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[Tack]

I have so far discovered that wargs don't get addicted to Go Juice, so that's where all of my Yayo has been going.

This may be a new development because I'm pretty sure I've gotten a warg addicted to yayo for reasons I am not obligated to explain to you or anyone else until I'm tried in the hague.

You’re absolutely right, they may or may not be addicted to both Go Juice and Luciferium.
Still though despite their pain tolerance being incredibly high they still manage to not die even if I toss them into an ant raid

[Sean Mirrsen]

Had quite a fun excursion just now.

So my little colony of five (three original settlers plus two acquisitions) got a little stabilized, and I decided I could start acting on the various quest markers.
The game helpfully tosses me a ridiculously useful quest - an item stash of just one item. A resurrector mech-serum. Guarded by just three people.
What the hell, sure I'll go.

Three steps out the colony, the first attempt is aborted because two of the three caravaneers contract malaria and the plague. At the same time. Tropical jungle, yay. The game clearly wants to tell me something.

While the away-team-to-be is recovering, a new quest pops up in the same direction. Adam, the lover of Holloway (one of my original three), is incapacitated and stuck in a bandit camp. Two bandits, two turrets, and a mortar somewhere in the middle of a nearby swamp, just past the item stash.

Okay then.

Away team - three people and one elephant - is reassembled and aways without further issues. The item stash is reached easily. Us, three people with guns, and the bandits, three people with knives and a bow, have a short discussion about who owns the valuable item in the shack over there. The lone escaping survivor agrees with our point of view, and the caravan packs up with the mech-serum and a couple useful trinkets like standing lamps and an excellent steel bed stowed safely on the elephant.

The trek through the swamp from the stash to the rescue site takes longer than the trip from the colony to the stash, but I figure we have about enough food for the trip back as it is. Then, a few hours before the caravan hits the rescue site, Holloway contracts muscle parasites. Her rifleman skills become immediately less useful, but no turning back now. The site is reached, and wow how is this a swamp and not a forest. Trees bloody everywhere.

Now, this would be my first time actually engaging a mortar emplacement, but I sort of got the gist of how it works. Problem is nobody can get close because there's a turret in the way. Holloway with the rifle sets out to shoot out the battery that connects the turret to the rest of the power grid, while 'All-Trades' the reliable handywoman with the SMG, shoots the bandit not operating the mortar. 'Savvie', the shotgun-wielding commissar in marine armor, makes a beeline for the mortar itself through the swamp and the trees.

All-Trades successfully kills the second raider, while the first mortar shell nearly takes off Savvie's foot (and many other organs, but armor protected those, presumably). Holloway eventually takes out the turret's battery, and narrowly dodges the second shell that badly injures All-Trades. All-Trades starts bandaging herself while Holloway and Savvie charge the undefended mortar. Before the operator is killed, he manages to fire two more shells. One misses Savvie as she makes it into minimal range and starts putting fist-sized holes in the raider's limbs. And then Holloway also moves in closer to get a better shot, which leaves All-Trades as the only target in the mortar's effective range.

Welp.

A short deliberation later, the mech-serum is used on All-Trades because a good colonist is a better use of it than... well, not using it. But now she's got resurrection sickness, and Adam, the rescued lover of Holloway, is in fairly terrible shape. And the caravan isn't well stocked enough on food to stay here for however long it takes everybody to recover, or trek back with two disabled people and a loot-loaded elephant through the tropical swamp.

A small hospital is erected out of disassembled surroundings and the caravan's sleeping bags, rhinos are hunted for food, and a couple days later All-Trades is back on her feet and I'm considering just moving out as-is because it's clear that Adam isn't recovering anytime soo... and now Adam is dead. What?
Brain damage. From go-juice withdrawal. Oh so that's why he wasn't recovering. Welp. No reason to stay anymore.

Holloway is obviously distraught, but is bizarrely held up by the lingering positive thought of 'rescuing' Adam. Well let's not waste time, then, everybody's spirits are low enough as it is. On the way back, Holloway has a minor break and then contracts the flu.

And thus the expedition made its eventual return to the colony.

They didn't bring back the mech-serum. They technically didn't rescue Adam - though what remains of his body after a week of trudging through the tropics stuffed into a saddlebag, is now interred into a nice slate sarcophagus in a cave next to the main colony buildings. Holloway is barely stable, and is going to be crashing into break territory in a day or so as the lingering positive thought disappears. She is also still infected with muscle parasites. Also wasted a whole lot of time, almost had the main colony burn down because of too few people to fight the massive forest fire, and had a significant amount of vegetables that didn't fit into the freezer rot away in the stockpiles.

