How do you keep your colony from having too many people?

[Jaggid Edje]

I've always had a problem in Rimworld with keeping my population in check. The game just seems to love to throw "join" type quests/events at me, no matter how large the colony is and I have trouble saying no. It's just compounded now with the whole making-babies thing.

I do put pawns I really don't want to keep on trial and then banish them, sometimes I even get rid of them by means that give a mood penalty to everyone else. But even with that culling, the colony just grows and grows.

I'm just curious about 2 things:
1. What kind of parameters do you use to determine if you will keep a pawn or not? (Maybe I'm not being picky enough)
2. What other methods do you use to get rid of unwanted pawns, besides the standard banishment and sending out on a caravan to the far side of the world with no food, etc.?

Also, kids...how the heck do I get rid of those without feeling bad about it. I terminate pregnancies with a surgeon, often...but some slip through due to my lack of diligence. More than I'd like.

[VitaKaninen]

I am very picky when I choose colonists, and I have not played with Biotech yet.

First, I need to have a job in mind for them, and then I choose what skills and traits I want them to have, and then I need to wait for that pawn to wander onto my map.

I will turn down 500-2,000 pawns before I choose one that fits my needs. If I hire one that is sub-optimal as a temp pawn, I have no problems kicking them out later on when a better replacement comes along.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Born and raised colonists are consistently some of the best colonists you can get in the game. Those are the ones you should be keeping (if you have the infrastructure for it anyways).

As for population control...it sounds like you're doing too good of a job keeping them alive during raids. Consider raising the difficulty or sending some of them off on more dangerous tasks on the world map.

[MadArtillery]

For the most part without any prisoner recruitment my colonies usually stay pretty manageable. I have VE Outposts installed just in case I start feeling overwhelmed with colonist count I can send them out to do minor tasks and handle themselves. Still gotta deal with their raids but don't need to think about them aside from that. Just don't use the crafting outpost, that one is way overtuned.

[Nuggz]

If you use mods, maybe check into Vanilla Expanded Outposts. You can send off pawns to set up a outpost on the world map, and will periodically send materials (depending on the outpost type). They won't be in your colony bar, and don't need any specific support though you should still outfit at least 1 pawn with protection as raids can happen on the outpost, but it will only match the outpost wealth so chances are, it will be a single tribal. You can also send children along where they do grow as normal, but won't get learning so they will end up with limited growth opportunities at milestones. It's a handy way to reduce numbers at your main settlement, and pawns in outposts can be removed at anytime, or added to.

[x]

I "adquire" people in different ways.

- Local production (I don't think I need to explain). In this case we can choose a lot of options while they are growing up.
- Refugees that are staying with you and want to join. Basically we can choose if we want to keep or not.
- Quest related colonists (escapees and other people). A lot of times we don't get to see who we are hiring, including downed transport pods (both neutrals and enemies, but neutrals they choose to join or not and prisoners you can arrest and then chose what to do). We can always let them die and not bother at all.

And last but not least (with a few mods), this is my "basic" setup:

- Gather all the corpses of downed enemies in a big ass walk in fridge with a crematorium
- Have a look at the characteristics of them all and "forbid" the ones I want to keep, then cremate all the others. My crematorium is set to burn human corpses forever (within a radius) so I just turn it on and off.
- Use ressurector mech serum to revive the bastards.
- Imprison, convert and recruit.

If you can have enough luciferium and advanced components, you can craft ressurector serum quite fast (but at a huge cost of parts and research, so mostly later game). It takes a lot of luciferium and advanced componets. Medicine is rather easy to have and so is plasteel.
When reanimating bodies (reminds me of the movie Unirversal Soldier) I just choose the ones with good personality traits and skills I want.

As to limit your population, you should sterilize your people. Since I've been playing modded for so long, I can't recall if sterilization procedures are vanilla of mods. But a quick snip snip and shop's closed.
You can trial and banish as you said before, sell to slavery, hack off for meat or, if you are advanced enough, send them off on a ship.
You can also send them on suicide missions. Sure, everyone will be unhappy someone died, but you didn't actually execute anyone, did you?

