it is a bit weird that all your pawns don't need to be inside a room to launch 🤣

I'm trying out the animation creation tool for the first time today, and it's quite fun.

Someday, I'd love to draw a full-length RimWorld animation, haha.

You can see the baby's genes include cold weakness and tolerance, as well as weak and strong melee damage.

Meanwhile, the impid speed did not show up, but slow runner from the neanderthal did.

The neanderthal's strong immunity showed up, in contrast to the impid's weak immune system as well.

How can the baby be both weak and strong at something? Does it average out or is only one of the genes picked upon birth?

My drugs are gone

Genuinely incredible that even after outfitting a team with the best possible helmets at the highest quality thresholds, raiders can just brute force the RNG combat system in vanilla to take a colonist out for 16-21 days anyway (or 8-11 with transhumanist ideology). Really engaging gameplay there.

I debated just leaving it there as a short rant and yet another reminder on why playing without Combat Extended leads to absurd nonsense like this, but I also decided to look into the numbers a bit, as I haven't actually been in this situation before. I have no idea what the odds of this shot actually were (in terms of targeting the head versus body, etc) coming from a 11 skill Careful Shooter Impid with a normal Recurve Bow, but I took a look at the wiki for the relevant damage values since I was curious what all of this was for:

• Cataphract Helmet (Legendary) has 200% Sharp armor, the absolute highest it can go.
• Recurve Bow has 21% AP and 14 damage

This results in 179% Effective Armor Rating, which is then used with a d100 roll to see what actually happens when the pawn gets shot:

• If the random number is under half the armor rating, the damage deflects harmlessly.
• If the random number is over half the armor rating, but not higher than the armor rating, the damage is halved.
• If the random number is greater than the armor rating, the armor has no effect.

So in this case, 89.5% of shots to the head are deflected outright, but the remaining 10.5% of shots hit with half damage.

In this case, the damage was halved by the helmet, leaving the attack with 7. Because brain injuries have been plaguing this 16-year colony to an absurd degree, I decided to also give everyone Stoneskin glands to see if it would help (I didn't crunch the numbers until now, preferring to take the wiki's info at face value). This gives 70% Sharp armor, and using the above formula, our Effective Armor Rating is 63% for the remaining 7 damage. Unfortunately, this means there's only a 31.5% chance to deflect, 31.5% to hit with half damage, and 37% chance for the Stoneskin to do nothing. In this case, it did nothing. And even if it had halved the damage, because all brain damage constitutes a permanent injury, there was only a 31.5% chance for this layer to deflect the remaining damage.

So essentially, even with the best helmet in the game with the best implant, shots fired at the head/skull/brain have a ~7.2% chance to do permanent damage.

Fortunately, my pawn has the Robust gene (75% incoming damage) and the Tough trait (50% incoming damage), so they both reduced the remaining 7 damage down to the final 2.6 damage as shown in the screenshot.

All that being said about the formula, I did see the recent discussions about brain damage being/feeling more prevalent in 1.6, and based on my recent/current runs, I feel like it's happening more often than it has in any of my previous colonies before 1.6. Cyclops in particular were a particular scourge early on, and I prioritize them over all other mechs now. Funnily enough, the particular raid that prompted this post consisted of 52 Impids against my 8 pawns wearing Cataphract helmets of Masterwork/Legendary quality, leading to two brain injuries.

But what makes this vanilla combat nonsense worse is that even by taking every single measure I could possibly take to protect the brains of my pawns in combat, a single tribal raider with a recurve bow (normal) is still able to roll the dice against the strongest helmet in the game at the highest quality and possibly force me to bench a pawn for 8-21 days because RNG deemed it so. And with hundreds of raiders firing hundreds of arrows, this RNG feels inevitable.

[And yes, I know healer mech serums, lucferium, the Scarless gene, and Creepjoiners with Unnatural Healing are alternative methods to treat brain damage, but Scarless and Unnatural Healing (with artificial arms) seem like the only solid alternatives].