But also brought back a couple mini-turrets and a mortar, so I'm filing it under "technical success".

[Majestic7]

I'm more concerned for characters like one of my current colonists, body purists with a vital prosthetic that isn't likely to be replaced. I.e. a prosthetic heart. I'm not doing any heart transplant surgery when one of my most skilled medics started out with the nickname "Disaster".

You can implant them with the mech healing serum, it fixes all ailments. Nanobot magic. I don't know how that interacts with existing prosthetics, though, might be safer to replace the heart with a biological one before the operation...

[Tack]

Wow, you’re willing to lug around turrets and mortars?
I just nick the components and go.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't have turrets and mortars researched yet. So they're far more valuable to me whole (which is also why I went for shooting out the power instead of just trying to blast the turret).

[Majestic7]

Shooting out power with sniper rifles is usually the best way to deal with turrets, since power thingies are less durable and you can't carry them with you.

[Akura]

A group just came back from taking out a pirate outpost. As mentioned above, I disabled a turret by taking out the power conduit. In addition to the turret, I looted a battery, some uranium, and some other loot. Poor sods were at about 15kg below maximum load - what was supposed to be a there-and-back raid took almost 2 days to get back.

Upon their return, it seems like the battery has up and vanished. Everything else turned up fine, I saw one of my guys depositing the uranium, and I ordered the turret installed somewhere after dropping it from another colonist's inventory. Can't find the battery anywhere, it's not carried by any of them, it wasn't dropped at the map edge, and it's not in the colony inventory(viewable from the Form Caravan screen). The battery was certainly in the caravan inventory before their return.

[Sirus]

This is just a guess, but could it have rained at all while the caravan was moving? I remember hearing that batteries exposed to rain can explode; perhaps they got wet and were destroyed in transport.

[Akura]

Pretty sure that only applies if the battery is installed, plus I'm also pretty sure that weather is specific to loaded maps, not the world map.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'm also pretty sure that batteries exploding in the rain is an event specific to maps as well. I'm not even sure that self-discharge is applied when batteries are items.

I carried a fully charged battery from the rescue quest I described, back to the colony, over the course of a week, in tropical jungle where rain is a near constant. So whatever happened, random rain-caused explosion wasn't it.

The only explanation I have for a suddenly disappeared item, is the sort of thing that happened to me once. One of my past colonies started near one of them "ancient danger" rooms, and aside from the usual angry robots and a canned raider force, there was a megascreen TV, just sitting there as an item. After defeating the robots and the raiders, I decided to clear the room out, entirely, because I needed the stone blocks. So I used the "deconstruct" designation tool, and selected the whole room.

And that's how I learned that the blanket deconstruct designation tool always designates the topmost eligible target in every tile, including deconstructable things that aren't installed. Such as megascreen TVs. I learned that after the fact, when I looked around and didn't find the megascreen TV anywhere.

[Blue_Dwarf]

And that's how I learned that the blanket deconstruct designation tool always designates the topmost eligible target in every tile, including deconstructable things that aren't installed. Such as megascreen TVs. I learned that after the fact, when I looked around and didn't find the megascreen TV anywhere.

Oh wow, you get 17 components and 195 steel from that   

[EnigmaticHat]

The value of those materials is still less than half the price of a megascreen TV I'd say.

In a young colony recently I was given a grim reminder of why I value advanced helmets so much: one of my colonists was one-shot by an autopistol from a mile away.

[Akura]

Found it. It was sitting in a lake somewhere, nowhere near where the returning away team could have walked when they were storing loot. The reason why it wasn't showing up in stocks was because it was sitting just outside the home area.

[scriver]

What's a good method of manifacturing chemfuel? I'm in an Arid area. Is converting wood to chemfuel a waste or more efficient than just burning the wood to begin with?

edit: This is one of the first times I've colonised an area without an abundance of trees so I've never had to worry about power before.

[Majestic7]

If you tame boomrats/boomalopes, you can milk them for chemfuel. Another option is to research ground-penetrating radar and deep drilling. Third option is to send some of your dudes to a forested region for a lumber expedition, then bring a wood caravan back?