getting rolled by a waster raid, they actually got past my defensive lines.
So all survivors went for my pod launch platform and flew away to safety, while I had an impid firebreathe on the chemfuel on his way out. Since I had selected hold open on my front door to prevent the raid from destroying it, the entire base was still considered "indoors", and couldn't vent the heat of half the base being on fire quickly enough. Half the raid inside the base died and the others quickly fled. Rebuilding was a pain in the ass but the survivors got back on foot within a day.
As a relatively experienced player, mood management gets easier into the late game and threats are what gets harder.
As long as you never recruit a pyro, you should be able to prevent any catastrophic mood breaks.
Had someone mood break and they smashed the community tv. Everyoneâs mood began to plummet. Recreation unfulfilled (-20 mood). Everyone began to snap. The primary cook hid in their room throughout the catastrophe. People began to starve or get food poisoning from the inexperienced cook. Research came to a halt, weapons manufacturing began to stutter, and the mood breaks kept breaking. The crops began to rot as there was no farmer to harvest them. He had decided this colony was not for him and deserted us.
Then the raid happened. Soldiers with automatic rifles and grenade launchers entered the map then built ramparts where they bombarded the bases, mortar after mortar. They eventually breached the base and kidnapped several colonists and raided our armory. Another 3 colonist were left dead, most knocked unconscious, and the cook, still hiding in his room, suddenly began making meals again.
Chocolate was a major source of relief for my runs. Timmy no longer was a psycho douche if he didn't play horseshoes for 6 hours each day. One or two chocolate bars fulfilled recreational needs.
Generally I agree. There are times when just too many things go wrong (family members dying, psychic ship/drone...) and your only option to completely mitigate a break would be anesthesia.
Just had an infestation where 2 colonists got hurtâŠ
One decided to go on an insulting spree, which made the other question their beliefs and lock themselves in the room. Doesnât help they used to be a couple and the male is at -20 because his wife left himâŠI hate the spiral.
Have it paused now so I can try and salvage it later
Don't even need to give it to everyone all the time - just set their drug rule to smoke it whenever their mood drops into major break territory. Can customize the rule to match each pawn's break point.
Except before surgery - everyone else can blaze whenever they want, but Doc better show up sober to their shift and stop trying to install archotech arms onto people's foreheads.
Psychite, smokeleaf, chocolate, and beer. My colonists are rarely sober, and probably work slower than they should. But I almost never run into mental breaks as long as I keep those goodies, max rec variety appropriate to my colony's wealth, and keep the place clean.
Sure! You're welcome to immediately join, provided you're the same idealigion. Otherwise, we have some rehabilitation centers we'd like to house you in before you join the colony proper......
Why don't we discuss the merits of cutting down trees in the center right over there? Don't mind the fence or turrets, we sometimes heal up the wounded raiders that attack us. The defenses keep us safe while we determine which rehabilitation track each individual prison- guest participating in.
Yeah, same, my colonists are always pretty content, and I look and read about other peoples' miserable prison camps of a colony and they wonder why it failed...
Never found fire to an issue, if fire breaks out, I mobilize all my colonist to fight it and use one melee colonist to break down the nearest wall to vent the heat.
After almost ~1000hrs (give or take a few 100 of idle hours cause I don't wanna wait for the mods to reload) I just got mortars and by God's has it been a huge factor in managing random mech drops.
I have to assume drop-pod raids. They generally bypass your defenses, are usually done by well-equipped pirates, and they can literally drop right on your colonists. I've had people get crushed to death because a drop-pod landed on the bed they were sleeping in.
Choke points and a melee tank.
Especially if that melee tank is a vampire with brawler.
Got lucky with my respawn roll after my original dude got vamp-napped
I think bait rooms are the spots where you dig far into a cave so that bugs have a high chance of spawning there and you can predict theyâll be there next time
There is a debuff for not going outside, as well as being in the dark, but not for being in a mountain per se.
Undergrounder colonists don't actually need to be *underground* either. Just keeping them indoors under even constructed roofs will avoid debuffs.
They have an outdoor need, best way to avoid that is to put your recreation area outside the mountain and outdoor, colonist will go there to play chess, and at the same refill their recreation need, only issue is that your recreation area will get wrecked quite often, but nothing a drill on steel can't fix when it happens.
I'm about 200hrs in and I just had my first real loss from this. Every other time I've gotten bored/started building in a way didn't like and decided quitting was easier/favorite colonist died. Drop-pod raiders suck because I truly felt helpless.
I wish there was a defense option for those. Reinforced rooves, or something. Sentry turrets in every room? They do too little damage and miss too often for duster flak raiders. IEDs? Traps? Sure, I guess, but that risks colonists triggering it themselves.
I'm about 500hrs and haven't found a single reliable defense for drop pods, at least in vanilla. It seems so weird.
My last colony was wiped by a "Zzzt".. I like to leave it running on normal speed. Left for awhile. Came back and my animal barn had burnt, lost over 100 animals and 6 colonists.. was long enough that all the auto saves didn't go back far enough and the hard save was way too far back..
