Arid Shrubland is still the easiest biome in the game

[KalkiKrosah]

Definitely easier than Temperate forest.

[x Princess Leliana x]

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

Definitely easier than Temperate forest.

Curious to hear your explanation

[Glerk]

Year-round temperate forest is the best.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by x Princess Leliana x:

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

Definitely easier than Temperate forest.

Curious to hear your explanation

Alright.

Almost all arid shrubland tiles have a year round growing season. A drier climate means less diseases occur and also means less trees for raiders to hide behind. It's slightly hotter than standard temperate forests so you only ever have to plan for heat waves in the early game, and the heat waves are very manageable. Being a drier and flatter landscape means caravanning is much easier to accomodate. Dromedaries are common place in arid shrublands and you can also tame dromedaries to help carry your wares ithose caravans. Boomalopes and Boomrats can be tamed for fuel or hunted for food, and when they explode there is less foliage to be set on fire. Less foliage means faster walking speed when traveling across the map. The animals in arid shrublands are less aggressive; all the large animals such as Elephants and Rhinos are passive in nature. The predators that do show up are either cougars or fennec foxes and foxes rarely hunt colonists. Not only are berries present on the map but also agave fruit, making scavenging for vegetables a relatively simple task.

The only major downside would be the lack of wood. Saguro cactuses yield 15 wood on full maturity and drago trees yield 25 on full maturity. You can alleviate this problem through trading, researching stone cutting or making your very own tree farm (which is now gated by a tech requirement). Steel can also be used in place of wood in many cases.

Oh and no natural growing heal root. But with less diseases happening you won't need medicine as often. It's more of a compromise than a complete disadvantage.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by GlerkTheFlurp:

Year-round temperate forest is the best.

I used to believe that but when I played Arid Shrubland more often I found that Temperate forest has more aggressive wildlife (bears, cougars, wargs), is more disease prone, is slower to caravan through, has to deal with BOTH cold snaps and heat waves, provides more natural cover to raiding war parties and is much more flammable and slower to travese through than an arid shrubland.

[x Princess Leliana x]

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

Originally posted by x Princess Leliana x:

Curious to hear your explanation

Alright.

Almost all arid shrubland tiles have a year round growing season. A drier climate means less diseases occur and also means less trees for raiders to hide behind. It's slightly hotter than standard temperate forests so you only ever have to plan for heat waves in the early game, and the heat waves are very manageable. Being a drier and flatter landscape means caravanning is much easier to accomodate. Dromedaries are common place in arid shrublands and you can also tame dromedaries to help carry your wares ithose caravans. Boomalopes and Boomrats can be tamed for fuel or hunted for food, and when they explode there is less foliage to be set on fire. Less foliage means faster walking speed when traveling across the map. The animals in arid shrublands are less aggressive; all the large animals such as Elephants and Rhinos are passive in nature. The predators that do show up are either cougars or fennec foxes and foxes rarely hunt colonists. Not only are berries present on the map but also agave fruit, making scavenging for vegetables a relatively simple task.

The only major downside would be the lack of wood. Saguro cactuses yield 15 wood on full maturity and drago trees yield 25 on full maturity. You can alleviate this problem through trading, researching stone cutting or making your very own tree farm (which is now gated by a tech requirement). Steel can also be used in place of wood in many cases.

Oh and no natural growing heal root. But with less diseases happening you won't need medicine as often. It's more of a compromise than a complete disadvantage.

You make a lot of fair points, ive only done a temperate and an arid so far. Lack of trees is a massive killer early game when you have no money for trade, and no farming tech for wood. Farmland is also hard to come by with all the sand, it makes an early game sustainable base very hard. But overall, the year round growing and lack of diseases has served me well

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by x Princess Leliana x:

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

Alright.

Almost all arid shrubland tiles have a year round growing season. A drier climate means less diseases occur and also means less trees for raiders to hide behind. It's slightly hotter than standard temperate forests so you only ever have to plan for heat waves in the early game, and the heat waves are very manageable. Being a drier and flatter landscape means caravanning is much easier to accomodate. Dromedaries are common place in arid shrublands and you can also tame dromedaries to help carry your wares ithose caravans. Boomalopes and Boomrats can be tamed for fuel or hunted for food, and when they explode there is less foliage to be set on fire. Less foliage means faster walking speed when traveling across the map. The animals in arid shrublands are less aggressive; all the large animals such as Elephants and Rhinos are passive in nature. The predators that do show up are either cougars or fennec foxes and foxes rarely hunt colonists. Not only are berries present on the map but also agave fruit, making scavenging for vegetables a relatively simple task.

The only major downside would be the lack of wood. Saguro cactuses yield 15 wood on full maturity and drago trees yield 25 on full maturity. You can alleviate this problem through trading, researching stone cutting or making your very own tree farm (which is now gated by a tech requirement). Steel can also be used in place of wood in many cases.

Oh and no natural growing heal root. But with less diseases happening you won't need medicine as often. It's more of a compromise than a complete disadvantage.

