Got back into the game after so long.
Tried playing on Cassandra Challenging and got like 3 raids in a row with 1h of gameplay (maybe I pissed off pirates by rescuing too many people), so a raid with three times my population came in right when everyone was injured, depressed or on berserk. RIP.
Then I played Phoebe Challenging which might be my favorite mode. I did the Rich Loner game start which is cool but feels cheatsy. Got up to 6 people when I had my first Toxic Fallout, and damn..had to slaughter all my 4 trained boars, and cannibalize two Raiders. At that point, raids were life saving since they'd bring in a day or two of food. As a bonus, everybody had malaria, flu, and would go berserk since animals were being slaughtered and people were starving.
When the fallout ended, somehow everyone survived by a notch.. then my Cook died due to infection in a wound he got from a fight with my character..and my own character almost died from infection too.
Still, I think it was the coolest experience I've had with the game. I had zero provisions and preparation, poor defences, and somehow everyone would have survived if I had noticed the cooks infection.
I so wish Rimworld was more like DF in the sense of more realistic threats. Cassandra spawns way too many things out of thin air, and even though Phoebe makes it more bearable, sometimes it's just not challenging enough. I don't follow development, so it might be heading there and I just don't knkw it.