On recruiting Space Refugees...

[Burgerkrieg]

... AKA the dumbest, most ridiculous and stunningly counterintuitive game mechanic I have encountered in my entire gaming carreer. Imagine you fall out of the sky in a pod after having travelled hundreds of light years on an almost entirely wild and hostile planet. You're heavily injured, but your daughter, who has established a small little townlet here, rescues you. How great your joy must be?

So, naturally, you spend a day or two in a bed she and her mates own, use up all of their medical supplies, and the ♥♥♥♥ off in the middle of the night, to defeat a planet filled with bloodthirsty bandits and very hungry predators equipped with nothing but a shirt and some trousers.

In a parallel universe, your daughter put a gun to your head and yelled "COME WITH ME OR I'LL SHOOT YOU IN THE NOGGIN, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!". She throws you in a tiny room with no lights, feeds you rotten raccoon meat and occasionally throws some pills at you. Occasionally, she and her mates will pull you into an interogation room and whisper weird ♥♥♥♥ into your ear, trying to somehow break your will.

So, naturally, you decide "These are the people I wish to spend the rest of my life with" and join their colony like everything is suddenly fine and dandy.

Rimworld appears to be a highly polished, well done and really intuitive game. It makes you expect weird ♥♥♥♥ to happen, and it makes you expect bad ♥♥♥♥ to happen, but you always understand why it does what it does. When you make a decision and take the steps to accomplishing a goal a rational human being would take, you get there (unless squirrels eat your balls). This ridiculous, terrible mechanic sticks out like a knife out of a wedding cake. I realize this game is in Alpha and Early Access and all, but Steve Almighty how have you not even added a note in your otherwise so comprehensive tutorials telling people to put those family members who are falling out of the sky in a jail cell instead of a sickbed? How is this not every thread in this discussion section? This is a hole so big it could easily fit Donald Trump's Ego inside it and then have some space left for a few airplanes and monster trucks. It's not even that complicated of a thing to fix!

[Falco]

This has nothing to do with the OP, but my god you guys run some sick prisons, I treat my prisoners about as well as my colonists, and that is quite well, also, if I am correct, prisoners can't use joy objects.

[MrButtermancer]

...yeah they are already occupying a bed and medical supplies, so it isn't exactly free, and they can definitely die of complications. Also, as you've pointed out... it doesn't fit at all.

[rina]

i think having the crash landing refugee be a gift to your colony who asks to join after healed and fed is a lot better than the event where someone joins your colony out of the blue whether you want them or not

[Horagen81]

Originally posted by Falconbunker:

This has nothing to do with the OP, but my god you guys run some sick prisons, I treat my prisoners about as well as my colonists, and that is quite well, also, if I am correct, prisoners can't use joy objects.

well the prisoner in my cell can watch tube tv or play chess... have 3 armchairs to choose from and place to sit and eat in private and sleeps on a superior bed.... oh do I need to say there is also a plant inthere with Daylilies XD

[spark.milanders]

Couldn't agree more with the OP. When I rescued my first cresh victim I was shocked when he got up in the middle of the night and walked off...not even a "goodbye thanks for all the meds". Having played obsessively over the past few days I now know I have to "capture" them but really a mechanic where they ask to join your colony once they are well is in order. Maybe not every survivor but rng of 1 in 3 would be nice. Or even a "wow thanks for saving me here's some silver"?

[Horagen81]

Originally posted by spark.milanders:

Couldn't agree more with the OP. When I rescued my first cresh victim I was shocked when he got up in the middle of the night and walked off...not even a "goodbye thanks for all the meds". Having played obsessively over the past few days I now know I have to "capture" them but really a mechanic where they ask to join your colony once they are well is in order. Maybe not every survivor but rng of 1 in 3 would be nice. Or even a "wow thanks for saving me here's some silver"?

THe first to come down was one of the colonist wifes ... I thought hey her I do not need to capture just rescrue.... middle of the night she gave the husband the middle finger(insulted before leavind on account of him being ugly) and left.... saw her in the last pirate raid and the he killed her himself.... I think there is a reason why married and poison is named the same in my country XD

[Miles]

Oh I thought I was doing something wrong and that's why they weren't joining. I didn't know I had to arrest them.

