good ways to actually succeed on crashlanded scenario?

[null]

i've honestly only ever gotten a successful base going ONCE on crashlanded, and that was with phoebe chillax on community builder with an ideology that gave me high yields on everything

its just super hard for me trying to manage base-building, hunting, cooking, farming, mining, research, etc on just 3 people while also trying to get more people thru kidnapping and celebration chances

[Bosh]

Focus on building a mostly self-sufficient base long before you try force-recruiting more people. Build some crappy shacks, a storage area, a clean & floored area for cooking if you're not using nutrient paste and maybe an area for growing crops. When your food supply is stable then you can focus on making a proper base.

[HunterSilver]

This is a longer post, so I'll try to break it into easy to read sections. There are 4 things you need to secure to maintain a colony: Happiness, Health, Food, and Security.

1) For Happiness setup bedrooms, a rec room, a dining room, and some recreational structures like chess and horseshoes. You can combine the dining room and rec room if you'd like. Floor them all to improve quality, even cheap crappy cement is infinitely better than dirt as it reduces filth just by being floored and reduces filth buildup. Keep some drugs on the side for emergencies such as alcohol, smokeleaf, and yayo. Have colonists take drugs only if their happiness drops below 35. It's better to be high than to have a mental break.

2) For Health setup a simple hospital room with enough beds for your colonists and with medicine stocked in it. Floor it and keep it clean. Unclean hospitals will lead to worse outcomes and constant infections. Infections will kill colonists and even when they don't they lead to days of bedrest both from fighting the infection and recovering after the infection.

3) Food is primarily from hunting, farming, and cooking. If you have a decent chef then set them up making Simple Meals. If you have no chef, setup a nutripaste dispenser and hoppers to feed it. Cooking/Nutripaste nearly doubles the nutritional value of food (1.8x more than raw ingredients). Try to only grow/hunt enough food to keep your colonists fed for a few days at a time. Trying to stockpile tons of food increases raid difficulty and requires lots of dedicated infrastructure to keep it stored. Make sure the kitchen is separate from other crafting stations (even the butcher's station) in a floored room where it's kept clean. Dirty kitchens lead to food poisoning which will ruin your colony.

4) For security you mostly need crafters building weapons and armor. That's basically it. Plasteel for bladed weapons such as swords, uranium for blunt weapons like maces, steel/components for guns, and the best armor you can stick people in such as Flak jackets and plasteel flak helmets.

Minimize the number of jobs everyone does and leave things neglected until you can recruit more people. Your builder should just be building. Your farmer should just be farming and cutting trees. Your researcher should just be researching. If that means you don't have a chef, that sucks, you should recruit one asap. If you spread everyone thin, nothing gets done properly, everything gets done slowly, and you get overwhelmed.

If you tell your builder to hunt and cook and research and craft, they will do maybe 1 of those things and the other 3 will never get done anyway.

[Wraith_Magus]

You're not really saying what your troubles are, so it's hard to troubleshoot them. Are you having trouble feeding your colonists? With raids killing your colonists? Diseases killing them?

In the very early game, you'll need to just make "good enough" stuff. In the long term, I want to have every wall be made of proper fireproof stone, but in the first couple weeks, wood is good enough. Corn is a more efficient crop overall, but rice yields quicker returns, and even that will take a week or so to grow, so just foraging for berries is "good enough." You'll run out of foragable material pretty quickly if you don't grow crops in all but maybe jungle biomes, but you need to survive right now "good enough" to worry about the long term.

You definitely want a dedicated hospital like HunterSilver is talking about in the long term, but until you can get specialized equipment like sterile floors, there isn't really a notable difference between a bed marked as someone's bedroom and a bed that's marked as a hospital. The important part is whether it's clean or not, and you can just order someone to prioritize cleaning a bedroom just fine. Speaking of which, while a lot of people prefer an "omniroom" with barracks sleeping, private bedrooms are better in the long haul, but again, just slapping together some shelter and having everyone bunk together is "good enough" for your first few days.

In fact, a good trick for starting out is to just look for those "ruins" where there's some stone walls and half-destroyed floors. If you're not mining your base out of a mountain, that's free pre-built construction materials! Just build wooden walls and a door to box in a space in the ruins, and you cut out a lot of work for a "good enough" shelter on your first day. In my current game where I did dig into a mountain, my initial base was a small crevice/valley that had only a few tiles of walkway into, which I built a dozen tiles of wall to close off and have my first chunk of base.

