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wow the darkness event kinda sucks.
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May 1, 2024 04:19
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| # ? May 21, 2024 17:37 |
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marumaru posted:wow the darkness event kinda sucks. A chromed up pawn with skip/jump abilities to pass over rivers or other slow terrain can zip between a well lit base and the night pillars fast enough to take only a handful of hits. Haven't tried drugs yet but I imagine go-juice/yayo would have them going even faster. If they're kitted out for melee and/or have a few animal pals (usefully, animals are immune to the darkness) they'll make short work of the spooksters that spawn (make sure you stop attacking the pillar when they spawn, the pillars throw off enough light that the spooksters are crippled when they come try to attack you and you won't get the darkness attacking you beside them. You can finish demolishing the pillar after killing the monsters).
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May 1, 2024 05:18
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marumaru posted:wow the darkness event kinda sucks. It gets worse at tier 3
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May 1, 2024 05:39
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marumaru posted:wow the darkness event kinda sucks. Much anomaly content can be made drastically easier with psychically deaf pawns and/or mechs
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May 1, 2024 06:11
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marumaru posted:wow the darkness event kinda sucks. The darkness event is my favourite now, but you have to prepare in advance. Make sure you always have lights around your base or enough wood to throw up emergency torches if you get the warning that its starting soon. Also make a bunch of flare packs as soon as you get the technology (which are useful in general anyway). I've done it four times now, including the end game event. First time I was wiped out but the latest time I got the doodads down in a single day. I also had a sanguophage this time who was caught outside studying a monolith, but leaped through the darkness fast enough to beat the initial noctol raid to my kill box. I like it because you're only gonna lose pawns through lack of preparedness, but it also gives you a window to prepare. Stuff like metal horrors or certain obolisks can lose you random pawns through no fault of yours, while the first revenant attack can be hard to react to as the "invisible entity detected" alert is pretty subtle. It feels nice to have an event where you have time to set up for it and can then see it through to the end without any pawns getting sacrificed or temporarily coma'd. FurtherReading fucked around with this message at 12:23 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 12:18
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The only problem with the Chronophagy ritual is that it's too effective, I have pawns with scars to heal but if they go for another hit of the youth juice they'll be underage again. 
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May 1, 2024 12:37
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Do a shittier version of the ritual that deages them less?
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May 1, 2024 12:45
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for context i have just made a high tech research bench, so im still pretty early. i was playing on a higher difficulty level so i didnt advance that much :'( tldr skill issue
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May 1, 2024 13:15
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The darkness event is hard-countered by flare packs. Make 2 of those, and have enough bioferrite around for refills, and it should be a breeze. But yeah, I wiped on it the first time I encountered it as well. Edit: Btw, from Reddit, unstable patch notes:  Potentially big change for tribal players Broken Cog fucked around with this message at 13:30 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 13:23
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isndl posted:
I mean yeah, but it's not fatal, although I didn't know about the friendly pawns not being able to leave, it works fine on the water and mud border maps 
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May 1, 2024 14:52
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Broken Cog posted:
That's a really good change, makes interacting with them a lot more appealing 
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May 1, 2024 18:39
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Got a weird bug yesterday with Dub's Bad Hygiene. My pawns all stopped drinking, washing, and using the bathroom. I noticed something was off when my animals started passing out and dying from dehydration, even though they had plenty of water troughs in their area. Checked my pawns and sure enough, they weren't drinking either and all had the "thirsty", "unhygienic", and "bursting" maluses. Was getting more social fights and mental breakdowns than I should have. Turns out it was some weird interference with Common Sense. Unchecking the "Pawns are encouraged to fulfill secondary needs during joy assignment, or if woken early" option in the mod settings made them start remembering to have bathroom breaks again. Just passing along the solution. Stay safe out there on the Rim.
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May 1, 2024 20:54
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Chronophagy ritual, even at lowest quality (2 years), actually cures brain scars. That's crazy good
Broken Cog fucked around with this message at 21:41 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 21:37
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I like that Chronophagy and the various rituals can be an alternative to the high tech solutions. I'd love it if there more high tech/low tech alternatives and routes. With the advent of mechs in biotech, I feel like Guaranlan Trees could have also been a low tech solution to a variety of problems that mechs fill a niche for, but as of now they're pretty ineffective in all circumstances. Royalty is really starting to show its age, generally.
