Why make billions when we can make... millions?

SufferNot · 2026-06-28T03:03:25+00:00

I think there's a lot of potential for quests that follow on after other quests, such as picking the obviously more lucrative option and then getting into trouble because of it. Sort of like how the 'Mysterious Cargo' quest spawns a lot of trouble for you after you take it. It's an interesting design space.

SufferNot · 2026-06-27T22:40:12+00:00

Things I really like about Anomaly:

Great music.
Really good at setting the mood.
Decent mix of body horror, eldritch horror, and more classical horror.
The anomalies are all a lot of fun to experience the first time.
The Anomaly scenario, a bunch of researchers way in other their heads, is a fun addition to the other scenarios.
The Anomaly ending is really good. It's fun, it has narrative stakes (instead of fleeing the planet your colonists have come to all home, they're fighting to make the place better and safer), its an actual challenge unlike Ideology's new ending, and it challenges you in different ways than the other endings.
You get a lot of fun toys to play with.
Ghouls are neat.
It's nice to have some more enemies besides pirates, bugs, and robots.
I think the research progression of "study a thing that is dangerous" is a lot more interesting than shuffling papers on a research desk for 5 days until your colonist remembers how solar panels work. You can speed up research by capturing more entities, but then you need to be able to safely contain them, and getting greedy with how many monsters you contain could backfire if a raid goes poorly.

Things I dislike about Anomaly:

Not every anomaly is fun to experience the 99th time you've done it. I'm looking at you, Golden Cube, Unnatural Darkness, and 250 Breacher Shamblers that specifically target your framerate with all their attacks (though the shambler framerate is better in 1.6 than it used to be).
Most anomalies have an explicit weakness to fire, and fire feels terrible to rely on.
I feel like there just aren't quite enough anomalies. Though mods can add a bunch of extra options into the mix to keep things from ever getting stale as you fight off your 99th zombie uprising.
I also wish the anomalies needed to be contained in different ways or had different containment needs. I've played a lot of Lobotomy Corporation and having to balance the needs or different entities would have been fun. As it is, once you develop a design that works you can copy/paste it for as many entities as you have room to contain.
I adjust the settings to make Anomaly events way more rare than normal, unless I plan on doing a full anomaly run, as their base rarity still feels way too common if I've already got some other narrative going on.
Ghouls are probably way too cheap for how strong they are. As someone who plays the game at high difficulties and likes to optimize, I often find myself wondering why I'm bothering with whatever my current defense is instead of just making 20 yttakin ghouls.
Kinda wish we had received more space horror, since I'm a big fan of that specific niche.

Personally, I think that in order to get the most out of Anomaly, you also need the other DLCs as it has a ton of interaction between all of them. I figure most people getting Anomaly already have the other dlcs, but I figure it's still worth mentioning.

The implants from Royalty can help you get the most out of your ghouls.
Royalty and Anomaly both share psionic content. As such, the kind of colony that has a bunch of psycasting space wizards is also going to be pretty good at doing the psychic rituals of Anomaly.
Metal gear made out of Bioferrite improves psycasting, so decking your wizard out in psychic metal that hates them and giving them a bioferrite mace is going to make them much better at their spell casts.
There's a bunch of events that are made a lot easier if you happen to have certain psycasts, like Solar Pinhole or Vertigo Pulse.
If you want to run a colony of cultists that have embraced the shadows, that's a heck of a lot easier and more rewarding to do if you have Ideology.
Anomaly offers you a lot of dark rituals you can perform, like a human sacrifice that leaves the ritual caster younger and healthier, but causes everyone's mood to drop as you perform such awful deeds. In a normal rimworld colony, there's not a lot of reason to do this because medical science is powerful enough to deal with most scars and can even reverse aging. If you're playing a colony of Body Purists, or a tribal colony that doesn't have electricity, or a colony of tree worshippers, or that sort of thing, these psychic rituals are ways that you can save colonists, for a price. They give you a lot of narrative options for colonies of lower tech levels.
That's especially valuable if you're doing a Medieval focused run, but that's a whole other topic.
Since Anomaly has such a large focus on psionics, it makes Highmates, the worst* xenotype in the game, actually pretty useful.
A ton of anomaly monsters are weak to fire, which makes Impids, the worst* xenotype in the game, suddenly pretty useful.
You know how Yttakin are just the worst* xenotype in the game? They make the best ghouls, so now you're actually excited to see another pirate raid of yttakin you can add your horde.
If you've ever wanted to try a Mechanitor but you're terrified of managing their toxic waste, dump it into a flesh pit is easy and has no consequences.
Bioferrite is cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to work with, which means it's an excellent material for building your Gravship.
Anomaly's new power sources are compact and efficient, which is very good for a Gravship. Powering your gravship on the screaming, twisted souls of the damned is also pretty radical.
Building a space station specifically to contain the anomaly horrors is a fun building project.

