Colony always fails after 2 seasons or so.

[Nightweaver20xx]

Let me start by saying I'm just over 28 hours playtime into Rimworld, so I am still quite new at this. So far I have unsuccessfully created almost a dozen different colonies on medium difficulty with Cassandra, and ALL have failed except one. They almost always fail at about the end of the second season. Either colonists go crazy from stress or die in attacks (usually just a lone attacker with a knife!)

I have created what defenses I could for them; I put up sandbags, barriers, what limited traps I can build and I've even tried a few "killboxes" as the community is so fond of calling them. Nothing works and my colonists either run out of food because it doesn't grow fast enough, or they refuse to hunt consistently, or they get stressed from the heat, relationship rejection, psychic drones or some other nonsense that adds up and makes them go nuts.

This is getting very frustrating and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I make a garden on fertile ground, I build a freezer, I make individual bedrooms, I build walls, I try to prioritize properly, but something always goes wrong.

[starbabylon]

Individual bedroom is unnecessary, I switched to barracks (1 for pawns and 1 for guests with hospitality mod) after 300 hours in game.
You will improve with each game, but first you really want to lower the difficulty to builder and enjoy the game, before you switch to medium again after 2 years or so. Rimworld is not a contest, it is all FUN.

28 hours in, and no successful colony, I advise you to keep playing Vanilla a bit more to learn the ropes.

But make sure you check manual priorities in the work tab, and prioritize wisely, specialize each pawn to get the jobs done.

[Brahmin Herder]

_________________________________Combat____________________________________

If you keep dying to raids, make sure you are using the weapons you have properly. Don't group up your people, always use cover (even if it is just a stone block), and get creative with traps/choke points and terrain. If you can funnel them into a tunnel to break up the raiders you will have an easier time. Make sure your defenses compliment the maximum range of your weapons to give you the most chance to hit. I like colonists with shotguns or heavy SMGs to have a compartment to hide inside my walls near the entrance, so they can pop out and do heavy damage before retreating into the hidey-hole.

Swamps and marshy ground are underrated. They can severely slow the enemy down, giving you more time to line up shots.

Traps are really strong, providing you can get the enemy to walk on them. I don't like playing that way, but for learning the game it may help. The AI will only go through your walls if you completely enclose yourself. Otherwise, they will look for an opening to go through if it's not too convoluted.

If you are dying to melee, have a ton of firepower. You want heavy hitting weapons that deal a lot of damage. Positioning is important. A melee fighter can have a lot of staying power, especially if the enemy weapons aren't all that good. You can use this to distract them while your marksmen try to make the kill. Avoid friendly fire by using careful positioning. Also, have an idea on whether you want to split up the enemy or punish them for keeping close together. Grenades can cause massive damage to grouped individuals. Splitting an enemy off allows you to whittle them down, and after a certain portion dies the rest should retreat. I try to keep a grenade near the front lines so I can have a colonist use their firearm until the time comes. It is just a matter of dropping the weapon and equipping the grenade.

If you are dying to firearms, I recommend a mix of maximum range weapons wielded by skilled marksmen and rapid-fire mid-range weapons like assault rifles. The enemy takes time to target too. If you micro well enough, you can have your colonists pop in and out of cover while the enemy is aiming, and this will make them have to start the aiming cool-down again. In small engagements, this can avoid a lot of dumb injuries.


Lastly, there are plenty of combat focused mods that you can use. Some make it harder, some make it a lot easier. I like the red barrels you get with Dub's oil processing mod because you can stage them behind cover the enemy uses or create fires at choke points. If you get gud a the combat someday, you should definitely try combat extended. Definitely makes the combat harder until you get a decent level of progression, but makes it much more nuianced and tactical. It even includes a kit system with weight/capacity as factors. It will allow you to have a primary weapon and if you have the space and gear, a secondary like a grenade or knife or medic kits.

_________________________________Happiness__________________________________

To avoid happiness issues, consider brewing alcohol or making smoke leaf joints. Colonists like spacious rooms and the quality of the furniture matters for how attractive they find a room. You can build a chess board and horseshoes right away, and can build more stuff when you have cloth. Recreation can be a big deal.