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May 1, 2024 21:41
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George Sex - REAL posted:I like that Chronophagy and the various rituals can be an alternative to the high tech solutions. I do really wish dryads were better. They're such a neat idea, but very poorly implemented compared to other similar kinds of things implemented later.
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May 1, 2024 21:57
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Dryads are plenty good if you're doing a Tree Connection colony. They're not as strong as mechs, but for those you need to invest a lot of resources, and for the higher tiers, build basically the entire base around them. But yeah, probably not worth it without the increased pruning speed.
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May 1, 2024 22:02
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Mechs offer a relatively linear, accessible, but resource intensive path to achieve basically anything, each with a trade off. Guaranlan trees offer an exchange of colonist labor for a very limited set of questionable features where the colonist labor may be better spent on an alternative path to achieve said feature. The mech route will almost always offer something for your colony and is a safe and efficient use of labor and resources. Guaranlan trees when analyzed, offer no such advantages.
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May 1, 2024 22:10
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If combat guaranlans could be drafted they would be extremely valuable. Hampered by the suicidal combat animal AI they are just a huge waste of time. I’ve played with a mod that lets them be drafted and controlled directly and they’re really great. Berry guaranlans are okay early in a desert map where growing is not yet solved by hydroponics.
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May 1, 2024 22:17
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I agree that dryads should be draftable, maybe give them the radius control effect, like with mechanitor, for the colonist attuned to the tree they're connected to. Other than that though, I feel they are pretty good for what you have to invest into them, which is one dude basically spending half of each day just pruning the tree. Though it also trains planting skill, so it's not completely wasted. They're also very thematic, and fun to play around with.
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May 1, 2024 22:20
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Mzbundifund posted:Berry guaranlans are okay early in a desert map where growing is not yet solved by hydroponics. Farming food, medicine or wood is more efficient than taking the Guaranlan alternative. As you've noticed, they have their theoretical niche in extreme or temperature restricted biomes. But you still need someplace to plant the trees and the dryads (and your colonists) can still get heatstroke or hypothermia. Broken Cog posted:They're also very thematic, and fun to play around with. Totally agree. I just wish they were more viable. I wish low tech in general was more viable and had better methods of further specializing into. George Sex - REAL fucked around with this message at 22:24 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 22:21
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I'd also like to add that both wood generation, and medicine generation can be useful, and haulers are always welcome. I've finished runs using 4-5 dryad trees at the end before, and I never really found them to be useless. They're just an accessory of the colony, not the main focus like the mechs are. Broken Cog fucked around with this message at 22:32 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 22:27
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The very nature of tree pruning means that they have to be a significant focus of the colony to get any returns, because every tree you add means a pawn spending roughly half their waking hours doing nothing but tree pruning. Running 2-3 trees is basically taking 2-3 laborers out of your workforce in favor of producing/maintaining whatever dryads you're going for, which is a tremendous deal if you're not running a giant size colony. Mechs are much easier to make an accessory or supplement, because you can jam a mechlink in a dude's head, crap out a couple haulers/cleaners, and get infinite useful labor without ever investing or researching anything else. Also if the worst happens it's way, way easier to restore a bunch of junked mechs than it is to replace a bunch of dead dryads.
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May 1, 2024 22:42
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Mechs require a ton of energy, steel, components, and passively produce a lot of wastepacks. They're hard to ignore. Edit: Not to mention prisoners for mech brains on higher tiers.
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May 1, 2024 22:44
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That's if you choose to heavily mechanize. A single mechanitor only building and maintaining 5-6 tier 1 'mechs costs very little in the way of resources and produces very little waste. I've done tons of colonies where I speedrun the mechlink specifically to have some lifters and cleansweepers and never looked at mechtech past that point because it's not that colony's focus. Each lifter/cleansweeper/agrihand costs 100 steel(50+50 for the subcore) and 2 components and will run indefinitely.