As a bonus, I have various medical and surgery mods so I just keep rejuvenating my people to their late teens (unfortunately I don't think there is an auto surgery mod so I need to manually rejuvenate them at 10% at a time).

I also have medpods (they need a lot or research and getting the isolenear core or something can be tricky as it's trader only. They use a lot of energy.

With the ressurector serum I can always revive some poor colonist that get's killed in an attack. And they are good as new quite fast.

[pizzabandit]

I recently started up a new run and diving deep into the biotech stuff. I started with 2 mechinators. I have been rejecting nearly all join requests and do not convert prisoners. I allowed one random join once and he turned on me, so I kept him prisoner for a long time then made him a ghoul to guard my children. I have only accepted a couple of other outsiders for my children who grew up and needed spouses that weren't related. We aren't savages after all and don't do inbreeding. To keep my pop from growing too fast, I gave all of my women bionic wombs so I can turn on and off birth control at will. I have a very small population so far, but they are all elite. Also I have a small ghoul pack to deal with invaders. Working on gene stuff now to help with the feeding issues. now my ghouls don't need to eat twice their weight each day.

tl;dr
You don't have to accept every join request. I reject 99% of them and breed my own children. Also have a large collection of gene banks and now genetically altering all of my colonists into terminators. Also bionic birth control.

[Holttem]

Originally posted by x:

I "adquire" people in different ways.

- Local production (I don't think I need to explain). In this case we can choose a lot of options while they are growing up.
- Refugees that are staying with you and want to join. Basically we can choose if we want to keep or not.
- Quest related colonists (escapees and other people). A lot of times we don't get to see who we are hiring, including downed transport pods (both neutrals and enemies, but neutrals they choose to join or not and prisoners you can arrest and then chose what to do). We can always let them die and not bother at all.

And last but not least (with a few mods), this is my "basic" setup:

- Gather all the corpses of downed enemies in a big ass walk in fridge with a crematorium
- Have a look at the characteristics of them all and "forbid" the ones I want to keep, then cremate all the others. My crematorium is set to burn human corpses forever (within a radius) so I just turn it on and off.
- Use ressurector mech serum to revive the bastards.
- Imprison, convert and recruit.

If you can have enough luciferium and advanced components, you can craft ressurector serum quite fast (but at a huge cost of parts and research, so mostly later game). It takes a lot of luciferium and advanced componets. Medicine is rather easy to have and so is plasteel.
When reanimating bodies (reminds me of the movie Unirversal Soldier) I just choose the ones with good personality traits and skills I want.

As to limit your population, you should sterilize your people. Since I've been playing modded for so long, I can't recall if sterilization procedures are vanilla of mods. But a quick snip snip and shop's closed.
You can trial and banish as you said before, sell to slavery, hack off for meat or, if you are advanced enough, send them off on a ship.
You can also send them on suicide missions. Sure, everyone will be unhappy someone died, but you didn't actually execute anyone, did you?

As a bonus, I have various medical and surgery mods so I just keep rejuvenating my people to their late teens (unfortunately I don't think there is an auto surgery mod so I need to manually rejuvenate them at 10% at a time).

I also have medpods (they need a lot or research and getting the isolenear core or something can be tricky as it's trader only. They use a lot of energy.

With the ressurector serum I can always revive some poor colonist that get's killed in an attack. And they are good as new quite fast.

Can you craft resurector mech serum??

[verymulch]

Originally posted by Holttem:

Can you craft resurector mech serum??

No, they're only from quest rewards and possibly ancient danger loot. If you're lucky, you can amass quite a few.

[Gal Kraft]

Originally posted by Holttem:

Can you craft resurector mech serum??

I suppose technically there's a case for crafting say 50 burkas for a couple healer mech serums. But probably not what you meant.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

I have VE Outposts installed just in case I start feeling overwhelmed with colonist count I can send them out to do minor tasks and handle themselves.