So far as defenses go, make sure you're preparing a defensible location. Walls are better protection than sandbags, but their protection stacks, so put a tile of wall and then a couple tiles of sandbags, and your pawn can stand behind the wall and peek out to shoot. Against shooting enemies, that's a great defense, it'll cut the amount of damage you take down to ~1/9th of what you'd take standing in the open. Against melee enemies, try to shoot them as they come in, but don't just stand there and let your gunners get shivved like a sucker. Pay attention to how long the recovery time is after firing weapons (especially weapons like bolt-action rifles) and don't try to get "one more shot off", just run when the enemy comes within 12 tiles or so. Against a melee target, you can have one pawn run away drawing the enemy's attention while another shoots. Pay attention to the target of the enemy, and switch who's running and who's shooting. Your melee pawns should be the pawns with the best armor, and they should be ready to dive in and take the hits for the gunners. If a melee pawn is stopping the enemy melee, your gunners can "fire over their shoulder" to get easy hits without fear of friendly fire. Avoid being swarmed at all costs, as this is a game where even just 10 duck-sized horses always beat a horse-sized duck. Have your pawns stand behind a door set to being held open or another chokepoint that you have built specifically to narrow the enemy approach, and let the enemy come to you one-by-one in a position where your gunners can shoot over the shoulder of the melees. Doors have the added advantage of being potentially closeable and you can just drag a melee pawn that gets downed back to safety behind more doors so you can do some emergency treatment.

Remember that you don't always have to stand and fight, and just declaring a caravan with your pawns and a couple items (like food) they can grab in a real hurry is a valid option. There are mods like Caravan Formation Improvements that let you set where your caravan leaves the map (and I will never play the game without it again), but if not, you can cancel and reform a caravan if they're going in a stupid direction like right at a raid. Abandon your original colony if you have to and settle a new base. You already started from nothing, you can start from nothing again.

You should have an end goal in mind, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get things stable first, then worry about making things that work long-term.

[Stealthkibbler]

A large part of the difficulty in the game is MOOD and SECURITY

your internal threats will come from colonist mood which gets harder with wealth while external threats will be raids, weather events, diseases, etc.

Following a lot of advice from others here will get you far, a fun thing you can do is have your Rec room, dining room and ideaology ritual room all be the same room.

personally i value ideaologies that give mood bonuses over work speed and yields, raider with raiding required is a big one for me because you can raid the little camps on the map for a +16 mood boost for all your pawns, if you have biotech you can make a genepack with +10 mood, then you're getting +5 from rec room, +5 from dining, +5 from fine meals, pawns also get a passive mood boost from having a good bedroom and a temporary boost everytime they sleep in it.

This entire games ebb and flow is the mood system, conquer that and everything else is a stepping stone into greater things.

[null]

i've never really had a problem with recreation (i just build a horseshoes thing and a chess table then its fine), my only mood problem is the dreaded "ate without a table" and the prisoners i didnt think to convert having random ideology debuffs i dont wanna fulfill (like raiding when only two of my colonists can shoot any good)

[Melkor]

Don’t keep it on 3x speed, slow down and focus on food

[Veylox]

Early on, if you have too much on your plate, remove the non-essentials. You have plenty of food on crashlanded so forget hunting, start planting right away and never do hunting on any pawn. Even if you're somehow starving drafting your pawns to kill animals is better than hunting. Just look at any hunter for a couple minutes and you'll quickly realize they spend their entire day running around shooting into the void killing absolutely nothing. If nothing gets done, blame hunters.

You can forget mining as well, you have more than enough steel on crashlanded to get a proper base running before running out, so keep that for later, you can progressively dig veins when you start needing them. Keeps your wealth lower too.

Focus on food, mood, increasing population, and having proper defenses. Even research can be sidelined early on until you're stabilized. Getting 3 more pawns means you'll get to do twice as much, colonies run much better with higher population. A good alternative is to invest in a mechanitor early on, since mechs can take care of a lot of essential jobs without being as demanding as pawns.

