Madman difficulty - ideas?

[Dallas]

Having played free play on easy (tourist) and medium (colonist) difficulty levels, i'm now attempting the hardest (madman) level and am interested to know others experiences of this.

I am finding that food is the main and constant issue, so from Sol1 there is no real time for base building, it's just constant exploration to keep up a supply of MRE's while hopefully getting enough tablets to unlock enough blueprints so that i can build a base somewhere and grow my own food.

So my main issue has been running out of MRE's while exploring for tablets (as most bases only seem to have one MRE). I know others have got through this issue, just interested in any tips you might have? thanks :)

[mazrados]

12 potatoes. You have 12 slots in single shelf. 12 potatoes per day is more then enough to survive some time. And eventually you get pumps so you can connect more wells. You'll also find more then enough food to survive until this point.

And I forgot that wells have internal storage so you don't need tanks. It's useful later when you need to expand so you have better buffer in case if you plant too much. It gives time to install more wells.

EDIT: You have 3 potatoes per plant (4 if you use incubator) so it's at least 36 potatoes from 1 shelf.. I'm not sure if per day, maybe it grows 2 days. Very fast anyway. Let's say you will need to eat 6 per day and it grows 3 days (faster for sure but let's assume that for the sake of argument) so you need 18 potatoes for food per full cycle and the rest is for seeds.

Easy - peasy I would say :)

[gagnedd]

You can currently cheese the game. I did. Medi kits only need 1 silicon to make. Make 50 or 60 at a time if you need. I went 2 days without water and over a week without food by just using a medi kit every time my health dropped near 0. Just keep making more medi kits and never let your health drop to 0. I was able to survive on no food, starving to death for over a week while I grew beetroot. Once I had some beatroot, I was able to eat just 1 per night before bed so I could at least sleep a few hours. A few days later, I had grown more beetroot, and eventually I had enough to eat 2, then 3 before bed so I could actually get a good night sleep. Eventually you have enough food that you never have to starve or ration again. The key, though, is to ration what food you do have, and use medi kits to keep you alive.

This is cheezy though, because what kind of kit could you create with a small amount of silicon that could keep you from starving to death? I consider it an exploit, but madman mode is so ridiculously hard and stacked against you, I was looking for any survival method that I could find!

[Dallas]

Originally posted by gagnedd:

You can currently cheese the game. I did. Medi kits only need 1 silicon to make. Make 50 or 60 at a time if you need. I went 2 days without water and over a week without food by just using a medi kit every time my health dropped near 0. Just keep making more medi kits and never let your health drop to 0. I was able to survive on no food, starving to death for over a week while I grew beetroot. Once I had some beatroot, I was able to eat just 1 per night before bed so I could at least sleep a few hours. A few days later, I had grown more beetroot, and eventually I had enough to eat 2, then 3 before bed so I could actually get a good night sleep. Eventually you have enough food that you never have to starve or ration again. The key, though, is to ration what food you do have, and use medi kits to keep you alive.

This is cheezy though, because what kind of kit could you create with a small amount of silicon that could keep you from starving to death? I consider it an exploit, but madman mode is so ridiculously hard and stacked against you, I was looking for any survival method that I could find!

I agree it's cheesy and an exploit, but i like the way you think!

[gagnedd]

Originally posted by Dallas:

Originally posted by Krapht:

Having played madman long enough to have all tablets and a couple of large domes, here are my tips
You start with one less bottle of everything so resource management will be more challenging and exploration more time constrained

Your #1 priority is getting water going. Don't remember if you start with enough materials to build a well, but you need it.
Then you need to get food going, which means that you need to rush a workshop with batteries to make potatoes grow. You start with a couple of days worth of food so exploring some nearby bases for food, materials (more important in madman) and tablets.
IIRC you don't start with a grinder so researching that and making it is going to be fairly high up on the todo list

Once you get situated there is not much of a difference between the campaign and madman. The start is rough, but then it evens out

I lucked out (I think) and got the sabatier blueprint fairly early so I skipped the CO2 scrubber (less power usage = less battery needed) and went straight for an additional well with sabatier for my personal oxygen and water needs. This way you can just click the connectors to refill, no need to fiddle with hoses or bottles. You only need a small solar to give it the extra power during the day, it doesn't need to run at night

What I did with my first batch of potatoes was to improve 12 seeds, plant those and make non-improved seeds of the remainder. Once grown I harvested the non-improved potatoes for food and repeated the seed process for the improved ones. This way I kept improving my potatoes while still having some to eat.

An important thing I noticed first with madman is that if you skip the incubator stage of potatoes, your potatoes will yield only 3 potatoes per plant instead of the normal 4, so don't skip the incubator

This is really helpful, thank you!

I failed i think because i didn't focus on growing my base food early enough and then ran out of MRE's from nearby bases.

I found that i didn't have enough pipe to build my well so had to make some (easy enough)

But i like your potato strategy a lot, i think this will be most helpful, and i'm going to try it again doing this.

Thanks again :)

Not sure what mad man you were referring to, but you don't even start with a blowtorch to build stuff with (nor the tech level to build one), and no seeds whatsoever (not even potato). You only have a jackhammer. You need to mine until you get a tech point, then use that to gain the blueprint to make a blowtorch. Then you make a blowtorch, and then you can build a well and solar panel to recharge the suit.

After that, you can visit the few surrounding bases, praying you get enough food (and hopefully some potato or beetroot seeds - I didn't find any till I had visited over 20 bases frustratingly). However, you may also want to mine more rock until you gain a tech point and the resources to make a grinder, so you can start grinding down a few things in bases as you look for food, seeds, and tablets. The beginning of the game is an absolute nightmare.

Best advice I can give is to let yourself starve during the day, and ration any food you find to use at night so you can get a few hours of sleep, and constantly make and use medi kits to keep yourself alive. You can't die as long as you keep using medi kits to bring your health back up before it reaches 0. Medi kits only take 1 silicone to make, so keep like 50 on you at a time. They will allow you to run on starvation mode until you can find enough food, or are able to grow enough of your own.

P.S. I didn't even know you could skip the incubator step and plant seeds directly into the shelf? Interesting!

[gagnedd]

Also P.S. You start with enough resources for a well, solar panel, and almost enough for a workshop

[Dallas]

Originally posted by gagnedd:

Also P.S. You start with enough resources for a well, solar panel, and almost enough for a workshop

Yes like you said i found i didn't have enough resources to make the blow torch to create the well so needed to mine iron and i also needed the first mechanic point i think too.

[gagnedd]

Practice starving to death all day long, making tons of medi kits and using them to keep you alive. Eat before bed, so can sleep for some of the long night. If you keep your food level up all day long before you are growing tons of crops, you will likely be out more often than not. Medi kits are currently cheap at 1 silicone per each. Make 40 at a time and keep yourself alive. You can survive for days without food if you keep healing yourself with medi kits. You just won't be able to sleep if you have no food, so nights are long and monotonous. That's why I use my food only at night to sleep

[gagnedd]

When I play madman, I get no potato seeds. In fact, on my current madman in which I have kicked the mode's arss, I stil have never found potatoes. It looks like I should have potato seeds at the start, but I don't. I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something

[Dallas]

I've never had any seeds starting on Madman, but i always find usually 5 potato seeds at one of the closest bases. Often the one that has the ATV which also seems to have a small circuit board and the seeds.