[Horagen81]

Originally posted by Karkoff:

Oh I thought I was doing something wrong and that's why they weren't joining. I didn't know I had to arrest them.

that is pretty normaly to think that :) I think it was on my third attempt back sometime that I reliase that :) mostly until then I hoped for runaways from pirates or slavers for my recruites even then though it is pretty hard to get them to join your colony :)
select the prisoner on the taps there is a tab called prisoner when you can select what kind of interaction you make. and bam I got my first one after a week of wooing her XD

[J/\S0|\|R0S]

This IS a huge problem.

It occurs in every rimworld scenario I play, OVER AND OVER, with no way to fix it.

Colonists spend resources and TIME (the most valuable resource of all) rescuing crashed drop pods.

Right now, there is a "space refugee" in my colony.

She is fully healed.

She will not leave the map.

She will not join the colony.

Her relationship with my colonists is good after a successful rescue.

The ONLY interaction I can have with her is to arrest her or attack her.

What kind of sense does this make for someone I spent time and energy and resources trying to save? I should attack her? (Note for the uninitiated or non-detail-oriented: Even the "arrest" option is likely to result in injuries.)

Please enjoy all this medicine. We want you to be well. NOW DIE!

How does this make sense?

How is NOT a huge problem to have pawns you cannot interact with in any way, who will never join the colony or leave the map?

[J/\S0|\|R0S]

She dies of malnutrition because she wasn't smart enough to feed herself and "rescue" was not an option for any of my colonists because she is not a colonist. She's a "healthy space refugee", apparently doomed to wander forever in one room.

Yeah. This is a "minor" problem of game realism. SURE.

Also inb4 necro complaints on pages that came high on google when searching for solutions to a problem that apparently has not been addressed in four years.

To prevent anyone necroing the thread, all that has to be done is a solution to this problem is found. Then nobody will post the immense frustration I have after reading all the replies that there is no way to fix this.

[Preechr]

If its a game-breaking situation for you, turn on dev mode and force recruit the refugee. We won't tell anyone.

When you rescue someone that's not affiliated with a faction, they have a high chance to join, but that's not a certainty. Its a game mechanic, so its either left purely to chance or someone could have coded in a bunch of conditional statements that modify that base chance. Given that the game was built around modding, adding in vanilla conditions would be just another thing a future modder would have to factor in for, making it all even more complicated.

RimWorld generally handles these things with simple percentage chance rolls, leaving it up to modders to complicate stuff if enough players think that's not good enough. KISS principle. Always best. You always have the option of simply fixing it yourself as well.

[TwoTonGamer]

Vanilla behavior for 'rescued' (not 'captured') non-colonist pawns on the map:

They are rescued to a non-prisoner bed or non-prisoner medical area.
They are treated and fed by the colony.
When they recover sufficiently they leave the map on their own volition or freely join the colony.

This happens every time in my playthroughs with space refugees, visiting traders that become downed on my map, etc...


If you are seeing different behavior, I would wait longer and see if they eventually leave. Sometimes they do stay a few days before leaving (maybe to see if they want to join or not). If you are certain they will not leave, I would suspect a mod is causing this hiccup as I haven't seen this in my (mostly) vanilla playthroughs.
(if you want to just take care of it, without mod troubleshooting, I would arrest them and then choose 'release', see if that fixes it and gets them out of your base).


I remember many years ago, on one of the builds in beta, that the 'rescues' had a hard time pathing off the map. We had to open doors for them and make a very clear, unobstructed path for them to find the way out of our bases. They would also step on traps and kill/down themselves.

That particular problem from four years ago in beta was fixed and I have not seen that behavior since, although I do remember it and it certainly was a problem at the time.


Edit: Oh, I did have a mod related 'rescue' problem, myself, recently. It was regarding the 'Hospitality' mod and the 'rescued' pawn decided to become a 'guest' on their own even though I was not accepting guests at my new colony yet and didn't even have any 'guest' beds. After being rescued they spent about a week with me as a guest and then left a bad review of my 'hotel' when they left. But, that is a mod issue and not vanilla behavior.

[Horagen81]

that reminds me the mountain maps with caverns tend to have a pathing problems for caravans.
Perhaps it is something similar ?