You can give big buffs for things like having a nice bedroom, being comfortable, attractive surroundings, impressive dining room/rec hall and food consumption. Colonists that are passionate for their work also gain a mood boost while doing it. There are some rooms you can combine as well, which can give you a high level of impressiveness without drawing in extra wealth which attracts raids. The buffs can last for several hours and can really help.

Debuffs must be mitigated as they can be pretty bad. The big ones are pain, relationship issues, and events like psychic drones. Infections cause a lot of pain. Have your best doctors treat injuries with at least herbal medicine to reduce risk of infection and pain. Herbal Medicine will work just fine up until you need to actually do surgery. Depending on your biome, you may be subject to certain diseases which you can avoid by buying specific medicine from merchants. The diseases can kill an early colony very, very easily and are to be taken seriously.

For relationships, I actually use a mod that reduces the chance that they ask someone out because I feel like it happens way too much and just makes the game unfun. TBF, I'd probably be pretty horny if I only lived with 2 other people in some wasteland and had nothing fun to do but lay in the dirt and watch the clouds. If you want to mitigate it without mods, you can have the problem colonist on a different shift which you can manage using the schedule tool on the bottom. Alternatively, if they are specialized in a different task, build a separate work space. If colonists do end up dating or getting married, it is great for their mood. If the colonist they like or are related to dies, it can cause massive issues. Personally, this is part of the drama the game provides and I think it's awesome. It'll be a hard challenge but at some point it happens to everyone.

Psychic drones are just going to mess you up no matter what. Some colonists are more sensitive to them. To reduce the issue, try giving them more free time so they can get more positive buffs from things like recreation.

_________________________________Food______________________________________

This was challenging for me when I first started as well. The trick is to have many different crops and be aware of their growth time. I start off with a patch of potatoes (9x9 ish) and a whole bunch of corn. If you have skilled growth colonists you can plant stuff like cotton and healroot too but obviously starvation is the biggest issue. You want the potatoes to come in before all the harvestables on the map are exhausted. You can use the gather tool and just drag it over the map to gather berries and other edibles depending on your mod set up. The potatoes should feed you for a while, you want them to last until the corn harvest. Corn has a massive yield, and this should be what sustains you through the winter.

For hunting: You can manually kill animals. Just draft a colonist and tell them to attack an animal. This can be a good way to keep your food stockpiles full. New animals will move into the map periodically. In a future update, the dev is going to make herding animals more viable as you can cleanly kill them and will yield more resources. This is not implemented yet but is something you should consider for the future. Herding currently can be a good way to get milk and wool, but feeding the animals can quickly become a problem. Hay is a good solution to this problem, but obviously you want to make sure your people can be fed first.

Make sure you pay attention to the biome you are settling in. Each tile has a average temperature and growing period. 20 day growing periods are very feasible, if you do a good job managing your farms and know what to grow and when.

_______________________________Weather______________________________________

You mentioned this as a big issue. Heat is definitely a killer, and in my experience you get a heatwave after a few days in games. You need to have an AC set up by this point, there is no way around it. You can use passive coolers if you have the tech but it will cost a lot of wood and aren't that effective. Make sure your colonists have a nice place to relax in cool temperatures. It's like real life, when it is super hot out and you are doing manual labor it is simply impossible to work without sustaining heat injuries. Give them free time during the hottest parts of the day and they should hopefully stay inside, mitigating that problem. This can be hard to do and get stuff done obviously, but losing a colonist is to something dumb like heatstroke is way more annoying than being a few days behind schedule.

Clothing can insulate you from cold AND heat. Dusters and cowboy hats can help out with the heat.

I prefer settling taiga biomes as they usually have things like swamps/marshes, mild summers, and although the winters are longer and colder, your colonists will be spending much of their time inside during winter anyway. In my opinion, it is easier to manage cold than heat. Most of the raiders that get sent your way will be wearing winter clothing around fall, so you can strip the wounded (avoid wearing dead people clothing, that's a big debuff to mood) and last a while. A parka and turque will allow you to be outside in some pretty cold temperatures without much problems.

[Raymond]

2 seasons? you already doing better than me when I just started out.

[Narrowmind]

Some excellent tips.

