Fastest way to get more components?

[Squirting Elephant]

Can't rely on random traders and I assume you mined out everything on your map (also explored the insides of mountains) and deconstructed all ship parts. So these are the option I know of:

- Make caravans and send them to tribes/whatever to trade. But risky since they can get attacked + several colonists will be unavailable for a long time.
- Wait for random traders and pray they got some components (too much RNG).
- Rush research for trade beacon (not sure how fast you can have one up + what the trade frequency of it is, is it days or seasons between traders?)
- Rush machinery and erm... pray you got a LOT of iron on your map to make components.
- You can temporary dismantle some other stuff to get components for more important things. But you only get 66% back I believe so this is not viable long-term, only for emergencies.

Is there no way to send caravans to the neighboaring tile JUST to mine but without starting a new colony everywhere? That would be the most ideal thing.

[grapplehoeker]

Why wait for random traders (random types of traders even) when you can pay to specifically request bulk traders to come visit?
As long as you have a strong economy and can afford to both summon traders and buy all the components they bring, then that's a very fast way to get more components ;)

[Squirting Elephant]

How? I know the "Factions" menu and 3 factions are green to me. But no option to call them. 2, 16 and 21 reputation.

Or did you mean the trade beacon for this? Because that is a rather late tech but I could rush it in a new game.

[Dire]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

How? I know the "Factions" menu and 3 factions are green to me. But no option to call them. 2, 16 and 21 reputation.

Or did you mean the trade beacon for this? Because that is a rather late tech but I could rush it in a new game.

You need to construct a comms console and a obitical trade beacon near your storage room, after you do that select a coloniest and click the comms console, there you can trade and improve your relationships.

TIP: Don't request for trade caravans untill the neatural price is 300 sliver, the way you can make the cost of 600 sliver go down to 300 sliver for a caravan is to gift factions with free sliver using a comms console.

[Mytheos]

@OP

Com station and orbital becon arent too hard to get early on, focus on that.

As Joel mentioned you can pay them for increased faction, and once you do, it will only costs 300 silver per trader you call in...

You can call a trader from every faction you are allied with, but there is a short cooldown after you do, you can essentially though call one almost every day if you have 3-4 allies.

[Squirting Elephant]

Yeah I rushed com station. No more component problems, 'infinite' silver due to selling INSANE quantities of corn non-stop and pirate trader to get more colonists once you get rich. It actually feels a bit too good. Actually it is outright overpowered.

I always thought that the com-station had maybe weeks/seasons between calls but they come after just a few days and you can call multiple at the same time (hope they don't shoot each other :P).

I wonder... What if I trap them in a heat-room and kill them everytime before they leave, do I lose rep or anything?

[ProvoGo]

You can't trap them any longer, if you do they will just mine their way out as soon as you trap them

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Yeah I rushed com station. No more component problems, 'infinite' silver due to selling INSANE quantities of corn non-stop and pirate trader to get more colonists once you get rich. It actually feels a bit too good. Actually it is outright overpowered.

I always thought that the com-station had maybe weeks/seasons between calls but they come after just a few days and you can call multiple at the same time (hope they don't shoot each other :P).

I wonder... What if I trap them in a heat-room and kill them everytime before they leave, do I lose rep or anything?

Heh see? It's easy ;)
No, don't go annoying your potential trade partners by harming them.
Save your wicked ways for the raiders.

[ministrog]

Well, you can ambush them once they're inside your trap. Btw, there's 4 types of trading in Rimworld with some being fairly similar.
There's the caravans that come by your base randomly or when you summon them.
Trade caravans you bump into with your caravans.
Visiting towns with your own trade caravan.
Trade spaceships that you don't see, but call you randomly from planetary orbit.


That last 2 have the most silver in stock in case you want to sell metric tons of stuff. The trade ships also have the most stock of things too. I've seen one ship with around 700+ human meat. That weirded me out.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Schrödinger:

That last 2 have the most silver in stock in case you want to sell metric tons of stuff. The trade ships also have the most stock of things too. I've seen one ship with around 700+ human meat. That weirded me out.

The topic is about acquisition of components, not about how to profit on sales. although the silver you paid them for the components would be easy to recoup too.
In terms of speed, it would be a lot faster to make repeated requests for bulk traders from all friendly tribes, than to assemble and dispatch caravans.