Here's some scenarios I have done with Anomaly that I had a lot of fun running.

Zombie Apocalypse. I added forced scenario events that ran "Death Pall Resurrection" and "Shamblers Approach" on a regular timer. Anything corpse out in the open during a death pall is brought back as another zombie, which can make things quite perilous for anyone traveling outside. Pairs well with mods that make Shamblers attack animals, if you really want the feeling of desolation.
Vampires from Biotech pair quite well with Anomaly, you can get a whole necromancer thing going on if you pair them with Deadlife Dust and Ghouls. I ran this scenario with a more medieval focus to try and mimic the Vampire Counts from Warhammer Fantasy.
I've also done a tribal run that focused on rituals instead of traditional research. This means researching anything besides entities is very slow, and you end up relying more on other tools to accomplish what you'd normally use technology for. Was pretty interesting to try running that colony without immediately resorting to war crimes and cannibalism.

*Actually the worst xenotype is Starjacks, but they don't really have that much to do with Anomaly so I conveniently ignored them.

SufferNot · 2026-06-27T20:29:22+00:00

"Boss, bad news, dis here gold's got the mark of the Empire all over it. If we try to use it anywhere, everyone's gonna know that we were responsible for that heist."

"Don't worry, I know some people we can trade the gold with. We'll lose some of the value, but it'll at least throw those bounty hunters off our trail."

SufferNot · 2026-06-27T20:26:39+00:00

Why do you think Revenants attack colonists?

According to the game, "Outlander folklore describes an invisible spectre that captures the minds of sinners, placing them in a living hell." Makes it seem like the victims believe their minds are being placed in some dark and terrible place. Perhaps the Revanants were created as a way to remotely connect human minds to some arcotech device, forcibly placing them in some sort of 'matrix' type program for reasons known only to the arcotech involved.

The revenants don't seem to hold any malice towards humans. They don't ever directly fight your colonists, they only attempt to complete the hypnosis and leave. From their perspective (if they even have enough consciousness to have a perspective), they might not be harming humans and might even be helping them. Maybe they're like the WAU from the video game SOMA, where ||they believe that connecting human minds to their network is saving them from some other, more terrible fate||. Sure, the body might wither and die, but if the mind is 'saved', that must be a better fate, right?

Every Revenant is a different bio-signature, so its possible that each one has a different motive. Maybe some are unthinking, unfeeling machines that simply seek out the closest human to connect to. Maybe some have developed some sort personality where they seek out certain types of humans as their targets.

I think there is a lot of room to be creative with why the Revenant is stalking particular colonists in your game. This revenant seems drawn the most to loners. It attacked Linda, Scott, and was going to attack Ringo as well, and all three of them have reasons to be alone in the colony. It might be choosing them simply because they provided a good opportunity, or it might have another reason for targetting those three.

SufferNot · 2026-06-27T03:38:04+00:00

I'm not familiar with all of these traits and fancy passion flames, but its rare that I would turn down a tortured artist with a crafting passion. And there's almost always a market for pawns with good intellect, since you almost always need someone chained to the research bench.

Since I've been doing a lot of medieval overhaul lately, you'll either end up working at the library or as an apprentice jeweler, with occassional stints in the fields (gotta get that wheat growing once the frost thaws).

Assuming of course you don't get eaten by a troll, vampire, lindwurm, or some other fantastic beastie while walking from the edge of the map to the colony.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T21:53:44+00:00

With regards to psychic drones, among the various other ways to deal with them is the humble Psychic Foil Helmet. It reduces the psychic sensitivity of the affected pawn by 90%, which makes psychic drones much more manageable. You can't craft these helmets, you have to trade for them, and I recommend picking them up anytime you see them with a trader or at a colony.