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May 1, 2024 22:45
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Broken Cog posted:Mechs require a ton of energy, steel, components, and passively produce a lot of wastepacks. They're hard to ignore. Once they're built, they're nearly fully passive. They can be made more so with the waste zapper and a hauler. But a dumping zone at the edge of the map is also very straight forward. Staying at the first tier is without issue or compromise. If you work up to the late stages of mechs, you can dedicate a significant part of your base to their operation, but you don't really have to
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May 1, 2024 22:49
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400 power per charger, steel for replacements, waste, etc. It adds up. Not to mention the cost for setting up the infrastructure. For trees, you can just use planters. With Tree Connection, they should be fine handling both fields and trees.
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May 1, 2024 22:55
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200 per charger and you need maybe 2 if you've only got the six default bots. For the trees you've also got to have a sufficiently large place to put them where you can't build anything, there's a mood penalty for not being connected to a tree, you've also got to deal with the mood penalty from chopping down trees which leads into dedicating dryads to wood production, the dryads take time to mature, they can be killed pretty easily and from what I can tell at best with a 20 growing skill pawn it will take 3.6 hours every day to keep a tree at 100%. Mechs are an upfront investment with a lot of utility since even cleaners can fight if needed, and resurrection only takes a bit of time. e: it takes 11 days for a dryad to spawn and mature, and only 1 dryad can spawn every 6 days. Carcer fucked around with this message at 23:29 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 23:25
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Broken Cog posted:I'd also like to add that both wood generation, and medicine generation can be useful, and haulers are always welcome. Haulers are the only thing I've ever used dryads for, and they are kinda nice at that- especially if you use zones so they can grab stuff at the edge of the map you wouldn't want your colonists to go out to get for fear of predators/sudden raids. Mech haulers are still way better once you've set up the infrastructure for them. You have to consider that all the time your colonist spends pruning is time they could just be hauling things themselves, so all the dryad hauling labor is in part transmuted planting labor, rather than being all profit like the mechs. Before biotech I once played with a mod that let you craft simple mindless robot colonists. They could do planting work so they could prune the tree. I had a robot pruning the tree all day and the dryads running around hauling. It was pretty awesome actually.
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May 1, 2024 23:38
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The advantage to the gauranlen trees is they function regardless of temperature, so they're useful in cold biomes.
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May 1, 2024 23:40
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Mechs work 24/7 with only occasional downtime to recharge and do all sorts of boring unskilled labor like hauling, planting, and constructing. Even with just a few basic mechs on a single mechanitor you massively multiply your pawn labor, and more importantly, let them do more complex crafting and research tasks without interruption. Efficiency is huge in a game like this and it can quickly compound into large benefits very quickly; that's part of the reason why low/no sleep genes are completely overpowered. If you do a colony with a decent supply of labor mechs and then one without it will probably feel glacially paced in comparison. Gauranlen trees... yeah okay they're kind of mixed at best. The combat ones are worthless, the quadrums spent growing them and pruning the tree will likely be wasted in a single raid when they all get shot and die because you can't control them. Hauling dryads are a bit better in that they're a work multiplier kind of like mechs, except you're basically trading a few hours a day of one pawn's labor for multiple haulers. It's a pretty decent trade but one that drops sharply in value once you already have one. The usefulness of the resource dryads can vary widely; if you're on a temperate forest map or the like they're not really worth the effort, but like OwlFancier noted having dryads pooping out berries, medicine, and wood even in the worst extreme desert or remote ice sheet is game changing for those environments.
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May 2, 2024 00:48
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With gauranlen connection and skilled pruners each tree can produce several haulers. Up to four, I think? 4 half-speed haulers for 6 hours of colonist labor per say. Which is pretty good. But then everyone without their own tree gets a scaling negative moodlet. I gave it a good try once, but huskies are less trouble.
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May 2, 2024 00:55
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Aren't the mech phoned-in raids very steel positive? Thought it was easy to farm those once you had an established colony
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May 2, 2024 03:56
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Using Draw Fleshbeasts to deal with mech clusters is pretty fun, though if the fleshbeasts win then I have fleshbeasts to deal with instead. On the plus side, being squishy meat blobs makes them a lot easier to kill than mechs. It's probably a strategy that falls off quickly on the higher difficulties though, I'm at 6 void statues and 4 beacons around my ritual spot and while they seem to take out the basic tier mechclusters just fine, there's not really much I can do to increase ritual strength at this point. It would be nice if there was an option to scale it up by cranking up the amount of bioferrite offered.
