Control frustration

[vortex]

I've got issues with the priority system in this game. Specifically a mad animal made it to my colony to kill my pet because my colonists wouldn't attack it. I don't know what else to do, I set hunting priority to 1 and market it for hunts, but eating and chopping trees are more important to my colonists. Why isn't there a way to set a priority alert? Or if there is, the game isn't clear about it and it's not mentioned in the tutorial.

Edit: I figured out how to prioritize it. But really, why isn't this info in the tutorial?

[stevasaur]

For actual combat, you want to "draft" your colonists by hitting the "R" button by default while selecting the colonist(s) you want to control. That allows direct control (but the colonists cannot perform most non-combat actions, even ones that might be useful in combat like medicine or construction). While drafted, you can even manually attack targets by clicking on the button showing the colonist's weapon and then the target. This works on basically anything: predators hunting your pets, non-aggressive animals you want to focus-fire on, even walls and doors if for some reason you don't want to/can't deconstruct them.

[RCMidas]

All you had to do was select a colonist and right-click the critter to manually prioritise that animal, same as for any other task. Especially considering if you set hunting to priority 1 but they carried on chopping trees, you had them set to priority 1 also. Food and rest also takes a non-negotiable Zeroth class priority over mere tasks, and the only way out of that is to draft a colonist as if readying them for battle.

[Koba]

Originally posted by vortex:

I've got issues with the priority system in this game. Specifically a mad animal made it to my colony to kill my pet because my colonists wouldn't attack it. I don't know what else to do, I set hunting priority to 1 and market it for hunts, but eating and chopping trees are more important to my colonists. Why isn't there a way to set a priority alert? Or if there is, the game isn't clear about it and it's not mentioned in the tutorial.

Priority works from your manually input values and a fixed priority rate starting left to right.

If you put priority 1 to hunt but you also add 1 to bed rest and your pawn have a small bruise, he'll search for a bed to rest prior to hunting.

Personally, I rarely use priority 1 unless I really want to my pawn continuous work in something without I need to command him do priorize it manually.

[Nuggs]

I'm sure as you've said youve figured it out. But i'll leave some tips here anyway

So theres not really positivity when it comes to animals or controlling it at all when it says there is a "mad animal". It doesnt mean mad like its angry or in a bad mood because it didnt get a belly rub this morning lol. Mad as in its gone crazy and is out of control. So the only way of handling a mad animal is to either lock ur colonists inside for a day or so to doo indoor things until it becomes normal again over time. Or hunt it.

Hunting it is the easiest way but not safest way to deal with a mad animal. depending on what kind of animal it is. But at least if you kill it you wont need to hide your pawns inside. This can be done 2 ways. One by the way you tried to do it and 2 by manually drafting people to kill it.

If you try to hunt it with the priority system only you'll need to readjust peoples priorities. which is tedious to have to do every time an animal thats mad needs to be put down. Its much easier to just grab a pawn or 2 or 3 and just draft them and order it killed manually.

But if you insist on using priorities to do this, just remember priorities are done on the list of priorities from left to right and from highest priority to least. so if you have your hunting pawn also doing construction and medical, all set to 1, then that pawn will always do construction and medical first because they show up from left to right prior to hunting. So you would have to literally uncheck every other priority before hunting or set them to 2 -4 to get hunting always done first.

This is fine if you actually have a pawn you want to always do hunting first with but if you have no pawns youre interested in doing this with you'll have to mess with your priorities every single time you get a mad animal.

so my advice again would be to just manually draft people when you get a mad animal to kill it. its much easier to do. Also the tutorial may not explain the whole left to right thing. But it does when you check in manual priorities in one of the top corners of the box that contains the list of your pawns and all of their priorities. It will have arrows with one saying most importand and one saying less important so you know its a whole importance from left to right kind of thing. Can be a tad confusing for new players though.

[ichifish]

Originally posted by vortex:

I've got issues with the priority system in this game. Specifically a mad animal made it to my colony to kill my pet because my colonists wouldn't attack it. I don't know what else to do, I set hunting priority to 1 and market it for hunts, but eating and chopping trees are more important to my colonists. Why isn't there a way to set a priority alert? Or if there is, the game isn't clear about it and it's not mentioned in the tutorial.

Edit: I figured out how to prioritize it. But really, why isn't this info in the tutorial?

For better or worse, Rimworld expects you to learn things the hard way. This may be intentional (the game doesn’t prevent some “dumb”pawn behavior because you can find uses for it), an oversight (the smaller the development team the harder it is to notice issues that bug new players), or a combination of both.

Here are some other things things the game should probably tell you about but doesn’t:

1. It’s possible to remove support walls before removing roofs, and roof collapses can easily kill unarmored pawns.
2. It’s possible for pawns to zone-hop between two disconnected areas of the same zone, even when their path between the zones will get them killed.
3. It’s possible for pawns to die of starvation if you set the wrong food restriction.