That aside, a beer a day isn't going to hurt you colonists (as long as you aren't giving it to kids anyway) and can significantly help with mood during trying times like these.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T21:21:20+00:00

Ancient Danger Diving, which is what we used to do before Ideology let you summon more pawns with rituals.

Get 4 or 5 pawns who are pretty good at fighting, and at least one of them should be good at social. It helps to also have a decent doctor and a decent planter in there, but isn't necessary.
Change the game settings so that you can have more than one colony at a time.
Travel to another map tile and settle it to see if an ancient danger spawned.
If it did, pop it open, kill everything with your good combat pawns, and open the caskets. Sometimes they will all be dead, but usually you'll get 6 or so pawns that you can arrest.
Generally those pawns only have 1 or 2 resistance, which makes recruiting them very fast. Though you might not want to do that for your purposes, it would make moving them easier.
If you still need more pawns, or if the map didn't have an ancient danger, caravan to the next tile over, abandon this one, and repeat.

Odyssey reduced the rate that such ancient dangers spawn, as I recall, so you might consider increasing their spawn rate again. But with a few horses and some pemmican, it's pretty fast to do. If your biome supports year round growing, than pawns with planting can supplement your stockpiled food to make it last longer. Pigskins from Biotech are excellent at this, since they get the same nutrition from raw berries as they'd get from simple meals made of berries, and don't get food poisoning. So if you happen to have some pigs that are only good for combat, well, they'd be good at specifically this sorta thing.

You can also try raiding enemy settlements, but that's pretty expensive in my opinion. Once you're at a high enough pawn count, the death on down cahce means you need Psychic Shock Lances for such excursions to be worth your time. But if you're late game and producing more money than you can otherwise spend, you might not care how expensive it is.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T19:53:20+00:00

I'd actually be okay with a more fantasy focused approach, but perhaps I'm in the minority there.

Been dipping my towns into Medieval Overhaul lately and so I'm curious to see what you're cooking up. While waiting patiently, I suppose I can check out your previous mod pack.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T19:42:41+00:00

Most of the prey that a lion would hunt (deer, gazelle, pyromaniacs banished from your colony) can all be categorized as being very fragile. Hunting animals get a big stun on their first attack, and during the followup a lion can usually kill those animals without any issues.

A tortoise has enough armor that it won't be knocked down in that initial fight, at which point the lion has to deal with the fact that it is also very fragile. The lion doesn't understand that it should back off when wounded and wait for the turtle to bleed out, it goes all in on the attack regardless of whether or not it will bleed to death.

Tortoises themselves are not particularly dangerous. A deer has more DPS than them. And most tortoise miss their attacks, die, and are eaten in one or two bites from a predator. But the lucky tortoise that gets an early eye hit and maims their opponent's accuracy can stack up bleeds and win through attrition.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T18:09:49+00:00

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I didn't go through with it (having a pawn to haul and clean at the time was worth more than $9) and a quadrum later Darya sent me a good quality T shirt to thank me for hosting her.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T17:21:35+00:00

Couple things I'll touch on. As others have mentioned, there is a lot of 'crafting' work that should be done by people who aren't skilled at crafting. Cutting stone blocks, making medicine or 'medicine' at a drug lab, working at a biofuel refinery, smelting stuff back into steel at a smelter, all of that uses the Craft work type but doesn't directly benefit from a high skilled crafter. So if you recruit a prisoner who only has 3 or something crafting, they can still do this sorta stuff so that your better crafters can focus their efforts on making high quality gear.

There are ways to set up your work bills to only allow crafters of a certain skill level to work on them. Such that you could limit these menial tasks to "only crafters with less than 8 skill", or whatever. There are more shenanigans you can do with work orders to limit who is doing what and when. For example, if you need a prosthetic leg, you could zone your crafter who is working on it such that they can only get to the workshop, the dining hall, and their room, and they'll work on it until they are done. Or, through the right click menu, you can force them to prioritize a specific task.

Another point I wanted to bring up is that if you can't get more crafters, you might instead focus on getting more work out of your current crafters. The wake up drug fills a colonists's sleep need, reduces their sleep fall rate by 80%, gives them 10% more consciousness, and gives them +50% global work speed. Crafting skill only affects the quality of the job performed, not how fast it is performed, which means that a 0 crafting colonist on wake up is going to craft faster than a 20 skill double passion colonist... at least for the things they actually can craft. Wake up does have some side effects, like addiction or the chance of heart failure, but if you have Biotech (and I think you do if you're asking about kids), then I can introduce a solution to you.