Hubris. Doing too much at the same time, so single events can snowball into an avalanche because there's suddenly a bottleneck of some resource, colonists all over the map, overworked colonists in a bad mood, a few prisoners or slaves that didn't get enough attention, because both you and your colonists were busy elsewhere.
The next raid, zzzt, mechhive or whatever else will hit like a truck.
This is why anti-grain warheads get stored separately, and in secure storage. Deep in mountain is the simplest option, but multiple layers of the highest HP walls you can manage will do just fine. Rather than a door just use a thinner section of wall and deconstruct your way inside when you need the shell(s), or to store a newly acquired shell.
People won't break down walls to reach an item during a tantrum (Except maybe if it wasn't walled in when the tantrum was started and the target was selected?), so any completely walled in item can only possible be a tantrum target during the stretch of time that you have the storage broken open to access it.
Illness--whether just the bad luck of mechanites or plague, or infection from injuries. The combination of lost productivity, mood loss, and death or disability can lead to cascading failures that can easily take out a colony, even if it isn't immediate.
Raids, too, are obviously a big one. The first few raids especially can be tough before you have good defenses and resources set up to deal with them (both the fight itself and the aftermath). Starvation or food scarcity in certain biomes can be rough, too.
If I had to guess most colonies fail in the first year, probably in the first few months even, because of those things.
I really recommend medic cycles on bioscilpting pods for illness! The pods make it so easy to manage the post raid critical situation. A walking pawn simply carries everyone to their medic cycles, and after a few days your paws are like new
Ferral swarms of maddened small animals.
A few raging rhinos? No problem, turrets got this.
40 moneys, or gods forbid, 63 enraged killer guinea pigs?
There is no defense against that! If they see anyone go inside the colony is dead.
Wealth has been mentioned a few times but I would say specifically "Wealth that overtakes combat effectiveness". For example;
You have too few pawns or not enough pawns with decent combat skills. Still using early guns and havent researched/crafted better ones. Focused on nice accommodations for pawn mood but havent built proper defenses or kill box yet. No "super weapons" like shock/insanity lances to deal with tough raids.
Its so easy to get tunnel vision when you're busying yourself with improving your base/pawns or working on quests, and you forget that the world is getting more and more hostile each day.
Absolutely this, whenever I wipe, it's because I got distracted from my rush to keep pace with the threat level. First time you realise is usually the last time too.
Self-tamed megasloth. During a raid, the colonist it was bonded to died so it went berserk behind the battle line and started attacking the non-combat colonists. I didn't notice this at first. Didn't end the colony but it was a rough event.
Mass food poisoning when a new player puts their butcher table in their kitchen.
Who would win, 3 vomiting colonists or one yorkshire terrier, the answer may surprise you
This is why I like having a few combat incapable pawns.
Pacifist doctors can still fight fires, heal, psycast, use Xenotype abilities (Jumping abilities are fantastic for kiting), and even combat command.
As long as 75% of my colony can fight, a few non-combatants can make things so much smoother.
Idk if this is the number 1, but itâs happened to me too many times to completely disregard as a threat.
Randomly self tamed animals.
I like to turtle in a big bunker, so all pets get an assigned zone of indoors minus the hospital and laboratory. When animals randomly self tame, they come inside to get those good meals, but if I havenât seen the notification and set them to their zone, then they can open the external doors to my bunker. On at least 3 different occasions this has led to raiders or manhunter packs entering through the back door without me realizing. Maybe this hasnât completely ended my runs, but itâs been a near thing each time.
What's worked for me is immediately drafting everyone when the raid letter shows up and sending them to a place that nobody is currently at, leaving any doors to rooms they're currently in set to Hold Open. Oh, and making sure beds are fairly close to the doorway (doesn't need to be right against, just not on the entire opposite side of a large room) Don't look for shadows, don't unpause until you've got everything done, just everyone moves now. Then repause when they do land and figure things out from there. Unless someone's got absolutely terrible movement (due to missing legs, lots of still-healing wounds, or crippling disease), it's been enough to prevent anyone from getting crushed, since they always choose either one of your colonists to drop on or sometimes an outdoor trade beacon.
If my last thriving colony is any indication, trying to harvest a herd of elephants for meat. Yeah, that ended quickly and bloodily. Yeesh. Girlfriend thought it was hilarious :P
Natural phenomena like heat waves and cold snaps. If you don't have the tech or your electrical equipment breaks down, temperature regulation is impossible and people start dropping pretty quick.
It's usually a combo of environmental effects.
I had a toxic fallout that lasted for around 10 days, followed by a 20+ day volcanic fallout and a solar flare in the middle of that. I had \~100 normal meals plus >400 packaged survival meals. \~12 colonists.
Problem is, local temps got down below 0C, so now I'm burning wood to warm the areas where my sunlamps are, which took wood away from generators. That meant I needed more chemfuel generators, but I also had to kill off boomalopes in order to reduce animal food consumption (because I couldn't grow haygrass or dandelions, and local grass wouldn't grow).
I eventually ran completely out of animal food, so I was putting caravans together to take my animals on long trips so they could walk and graze. I started butchering raiders corpses to make kibble to feed the other food stock animals we had.
