Guaranlen Trees

[Zen]

There's a lot of things that seem to be very poorly thought out with the new expansion. And these trees take take about five hours of the day to maintain every single day. For one. For a skilled plant cutter. They're so inefficient that essentially whoever is doing the job can only prune the tree and eat and sleep.

These are extremely disappointing given that this whole expansion was partly marketed on their inclusion and interaction with the tree-worshipping meme. But really growing multiple of these trees just isn't very viable since to keep them at any level of useful dryads you need to dedicate someone to pruning them.

It takes like a day or twos work to sow a field and maybe a pen with hay for a large amount of animals by comparison. Why ever even interact with these things with how the math currently works?

[Punyrock]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Without the meme, they aren't brilliant. With it, they can be pretty good. You can get dozens of combat dryads with just a few hours of pruning per day per tree. They need a few balance patches, of course, the occasional tweak here and there, but again...

They are not necessary. They are there for some difference to the standard style. I don't exactly know what you were hoping out of them to be this disappointed.

that sounds pretty cool, i should try it out for my next colony

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Besides, if you're running Tree Lover, your biggest concern is not going to be what to do with the dryad trees, it's going to be the "try to avoid cutting any trees and keep tons of them alive" issue. So that's basically impossible in more extreme environments or if Randy feels like dropping a bunch of weather disasters in harsher ones (simultaneous Cold Snap and Volcanic Winter in a boreal forest anyone? And happened on a test Phoebe run, so even she don't give a damn sometimes).

Nope. Cactus isn't a tree, you can cut it with no consequences and there is fibercorn plant that produces wood and requires only 30% light to grow. You can grow those indoors under a roof with just a few torches. The only place where you'll have troubles with wood is sea ice... you know, the place where you always have the same issue tree huger or not and it is also a place where you can't grow a guaranlen tree.

The only reason for you to grow guaranlen tree is if you are a tree huger and you don't want that exclusive -25 mood penalty you get at sky high expectations for not having one. Even then it is best to set it to 0% pruning and use free time of your grower to do something productive.

[RCMidas]

Exactly. Cactus is not a tree and neither is fibercorn (which people have already complained gives SO LITTLE wood for the time investment). If you're going full tree hugger, your colonists will want as many living trees around as possible to avoid a mood debuff for not seeing any. Just avoiding cutting them down is only part of the challenge.

[Kasa]

The dryad that produces wood is not terrible per-say, not great but 25 wood every 2 days is better then nothing.

I usually play on tribal so when I gave the tree huger a run I focused on getting stone cutting ASAP and instead made everything from stone and steel that I could saving wood for use with torches and beds.

[Mimoslav]

You can avoid that mood penalty with bonsai trees. You can literally make a happy sea ice tree huger colony until you hit high wealth and get a penalty for not having a guaranlen tree that you can't plant on sea ice. But you are derailing the discussion.

Guaranlen trees are just useless. They are labor intensive and they give nothing of value in return. 32 berries per dryad every two days is a pathetic yield that you can easily outperform even by growing potatos in poor soil. Same goes for wood and herbal medicine. Combat dryads have animal AI so they'll go to sleep in the evening and will ignore your commands.

[Kasa]

@Dekk

To be fair I feel like the discussion was wrapped up pretty much around the time RCMidas posted about the new updated times they found.

Not much left to say ya?

[RCMidas]

Originally posted by Dekk:

You can avoid that mood penalty with bonsai trees. You can literally make a happy sea ice tree huger colony until you hit high wealth and get a penalty for not having a guaranlen tree that you can't plant on sea ice. But you are derailing the discussion.

Ooh, bonsai trees, that's genius! Nice one. I wonder if there's a way around the sea ice issue...like maybe fungal gravel? I want to test that now.

Originally posted by Dekk:

32 berries per dryad every two days is a pathetic yield that you can easily outperform even by growing potatos in poor soil. Same goes for wood and herbal medicine.