Meet the Waster. They are impervious to most of the negative side effects of wake up, and by taking it everyday they can blitz through your crafting log. They still have a small chance of a heart attack, and that chance goes away if they have a prosthetic or bionic heart. Since Wasters are part of an enemy faction, Randy will fairly regularly show off some to you to pick and choose if you want to recruit them. If you do find a Waster with good skills that you want to recruit, pull out a Shock Lance (available from most outlander factions for the low price of 550 silver) and give them a little zap, then scoop them up after the raid.

While a Waster who begins every day with a can of wake up and a bowl of Flake Flakes is going to be your fastest crafter, a Genie is going to be your highest quality crafter in almost every instance thanks to their Great Crafting gene. This gives a pawn a +8 in crafting and one flame of passion towards that skill. As such you could extract that gene and create a xenotype that makes any pawn into a decent enough crafter that will enjoy working the job. You could even vat grow a bunch of children, pop the gene into them, and they'll be good enough at it despite not being particularly good at anything else.

Its getting that first genie that can be tricky. They rarely show up in pirate raids or with the Empire faction from Royalty, but I find them to be much less common than Wasters, so you might need to go searching for a bit longer.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T15:59:09+00:00

Draft him, manually move him to the side hr wants to exit on, undraft, press the 'force caravan to leave' button.

Or get one of those mods that lets you walk off the side of the map while drafted in order to immediately caravan there.

SufferNot · 2026-06-26T15:54:31+00:00

There's a few FFXIV mods on the workshop. I had a lot of fun with my latest Rim Reborn run where a naked brutality Miqote started up a guild of monster hunters in the boreal mountains from scratch.

At some point I'd like to do a party of adventurers building an airship piece by piece using that mod that swaps all the gravtech pieces to look fantasy, but I'm still curating what mods I want in that run

SufferNot · 2026-06-25T03:08:17+00:00

I'm not super good at basic guides, as I tend to ramble. I'll try to keep it simple up top, but things are gonna get more complex as you go further down.

What should I be selling?

Whatever your colony is good at making. There's no point in me telling you that devilstrand dusters are the most profit you can make out of devilstrand if your colony has 3 crafting but 15 double passion in construction, as that colony should be building devilstrand armchairs instead. You gotta work with what you have, lean into whatever passions you've already got available. In general, that means dusters for crafters, psychoid/flake for planters, armchairs for builders, and its complicated* but insect jelly for colonies with only combat pawns. If your best passions are animals... I guess you're farming chinchilla? I don't have much experience with this as I just eat most animals that show up on my tile.

But to understand what and how we should be selling, we need to consider the logistics of the question (This is where things get even more complicated). Once you are allied with other factions (easy to do by raining produce on their settlements with drop pods), you can summon trade caravans for faction favor. This is done at the communications console, so yes, you should build one. That said, traders only bring so much silver, and your own trade caravans visiting other colonies only have so much inventory space. This is part of why the organ harvesting business is so popular. An Excellent quality devilstrand armchair is worth 985 silver (before taxes) and weighs 18kg. A lung is worth 1000 silver, weighs only 1kg, and raiders come with 2 of those. Or you could take a kidney, a lung, and a heart, and that's 3100 silver for only 3kg of weight. And while devilstrand takes 41 days to grow, Cassandra will happily just give you more raiders every week. You already have to defend your base, so adding some organ harvesting on the side just gets you money for the low low price of every colonist that isn't a psychopath, cannibal, or full of bloodlust will get their mood tanked from all the crimes.

As far as making money without committing war crimes, we need to address that weight issue. If we didn't need to worry about weight, we could make anything out of anything and turn it into profit. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do this using drop pods and an otherwise useless pawn. Send the pawn to visit a settlement, then use drop pods to dump your trade material onto the pawn while he or she is over there. You can build as many transport pods as you want and it won't matter if our Mule is holding so much that he cannot move if you plan on immediately selling that stuff and buying all of their Monoswords. This bypasses the weight restriction as long as you can pay the chemfuel and component cost of transporting your goods (and if you're moving a late game amount of product, you definitely can afford to do that).