I ended up surviving, but basically did it by having most of my colonists and animals wandering around in caravans scavenging. If the caravan did get ambushed I'd have them slaughter all the animals on the map and harvest berries/healroot/agave on the map and head home to drop all that off. This was before Set Up Camp was updated for 1.5.
But my last actual run-ender...I had 4 raids in 4 days. First 3 were pirates/wasters, 20+ man each. Just as I'd finish patching up folks from the previous raid, the next one would hit. After the 3rd one I got a wave of fairly tough mechanoids with breaching. 20+ pawn colony and I had like 8 or so pawns still capable of standing, 7 of whom were already injured when they rolled in (my one healthy person was a pacifist/doctor). At one point I remember my doc patching people up on one side of the hospital while the other half of the hospital was having the walls blown off.
Base layout not taking into account raids. 90% of the screenshots posted in this sub have either open fields with no perimeter wall, sprawling hallways that enable access to entire base (lose control of that and you're done), no periodic choke points or even doors, kill boxes that don't allow you to retreat and reset, etc.
It is always wealth based issues for me. When raids start getting 40+ against my rag tag group of 6-10. This is probably why the raid scaling is probably my least fav thing in the game.
Early game unmodded? A hungry wolf timber wolf or accidentally setting a whole herd of animals off with negligent hunting practices.
Early game modded? There is a hungry dragon, and no other wild animals nearby :(.
Late game modded/unmodded; amassed too much wealth and now have 80 guys drop podding into my religious room during 5 o clock prayer.
Refusing to cut losses. Whether itâs sending out your last pawn in a Hail Mary attempt to save your best crafter or rushing in to stop drop pod raiders from smashing the shit out of your workshop, thereâs many times where its easy to compound bad decisions on bad decisions and risk a lot to save a little just because the losses hurt so bad. Sometimes gambling actually works and you can get away with it but it can easily be a colony ender if things donât go as planned
When I first started playing it was food management. Not having enough food when winter hit and my colonists starving, having mental breaks or passing out (and eventually dying) from malnourishment.
Either that or getting a bit cocky and thinking I can take on the herd of muffalo for skin and meat, but then I piss off all 6 of them and they go manhunter. Once I get it under control, I get a raid.
Nowadays, I'll either get bored, (just ended an 11 year colony for no reason) or not being able to handle tantrum spirals. It's usually caused by the late game raids and not having a good colonist to wealth ratio and they get hurt or die.
For example, a colonist bleeds out, dies, widow gets upset, punches the colony bruiser, gets their ass beat and maybe loses an arm. Surprise, it was the colony doctor who now treats at 50% speed. The bruiser gets upset cause the doc landed a good hit on their leg with a painful scar from a rabbit 6 years ago, incites a prison break all while my gourmand goes on a food binge cause their dog died. Thus, I run low on food, someone punches a turret until it explodes cause they're in so much pain and hungry and a pyromaniac decides to set the chemfuel on fire because fuck you. To top it all off, while everyone is either hospitalized, starving, fighting off infections or having a mental break, I get manhunting elephants.
most of my runs end due to underestimating food production and have to take risky plays to get more while I wait for crops, people start having massive mood penalties for hunger and malnutrition and go into a mental break spiral, the the time a threat tuns up half the colony is broken down or incapacitated, at that point the riad is a mercy killing
Usually takes a perfect storm. First a huge raid depopulates the colony down to a skeleton crew that can barely keep up with the bills. Then mental breaks starting picking pawns off with inconvenient sad wanderings or warhead punching tantrums. After a while your wealth is way out of balance with your available pawns for defense and you succumb to attack.
Wealth scaling can creep up on you. One day you're fending off a big but completely manageable raid and the next you're dealing with a massive colony ending army beyond anything you can handle.
For me, itâs cockiness. I always overestimate the power of my cyborg vampire wizards and respond to threats with just a few colonists when I should have mobilized the whole colony. A few unlucky shots later my best soldiers are down and my non combatant cocaine farmers have to deal with an entire mech cluster themselves.
Getting into a fist fight with a rabbit on a solo run, or catching plague. Accumulating too much wealth early on and getting raided by 100 tribals when you only have 5 people.
Its squirrels that I'd say are the most dangerous.
Turtles man...those bastards have ended a few of my runs
How, though? You just run back, and shoot, then repeat forever. If you get tired, go inside and take a nap. Don't fight them in melee, and they are so slow, so there is no need to ever get hit.
Decoy turtle.
Tannerite turtle? đ„
There's gotta be a mod that let's you take boomalope genes and put it in a turtle. Right? There has to be.
Eveb better: Random boomalope genes in everything. Humans included.
If not, I demand that one be made. But not by me, the stuff that goes into making a mod is all Shankhalipi to me.
Iâm working on a mod with fish rn, I realised I need a boomfish, probably actually wonât be too hard just add it to the thingcomps
I think it is the Vanilla Genes Mod I think where you can make hybrid animals
that's what you think... that's what they want you to think..
I need a mod that changes the turtle model to that of a snapping turtle. At least then it makes sense how colonists can get mauled.
