Viability of a heatstroke killbox?

[Barlakopofai]

I just thought about cramming a bunch of heaters in a killbox that would make an attacking force die pretty much instantly after they enter and I'm sure it's not an original thought, so who has tried it and does it work?

[Jigain]

It works, but it's finicky. You need to have a closed environment for the attacking pawns to collect in, but the downside is that they bash down walls and doors in their way. So what you'd need would be doors you can control remotely, so you can close a door behind them to create an interior capable of retaining sufficient heat. This is not possible in vanilla Rimworld. The closest you could get would be a door in the back, held open, that hostile pawns funnel through. Once they're in, set the door to not be held open and send a sacrificial pawn around back to go through the door to trigger it to close.

All in all, I've found it too convoluted to spend more than a few trial runs on. I just gun them down as per usual.

[liosalpha]

it does work but it more trouble to set it up than its worth tbh. sealing them in is the hardest part.

personaly i found the molotof and a wooden floor much easier to set up and use. thou both do nothing for mechs. and youll mis out on training pawns combat skills.

[Hoki]

heaters wont provide enough heat but its possible to make heat trap entries but the very conept of them is chessing the game mechanics to keep the heat in the trap.

instead of heaters you would build heatrods: 3 tile wide structure made out of stone filled with stone doors inside. fill this room with burnable material and set it on fire and seal the room (a combination of wood and chemfuel works best from what i saw).

[Barlakopofai]

What about a frostbite killbox? Because the idea behind it really is to just get like 50 tribals writhing on the floor from heatstroke so I can just get a guaranteed capture on them, not to just kill them outright.

[HunterSilver]

Originally posted by Barlakopofai:

What about a frostbite killbox? Because the idea behind it really is to just get like 50 tribals writhing on the floor from heatstroke so I can just get a guaranteed capture on them, not to just kill them outright.

There are far easier and cheaper ways to capture tribals. With the dlc mass berserk or an orbital salvo are great ways to capture dozens of raiders per raid if you hit a cluster of them before you engage them.

[Barlakopofai]

I don't have the DLC.

[That Guy]

There's some interesting ways to make a heat-death-box with some mods, ranged from using lava with map mods to create death chambers of combustion to dedicated heat sources to create a heatstroke mazes.

My first tip is, if you do use a mod for heat generation, it doesn't discriminate and super heated air can be lethal. A method to exploit the temp system is by creating buffer chambers for the path, if the only way in & out is an open door it creates a section. If you want to keep an area hot for longer, or cold for longer, you can have a series of open door chambers leading to the primary chamber. The game will see each door-to-door chamber as a section for heat/cold exchange, meaning it has more buffer between "outdoors" temp and the target temp of the primary chamber. Raiders tend to be in gear acceptable for the "outdoor" temp of the colony, which makes a difference if you're in a cold area or a hot one for min/max safe temp for raiders.

If you use something like the furnace mod, you can set up two power points with only one of them connecting to actual power supply which then allows you to activate/deactivate the furnace from the mod by having it attach to the different power lines without putting one of your pawns in the death chamber while it's going.


For vanil methods, you can create a long snake tube of a maze that leads to a room filled with wooden furniture and then ignite the furniture after having a pawn back-door to the start of the maze to finish building a started stone wall trapping the raiders inside. As the pawn at the end of the tunnel ignites the furniture, which should be bad RNG quality wood items kept there for storage/trap purposes, the maze will start to super heat as the fire spreads to other items.

[Salami Tsunami]

Originally posted by Barlakopofai:

I just thought about cramming a bunch of heaters in a killbox that would make an attacking force die pretty much instantly after they enter and I'm sure it's not an original thought, so who has tried it and does it work?

As some other people have said, for a temperature based trap, the environment needs to be sealed.

The exception is in the case of an open door, which causes the temperature to equalize with the exterior, but at a slower rate. Using a buffer of a few spacer rooms with the doors held open, you can produce a viable temperature trap.

I'd suggest the actual trap built in a maze pattern, in a room connected to a stack of heaters/coolers. You can figure out the rest, I assume.