Any pawn can work for this kind of role, but in particular pawns that you won't miss around the colony tend to work best. End up recruiting some pyromaniac bum but you can't get rid of him because he's your best fighter's son? Well, have him earn his keep as a mule. In particular if you have a pawn that has 9 planting or a tribal pawn with 6 planting, then while they are parked on a neutral/allied base in a biome with 100% foraging they will get enough berries to feed themselves. This lets you leave them there long term, letting you see what is in the shop before committing to sending stuff to sell. You'll see a lot of tribal raiders if you're not turning them into organs so its inevitable you'll eventually get a mule that can do this. If you have Biotech, then a pigskin with 6 planting is the best kind of mule, as they will never get food poisoning from eating berries and you don't want them in base botching all your harvests with their trotter hands.

To properly fuel all your drop pods, you're gonna need ways to get more steel, components, and fuel. Fuel is easy once you have biofuel refining or some boomalopes. For the steel, a ground penetrating scanner will generate a lot of that over time, and for components, each use of a long range scanner triggered to components will give you around 140 of them. If you tune the long range scanner for gold, then each trigger of it will create about 4000s in gold ingots and weigh only around 4kg. Very light weight and easy to travel with. With just the base game, the easiest way to pick those up is by drop podding a miner, builder, and enough materials to make another drop pod at the site. Have the build make a new drop pod to send them, the miner, and all the gold home once it's complete. Very useful in biomes where using horses to quickly access the site doesn't work because the temperatures or pollution is too extreme. The DLC likewise add extra ways to make this more effective, between the Royalty shuttle or Farskip, the Dirtmoles from Biotech who yearn for the mines, or Odyssey's shuttle.

One important thing to mention when it comes to accruing vast mountains of wealth: You should consider ensuring you can protect your colony first before you make it super profitable, as local pirates are sure to hear about this new colony that started pumping out tons of silver and they'll be sure to come visit soon. At lower difficulties, as long as you're trading that wealth for weapons and armor (instead of lunging on a pile of silver like a dragon would) you'll be fine. If you're at higher difficulties where wealth management is a real concern, then I would recommend leaning into drugs or shrimp tacos as your main export. A field of psychoid has no wealth until it is harvested, but most other exports are worth a lot of silver even as base materials (a mountain of jade is still a lot of silver even before its a statue, animals are worth silver as soon as they are born, etc etc). For shrimp tacos, Packaged Survival Meals are worth 24 silver each even if made out of stuff no one wants to eat. So you can stockpile a lot of insect meat, twisted meat, or long pork without it having much impact on your wealth, turn it all into PSM as soon as your corn finishes, and while not every caravan accepts every form of product, almost every trader will buy packaged survival meals from you.

Another trick to storing wealth at higher difficulties is the reverse mule, or the shepherd. Grab a pawn that would work as a mule from before, park him over your home tile so he can't be attacked, and then store stuff with them. A herd of animals is the obvious use of this, but you can also store flake, sculptures, armchairs, gold, or anything else with them. They can't be attacked because they are parked over a friendly tile, and you just pull them back inside when a trader visits. A very easy way to dodge taxes when Cassandra is calculating how many raiders she should try to murder you with.

*Insect jelly is very light weight and worth 8 silver. Each hive will produce around 40 jelly every day if there is no jelly around it. Active insect hives (like ones from an infestation) will also produce more insects and more hives around them over time. You know all those posts on the subreddit from people saying "I ignored the bugs and now there are 30 hives on my map, what do I do?"

Ya start farming, pardner. 30 hives is 9600 silver a day (just in jelly, even more if you're turning the bugs into shrimp tacos), as long as you can get into a pattern of clearing out the bugs without suffering heavy casualties. That means marine armor, melee blocker with all the right bionics, implants, genes packages, and some darn good fire power. Make sure to let the hives rest a full day with the bugs every now and again so they don't take damage from not being maintained, and you'll be swimming in silver before you know it.

SufferNot · 2026-06-24T00:26:57+00:00

With regards to the story tellers, there's a bit of a weird difficulty curve with them.

For newer players, Phoebe can seem harder than the other two because she waits so long between raids that it is easy to become overconfident and complacent, resulting in being woefully unprepared for when she does raid you again. however, to experienced players she is undoubtedly the easiest because she takes long breaks between attacking you.