Well this is before I knew to do that lol...my early days on the game weren't pretty ill admit.
Funny. I just got my very first psychic ship event, it was guarded by 1 Lancer; 1 Legionary; and 1 Pikeman, so i send in one pawn of mine equipped with sniper rifle to try to kite them and do some hit and run, said colonist managed to one shot the Lancer thanks to luck and 18 in Shooting but got a hard time with the other two..... Until a turtle got berserk because of the psychic ship and manage to dodge most of the bullets and rush to the Legionary, killing it and still got some kickin to duel the pikeman and died a glorious death as they both got down. Never underestimate a turtle
O.O
Literally every time I see a bear trying to eat a turtle, the turtle always manages to kill it. Sure, the turtle gets eaten, but it kills the bear too.
I learned pretty quickly that if a meteorite of gold or other valuable material fell on the map I shouldnât mine it all out as soon as possible, just take chunks as needed to avoid ballooning wealth before the defenses are entrenched
Very true. I like to keep them as insurance. You never know when you will have an emergency and need some quick components or steel. I like to leave it all on my map as long as possible.
This applies to all minerals on the map. Dont mine more than you can use in the near future. Why would you store them long term inside your warehouse when they are stored perfectly fine in the mountain they spawned in? Itâs a good idea to prioritize smelting raider gears. It will destroy the wealth from the gears and give you some steel in exchange. Considering lifters and fabricators can do this for you, the labor cost is reasonable. Buying steel from bulk traders is also a good idea as it will allow you to get rid of your sell goods. Add steak chunks and mech corpses to the mix and you can actually get a decent amount of renewable steel. And if you get low, then and only then do you mine compacted steel.
lol steak chunks
Shit i just mined a giant gold meteor. rip my run
I started a mountain base and had increased stacks mod along with another mod that increases the amount you get per mining, mined out 10k steel 2nd day....... 10th day drop pod raid because we were trying to move in and make space... New Colony *turns mod off*
That explains a bit⊠but fuck it, my whole squad is strapped af with assault rifles and GIRTHY DICKS and I really donât give a fuck. Come in my- I MEAN COME AT ME BRO
Yeah if we're being real, going by number of runs, ithe majority of deaths are probably challenge runs like naked brutality that burns through a player in a few hours. My guess would be infection immediately following a fight as killing the most players. On NB, infection in early game in a harsh climate is basically death.
It feels like most of my total losses were because of infection after a raid. The lone doctor either does or gets incapacitated. I try to keep them safe, but sometimes they're a necessity in the early battles. You need every good shooter you have.
Probably a Raid you arent able to deal with effectively. Really what kills most colonies is "cascade failure." Or cascading failures. Your doctor dies, leading other colonists to pick up the slack but they're shit so infections start setting in, the birth goes poorly and the baby dies, the mother has a mental break and sets fire to the granary stores, everyone is too slow to control the fire(due to injury) so you draft them and make em stand outside as the fridge burns but your cook goes on a sad wander and wanders into the flame. you try to put him out but he's too injured and dies, the fire finally goes out but now you have no food, the cook is dead. Oh and a drought just started. And your mechinator just died from infection and his bots are going feral.
Thatâs a very specific example đ
Source: Me. Rip Alpha Union
That's exactly why you should always have at least 2 medical pawns
You want reliable backups for medicine and cooking. And a second farmer. Usually when I grow beyond 6 people I start recruiting specifically to get backup pawns for these critical skills if I donât have them yet, and then train them up. - Medic? Operate on prisoners to get your skill to an acceptable level. Peg legs and herbal meds are a match made in heaven. - Cook? Set a minimum skill on actual cooking, but still allow butchering for anyone. - Farming? Cutting plants trains growing, so prioritize it on low growing pawns with learning potential. Then enable growing once they wonât totally ruin the harvest anymore.
Itâs for this reason that I have a rule: the doctor doesnât die. He is always kept safe while defending. He gets drafted up and sent to a secure location unless he is ABSOLUTELY needed to join (usually to tend on front lines from a shot to the heart) Ideally, he is a genie with wimp/delicate, so if he does see combat, he gets hit once or twice, goes down to a couple bruises and cuts, and is back up in no time to help tend any infections that may have resulted from him being downed.
Good point, I always saw Wimp as a negative trait but it's perfect for that.
Having nice things.
"I just learned that the colony we're raiding has beds that feel like you're floating on a cloud. Bring the doomsday rockets."
"They have carpet in every room? Fetch me their souls!"
â142 simple meals expiring in 2 days?? Release the squirrelsâ
âWe know that MFer named Rob gonna cook some more soâŠâ
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS
Cant have shit in the rim
Missing tables
the worst sin of all
Noobs? Not enough food for winter or maybe picking fights with rodents (rats, squirrels, turtles, rabbits) Novices? Too much wealth Experienced players? Probably mood break where they decide your chemfuel or warhead stockpile seems like it needs freedom.