How do you manage outfits across your seasons, and how does it interact with battle gear? Do you have some kind of wardrobe near the kill box where your people can get switched into armor as needed?

[Big Daddy-Chan]

Make a really big and nice dining room/rec room. Make the billiard table, chess, tv, marble pillars, and art in it. Always make fine meals when you can. Have 1-3 dedicated melee chars and a good choke point for them when you fall back. Not sure what the opinions for them are but I dont use turrets. Also a big thing is to try to build your base in an area with one entrance.

[Sevrun]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

Some excellent tips.

How do you manage outfits across your seasons, and how does it interact with battle gear? Do you have some kind of wardrobe near the kill box where your people can get switched into armor as needed?

I tend to leave a couple of people in armor to buy time in case of surprise assaults and just build an armory with all the rest of the armor in it. Swap outfits to for them to put on their armor as needed. That's mostly for heavy armors though, if all you've got are flak vests and helmets I'd just leave them equipped.

[Nightweaver20xx]

Some of what you guys are suggesting are mid to late game tactics that I simply cannot do yet, especially combat. I simply can't have a lot of firepower, I don't have it available to me. I don't have turrets, or grenades, or automatic weapons. I've got the bolt-action rifle, the pistol and the knife. My colony usually dies long before I can even research anything better, let alone trade for it.

[mrChips]

Can you share some screenshots of your last colony and any specific problem areas you had with it, like your defenses, farm or unhappy colonists?

[Bozobub]

Notably, Cassandra is actually the most difficult of the vanilla Storytellers. Phoebe scales exactly as fast but hits you about half as often, leaving longer periods (on average) between major events. If you don't get complacent, this lets you heal up and repair much more reliably.

While Randy's difficulty can spike higher than the other two, much of the time he's far, far easier, frankly. I've gone 3 years without a major negative event, using Randy ^^'. Of course, he's also nailed me with 3 major disasters at once, too, so it's not all daisies and sunshine *shrug*.

Whenever you encounter too much difficulty, or for any other reason, there's no shame in changing your storyteller and difficulty mid-game, or even firing up the dev console. Don't let stubbornness ruin a good time =).

[Nightweaver20xx]

Uh, I wish I could share screenshots of my failed bases but I kind of deleted all my failed saves in a fit of rage a few days ago.

[xybolt]

First and more important thing is that RimWorld is a game where failures is a part of the game and that it's essential to learn from it.

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

Let me start by saying I'm just over 28 hours playtime into Rimworld, so I am still quite new at this. So far I have unsuccessfully created almost a dozen different colonies on medium difficulty with Cassandra, and ALL have failed except one. They almost always fail at about the end of the second season. Either colonists go crazy from stress or die in attacks (usually just a lone attacker with a knife!)

I have created what defenses I could for them; I put up sandbags, barriers, what limited traps I can build and I've even tried a few "killboxes" as the community is so fond of calling them. Nothing works and my colonists either run out of food because it doesn't grow fast enough, or they refuse to hunt consistently, or they get stressed from the heat, relationship rejection, psychic drones or some other nonsense that adds up and makes them go nuts.

This is getting very frustrating and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I make a garden on fertile ground, I build a freezer, I make individual bedrooms, I build walls, I try to prioritize properly, but something always goes wrong.

That can be turned into the following summary;

1. you struggle to keep the happiness level moderately or high
2. you have food production issues
3. you have combat related issues

In essence, the colony happiness is very important to the health of your colony. See why they are unhappy. You can check it at the pawns individually. Why do they have a negative mood points. Not enough rest? Poor comfort? Dirty rooms? Or more specific such as traits? Do you have a pawn that has a "night owl" trait? Adjust his work schedule that he sleeps during day (11-18). Do you have a pawn that has "Misogynist" trait? Keep him away from women.

Food production: well, that is based on experience. I have had food production issues as well, and after playing multiple failed colonies I could figure out how much food I should plant, when I should hunt, when it's time to expand my cattle ect ... If you realize that you don't have enough food, plant more. My starting colony with 3 people has 3 different plots with 15x5 food to survive the first three years. Sure, I had too much food, but that's better than nothing. Have a variety of food and keep preparing meals until you can prepare fine meals. That kind of meal is what you should produce.

