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Welcome to the idyllic settlement of...Wayfarer landing site.

(...which, if there were any justice in the world, would be called Margaritaville, in honor of our 28-year-old, demented, Alzheimer's-afflicted, 3-pawed, multiple-heart-attack-surviving starting labrador retriever.)

General stuff:

  • Blood and Dust difficulty, Randy Random, tribal start
  • All DLCs except for Anomaly
  • Seed: shipping
  • Coverage: 100%
  • Run duration to date: 28 in-game years; ~12y at my starting site, then a long trip in a janky gravship, then ~15y at the present location
  • Colonists: 22, plus 2 imprisoned faction members as joy beacons (they spend all their time boning)
  • Ideology: Supremacist, Transhumanist, Darkness, Human Primacy. I wanted to do a Glowforest run, but I didn't want to give up my goodies.
  • Modlist part 1, part 2. More mods than I usually use, but still a pretty light mod load compared to a lot of what you see on r/rimworld, I think. Heavily weighted toward QoL/UI/automation/making pawns marginally less stupid. I tried out Intimacy, which is more of a major content change than most of what I use; it was pretty cool.

Stuff I learned this run:

  • Darkness makes miniguns OP (see here). Except on away missions during the day; then it makes them hilariously inaccurate.
  • Due to the details of how the "Combat in Darkness: Preferred" precept works (see here), you don't need to cut down the glowing mushrooms in glowforest to keep the bonus. It took me a while to figure this out.
  • Kids are busted - my homegrown melee pawn, Cat, ended up with tough, brawler, and psychically hypersensitive as traits, plus great passions; the others I raised are also great. I had them grow up at 1x speed because I'm a masochist who loves long playtimes, but they were worth the wait.
  • It takes a really friggin' long time to get all the genes you want in genepacks that will play nicely together. I spent a lot of this playthrough with that as my main project, and there are still things I ended up giving up and leaving in a suboptimal state. All my cooks have the Poor Cooking gene, because it's on a genepack with my only copies of genes I want on everybody; as a result, they hover around 14-15 skill where everybody else is 20 at everything they do.
  • Psycasts are busted, especially Skip. I mean, I knew this, but having every pawn be a psycaster really hammers it in (they also all know Skip, which rules). So many things can be made into non-problems with the right psycast (and the right psycast is so frequently Skip...seriously, I cannot harp on this enough).
  • Islands aren't quite as defensively OP as I was hoping - most of them seem to have at least 2 sides of the map pathable. The dream, where there's just a single, easily defensible path of shallow water to your island, must be pretty rare (or I'm pretty unlucky, I visited a bunch of islands/atolls/archipelagos and didn't see any like that).
  • If your initial settlement is in glowforest, it gets a sapling anima tree. The tree won't grow without sunlight, but you can meditate at it anyway, and sun lamps will allow it to grow. If you land a gravship in glowforest, though, no anima tree will spawn. I decided this was bullshit, so I devmoded myself one. Sorry not sorry.
  • Related: The setup around the anima tree is a compromise between the tree needing light from a sun lamp to grow (and for the anima grass to avoid rotting) and my darkness-loving pawns not wanting to be in bright light. The walls are arranged such that the meditation spots work to meditate at the anima tree, but are in darklight rather than sun lamp light.
  • The big circular thing in the bottom-right is bug bait; one of the tiles at the back of the little hallway is the only tile of not-filled-in overhead mountain on the map, which means it's the only place natural infestations can spawn. I learned some new things (nearby regular ceilings matter!) about the infestation spawn rules while troubleshooting this; see this conversation for details. Thanks again, Aelanna!

Cool stuff:

  • This is the most obsessively I've ever optimized my pawns. Everyone is fully bionic'd out; most have multiple archotech parts; everyone is running a ~70 complexity/multiple archite gene custom xenotype to make them amazing at whatever they do; all my pawns are at least level 4 psycasters, mostly level 6, with a bunch of bonuses to psy sensitivity; all my melee pawns are tough + robust + strong melee + 20 melee skill + longjump; thrumbomane threads for all; etc.
  • Coolest weapons: This persona monosword, or this minigun
  • Mechhive run by my away team. Warning: long, unedited gameplay. I make lots of mistakes, and I also pause a ton, so it might not be all that fun to watch. But I think it does show off how bonkers my pawns are. Mechhive fight screenshot. Timestamps from the mechhive video of relevant fights, so you don't have to watch a bunch of boring parts: 1:53 breaking into stabilizer room, 5:02 scythers, 10:26 another stabilizer fight, 38:17 many, many militors
  • The Centurions are hostile ones, downed with shock lances and walled in, to serve as permanent free shield generators for my firing positions. They mostly came from the mechanitor quest raids. Their presence makes me constantly count as "in combat," which is in some ways helpful and in others annoying; I often get allies dropping in to "help" me (i.e., lower my TPS).
  • Tips for getting the alpha thrumbo ranch going (but don't get too excited, there's an unavoidably large element of "wait and pray to RNGesus for the quest to arrive")
  • Margarita (health screen), the dog who started the run with me (and after whom the settlement really should be named), is too...something...to die. She's had both Alzheimer's and dementia for more than a decade; this results in constant notification spam for "confusion." She's had multiple heart attacks. She lost a paw to an infestation years ago. She's 28 years old (labrador retriever life expectancy is 12). I preemptively dug a grave for her by the anima tree after her second heart attack (this was when I decided the colony should be named after her)...but it's still empty.
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