You make a lot of fair points, ive only done a temperate and an arid so far. Lack of trees is a massive killer early game when you have no money for trade, and no farming tech for wood. Farmland is also hard to come by with all the sand, it makes an early game sustainable base very hard. But overall, the year round growing and lack of diseases has served me well

Its not the best biome for your first time playing because the early game is slightly harder but some simple work arounds can get you past the hang ups caused by not having plentiful wood:

1. Use sleeping spots instead of wooden beds. After hunting a few animals you can make sleeping bags.
2. Build your first building along a stone wall to conserve wood
3. Build a barracks instead of individual bedrooms
4. Use wood to make your research table
5. Use wood to make a 1x2 table and 3 wooden stools. Deconstruct them once you unlock stone cutting
6. Use steel in place of wood for the butcher's table & stone cutter's table
7. Harvest drago trees and cactuses only when fully mature
8. Research tree planting and plant your own trees.

By the time you have tree planting unlocked it is no longer an issue. Plant several plots of 1x20 drago trees and space them 1 tile apart from each other (so you can walk between the trees) and the colonists will self harvest them on their own. Just beware of beavers who like to focus in on these tree farms.


And since you're relatively new I recommend playing in Temperate and Arid Shrubland a little while longer. Once those become too easy or boring move onto either Boreal Forest or Tundra. Winters there are long, but not eternal and once you have a stable food supply indoors both of those biomes become pretty easy. Its just that rush to hydroponics that gets annoying. Move onto jungle after that, resources and food are plentiful but the diseases and animals are nasty there. Then desert, which is like Tundra but hotter (but can be cold too). The swamp biomes are like jungle but wetter and more disease ridden, they should be easier now that bridges are vanilla. Then probably extreme desert, ice cap and sea ice in that order as the last ones to try out. The last one in particular is extremely hard to play and unforgiving of any mistakes.

[Kid 1,000]

Originally posted by KalkiKrosah:

Definitely easier than Temperate forest.

Agreed, but don't you find it boring? I like a 20 day growing season. Adds more variety to the year.

[Greep]

Try it as a tribal ;)

Also, I think the average arid shrublands is easier than temperate forest, but temperate can occasionally have temperatures that are hot enough so that are permasummer and cold snaps never happen ( think 18C winter is the hottest cold snaps can trigger in). In which case it is just straight up the easiest map.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by Greep:

Try it as a tribal ;)

Also, I think the average arid shrublands is easier than temperate forest, but temperate can occasionally have temperatures that are hot enough so that are permasummer and cold snaps never happen ( think 18C winter is the hottest cold snaps can trigger in). In which case it is just straight up the easiest map.

I did try it as a tribal. I play tribal all the time. It's still easy :)

[Astasia]

There is no lack of trees in arid shrubland. There are "fewer" trees, but there's still far more than you'd realistically need, it's only about 50% less than temperate forests. Wood is pretty useless in the biome though, even as tribal, as you don't really need to worry about passive coolers or heating fires, and those are the only things that consume any significant amount of the resource.

The amount of growable soil is close enough that it's going to depend more on seed than biome, you can fairly easily get a good roll for arid shrubland with more soil and fertile soil than a bad roll of temperate forest. Arid shrubland has sand patches, but temperate forest has mud and lakes, which also means it's much easier to build on arid shrubland without running into terrain issues.

Arid shrubland has always been, and will likely always remain, the easy mode biome.

[ignis]

It's based on 0.18, not 1.0, right?

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by ignisru:

It's based on 0.18, not 1.0, right?

Both actually.

[ignis]

In 1.0, without enough wood for fueled generator or passive cooler, it requires specific preparations. You have to rush research for batteries or tame boomalopes.

[KalkiKrosah]

Originally posted by ignisru:

In 1.0, without enough wood for fueled generator or passive cooler, it requires specific preparations. You have to rush research for batteries or tame boomalopes.

I play tribal games a whole lot and my defenses are pretty low tech. I use dead falls, improvised roof collapses shooters and good old flanking manuvers. I generally rush stone cutting first and once I have it I start replacing my wooden walls and doors with stone and steel. I keep a tab on how much wood I have in my storage and generally keep it above 250 wood at all times. When a heatwave hits I know I have enough wood for 4-5 coolers and the 7 days that buys me usually outlasts the heatwave.

Once I had the tech to make coolers I had already hooked up some watermill generators and those things pump out a good deal of power all on their own. I had a light for over a dozen rooms, about 8 A/C units and had my defense system of 6 mini turrets on a switch where it would cut off the power to the facility and power on the defenses. The only thing that always got power was the freezer.

The only time I built batteries was to test out a new way to handle an infestation. I built 3 batteries in a small cave I noticed was under some deep mountain and then built a double thick stone wall around the entrance. When the bugs showed up I just super charged the batteries and purposely made them explode. Bugs got set on fire, ran around setting more stuff on fire, and promptly cooked themselves alive. Kind of an expensive way to deal with a hive but I was proud that my plan worked. I never rebuilt the batteries after that point.

[ignis]

Hm... Well, one of the last updates increased initial trees amount on arid maps, so it may be viable again. When I've tried it, I had something like 500 wood as crashlanded including both starting reserve and all trees on map. New treed never had a chance to grow due to beavers (every single quadrum) and occasional thrumbos.