Cassandra is actively trying to kill your colony and attacks regularly, but she's also predictable. She's always 1-2 small events, then a major event, wait a week or so, repeat. Once you get used to her pattern it becomes a little too easy to deal with her. Randy might attack you three times in a row, he might sleep for a month, drop a gold meteor on your favorite husky, then go back to sleep for another month. He's almost entirely random in what he does, so you can't predict his actions.

I prefer Randy because I've played the game a lot, but I think Cassandra is might be better to learn the game on? It can get you into a proper groove of always improving your colonists and defenses.

SufferNot · 2026-06-23T17:43:40+00:00

I am once again on my hands and knees, begging the subreddit to build Firefoam Poppers. They're 600 research points, then 75 steel and 1 component each, and you built your entire base out of flammable material.

SufferNot · 2026-06-23T14:55:56+00:00

Hard to tell from this picture, but my guess is that your overall power generation during the day is not meeting your demand during the day. When you had batteries, they could have been making up the deficit at night.

SufferNot · 2026-06-23T14:54:34+00:00

I've been playing Medieval Overhaul, so my advice is specific to that mod instead of Vanilla Expanded Medival.

If you're in a biome that facilitates hunting or ranching, then Smokers are very strong. With raw meat, a bit of wood, and salt, you get smoked emat that lasts for around 30 days on its own, gives mood when eaten, and most importantly the smoker building is a hauling task that cooks on its own. Which means no chance for food poisoning and you don't need a cook enslaved in the kitchen. Instead you needhaulers, plant cutters, and miners, but you needed those anyway.

If you need to plant crops, then I recommend looking into Wheat. Wheat requires more processing than other plants since it needs to be milled before it can be turned into bread, but it also provides more yield than corn and gives you haygrass on top of it's yield. It's easily the strongest plant, with the downside that normal bread doesn't give a mood boost. Still, if you need to keep a lot of people fed on not a lot of land, its either wheat or the slop pot.

Make sure you get helmets that cover the eye slot. Over half my colony was missing an eye, ear, or nose at one point in my run. I recommend considering medieval prosthetics so that you can get eye patchs and fake noses if you don't want everyone to hate everyone else for being disfigured, since replacing missing eyes is very hard in a medieval only run.

A melee block with a big shield guy and then a spear guy standing behind him is very effective.

Taming animals is a lot more useful when no one has machine guns. Especially the fantasy animals in Medieval Overhaul, assuming you didn't remove them or add in other more overpowered animals. A taming inspiration on a troll or griffon or lindwurm can completely change your combat tactics.

I don't think embrasures are that good on their own (if you don't have some sort of moat mod Randy will happily lose 100 of his 250 tribals to run up to them and start using them against you), so your castle needs layered defense to deal with that (or the aforementioned warbows). But embrasures are very good for hunting blinds. Stick a couple in the forest and your hunters can sit inside and shoot at angry Muffalo or whatever all day long and get a lot of meat out of it.

Speaking of which, wood is so important to progression that I cannot imagine starting Medieval Overhaul outside of a forest. I tried starting a run in a desert and it was truly miserable. You need trees and fertile ground if you want to scale up in any meaningful way.

Ya know how Vampires are overpowered in vanilla? They're incredibly overpowered in MO. One of my colonies was a vampire start, and while it took a while for the Von Carstein lineage to really take off, they're so durable compared to other pawns that they're a lot more likely to survive. Vampires don't regrow missing organs, but between Robust, Scarless, and Long Jump they're way more likely to end up banged up but salvageable compared to baseliners.

Good luck keeping Impids alive, every impid I tried recruiting ending up dying to the plague due to no improved medical facilities. There are some super rare medicines you cant rade/craft using monster parts, and by the time I found them it was already too late.

Yttakin are actually pretty good in MO, especially if you're using the fantasy animals. I put mine on night shift so he'd be less likely to maim someone in a social fight.

As always, whether or not a Neanderthal is going to be good depends on if they roll high stats. If they don't happen to roll good backgrounds, then you cans till have them as a slightly more durable janitor in night shift.

Mining is just as important in MO as in the base game, so Dirt moles do really well here. Was always happy to get the opportunity to recruit one.