While I obviously get why the brain is so important for functioning and all that, pawns in Rimworld are already sleeping off some genuinely insane damage/circumstances for the sake of gameplay/fun. Just the day prior, my away team fought some mechs for a gravcore at one of the sites. One of my pawns in MW/Legendary Phoenix armor took some damage to the torso, which was fine. The damaged part, however, was their bionic heart, which "only" took 3 damage. They healed from it just fine later that day, just like many other injuries that don't have any permanent long-term effects. And while you can lose an organ/limb in younger colonies due to lacking proper armor coverage and/or not respecting high AP weapons, sustaining damage to organs (whether it's the kidney or the heart) has no real impact long-term as long as you're not actively sick or losing the organ outright. Basically, as long as the liver, stomach, heart, or neck isn't destroyed outright, pawns recover from damage to the body. This is extremely asymmetrical compared to the lingering effects of brain damage.

What I'm getting at with this is that brain damage shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach where all damage is brain damage. Take the earlier scenario, for example. Could a recurve bow of no significance made by some nobody in the desert realistically penetrate a highly advanced and heavily armored combat helmet made of the highest craftsmanship? Hell no. But instead of making it like Combat Extended, where armor thickness actually matters and the posted scenario wouldn't happen at all, converting blunt damage to the head into a stacking daze debuff of some kind would be a huge improvement for vanilla combat. It could function similarly to other conditions in the game (toxic buildup, rot stink, tox gas, etc., to name a few examples), where low levels wouldn't necessarily lead to long-term effects, but high levels without intervention or even just too much in a short window of time could have similar repercussions to brain damage. I feel like it would be a genuine improvement over the current feedback loop of combat > brain damage > biosculpter for 8-22 days > repeat. It's probably been done in a mod somewhere, but the idea came to me as I was writing this post out so I wanted to mention it at least.

All in all, I'll finish this run out with vanilla combat's 'brain damage for everyone' behavior (and pick up transhumanism), but once that's over I'll be looking forward to reinstalling Combat Extended. On a related note, I also learned from the wiki that legendary Thrumbofur dusters and Flak Vests are unexpectedly superior to their cataphract counterparts in terms of sharp armor protection, though less protective for the limbs (and not as fireproof as Phoenix armor), so that was interesting to learn.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Definitely let me know if my numbers are off or whatnot

Edit: formatting

Do you guys also do this? or am I weird for doing this?

1. Colta was imprisoned for using an orbital beam sight during combat.

Why was she imprisoned for that?

The enemy was just a bunch of crazy rats.

1. Orville spends time walking with her Lancer.

   She finds herself much more comfortable with mechanoids than with people.

2. This is the third scene accidentally omitted from the previous "Beyond the Orbit 3" comic. The rim pads reveal the characteristics of Coln and Miles.

When a mech cluster lands with 5000 points or more, you will be given only a few hours of peace before the mech cluster relay activates and awakens the mech cluster.  Each day it will do a random action to build the mech cluster.

Summon support squad: the relay will deploy up to 2 constructors and 3 lifters to help in cluster logistics, Construction, and rebuilding.

Send in resources: mechanoid drop pods will come down and contain resources the mech cluster needs to grow like: steel, uranium, components, advanced components, etc.

Send in reinforcements: self explanatory: depending on the points of the mech cluster, colony wealth, mechhive progress, and storyteller settings it will call down mechanoids of varying strength and size.

How the mech cluster would expand is that the mech cluster itself chooses a chunk in the four cardinal directions to expand and selects a random prefab to place that blueprint down and the constructors will get to work, a mech cluster can expand once every 2 days after the chunk has been built. If anything gets in the blueprints way they will build over any unbuildable terrain and remove any obstacle. 

Each chunk will have a specialty that further enhances and strengthens the mech cluster, each full of production and defense: 

Power chunk: these chunks will generate the necessary power the machine will need to sustain itself. 

Mining chunk: with large drills boring into the earth, the mech cluster can further sustain itself with more material.

Assembly chunk: these areas hold mechanoid production buildings that create mechanoid armies to attack your colony. Mech assemblers will no longer have a limited amount of mechonids it can produce, instead it will need to be fed resources by lifters in order for continued production. 