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by null:

i've never really had a problem with recreation (i just build a horseshoes thing and a chess table then its fine), my only mood problem is the dreaded "ate without a table" and the prisoners i didnt think to convert having random ideology debuffs i dont wanna fulfill (like raiding when only two of my colonists can shoot any good)

Well, for a start, you should only recruit people who can contribute to your base's defense. If a prisoner doesn't have a passion in shooting or melee, I'll release them (or if you're more mercenary, involuntary organ donation). If they have a passion but low skill, that's what ordering hunting is for, and if they have low skill in melee, tell them to punch some animals and then have people treat them without using medicine - that'll train your medical, too. Raids scale based in part on your wealth and how many colonists and combat-capable animals you have. Colonists that can't fight are deadweight, especially if they're also a liability because of mood.

Second, go to your prisoner's prisoner tab. Click "convert". Do not start recruiting until they're converted. Converting them as a prisoner is much easier than converting them when they're part of your colony.

Third, mouse over your colonist's recreation bar. It'll say how many types of recreation you need for that pawn. Note that any ideoligion leader or nobility pawns have higher demands and often need a couple more recreation types. Horseshoes and a chess table won't cut it past the earliest parts of the game. You should try to get a flatscreen or holoscreen TV and put it in your hospital facing the hospital beds with an armchair also in the area that's affected. (Pawns in hospitals are incapable of any recreation other than watching television and being visited by other pawns.) Poker tables and billiards tables are better versions of chess and horseshoes, giving a faster filling of recreation so the pawns both spend less time on breaks and also get less bored of the same activities. You should also buy a telescope as soon as you can and also buy books, preferably of good or better quality. You'll always have a few ways to have "solitary recreation" and "social interaction" but you'll eventually need as many as 7 different recreation types to fulfill.

Chemical recreation like beer is a LIFELINE, especially when you have to keep soldiers at the front or on a caravan to raid some enemy base where there are no other easy recreation methods. Bring a dozen beers with you (you can set beers to be carried at all times in the "assign" tab under drug policies, and put beers, psychite teas, and maybe some smokeleaf joints in every caravan) and any time someone gets into a break risk, have them chug a bottle to take the edge off. Harder drugs like go-juice can be useful in emergencies (they basically make your pawn immune to pain so they never go down until they're dead, which in a do-or-die moment for your colony, may mean death or death but taking more enemies with them) but don't use those casually. Some mods like Vanilla Brewing Expanded have additional options, and taking tea (which is non-addictive, so you can mainline that stuff for the "fancied a cuppa" mood bonus 24/7 until their bladder explodes) and pumpkin spice coffees on any kind of trip is mandatory prep for me. (Also, banish all teatotalers - who oddly, can't even drink tea, even though that's supposed to be what they totally subsist on! - and seek out chemical interest. Free mood bonuses just for having beer around!)

Also, don't forget about other mood impacts like having an impressive dining room/rec room/bedroom. Making individual bedrooms (besides double beds for couples) is a straight +4 or +5 to mood for a same-impressiveness room, and getting a private bedroom to slightly impressive is easier than getting an omniroom to wondrously impressive. Otherwise, have one big room that has all your dining, workshops, and recreation stuff inside (don't have outdoors recreation if you can help it), and put down some sculptures when you can to make it beautiful to look at so that you give pawns working and playing there a huge boost to their beauty. This gives a hefty mood bonus by itself and also, beauty goes down relatively slowly when they're forced to work in ugly environments like dark areas they're mining out or bloody warzones.

"Ate without table" happens either because your pawns were more than 50 tiles away from the nearest table and chair, or else because everyone wanted to eat at the same time and there weren't enough chairs for them. You should try to keep your dining area in a central location, and if you can't avoid pawns having to go someplace a fair distance away (like mining out a distant ore vein), set up some disposable tables and chairs and maybe a shelf with some rations beforehand. Note that raiders love to burn this stuff, so you shouldn't put anything you can't afford to lose out there.

[Cobretti]

You need to prioritise, simple as that. The harder the game gets, the more decisions you make about prioritising.

There are people that play tribal naked brutality starting with 1 person on ice sheet, they wouldn't even think about defences, research, farming or anything else initially because 1st they are trying not to die from cold within the first 5 minutes and 2nd they are trying not to die from starving within the next 5 minutes and once those things are under control, they can start to think about everything else in order of priority. I don't setup farming until year 2 or 3 in my games, research is also pretty late on.