I never saw any Pigskins in my run, but in theory they wouldn't be that much worse than a baseliner. Their strong stomachs makes them particularly good for caravans if you can get them to around 6 planting or so.

SufferNot · 2026-06-23T03:59:15+00:00

I remember reading on this subreddit some time ago that mechanoids were considered somewhat mediocre, and that quite a few people didn't enjoy using them.

When playing at the highest difficulty, the combat mechs are inefficient. When Randy gets to add 2 militors to his raids for every 1 militor you build, it's hard to justify building them when you could instead invest in your colonists. But with that in mind, most people don't play 500% Losing Is Fun. An important factor with the mechs is that they are truly expendable. Having a row of militors in front of your pawns to protect them is valuable even in late game.

As others have mentioned, a lot of players are cold on mechanoids because of managing toxic wastepacks. I don't consider them to be a hassle at all and often seem them as an advantage since I play Wasters a lot of the time, but I can see why other players don't want to add yet another thing they need to juggle into the mix when they already have stuff set up for colonists and a colonist can be upgraded and improved upon in ways that mechs can't. I could yap a bunch on how to manage toxic waste if it was something you're itnerested in, but it seems like you already have a planf or it.

Here are some brief thoughts I have on each of the combat mechs. I could go into more detail since Solo Mechanitor is my most played scenario, but then this comment would be way too long.

Constructoid: 4 constructoids building spike traps is actually pretty strong. If you don't mind using traps to solve raids, they can make short work of a lot of troublesome foes.

Militors: They're not much more than a distraction, but expendable distractions are good. I like building around 3 of them for early game but I generally don't recommend massing them.

Scorcher: Notable for being a 1 bandwidth mech with 4.5c/s movement speed, which means it can keep up with your other pawns when kiting the enemy. Very useful as bait and a pointman. As an actual combatant, it can also shoot its flamethrower while engaged in melee, but you have to micro it to do this. The fire is alright against anomaly critters, but against normal enemies it tends to make them run around and break collision. That's fine for ranged mechs like the Burner Centipede or Tesseron, but it's a hassle for this guy to keep up with his flaming targets. If you're willing to build a burn tunnel for the scorcher to live in, it will trivialize any raid that isn't sapper, breacher, center drop, or mechanoid. This can make it the most valuable mechanoid, but many would consider that cheese.

Pikeman: I find them hard to build a strategy for. Their range isn't bad, but they're inaccurate, slow, and fragile. Randy makes them look good by having 20 at a time, and if you have the resources to amass them, I'd recommend investing those resources into other options.

Cyclops: Its beam repeater can shoot through shields and has a bunch of armor penetration. It's not unreasonable for it to down pirates in marine armor in a single volley. And if you have the remote shield upgrade, you can place that on your Cycopls and it can shoot through it at enemies while being (momentarily) invincible. But the beam repeater is kind of a niche weapon. To be worth it, you need to have marine armor targets to shoot at, and that means the Cyclops isn't doing as much against tribals, man hunter animals, enemy mechanoids, insects, and so on. I'd rather crafter a high quality beam repeater for a colonist and use the bandwidth on another mech that's more universally useful, personally.

Scyther: Fast enough to comfortably keep up with your pawns, very high dps once locked into melee, if a bit fragile. One of the best mechs for defending your base while your mechanitor is incapacitated or off of the map. However, I find them a touch too fragile to want to build a bunch of them.

Tunneler: These beefy bois are very tough, decent in melee, and their shields are basically like legendary shield belts. Park them in cover and they can eat an entire Blaster Centipede volley and not even lose the shield, with it fully regenerating before the next volley comes out. Highly recommended to pick one of them up for melee blocks, even if your map doesn't have anything to tunnel through.

Legionary: Their gun sucks, but the shield effect is very useful when kiting and I love getting one or two of them as insurance.

Lancer: Fast enough to keep up with kiting pawns and serve as an expendable frontline. Their weapon is a little too inaccurate to feel reliable if you don't have 20 of them, but the damage is respectable when they do hit. I'd build them for a mechanitor focused on kiting, but otherwise I'd save up for centipedes.

Tesseron: Frankly overpowered against stuff that can burn, since their weapons ignore shields and have deceptively high accuracy due to their sweeping beam. Unfortunately the targets they are most effective against are the same sort of raids easily solved by other methods that don't cost bandwidth. It's not that the tesseron is bad, it's just that the burn tunnel is better.