Terraformer chunk: Heavy guarded with a single condition causes to harm the local area, the more Terraformer chunks there are, the worse it gets.

Heavy weapon chunk: a heavily protected location with one powerful weapon to defend the cluster or attack your colony, 

ranging from long range artillery that launches a powerful shell towards your colony once per day, To rocket platforms that shoot out swarms of rockets to overwhelm attackers, to even harnessing, to massive shield batteries that shields the entire base from mortars, to even chemical warfare with gas spewers containing harmful nanites that will turn your colonists into either rotting corpses, horrific mechanoid hybrids, or even shambalers 

Misc chunk: anything from storage, barricade paths, or other areas to look like a complex mechanoid facility.

Eventually with enough mechanoids produced the mech cluster will send out their produced mechanoids to attack your colony, the cluster's very presence itself nearly guarantees mechanoid raids and make other factions and traders steer clear of your location.

Whether you immediately wipe out the mechanoid cluster or suffer and let the cluster build up resources. Eventually the mech cluster will become more than you can handle with your resources running ever more, it will either you wipe them out, or they wipe you out. 

When a mech cluster is killed, the mechanoids will deactivate as well as the production buildings meaning that you can't cheese infinite resources without risk, however you can research mech tech and reverse engineer many of the structures found in the mechanoid cluster and use them to our own benefit.

I would appreciate some feedback and ideas to further enhance the concept, and if any modder reads this post and decides to make a mod about this idea, make sure you contact me so we can help make this a reality one day.

r6: just a little experiment. after initial setup and allowing some components for repairs, see if this 1 slave can survive here on her own

Like whether it’s me or the raiders using it, all it does is like slightly lower the stats and eventually cause cancer. I could be burning and booming the bastards, why would I use tox gas?

Hey everyone!

We’re overhauling how gravship research works - no more sitting at a research bench grinding points. Gravtech research now happens out when you travel.

Whenever your gravship launches, a ritual is performed (pilots/researchers push the systems to their limits) and you generate Gravdata - the new resource (not an actual resource but points towards research projects) used for all gravship projects. Gravdata gain depends on:

• Distance travelled
• Launch ritual quality
• Your crew’s new Gravship Research stat
• Gravship facilities that boost data yield

Example: fly 112 tiles, with 38% ritual quality, 160% researcher skill, and a 1.25x multiplier = 86 gravdata.

To process this, you could surely use a Gravtech Console (the “research bench” of gravships), which multiplies data by 5x. You can also find rare upgrades like the Flight Computer (+1x multiplier, max 2 per ship).

Progression is now structured around meaningful steps:

• Basic Gravtech – hull, engines, fuel systems.
• Power / Oxygen / Orbital Tech / Living – survival & infrastructure.
• Standard Gravtech – big engines, control terminals, Gravtech Console.
• Weaponry / Workspaces / Refining / Heat Dissipation – specialized systems.
• Advanced Gravtech – gravhulks, giant thrusters, gravlite, colony-scale ships.

Instead of just unlocking a tech with points, you’re building momentum through travel > gravdata > new systems > more travel. It’s a feedback loop that makes progression feel natural, earned, and adventurous.

More research projects will of course be added in the future.

You can read more on our patreon at www.patreon.com/OskarPotocki

The mod isn't quite ready yet, but we're very enthusiastic about it and we can't wait to show you what we have actually cooked.

I look away for one second and theres suddenly a bloodsplosion and like 15 of the rabid polar bears that attacked me are downed?? I use mods but nothing that affects animals!!!

I was enjoying my exploration of the world, jumping from site to site. Suddenly, a super-fast thief appeared. As everyone was in bed healing after a nasty crow attack, and the AC unit was destroyed, leaving an open hole in the wall, the thief sneaked in, took my gravcore, and ran away. How can I get a new one?

For a 15 percent reduction in all combat abilities, crafting quality and general labor speed +1 feels insanely low.

My single psycaster Ergo in the bottom middle is soloing this entire raid of nearly 500 with psychic invisibility, berserk pulse, and fireball.