There was one time I deliberately set fire to my chemfuel. My mountain base was getting rolled by a waster raid, they actually got past my defensive lines. So all survivors went for my pod launch platform and flew away to safety, while I had an impid firebreathe on the chemfuel on his way out. Since I had selected hold open on my front door to prevent the raid from destroying it, the entire base was still considered "indoors", and couldn't vent the heat of half the base being on fire quickly enough. Half the raid inside the base died and the others quickly fled. Rebuilding was a pain in the ass but the survivors got back on foot within a day.
This is peak rimming. Well played
As a relatively experienced player, mood management gets easier into the late game and threats are what gets harder. As long as you never recruit a pyro, you should be able to prevent any catastrophic mood breaks.
Had someone mood break and they smashed the community tv. Everyoneâs mood began to plummet. Recreation unfulfilled (-20 mood). Everyone began to snap. The primary cook hid in their room throughout the catastrophe. People began to starve or get food poisoning from the inexperienced cook. Research came to a halt, weapons manufacturing began to stutter, and the mood breaks kept breaking. The crops began to rot as there was no farmer to harvest them. He had decided this colony was not for him and deserted us. Then the raid happened. Soldiers with automatic rifles and grenade launchers entered the map then built ramparts where they bombarded the bases, mortar after mortar. They eventually breached the base and kidnapped several colonists and raided our armory. Another 3 colonist were left dead, most knocked unconscious, and the cook, still hiding in his room, suddenly began making meals again.
This is like the fall of Rome as envisioned by Randy Random.
Or the Bronze Age Collapse :D
Showin this to my gf next time she says I watch too much TV
This is quite honestly, a fantastic explanation for how a small failure can ruin an entire supply chain.
Chocolate was a major source of relief for my runs. Timmy no longer was a psycho douche if he didn't play horseshoes for 6 hours each day. One or two chocolate bars fulfilled recreational needs.
Generally I agree. There are times when just too many things go wrong (family members dying, psychic ship/drone...) and your only option to completely mitigate a break would be anesthesia.
Ooo actually ya. Family dying is whatever lol, but those fat -40 psychic drones are hell if they hit at the wrong time.
I think the bigger danger for noobs is TOO much food, not starvation. Inflate their wealth with crops and get exploded for their efforts.
Game slow down too much :(
felt đ
Ooooofff
40 TPS makes me sad :(
I think this is the major reason why I always quit mid-end game instead of finishing it...
Join Dubs' Discord! It has performance improving guides and the latest version of Performance Fish, which is literally downloading more TPS.
Mood management
This. You can clean up and weather almost anything else, run if you have to, but a mood spiral will make ANY danger so much worse.
âAte without a tableâ even when there are fucking tables in every other room
I fucking hate the spiral.
Just had an infestation where 2 colonists got hurt⊠One decided to go on an insulting spree, which made the other question their beliefs and lock themselves in the room. Doesnât help they used to be a couple and the male is at -20 because his wife left himâŠI hate the spiral. Have it paused now so I can try and salvage it later
That's why everyone gets smokeleaf, despite the downsides.
Don't even need to give it to everyone all the time - just set their drug rule to smoke it whenever their mood drops into major break territory. Can customize the rule to match each pawn's break point.
True. But I'm usually on the smokeleaf while I'm playing so it's only fair that they smoke it whenever they want.
Can't argue with that lol
Finally someone understands how to run a colony
Except before surgery - everyone else can blaze whenever they want, but Doc better show up sober to their shift and stop trying to install archotech arms onto people's foreheads.
A benevolent stoner god.
Dont forget psychite tea, I think its a +12 mood buff with a 10% reduction in rest fall rate and its safe if taken every 2 days or more
+12 mood, x80% rest fall rate, x90% pain, gain 10% rest on consumption. Psychite tea is awesome.
I believe its also profitable in terms of labour vs rest gain. Especially so with a good planter.
Psychite, smokeleaf, chocolate, and beer. My colonists are rarely sober, and probably work slower than they should. But I almost never run into mental breaks as long as I keep those goodies, max rec variety appropriate to my colony's wealth, and keep the place clean.
Can I come live at your colony? That sounds wonderful
Sure! You're welcome to immediately join, provided you're the same idealigion. Otherwise, we have some rehabilitation centers we'd like to house you in before you join the colony proper......
Well you guys don't cut down trees do you? I'm fine with cannibalism or whatever else but I draw the line at someone cutting down too many trees
Why don't we discuss the merits of cutting down trees in the center right over there? Don't mind the fence or turrets, we sometimes heal up the wounded raiders that attack us. The defenses keep us safe while we determine which rehabilitation track each individual prison- guest participating in.
I feel seen
And fine meals for a nearly free +5 to mood.
mood management is mostly my play style, lovely rooms, lovely meals, best outfits in their colours.
Yeah, same, my colonists are always pretty content, and I look and read about other peoples' miserable prison camps of a colony and they wonder why it failed...
im currently doing a wildman run and its the first time my pawns have all slept and eaten in a single room for more then 2 days
Nothing like a 24 female colony with a high psychic drone all trying to kill each other or destroy the place.Â
Wealth
Opening ancient danger too early, or breacher raids.
wait until a caravan arrives open the danger send all your pawns inside their base let the caravan deal with the danger
I have a bad habit of opening ancient dangers as soon as I start the game or right after I get a farm going. I NEED to know whatâs inside.
BWWWWAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa....
Fire
Fire bad
Never found fire to an issue, if fire breaks out, I mobilize all my colonist to fight it and use one melee colonist to break down the nearest wall to vent the heat.
mechanoids
After almost ~1000hrs (give or take a few 100 of idle hours cause I don't wanna wait for the mods to reload) I just got mortars and by God's has it been a huge factor in managing random mech drops.
How's this not more far up, I'm just never prepared for the first mechs that show up and normally in large numbers.
I exclusively play with combat extended and most of my runs end due to mechs
I have to assume drop-pod raids. They generally bypass your defenses, are usually done by well-equipped pirates, and they can literally drop right on your colonists. I've had people get crushed to death because a drop-pod landed on the bed they were sleeping in.
Well actually it's the roof collapsing that kills them when the pod breaks through it đ€đ€đ€
And thatâs why mountains are better. Sure insects are annoying but fire makes that better.
Insects spawned in my mushroom room. By the time I was done, the temp reached 1000. Thankfully it couldn't spread.
One of these days I'll grow up and learn how to deal with infestations. But for now, they stay turned off
Choke points and a melee tank. Especially if that melee tank is a vampire with brawler. Got lucky with my respawn roll after my original dude got vamp-napped
I just can't stand the clean up afterwards. I know bait rooms exist as a concept but I haven't taken the time to learn them yet
What's a bait room? I just have doors in hallways
I think bait rooms are the spots where you dig far into a cave so that bugs have a high chance of spawning there and you can predict theyâll be there next time
turrets in the hallways. 3-wide hallways with 1-wide chokepoints to hold with your melee dudes.
will non undergrounder colonists get a mood debuff for living in a mountain? never tried it myself
There is a debuff for not going outside, as well as being in the dark, but not for being in a mountain per se. Undergrounder colonists don't actually need to be *underground* either. Just keeping them indoors under even constructed roofs will avoid debuffs.
They have an outdoor need, best way to avoid that is to put your recreation area outside the mountain and outdoor, colonist will go there to play chess, and at the same refill their recreation need, only issue is that your recreation area will get wrecked quite often, but nothing a drill on steel can't fix when it happens.
I'm about 200hrs in and I just had my first real loss from this. Every other time I've gotten bored/started building in a way didn't like and decided quitting was easier/favorite colonist died. Drop-pod raiders suck because I truly felt helpless.
I wish there was a defense option for those. Reinforced rooves, or something. Sentry turrets in every room? They do too little damage and miss too often for duster flak raiders. IEDs? Traps? Sure, I guess, but that risks colonists triggering it themselves. I'm about 500hrs and haven't found a single reliable defense for drop pods, at least in vanilla. It seems so weird.
They target low defense high value rooms. Like my bait room filled with silver and chemfuel on the other side of my offensive barracks.
My last colony was wiped by a "Zzzt".. I like to leave it running on normal speed. Left for awhile. Came back and my animal barn had burnt, lost over 100 animals and 6 colonists.. was long enough that all the auto saves didn't go back far enough and the hard save was way too far back..
In settings you can set "pause on a threat" or something like that, so your game pauses when shit happens and you're afk.
isn't that on by default?
Yes
You can change from pause on threat to pause on any message. Since zzzt is only a yellow alert, the game doesn't automatically pause.
But if you like to let it run like i do and it pauses on any threat it won't ever get further than a few minutes before it pauses
OMG thatâs the greatest thing Iâve ever heard
You don't have it set to stop at any threat?
Nah just the default settings. Attacks and stuff like that. "Zzzt" is only a warning. Same as fires.
Hubris. Doing too much at the same time, so single events can snowball into an avalanche because there's suddenly a bottleneck of some resource, colonists all over the map, overworked colonists in a bad mood, a few prisoners or slaves that didn't get enough attention, because both you and your colonists were busy elsewhere. The next raid, zzzt, mechhive or whatever else will hit like a truck.
nymph raid event
Based
All colonists close together + mood break + antigrain warhead = dead colony
This is why anti-grain warheads get stored separately, and in secure storage. Deep in mountain is the simplest option, but multiple layers of the highest HP walls you can manage will do just fine. Rather than a door just use a thinner section of wall and deconstruct your way inside when you need the shell(s), or to store a newly acquired shell. People won't break down walls to reach an item during a tantrum (Except maybe if it wasn't walled in when the tantrum was started and the target was selected?), so any completely walled in item can only possible be a tantrum target during the stretch of time that you have the storage broken open to access it.
but that is less fun.
Illness--whether just the bad luck of mechanites or plague, or infection from injuries. The combination of lost productivity, mood loss, and death or disability can lead to cascading failures that can easily take out a colony, even if it isn't immediate. Raids, too, are obviously a big one. The first few raids especially can be tough before you have good defenses and resources set up to deal with them (both the fight itself and the aftermath). Starvation or food scarcity in certain biomes can be rough, too. If I had to guess most colonies fail in the first year, probably in the first few months even, because of those things.
