How can I get more colonists?

[Stellar]

Hello, new player here. How can I get more colonists? I'm 3/4 the way through my first year and so far no one has joined my colony but one person died. I want to grow this thing and quickly, I could use about 6 or 7 people.

[Narrowmind]

I feel it can be done fastest without nodding if you use Randy Random..

[Jigain]

The intended main way to get new pawns is to be raided, capture raiders that don't immediately die, then convince them to join you.

[Camous]

covert raiders that you capture using a prisoner bed, rescue colonist from space pod crash or complete quest that grant a colonist as a reward. colonist will also join randomly but this is down to chance. note that all space pod crash can yield a colonist who can't join as they are already in a faction and quest are time delayed, for colonist you captured from a raid pick your colonist with the highest social and assign to wardening as this speed up the recruitment time. to recruit a prisoner all you have to do is select recruit or reduce resistance in their prisoner tab within the colonist action selection

[Stellar]

Ok. Do I need to give them a luxurious prisoner's cell?

[Narrowmind]

Need is a strong word. It will hurry your acquisition, because the nicer the circumstances, the faster they may see things your way. But if you can't do it, you can't do it. It's not a big deal, though.

[VoiD]

The game sends you more opportunities to capture living enemies, buy slaves, random joining events, etc when your colony is running low on people, and does the opposite when you get crowded.

That being said there are ways to guarantee you'll get colonists, good ones too.

By default every time you down an enemy there's a chance that it will just die imediatelly, even if the wound isn't fatal, but, there is this one item called psychic shock lance, which you can often obtain from traders but more easily from sending some caravans to friendly higher-tech towns (as in, not tribes) from time to time, they are a bit expensive, almost 1k each depending on your pawn's social skills and difficulty settings, and they are consumables, you can cast them 2x, then you'll have to use another.

What it does it imediatelly incapacitates a target, so it will never die, it's by far the best way to hunt for perfect colonists with great traits like industrious, tough, neurotic (if you can handle the negative break chance), etc...

There is a downside that it might damage their brain on the process, it doesn't happen often, but it can happen, if it does happen then you'll have a few choices.

Either you think that pawn is too great to go to waste, so you can try to get a healer serum (is it a DLC item?) to cure it's brain scar, or you can inject it with Luciferim and manage to secure a supply (trading) of that thing so that it can take one every 5~6 days, else it will go berserk and then die. Luciferium gives a lot of bonuses to every area and can heal permanent damage scars, like brain scars, over time, but there is no cure for it's addiction.

Once you get an economy going, manufacturing some items (drugs, clothes with a skilled crafter, etc...) you'll be able to send out constant caravans to fill up on luci and lances, towns also tend to have some great stuff like bionic parts and high tech gear too, so you might find some stuff that can help with your gameplay from time to time.

But yeah, if you don't want to deal with any of that then I guess it's all about waiting to see what the game throws at you.

[VoiD]

Oh, and if they get a brain scar there's also a chance they turn into a savant, meaning they will lose all social skills and won't be able to talk anymore, but they will turn into extremely fast workers instead, which is great. The trait remains even if you heal their brain.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by VoiD:

The game sends you more opportunities to capture living enemies, buy slaves, random joining events, etc when your colony is running low on people, and does the opposite when you get crowded.

The game does not do the opposite when you get crowded. It just stops doing the former.

I don't know if you're misinformed or if you meant to say the game (specifically, the storyteller) stops sending you easy pawns, but the way you wrote it propagates one of the longest lived myths surrounding this game - that the more pawns you have, the more the game actively tries to kill them.

[Bullwinkle]

The game has certain EVENTS which can give you opportunities at more colonists, such as when a transport pod drops from the sky. You might also get a quest to go rescue someone and they will join if you do the quest. The frequency of these events, quests, etc can be adjusted using the Scenario Editor, but that only works before the start of the game. But you can change the settings in the middle of a game if you use the mod, Scenario Editor. EDIT I mean Scenario Ammender

[The Knowledge Seeker]

Originally posted by VoiD:

The game sends you more opportunities... [snip]

That being said there are ways to guarantee you'll get colonists, good ones too.... [snip]

Thank you for writing this all out and posting it. I have a new colony going (vanilla with both DLC's) and my 3 starting female pawns are doing a fantastic job working together and getting along. Eventually I will want to expand them... but I want to pick who I want.

Now... for those that auto join and I don't like them... how would one go about getting rid of them with as little penalty as possible?

[Narrowmind]

Banishment?

[Bullwinkle]

Personally I don't allow auto joins, but yeah, banish them or send them on a caravan naked and with no food to somewhere very very far away. Or you can use dev mode and just remove them.

[The Knowledge Seeker]

Thank you, both, for your answers :)

[Narrowmind]

The game is open to us and offers a lot of sand in the box. Enjoy it!

[failsafe]

My main source for coloonists is from raids. I try to capture wounded attackers and then recruit them. It certainly works better later, when there are enough resources. It is good to have prison cells with temperature regulation and relatively neat, though I just put there a bed, table and lamp, so no luxuries. It takes time to recruit a raider, but later he becomes a standard member of the group.

Transport pod crashes are little more problematic - in this game I couldn't save a single person, since they die right after being placed in the bed or even sooner.

In other game I've managed to buy some slaves but in this one I never had chance to do this, since traders don't offer slaves.

Once per a while I get asked to accept person from outside willing to join my group, but this seems rare.

In long run I believe that defending from raids is most efficient way.