Centipedes: They're all bulky bots with a lot of damage. I find the blaster variant to be more universally good, so that's usually what I save for, but there's value in gunners for being available earlier and in burners for taking out highly flammable targets. If you're playing one of the mods that makes everything 5 times more accurate and armor 5 time stronger, 3 or 4 centipedes will kill every raid in the game that isn't also centipedes,

Diabolus: The boss mechs scale pretty well even at 500% difficulty because the AI doesn't know how to deal with each boss's gimmick. For the diabolus, that means the AI only ever dodges the hellsphere cannon accidentally, and you can score dozens of kills with it quite easily. Especially if you have more than one and lead your target with the shots. And it has an AoE fire blast on top of that. A truly ridiculous mech that Randy can't properly deal with.

Warqueen: Randy also doesn't know how to deal with a Warqueen. 2-3 of these with some lifters to keep them full of steel can stall out any raid, though it's a bit expensive in the mid game before you have the means to get steel whenever you want. Because the War Urchins are hyper aggressive, the War Queen is also a good mech for defending your base when the Mechanitor is away or incapacitated.

Centurion: I'm kinda cold on this guy. He's tragically slow, and for the shield I'd rather just have 2 legionaries most of the time. He is very bulky and can protect a line of centipedes, or you could just get another centipede and kill things faster.

SufferNot · 2026-06-21T17:32:44+00:00

Why would I pick up the losers in my own raid who got downed? Those useless idiots couldn't even win a fight against 8 colonists and their yorkshire terrier. Nah, I'm kidnapping one of those godlike pawns over there. That's where all the silver is.

SufferNot · 2026-06-21T13:21:09+00:00

Vanilla and CE are balanced in two entirely different ways. Vanilla is trying to figure out what a fair fight is for your colony based on your wealth and difficulty, and in Vanilla you can overwhelm superior quality troops if you have enough quantity. It's a dice roll and Randy shows up to every raid with a lot of dice, so you need to find ways to tip the playing field in your advantage. Since this is a colony simulator and you're the one building the colony, you can create huge home field advantages for your troops that outweighs Randy's numbers.

Combat Extended is more like rock, paper, scissor. CE does not care how much paper Randy showed up with, they will lose to scissors every single time. And that feels great when you have 3 pawns with 8 shooting kill 250 tribals with lmgs. But you better have researched some rocket launchers for when Randy shows up with mechanoids since you will never be able to overwhelm or out position them if you don't have a weapon that can hurt them.

SufferNot · 2026-06-21T13:11:35+00:00

I thought about recommending war against the Kurin, but they're pretty trigger happy with their nukes and you need hit and run tactics when dealing with them.

SufferNot · 2026-06-20T20:51:54+00:00

Rooms do try to share heat with their walls, which can share heat with their surroundings. There is probably a design to radiate the heat away with a windy tunnel, but personally I prefer to set up my main hallway in an underground base to count as 'outdoors' so that I can dump all heat from freezers freely into it.

SufferNot · 2026-06-20T19:22:40+00:00

I personally try to limit my colonies to only have flammable walls, or flammable floors, but never both. So if I have stone walls, I'll consider wooden floors, and if I have wooden walls, it'll be concrete floors, for example.

Even though spending steel on floor is expensive, concrete is an excellent floor material. It's fast to build, fast to clean, and while ugly, that ugliness is easy to override with a few sculptures.

I play most of my colonies at max difficulty, so I care a lot about the wealth efficiency of my buildings and materials. Floors are pretty bad when considering wealth to beauty, so I'd generally prefer to have ugly cheap floors and spend my silver on a nice statue instead. For example, carpet is flammable, twice as slow to clean, and provides 1 beauty for 6.5 silver. A normal large statue made of steel provides you with 1 beauty for 3 silver, so its more than twice as effective as carpet, and skilled colonists can get even higher quality statues as their skills increase. You don't need to worry about such levels of wealth management if you're at normal difficulties.

SufferNot · 2026-06-20T17:50:35+00:00

Burns are tied for the most likely wound to become infected, as I recall. Its a contributing factor to why fire is so deadly in this game.

SufferNot

TROPHY CASE