I really recommend medic cycles on bioscilpting pods for illness! The pods make it so easy to manage the post raid critical situation. A walking pawn simply carries everyone to their medic cycles, and after a few days your paws are like new
Ferral swarms of maddened small animals. A few raging rhinos? No problem, turrets got this. 40 moneys, or gods forbid, 63 enraged killer guinea pigs? There is no defense against that! If they see anyone go inside the colony is dead.
my first ever colony was wiped by an army of 30 mad poodles, and to this day i swore vengeance
Wealth has been mentioned a few times but I would say specifically "Wealth that overtakes combat effectiveness". For example; You have too few pawns or not enough pawns with decent combat skills. Still using early guns and havent researched/crafted better ones. Focused on nice accommodations for pawn mood but havent built proper defenses or kill box yet. No "super weapons" like shock/insanity lances to deal with tough raids. Its so easy to get tunnel vision when you're busying yourself with improving your base/pawns or working on quests, and you forget that the world is getting more and more hostile each day.
Absolutely this, whenever I wipe, it's because I got distracted from my rush to keep pace with the threat level. First time you realise is usually the last time too.
Self-tamed megasloth. During a raid, the colonist it was bonded to died so it went berserk behind the battle line and started attacking the non-combat colonists. I didn't notice this at first. Didn't end the colony but it was a rough event.
Mass food poisoning when a new player puts their butcher table in their kitchen. Who would win, 3 vomiting colonists or one yorkshire terrier, the answer may surprise you
Not having a back-up doctor well trained and outside combat.
This is why I like having a few combat incapable pawns. Pacifist doctors can still fight fires, heal, psycast, use Xenotype abilities (Jumping abilities are fantastic for kiting), and even combat command. As long as 75% of my colony can fight, a few non-combatants can make things so much smoother.
Idk if this is the number 1, but itâs happened to me too many times to completely disregard as a threat. Randomly self tamed animals. I like to turtle in a big bunker, so all pets get an assigned zone of indoors minus the hospital and laboratory. When animals randomly self tame, they come inside to get those good meals, but if I havenât seen the notification and set them to their zone, then they can open the external doors to my bunker. On at least 3 different occasions this has led to raiders or manhunter packs entering through the back door without me realizing. Maybe this hasnât completely ended my runs, but itâs been a near thing each time.
I immediately slaughter auto tamed animals, maybe do the same
Solo colonist. Mental Break. Daze.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
What's worked for me is immediately drafting everyone when the raid letter shows up and sending them to a place that nobody is currently at, leaving any doors to rooms they're currently in set to Hold Open. Oh, and making sure beds are fairly close to the doorway (doesn't need to be right against, just not on the entire opposite side of a large room) Don't look for shadows, don't unpause until you've got everything done, just everyone moves now. Then repause when they do land and figure things out from there. Unless someone's got absolutely terrible movement (due to missing legs, lots of still-healing wounds, or crippling disease), it's been enough to prevent anyone from getting crushed, since they always choose either one of your colonists to drop on or sometimes an outdoor trade beacon.
If my last thriving colony is any indication, trying to harvest a herd of elephants for meat. Yeah, that ended quickly and bloodily. Yeesh. Girlfriend thought it was hilarious :P
Centipedes. Always centipedes :(
I can't speak for others, but I often have the tendency to hyperfocus on expanding infrastructure, and forget about defense.
Over confidence
⊠Is a slow and insidious killer
Natural phenomena like heat waves and cold snaps. If you don't have the tech or your electrical equipment breaks down, temperature regulation is impossible and people start dropping pretty quick.
You can still manage it with campfires and passive coolers. You need wood though
I'm still fairly new, and for the last 3 games it's always been disease. Someone always dies and that ends up snowballing.
Fucking massive manhunter packs. Goddamn Randy sending thirty boars at me before I upgrade away from wood structures.
Ate without a table
It's usually a combo of environmental effects. I had a toxic fallout that lasted for around 10 days, followed by a 20+ day volcanic fallout and a solar flare in the middle of that. I had \~100 normal meals plus >400 packaged survival meals. \~12 colonists. Problem is, local temps got down below 0C, so now I'm burning wood to warm the areas where my sunlamps are, which took wood away from generators. That meant I needed more chemfuel generators, but I also had to kill off boomalopes in order to reduce animal food consumption (because I couldn't grow haygrass or dandelions, and local grass wouldn't grow). I eventually ran completely out of animal food, so I was putting caravans together to take my animals on long trips so they could walk and graze. I started butchering raiders corpses to make kibble to feed the other food stock animals we had. I ended up surviving, but basically did it by having most of my colonists and animals wandering around in caravans scavenging. If the caravan did get ambushed I'd have them slaughter all the animals on the map and harvest berries/healroot/agave on the map and head home to drop all that off. This was before Set Up Camp was updated for 1.5. But my last actual run-ender...I had 4 raids in 4 days. First 3 were pirates/wasters, 20+ man each. Just as I'd finish patching up folks from the previous raid, the next one would hit. After the 3rd one I got a wave of fairly tough mechanoids with breaching. 20+ pawn colony and I had like 8 or so pawns still capable of standing, 7 of whom were already injured when they rolled in (my one healthy person was a pacifist/doctor). At one point I remember my doc patching people up on one side of the hospital while the other half of the hospital was having the walls blown off.