Combat: I am not sure what happened. I might need some information on this. If you have started with 3 people, you should have one pawn with a gun. He should be able to kill that lonely attacker from distance. Do you know that you can control them by going in combat mode? If you have a feeling that they need to be managed manually, do it. Use the game's pause feature often!

A tip: check "work" tab. Mastering that tab is very important and is a key to success I believe. Assign tasks to specific colonists and let they work for you.

[Jigain]

For food, I'd recommend planting rice to start with. It grows quickly and has a good yield per day. Once you feel comfortable with your stockpile of food, you can consider changing to growing corn - it has about the same yield per day as rice, but grows slower. Essentially you're trading slower harvests (meaning less work for your growers to do, freeing them up to do other things) for reduced experience (because your growers don't interact with the fields as much) and instability (because longer-growing crops are more susceptible to blights, fires, and the like due to longer grow times). Whether you go with rice or corn is up to you, both are good in their own way. Potatoes are... a last effort, if you only have low-fertility soil like gravel. Potatoes have significantly lower yield than rice and corn, but also a much lower fertility sensitivity than both of the others. In other words, rice and corn will benefit greatly the higher fertility the ground has, but suffer significantly if planted in low-fertility soil. Potatoes on the other hand won't benefit much from higher fertility soil, but also won't be penalized as much in low-fertility soil.

During my 1000+ hours in Rimworld I've never had any reason to grow more than one type of crop. I can understand it if you want some visual variation, but from a mechanical survival standpoint, you just need one.

[Nightweaver20xx]

I have a relatively successful colony going right now, Funkhousen, and here are a few screenshots. I have a small killbox planned for around my A/C because the last raider destroyed it to get in without going around to the main killbox. Tell me what I'm doing wrong.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077061
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113076966

[Raymond]

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

I have a relatively successful colony going right now, Funkhousen, and here are a few screenshots. I have a small killbox planned for around my A/C because the last raider destroyed it to get in without going around to the main killbox. Tell me what I'm doing wrong.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077061
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113076966

That's because there is no entrance into your base from your killbox so the raiders treat the box as another section of the wall. The way killbox work is that you use valuable buildings (AC included) to bait the raiders into attacking in the direction favorable to you, and the killbox has to be the only entrance to reach those buildings in order for it to work. Just get rid of the door blocking your killbox, put a solar panel or a 2nd wood fueled generator, and wall off the AC and the killbox should work.

[hadiyanfaz]

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

Let me start by saying I'm just over 28 hours playtime into Rimworld, so I am still quite new at this. So far I have unsuccessfully created almost a dozen different colonies on medium difficulty with Cassandra, and ALL have failed except one. They almost always fail at about the end of the second season. Either colonists go crazy from stress or die in attacks (usually just a lone attacker with a knife!)

I have created what defenses I could for them; I put up sandbags, barriers, what limited traps I can build and I've even tried a few "killboxes" as the community is so fond of calling them. Nothing works and my colonists either run out of food because it doesn't grow fast enough, or they refuse to hunt consistently, or they get stressed from the heat, relationship rejection, psychic drones or some other nonsense that adds up and makes them go nuts.

This is getting very frustrating and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I make a garden on fertile ground, I build a freezer, I make individual bedrooms, I build walls, I try to prioritize properly, but something always goes wrong.

at the first time i played this game, i tried medium, and keep failing my base. but now im playing with merciless randy random, but that happened just after i finished my 300 hours with builder cassandra and 100 hours with medium and savage.

my poin was, there are so many mechanics on this game, so much than another sim games, you need time to learn about all those mechanics. about how tempreature worrks, about how raiders are works, about how your pawan are works, about all the incident are work, about the wildlife, your pet and so many others

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

I have a relatively successful colony going right now, Funkhousen, and here are a few screenshots. I have a small killbox planned for around my A/C because the last raider destroyed it to get in without going around to the main killbox. Tell me what I'm doing wrong.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077188
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113077061
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2113076966

first, remove the door you put between your kill box and your base. it a must.

and secondly, when you still get raiders that not going trough your kill box after u removed that doors, it was a sappers, another kind of raider, the smart one.