Any tips for fully under mountain base? Pen animals, power generation, the works.

[SPARKEY]

TL:DR. Want advice on how to farm meat/food and produce power fully underground, with minimal mods.

So I saw the latest update to Geological Landforms and decided to try one of the new cave land forms, but while looking at them I thought they would be quite difficult mid to late game.
Not counting the Cave Entrance which is basically just half/half, the other cave maps have limited open air for plant and animal farms, or for power generation by solar & wind.

Google hasn't really been much help as what I found can be condensed into 'insect spawners', 'fungus farms', 'room size 11x11 max', and 'eat your enemies'. I'm not averse to the whole 'eat your enemies' thing, but I have been eyeing the Hospitality mod, and I think visitors would want to eat something other than insect and 'long pig'.

Any tips for a 450hr noob?

[Astasia]

If you have ideology and go with the undergrounder meme it's pretty trivial these days. Grow lots of nutrifungus and convert the excess into chemfuel to power your base with chemfuel generators. If you don't have that or don't want to use that meme, then there's an extra step of getting hydroponics and sunlamps then growing rice instead, but still convert the excess into chemfuel and power your base with it. The sunlamp/hydroponic rice setup into chemfuel is very net positive power, so you can feed your colony and power your base that way, with spare power for some cotton/healroot/drug hydroponics.

Meat/animals aren't necessary, you can make fine/lavish vegetarian meals with nutrifungus or rice. Butchering raiders is a strong option though, allowing you to grow less crops, you can eat the meat or use it for chemfuel. Keeping animals is possible, but grazing is generally out of the question. You will probably have to grow food for them in another room then store it on a shelf in the animal room. Boomalopes are useful, saving some effort in chemfuel conversion and being more efficient overall, but not necessary.

You will end up with a lot of insect meat from infestations, to again eat or turn into chemfuel. So basically food and power aren't going to be an issue at all. The main "difficulty" is digging out your base to begin with, and making sure you design it in a way that makes infestations easy to clear.

[baddoggs]

Lots of bugspray....
I tunnel frequently and the most consistent issue for me is
Hives.. You will need basic turrets and fairly decent firearms.

[liosalpha]

Play whats fun for you thou, with a custom senario you can disable many features including the investations or force the whole world in to being in to long pig.
Maybe ad some added difficulty too, there is plenty to pick from.

On the side, being in a map with little open air pockets make those places also hotspots for lightning, droppods, clusters and metiorites etc.
having a little green entrance to your map will make that place a gathering for all animals, making that place starved of anything vegative and a general bloodbath with 2 or more carnivores.
The game will still try to populate the map if it where one open plain, so meat is rather easy (on some what temperate biome,)

[sooshon]

I dunno how viable it is nowadays and with all the DLC stuff, and I haven't played in a while and am new to all this stuff, but I used to have fun in 1.0 making "deepfrozen" mountain bases, where you permanently cool your whole base to below insect spawn temperature. If the temperature is below 4F insects will never spawn, so you can live in a mountain being completely safe from both droppods and insect hives. There are of course several really big drawbacks: you would need to plant food outside because it is would be too cold to grow plants, all your manufacturing productivity would take a big hit due to productivity temperature penalties at workbenches, some restrictions on gear since you need to make sure colonists are warm enough, pretty much always having the "slept in the cold" mood debuff. The big plus is that you can pretty much have a guaranteed single entry that you can defend well and be guaranteed never to have any danger from elsewhere, everyone on the inside will always be safe. Again, not sure how this plays out in today's Rimworld version since foodgrowing in caves and cave-life in general has been completely reworked and I haven't touched those particular newer mechanics yet, but it used to be really fun trying to play this way. If anything, there might be even more viable options to do this with a particular custom xenotype.

[SievertChaser]

Dedicated construction materials are replaced with smoothing walls and floors; you will be swimming in excess stone blocks. Also, you need to smoothen walls to hide conduits under them.

[eMYNOCK]

indoors 24/7, no natural light, fungi everywere, maybe bugs to supplement the fungi... delicious nutrient paste made out of fungi and bugs... that does sound awefully familiar to me...

all you need is to be a transhumanist-tunneler with the urge to sing diggy hole all day...
or you might just be a gamer... you decide.

seriously, who needs to raise chicken or cattle when the meat and jelly shows up on its own eventually?
fungus needs no light and everything that does (devilstrand aside) grows much faster in a hydrophonics basin anyhow.

the outside world is goind to kill your colonists no matter what... may as well cozy up in a mountain and and the environment can do what ever it wants... to someone else... most of the time.

[baddoggs]

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

indoors 24/7, no natural light, fungi everywere, maybe bugs to supplement the fungi... delicious nutrient paste made out of fungi and bugs... that does sound awefully familiar to me...

all you need is to be a transhumanist-tunneler with the urge to sing diggy hole all day...
or you might just be a gamer... you decide.

seriously, who needs to raise chicken or cattle when the meat and jelly shows up on its own eventually?
fungus needs no light and everything that does (devilstrand aside) grows much faster in a hydrophonics basin anyhow.

the outside world is goind to kill your colonists no matter what... may as well cozy up in a mountain and and the environment can do what ever it wants... to someone else... most of the time.

You have heard of hydroponics?? Right? Electric lights are a "thing" as well...

[Malthar]

Originally posted by baddoggs:

Originally posted by eMYNOCK:

indoors 24/7, no natural light, fungi everywere, maybe bugs to supplement the fungi... delicious nutrient paste made out of fungi and bugs... that does sound awefully familiar to me...

all you need is to be a transhumanist-tunneler with the urge to sing diggy hole all day...
or you might just be a gamer... you decide.

seriously, who needs to raise chicken or cattle when the meat and jelly shows up on its own eventually?
fungus needs no light and everything that does (devilstrand aside) grows much faster in a hydrophonics basin anyhow.

the outside world is goind to kill your colonists no matter what... may as well cozy up in a mountain and and the environment can do what ever it wants... to someone else... most of the time.

You have heard of hydroponics?? Right? Electric lights are a "thing" as well...
:lunar2019deadpanpig:

didja miss the "natural" part of "natural light" mate?

[eMYNOCK]

I am pretty sure i also explicitly mentioned hydroponics...

And not being able to grow devilstand in them.

[Burki from Turki]

you can be a funny man and use vanilla expanded outposts, recruit a bunch of people and make a hunting outpost for food, with like 6 people you can get 6000 meat per 15 days pair that up with a rice hydroponics and cook fine meals you will even get surplus food which you can gift to other factions and call them as military aid once you have allied them to help you during infestations