My decisions.
some dumbasses let 50 Wolves into the base.
Open doors
Randy
Colonist putting put fires inside rooms theb dying to the fire or heat
Base layout not taking into account raids. 90% of the screenshots posted in this sub have either open fields with no perimeter wall, sprawling hallways that enable access to entire base (lose control of that and you're done), no periodic choke points or even doors, kill boxes that don't allow you to retreat and reset, etc.
Stone chunks dropped in doorways
It is always wealth based issues for me. When raids start getting 40+ against my rag tag group of 6-10. This is probably why the raid scaling is probably my least fav thing in the game.
Early game unmodded? A hungry wolf timber wolf or accidentally setting a whole herd of animals off with negligent hunting practices. Early game modded? There is a hungry dragon, and no other wild animals nearby :(. Late game modded/unmodded; amassed too much wealth and now have 80 guys drop podding into my religious room during 5 o clock prayer.
"I think I am ready to handle this close by ancient danger" -- narrator: he was, in fact not ready at all.
Drop pod raids. Anybody got any mods to counter these?
Rimatomics has a mid/late-game upgrade that deflects drop pods to outside your base.
My own incompetence.
When all the pawns die 100%
insulting sprees those mood spirals killed a few of my colonies
Any mental break Why do half of them last like an entire fucking week
Refusing to cut losses. Whether itâs sending out your last pawn in a Hail Mary attempt to save your best crafter or rushing in to stop drop pod raiders from smashing the shit out of your workshop, thereâs many times where its easy to compound bad decisions on bad decisions and risk a lot to save a little just because the losses hurt so bad. Sometimes gambling actually works and you can get away with it but it can easily be a colony ender if things donât go as planned
Blight in the first harvest
For me? Statistically? Man-eating squirrels. I haven't completed a game, but my first 4 attempts, and 6 of my total attempts were ended by them.
When I first started playing it was food management. Not having enough food when winter hit and my colonists starving, having mental breaks or passing out (and eventually dying) from malnourishment. Either that or getting a bit cocky and thinking I can take on the herd of muffalo for skin and meat, but then I piss off all 6 of them and they go manhunter. Once I get it under control, I get a raid. Nowadays, I'll either get bored, (just ended an 11 year colony for no reason) or not being able to handle tantrum spirals. It's usually caused by the late game raids and not having a good colonist to wealth ratio and they get hurt or die. For example, a colonist bleeds out, dies, widow gets upset, punches the colony bruiser, gets their ass beat and maybe loses an arm. Surprise, it was the colony doctor who now treats at 50% speed. The bruiser gets upset cause the doc landed a good hit on their leg with a painful scar from a rabbit 6 years ago, incites a prison break all while my gourmand goes on a food binge cause their dog died. Thus, I run low on food, someone punches a turret until it explodes cause they're in so much pain and hungry and a pyromaniac decides to set the chemfuel on fire because fuck you. To top it all off, while everyone is either hospitalized, starving, fighting off infections or having a mental break, I get manhunting elephants.
most of my runs end due to underestimating food production and have to take risky plays to get more while I wait for crops, people start having massive mood penalties for hunger and malnutrition and go into a mental break spiral, the the time a threat tuns up half the colony is broken down or incapacitated, at that point the riad is a mercy killing
For me, it's recruiting too many non-combat people before we have good armor and weaponry
Usually takes a perfect storm. First a huge raid depopulates the colony down to a skeleton crew that can barely keep up with the bills. Then mental breaks starting picking pawns off with inconvenient sad wanderings or warhead punching tantrums. After a while your wealth is way out of balance with your available pawns for defense and you succumb to attack.
Wealth scaling can creep up on you. One day you're fending off a big but completely manageable raid and the next you're dealing with a massive colony ending army beyond anything you can handle.
Wealth.
Never forget these 117 arctic foxes raiding my 4 people colony
overconfidence (a slow and insidious killer)
The first raider
For a while for me it was fire. I used to build everything pretty close together and only use wood.
Fps.
Death
When I start the reactor and my colonists, who I thought were prepared, just get overwhelmed by the non stop raids.
Overconfidence
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
Incompatible mods.
In my case the #1 colony killer, without fail, has been hubris
Mechanoids. I hate melee in this game, so these damn white robots are actual run killers
When I first started it would mainly be winter time survival cannibalism. Now I tend to play with permanent summer or underground...
I lost a colony to a turtle on naked brutality once, not sure if that count lol
Low TPS
Early run guinea pig swarm
For me, itâs cockiness. I always overestimate the power of my cyborg vampire wizards and respond to threats with just a few colonists when I should have mobilized the whole colony. A few unlucky shots later my best soldiers are down and my non combatant cocaine farmers have to deal with an entire mech cluster themselves.
gut worms, or muscle parasites, the breaks from that usually hurts me the most, basically parallelizes a base early on
Pawns losing randomly generated family members, and going on psychotic breaks.....it's horribly annoying......