Is there a point to settling a place that isn't perma-summer?

[Erenussocrates]

Are there really any advantages to settling a place that has cold winters?

The same thing can be asked about riverside vs. non-riverside too.

[[YSC] Este tri Fum minecraft]

challenge and diversity. that's like asking is there a point to playing the game on something else than base builder difficulty

[brian7772]

Yep the challenge of survival in harsh climates. I settled in an area thats 110-150 with almost no wildlife or places to grow crops. Before I could get a dryad tree up my people took turns starving and suffering heat stroke. Now they are thriving in their human leather cloths after a space battle broke out above us sending tons of food to the ground in escape pods.

Why? Because I've never played a hot game and wanted to see the difference between that and a cold one.

[Chibi Life]

The game feels different when you play in different climates. Winter isn't always a disadvantage either like for tribal play you can farm a ton of crops before winter hits and use the cold weather as a freezer. I like playing on cold bogs personally just because of the challenge of building an efficient base while also dealing with the limited growing periods.

They all provide different ways to play and their own interesting challenges to overcome. Perma-summer has a hidden challenge: You're more likely to overgrow food simply cuz of how easy it is and your wealth will go up a lot faster due to carelessness lol.
I'm doing a perma summer right now on my first ideologies playthrough while I learn everything but back to cold bogs once I'm good.

[Laub]

Pick random start place and good luck ;)

Otherwise, it's a personal opinion. You can play like "i get whatever i can get" or "i write my own story and the people want to life at a river, because they like that". For sure, if its always cold, the game is much harder, but not impossible. I play the most times in cold areas. Raids are only fast food for the people.

[ACS36]

Perma-summer is pretty much playing on easy mode.

River are honestly whatever. They don't really effect difficulty enough to care.

[Astasia]

There are some advantages, it's up to you to determine if they are worthwhile or not. When it's below freezing corpses and food on the map don't rot, this gives you more time to collect certain drops and allows you to more easily scavenge animal kills (just click "allow all" every few days). If you are playing tribal, winter is a good time for hunting/scavenging and gathering meat and turning it into pemmican since you can store the meat in a room that is below freezing without a power cost and without having to "rush" to use the meat up before it spoils.

Getting food year round is pretty trivial (especially with ideology), the main downside of winter maps are the slowed movement from snow, both on your map and on caravans. It also makes ranching more pawn labor intensive.

I like to change biomes every game for variety. I find the extreme biomes can be fun for a while, but can get boring if played on over and over. Permanent world conditions like toxic fallout can also be fun. These things don't really make the game harder if you know how to deal with them, they just change up the "pattern" of how you play and approach things, and variety is the spice of life as they say.

[gimmethegepgun]

A smaller note is that colder biomes have more wild healroot (whereas tropical has none at all) and have fewer diseases. Technically, that's the biome, not the growing season, but they are generally linked.

[Erenussocrates]

Challenge is the opposite of advantage though, but I knew people would say it.

What about rivers though, they are like not bad at all if you don't have enough components or steel. Also great way to save steel when you settle around it too. Otherwise a long circuitry can cost a lot of steel as well, and also be hard to defend or maintain when it's spread out all over the map.

[RamboRusina]

How are you gonna make snowmen in place of eternal summer?

[Darkcake99]

Originally posted by Erenussocrates:

Challenge is the opposite of advantage though, but I knew people would say it.

What about rivers though, they are like not bad at all if you don't have enough components or steel. Also great way to save steel when you settle around it too. Otherwise a long circuitry can cost a lot of steel as well, and also be hard to defend or maintain when it's spread out all over the map.