[ministrog]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Originally posted by Schrödinger:

That last 2 have the most silver in stock in case you want to sell metric tons of stuff. The trade ships also have the most stock of things too. I've seen one ship with around 700+ human meat. That weirded me out.

The topic is about acquisition of components, not about how to profit on sales. although the silver you paid them for the components would be easy to recoup too.
In terms of speed, it would be a lot faster to make repeated requests for bulk traders from all friendly tribes, than to assemble and dispatch caravans.

I explained that half-heartedly, my bad (tried to be funny and failed). I was actually trying to point out that the chances of finding components with a trader are not 100%. You'll have more chances with the last 2 I mentioned before. More variety of stuff means more chances to get a components in a single trip.

If you wanted to even further maximise your chances, with infinite silver, you could crash land near a bunch of allied towns. Make a caravan and hit up all the local towns. Not exactly sure how fast towns reset their stock.

[Squirting Elephant]

Yeah some tradeships have like 11k silver in stock, most bulk traders have only 1100-1800 silver but you can summon them almost every day (and at some point after tributing enough) I guess literally every day. You have more silver than you can ever spend starting in the 2nd season already. Feels very overpowered.

And weirdest of all is that getting rich is so simple:
- start new game
- make HUGE freezer and absurdly large corn fields
- rush com and build one
- start selling corn to bulk traders and summon them anytime you can, even for 600 silver it's still a good profit. If your corn value gets too low (probably took too long before hauling it) then just make meals out of them and sell it again.
- Buy all components/iron

That's it. And cornfields can easily give like 20-40k corn per harvest and sell for quite a bit. Though I'm not sure if cotton is better perhaps but even with corn you can buy whatever you want.

you could crash land near a bunch of allied towns

I did this as well but haven't sent any caravans yet because the com-station alone gives me too much.

Com station needs to be a bit less reliable. like increasing the time between requested caravans by like 5-10x and make it more reliable in later research somehow like an advanced com. Or decrease sell prices of raw goods. Right now all you need is 1 research and gg.

[Mytheos]

Originally posted by Squirting Elephant:

Yeah some tradeships have like 11k silver in stock, most bulk traders have only 1100-1800 silver but you can summon them almost every day (and at some point after tributing enough) I guess literally every day. You have more silver than you can ever spend starting in the 2nd season already. Feels very overpowered.

And weirdest of all is that getting rich is so simple:
- start new game
- make HUGE freezer and absurdly large corn fields
- rush com and build one
- start selling corn to bulk traders and summon them anytime you can, even for 600 silver it's still a good profit. If your corn value gets too low (probably took too long before hauling it) then just make meals out of them and sell it again.
- Buy all components/iron

That's it. And cornfields can easily give like 20-40k corn per harvest and sell for quite a bit. Though I'm not sure if cotton is better perhaps but even with corn you can buy whatever you want.

you could crash land near a bunch of allied towns

I did this as well but haven't sent any caravans yet because the com-station alone gives me too much.

Com station needs to be a bit less reliable. like increasing the time between requested caravans by like 5-10x and make it more reliable in later research somehow like an advanced com. Or decrease sell prices of raw goods. Right now all you need is 1 research and gg.

I agree its too easy to make money after a point...

However, prices arent as good at higher difficulty levels so its harder to rake in the silver...not to mention it depends on the biome as well...there are many biomes you cant grow year round...some dont have fertile soil to really grow corn well...and others dont have enough soil period to grow huge cash crops.

So yes in an easy biome/difficulty, its way too easy to make money...however in harder biomes on harder difficulties its more reasonable...but still a little too easy.

[Squirting Elephant]

Ah good point. So perhaps they need a seperate balance depending on difficulty and starting biome.

[ministrog]

Well the game needs to have one thing that's easy to make up for the other things that's BS. examples are blight takes nearly all crops down in a single instant. Hydroponics almost doing the same thing with a solar flare incident.

When you're new and you got no clue what you're doing, farming is the slowest and easiest way to make progress.

[Pestilence]

Which trader type has the most components? I have requested 3 bulk traders and none had components when they showed. It has been like 2 years and I have not had any components and everything is breaking down and I can not repair or build new stuff.