I played on, built a bridge across the river and saved most of the ponies. The last gecko left before the military got to it. There were 7 survivors out of 9, including 3 foals, but Laurel died to infection and a few of the rest are crippled.
A Feral Pegasus Ghoul shows up. It kills a dog and a cat, then Pierce engages it, but since he is slowed down from "ability to stand lost", the ghoul is much faster and Pierce just blocks and rolls on the ground. The ghoul is finally killed by a shot to the head from a sprite-bot.
Laurel comes back as a ghost. I get my first batch of coffins ready.
After that there was a second wave of migrants. Military got crippled by irradiated storm (I think it causes the rot as well as geckos), Hive tantrumed and killed a pony, nothing got done on time, ponies were being killed off by geckos and the outpost was slowly declining, when a massive wave of migrants arrived and saved the day. The military grew from just 2 ponies to 2 squads of 3 each, One ranged, one melee. I got a sniper CM too, so maybe I should switch to rifles.
I got a leather riot shield artefact and a Legendary+5 leatherworker. Great.
Industries are gradually moved underground. I build farms to have something to sell to caravans. On autumn year 2, after cutting down about 80x60 tiles, I have 120 scrap metal, so it is abundant again. I mostly just made bronze, because I didn't have enough charcoal to make steel. I still say, there should be an efficient reaction to make steel at the prismatic smelter.
There is no option to make plywood wheelbarrows Oh and I got plywood to work. It indeed is stored as "plywood" (stone) tool or toy (type). I have no idea why it didn't work the last time I tried.
I can't figure out how to store alcohol disinfectant now. It isn't stored in my stockpile that only accepts soap. I guess it's OK, though. Ponies leave it close to the well and hospital beds, where it is needed.
I dig down to magma and prepare the place for magma smelters and forges. This will save on charcoal considerably.
The reservoir is built and this time it has 3 z-levels. Even more than Ponderplanned had! Hopefully this will remedy the design error in the method of water depressurisation that allows the water to flow back. It can bite me when I finish the water pump gym a few levels below.
The general lack of everything is slowly remedied and industries expanded. I'm almost ready to pursue robotics and magic.
Hens produce around 40 chickens after sitting on the forbidden eggs for a season or two. Two of them continue to sit on their eggs. It took a while, but I got all the chickens I'll need, so I pastured them in a 30x10 pasture that will lead to robotic workshops. I can probably expand the pasture later if I need to. For now the chickens and puppies don't fight, so there's enough room.
I got stacks of 60 small calibre bullets from somewhere (probably chests). Not that I'm complaining, but we normally make these in stacks of 30.
Two pipbucks got equipped on the same pony It is as I feared, the hoof upgrades will be used inefficiently. On the plus side, SATS works.
I got an FB named "Hell". Not that I care, I've sealed off the caverns for now.
After the un-nerfs the air rifles with bronze pellets can wound wildlife, but just barely. I switched to combat pistols and they are a great upgrade. Small calibre bullets tear radscorpions apart. I've seen torn muscles, bullets getting stuck in wounds, damaged veins and nerves and even a body part getting cut off by a pistol shot. Oh and I got a box of BB pellets right after I stopped needing them.
Since we can't make Hunting rifles, could we at least refurbish them? We can only get them in in low quality and
they are useful to put ponies with combat and hunting rifles in one squad to give them all medium bullets, so that snipers learn from gunner veterans. This a a viable and reasonably cheap method of training snipers; they are safer in a bigger ranged squad and benefit from the demonstrations by gunner veterans (well, not gunnery, but dodge, armour user, shield user and so on).
Shortly before I finished the session, a bunch of foal snatchers, crazed raiders (with the syndrome) and Ranger Scouts have shown up. Apart from one who got caught in a cage and executed, the military had no trouble killing them all.
Despite sorting through a lot of medium quality salvage, I didn't get any plans. Just some parts for robots and trerminals.
I dot a plasteel depleted energy lance. Is this normal?
> > On expeditions, how about making it cumulative? Each power armor or battle saddle involved also increases the survivability of the other ponies.
> It's possible, but too convoluted to be worth the result due to overlapping support interactions.
It would be doable to have each pony in Power Armour give "Heavy Support" syndrome to two other nearby ponies, without stacking. Heavy Support could increase survival chances and maybe provide some minor boost to combat effectiveness or defence. Power Armoured soldiers could give this to each other, kind of like Team Player perk works in Fallout Tactics. This should be simple enough to implement and close enough to the proposal.
When it comes to expeditions causing bleeding, divide the effect into smaller chunks in separate interactions that don't fire up if "Power Armour present", "Battle Saddle Present" and "Heavy Support present".
> > starmetal power armor
> Starmetal power armor doesn't have the bonuses of regular power armor as those are still attached to the material. This will be changed.
I guessed the syndromes wouldn't be there, but hey, that thing is a lot better than combat armour, in the current version he can still wear it over a hazmat suit and throw in autoinjectors to get similar effects. No Strength and Endurance boosts, though.
> > We should be able to to forge pitchforks for spear-wielding soldiers.
> Perhaps, though salvage should yield enough pitchforks for your needs.
It usually does, but It didn't this time around until I got a plasteel depleted energy lance a year later. It would just be more reliable to be able to forge all T1 weapons. Besides, a spear is simple to make compared to the rest of this stuff and I'm not the first to ask for this.
> Horseshoes.
I get plenty from dead ponies and end up selling the bronze ones and melting iron and steel ones. My advice is to just make some bronze security horseshoes (you can melt scrap directly into bronze for a lot of bars) and keep a few spares. Though I'm pretty sure those are made in sets of 2 and not 4 for some reason.