Fair, when you give yourself advantages it takes away the challenge :p good way of stating it. Rivers are great early game but you'll never make it into a killbox without mod support, I eventually dry my river defences up with hydro pumps or dig out spots behind water adjacent to a mountain/rock formation to make turret spots, since deep water is untraversable it can be very useful for denying enemy movement to areas altogether, I think rivers are a fat win even if they spam your map to death, they almost always have a practical use that requires a ton of brainstorming to figure out. hope it helps :)

[HunterSilver]

Yes, I've noticed that arid shrublands and deserts offer less nutrition per grass tile for ruminants than forests and similar locations. Feeding large ruminant herds off of just grass is impractical, if not impossible, on areas that traditionally have permanent summer. Meanwhile, in a standard boreal forest it's trivial for most of the year, and then you have to feed them from food stores during the winter.

Depending on your start, the heat from areas with permanent summer can also be a huge downside. Tropical rain forests, arid shrublands, and deserts experience frequent and prohibitively hot days at the best of times, and outright lethal temperatures during heatwaves. Maps that otherwise don't have permanent summers experience much cooler heat waves, and they experience them much less frequently.

[Erenussocrates]

Jungle maps are permanent summer and are very ideal for grass only herding too, I have like 30 elephants, it only takes a lot of allowed space but I never feed them myself.

[ROE]

Boreal forest 30/60 is my favorite biome. 20/60 is pretty good too.

For me the best advantage is that I only have to concentrate on heat. Rarely will the temp ever go above 80 degrees.

Animals to hunt are abundant, but so are predators. Good for taming bad for attacking your pawns and animals.

The last thing is anecdotal, but I swear it seems like the pawn AI behavior is better in biomes where there is a non growing cold season. In perm summer my pawns just always seem to run around like fools trying to do to much growing. In the cold quads pawns can craft, research, do art, and so on without distractions. My cold colonies always out produce my warm ones.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Erenussocrates:

Are there really any advantages to settling a place that has cold winters?

As others have stated, it allows for more diverse play experiences and challenges.

It's worth noting that each site is also going to have lures in the terms of the availability of raw materials. Granite and Marble combos are highly desirable, so a player may pick a particular tile solely due to the presence of those types of stone. They might also want a good supply of wood, so they'll be looking for a forested area. Then, they may also want to try to construct a base inside a mountain, so they'll pick a mountainous region. Solving for all those isn't easy and a player may accept the challenges more extreme biomes bring just to have those other bits. (More often, I assume, it's "biome first, resources/type second" as far as choices go for most players.)

The same thing can be asked about riverside vs. non-riverside too.

Watermill Power Generator. It's hella-overpowered. :) (Fairly late addition to the game, dev wise.) That's for vanilla, but some players use fishing mods as well.

There's also a challenge there. Building space/location becomes a high priority in mid to late games as players unlock new things and try to juggle efficiency. It's a very common game mechanic to impose additional challenge in building games. In Rimworld, before "rivers", "Mud" and a few swampy water tiles were really the only challenge element in normal biome maps. (Aside from mountain/rock outcrops players may not want to explore) Since many Rivers flow through near-center of the base's tile, it provides yet another challenge as well as an added "aesthetic" quality. It's the only place where a "bridge" is useful, for instance, and a player may just want to play around with bridge-building. :)

For myself, I don't usually play with bases that don't experience snow/cold. Seasonal change is A Very Big Deal ™ to me in terms of base-building/survival games. And, Rimworld's "survival" tag practically demands some sort of seasonal environmental change the player must prepare for. It would be rare for me to even consider buying a base-building/survival game unless it has seasonal/environmental changes. (Some do have other elements I'd engage with, like "outer space" or maybe one of the "island/tropical" survival games that have additional mechanics. But, at Rimworld's scale, I doubt I'd buy a game that didn't have seasonal challenges in an Earthlike environment.)

[Chibi Life]

I don't get it, I used waterwheel once and raiders just keep destroying it so I never used it again and I've never had a single issue with efficiency lol. Screw rivers.

I mean I'd wall off other sources of power like geothermal with stone walls but how you gonna wall off a water wheel? Their ranged attacks will also shoot it from across the river.