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May 2, 2024 04:08
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Kanos posted:The very nature of tree pruning means that they have to be a significant focus of the colony to get any returns, because every tree you add means a pawn spending roughly half their waking hours doing nothing but tree pruning. Running 2-3 trees is basically taking 2-3 laborers out of your workforce in favor of producing/maintaining whatever dryads you're going for, which is a tremendous deal if you're not running a giant size colony. A hauling dryad is immune to toxic fallout, immune to disease, never gets sad, never has mental breaks, never eats, and sleeps less than a normal pawn. For one pawn's efforts, you can have up to 4 of these haulers from 1 tree. They're half speed, but that's still a huge amount of labor; even if a pawn spent all day pruning, you'd still be doubling their labor vs having them haul, and the pawn gets to hang out trimming their tree potentially with a huge mood boost due to Burning Passion in plants instead of having to haul raider corpses and metal slag in and out of a swamp. That'd already be good, but the situation is actually even better than that: to keep 4 hauling dryads you don't have to prune all day, or even every day. For a relatively competent Plants pawn (12+ skill, say) it only takes around 5 hours per day to keep a tree at maximum connection, and you can easily skip several days in a row with no consequence (after that you'll only have 3 haulers for awhile). That's a lot of value for relatively little effort. That's not as good as 1 mechlink with 4 hauling robots, but the pawn with a mechlink can also have dryads and can easily use that spare bandwidth on other robots instead
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May 2, 2024 04:11
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The super garbage thing about gauranlen dryads in general is the immense time throttle on them (time cost for building up bond strength, for spawning each dryad and again for metamorphosis to selected type), and absolutely locking the tree handler to the map. It requires the handler to not be gravely sick or injured or away on a caravan or colonist loan mission. Just feels like a massive investment before it pays off at all.
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May 2, 2024 04:58
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Dryads are a useful tool for some colonies. If your only Plants pawn doesn't have Medicine, you don't have much soil to work with, or you're just desperate for haulers, dryads can be a solid addition to a lot of interesting situations - I think they get ignored by a lot of players because they're not the best solution when conditions are ideal. It's easy to point out that growing corn is more efficient than berry dryads, but if all you have is a small patch of 70% soil then dryads are a great stopgap before hydroponics. And that right there illustrates their biggest problem: given enough time and research there are better solutions than dryads for everything that dryads can do, so they only wind up being good in certain niche situations.
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May 2, 2024 05:52
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You also only get one Guaranlen seed a year, on top of the long lead time on spawning dryads. You pretty much have to have planned your colony around dryads from the start because your colony will be growing faster than dryads can meet its needs and if you solve your problems the traditional way you no longer need the dryads. The soil and space requirements also make dryads difficult to integrate into a colony on a whim, you can stuff a mech lab into any old room but dryads simply need too much for the value you're getting.
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May 2, 2024 06:16
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I legit don't think I have ever planted a dryad seed in the like 2.2k hours I have in this game
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May 2, 2024 06:38
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The obvious solution is to mature a horrific genetic hybrid of Gauranlen, Harbinger, Anima and Pollux trees. The twisted tox-dryads are your friends.
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May 2, 2024 06:53
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| # ? May 21, 2024 17:37 |
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Inadequately posted:Using Draw Fleshbeasts to deal with mech clusters is pretty fun, though if the fleshbeasts win then I have fleshbeasts to deal with instead. On the plus side, being squishy meat blobs makes them a lot easier to kill than mechs. It's probably a strategy that falls off quickly on the higher difficulties though, I'm at 6 void statues and 4 beacons around my ritual spot and while they seem to take out the basic tier mechclusters just fine, there's not really much I can do to increase ritual strength at this point. It would be nice if there was an option to scale it up by cranking up the amount of bioferrite offered. Don’t forget you can boost ritual strength with psychic sensitivity! The philophagy ritual, eltex gear, psychic sensitivity gene, etc.
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May 2, 2024 06:58
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