Yes. I concur in this regard absolutely. Those are extremely low numbers that once you actually start to be able to produce enough of them, there's no real point because you've vastly superior resources.

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Ooh, bonsai trees, that's genius! Nice one. I wonder if there's a way around the sea ice issue...like maybe fungal gravel? I want to test that now.

Fungal gravel requires overhead mountain.

[Zen]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Without the meme, they aren't brilliant. With it, they can be pretty good. You can get dozens of combat dryads with just a few hours of pruning per day per tree.

I was actually using the meme and found them to be just vastly inferior to animals or crops. They're so much of a time sink as to be a trap to use. You also mention that you don't need every playstyle to be good or viable. I don't require it to be *good* but I do need to it be *viable*. Trap options are not really options.

Another thing: You seem to imply it takes hours to produce dryads. The first dryad takes hours to produce *an immature dryad*. Then, it takes about six days to grow, independently of your skill. If your Connection level falls below the threshold for a dryad to exist, it ceases to exist if it was immature (I have not tested with with a fully grown caste-dryad but the tree seems to imply this is a hard cap).

[Meowtown]

Is this tested with a plant specialist? Once you give them the specialization they are limited to pretty much only growing and with their buffs wouldn't that cut the time down further?

[Zen]

I think it does since it comes under plant cutting but I've not tested it. The problem with it taking so long is that they don't get time to do things though. If you make them a specialist they'll get their time back but wont be able to do much with it - And of course you wouldn't do this at all early on when you don't have many colonists because you need to be able to flexibly do jobs as much as possible.

[Smartboy64]

At risk of getting roped into a mess here. I will put in my two cents real quick.

I have a Gauranlen Tree. I was curious to see how it worked so I made a colony with the mindset of 'We are doing this'. So when getting my starting colonists I randomized it and lucked out on a pawn with a 12 Plants, Double Passion. I made her a Plants Specialist on top of it for added buffs.

With that I currently have the tree set to 80% and it takes 5.5 hours for maintaining (according to the in game UI). I'm happy with this. She still gets experience in Plants when working on it and my colony is still brand new with only 3 colonists. She is able to handle the hay, rice, cotton, and fibercorn while still tending to the tree without an issue.

Should I go for a bigger colony, yes I will need another planter. Then again, who doesn't? After like 5 colonists you need a second planter to help out keeping up with the food demands so I don't see that setting me back.

On the negative side, yes the Dryads take too long to spawn. 7 days or so for an immature dryad to spawn? Why can't we have the time it takes to spawn be based on the colonist's Plant skill? The better they are working on the tree, the faster it spawns.

I think this playstyle certainly needs the most review and tweaks to it, as it is the most complex (you literally grow workers, nothing in base/vanilla Rimworld does that). However, I like it as it brings about something new that isn't my standard crazy super solder cyborgs.

[Mimoslav]

Originally posted by Meowtown:

Is this tested with a plant specialist? Once you give them the specialization they are limited to pretty much only growing and with their buffs wouldn't that cut the time down further?

Gauranlen tree pruning is unaffected by both harvest yield and plant work speed. In other words having access to plant specialist only makes those trees even worse in comparison.

[RCMidas]

Here's the thing: this is all REALLY good in-practice data that we're getting out of this and analysing. Some kind of broad consensus will eventually form, and be all the better because of this. So let's keep finding more two cents to add to this.

The fact that you can build a roof over or plant these trees under a mountain makes them good for tunnelers that never want to leave the safe underground but also want to take advantage of this.

I'm also going to test out the value of planting a metric fudgeton of them by means of growing gaumakers over and over, but not linking them to anyone. Then planting them in front of the most vulnerable part of my base. They'll pump out two regular dryads over and over until destroyed, I can store the pods and seeds as long as I like to replace them, and I get a living barrier to slow down raids.

If nothing else, it'll be amusing.

[Mimoslav]

You can't plant gauranlen tree under a roof.