Originally posted by NuggZ:

If you use mods, maybe check into Vanilla Expanded Outposts.

Thank you both for this suggestion. I had subscribed to that mod a few weeks ago, but haven't enabled it yet. Was thinking of waiting until I start a new playthrough rather than add it mid-save.

I'm going to keep it in mind and maybe enable it in this playthrough if the growth continues. I'm on year 12 of the playthrough and have 21 pawns (8 of which are pawns that were born natively, and 2 more were children that joined as part of quests...I just can't bear to part with the pawns I raised.)

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by pizzabandit:

To keep my pop from growing too fast, I gave all of my women bionic wombs so I can turn on and off birth control at will. .

Wait, that's a thing??
I have super-slow research in this playthrough, but I did just finish bionic research a few days ago. I'll have to check that out!

I already sterilized most of my adult colony but I have a half dozen children that will be eligible once grown.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Originally posted by pizzabandit:

To keep my pop from growing too fast, I gave all of my women bionic wombs so I can turn on and off birth control at will. .

Wait, that's a thing??
I have super-slow research in this playthrough, but I did just finish bionic research a few days ago. I'll have to check that out!

I already sterilized most of my adult colony but I have a half dozen children that will be eligible once grown.

Pretty sure that is a mod. A lot of the time people say this sort of thing not even realizing it's some mod thing or are simply too lazy to mention the mod even if they know it is.

[Veylox]

The game definitely doesn't throw any type of "join" event at me, and even when it happens there's an option to refuse. Meaning you don't have to do anything specific to not grow your colony. Just don't accept the opportunity to grow it.

1) I'll keep a pawn if it has my ideology from the get-go, meaning I almost exclusively recruit through rituals. Then I look at traits first. If he has any of the really good traits (I'm usually looking for sanguine and tough primarily, ascetic if I want a royal), no mood negative one, with at least one useful passion, and is capable of violence, I'll keep him.

2) Banish banish banish. You could always force a pawn to be guilty and execute him too, but i'm too lazy to do that. Since I recruit through rituals and you need a successful ritual to recruit a useless pawn, banish never gives a mood debuff. It gives a minus 3 for 7 days that is ALWAYS accompanied by more than +3 for 7 days from the ritual.

The easiest way to get rid of children is to go Inhuman. Inhuman pawns don't care about most relationships, so their children dying is fine

[Elementium]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

I've always had a problem in Rimworld with keeping my population in check. The game just seems to love to throw "join" type quests/events at me, no matter how large the colony is and I have trouble saying no. It's just compounded now with the whole making-babies thing.

I do put pawns I really don't want to keep on trial and then banish them, sometimes I even get rid of them by means that give a mood penalty to everyone else. But even with that culling, the colony just grows and grows.

I'm just curious about 2 things:
1. What kind of parameters do you use to determine if you will keep a pawn or not? (Maybe I'm not being picky enough)
2. What other methods do you use to get rid of unwanted pawns, besides the standard banishment and sending out on a caravan to the far side of the world with no food, etc.?

Also, kids...how the heck do I get rid of those without feeling bad about it. I terminate pregnancies with a surgeon, often...but some slip through due to my lack of diligence. More than I'd like.

1. if they fit into those role :
good worker (hard worker, neurotic, passionnate in their work so on)
good combatant (tought, masochist, ect)

any mood bonus, speed bonus, reduced need are welcomed

avoiding pyroman, gourmand, chemical interrest, mood malus as they tend to break at the wrong time

also with ideology active, some are easier to convert other harder, so i can reject some of the previous good colonist that would take way too long to convert to a compatible ideology to my gameplay
Biotech can help to make you more picky as children are quite easy to nurture into excellent people if you have good enought security and social people

2.
aside from banishment, meat shield, even though when available i use bots and animals for that.
I guess i could try to make them giving up, as long as they don't have a precious equipemnt on them

[Meteorific]

Easy. The bad pawns are in front when the fighting happens. The problems sort themselves out.