colony limit?

[Nekochan]

I read that there is a colony limit and the sweet spot is around 8 before the game starts to try to kill your people by random events beyond your control (the type of events I hate). Is this true? Is there a mod to not have a healthy 100% bionic person, who totally needed those bionic upgrades, to not randomly die from a heart attack at the age of 30?

[Bozobub]

You can have up to FIVE colonies, since A16. I think you are confusing that limit with the "soft" and "hard" per-colony pawn limits, which vary by Storyteller. Notably, Randy has NO soft cap, just an (unmodded) hard cap of 50. Above a given Storyteller's soft cap, the game stops actively trying to give you colonists. Above the hard cap, it starts conspiring against them. You will mostly notice this as drastically increased fatalities among downed friends and enemies, even with blunt less-lethal weapons, and much more difficult recruiting chances.

It's definitely possible to keep recruiting past the hard cap, if you're super-determined and very proactive re: colonist safety, but I'm not sure how much fun it would be ^^'. There are also mods (or simple manual XML changes, if you prefer) to change these caps as you like. Performance WILL suffer with many colonies/colonists!

Notably, there's also a mod to add "Z-levels" (of a sort) to RW called "DeepRim" (sorry, Ludeon link only):
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=39262.0

[Narrowmind]

Originally posted by Bozobub:

Above a given Storyteller's soft cap, the game stops actively trying to give you colonists. Above the hard cap, it starts conspiring against them. You will mostly notice this as drastically increased fatalities among downed friends and enemies, even with blunt less-lethal weapons, and much more difficult recruiting chances.

It's definitely possible to keep recruiting past the hard cap, if you're super-determined and very proactive re: colonist safety, but I'm not sure how much fun it would be ^^'.

Originally posted by Jigain:

Aye, grapplehoeker has the right of it. Again, you can easily confirm this (and it would certainly be much more preferable that you see how the system works yourself before you keep spreading an unfounded myth) by changing the storyteller def files. If you don't want to do that, there's also mods on the workshop that'll accomplish the same effect for testing purposes (I think one was called Variable Population or something of the sort). Just set all values - minimum, desired, maximum, and critical - to 1. Just one pawn. If the game behaves as you claim, you should be getting hammered with bad events and (perhaps most obviously) have raids more than ten times as strong as you'd normally get, all in an effort to make you reach one pawn. If the game instead behaves as I and grapplehoeker claims, you should see no discernable difference in the amount of bad events or the strength of raids compared to before you set the storyteller pawn limit to one, but you should see a distinct difference in your ability to capture, purchase, and recruit pawns.

[Bozobub]

You may be confusing "actively trying to murder your pawns" with "CONSTANTLY trying to murder your pawns" (hard to tell from just those 2 quotes if you are agreeing or disagreeing ^^').

As I mentioned, it's definitely possible to exceed the "hard" cap, even with vanilla, unmodified settings, if you're determined enough, watch your pawns like a hawk – to avoid "downed" pawns, the biggest risk when over the hard cap – and constantly recruit every warm body you can. Recruitment chances (at least with a skilled Warden) don't generally quite drop to 0, just very low, so having lots of prisoners and more than one Warden can help a lot; you're simply rolling the dice far more often.

[Narrowmind]

It's just, I said the same thing and was told it is a myth that the game conspires against you after the cap. It seemed to me that too many seem to be agreeing that going over the limit is punishing, but some believe this is totally unfounded and can be tested through dev tools or the use of mods.

[Bozobub]

Heh.

Sure *shrug* but ya know, not only did I just describe how it's been represented by the dev, you can change the numbers and check for yourself. Edge cases like ONE colonist (or 1000) aren't great tests; the system wasn't really expecting that as an input, not surprising it can get a little wonky. I'm pretty sure -1 is gonna be an issue too ^^'. Remember, it's a weighted, semirandom function.

Remember also, this behavior changes between Storytellers quite a bit, and can be completely unpredictable when using modded Storytellers.

[Narrowmind]

I do agree with you.

[Nekochan]

Thank you for all the answers, yeah it was my main concern of things that had nothing to do with what I was doing killing my colonists. One dying cause they got their torso blown off is acceptable to me lol.

[Bozobub]

Oh, THAT can happen too; RNGeebus is kind of a jerk, but it's probably not due to your number of colonists =).

[Jigain]

Yep. The game will still kill your pawns in wacky and creative ways that, to some, are not funny or enjoyable - but it will not be because you had "too many pawns". At most you could make an argument that the more pawns you have, the more opportunities there are for things like meteors to hit at least one of them, but at that point you're really splitting hairs. :)

As a side note, I typically end up with 50+ pawns before calling a save quits because of boredom. That's on Cass, who has an "critical" cap of 18 pawns. And even at that point the main cause of deaths is not the game rolling dice against me, it's just my own stupidity for not keeping on top of things in critical situations.

[Narrowmind]

It's good to read of your own experience. Thank you.

[Gui✯_✯]

Limit of colony any want to get type of 250 colonys or sttlemenst can go in open log file in option in game and clic paste Config and Pfs and open with notes and see limit of 5 change for number colonys you like, save this file and run rimworld and go options and you the number you put dont change or this bac to 5 again just dont clik in maximum number of colonys or back to five and need do it again i dont very good speak english im from Portugal