Rimworld: The Story of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, Part Two

I hope you all enjoyed my first true look at Rimworld last time, because I'm back with another part! In this part, we'll continue to expand the community of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, both by building and mining, as well as hopefully getting some new faces on board.

Also, here's a bit about Emmie, since I didn't include too much about her last time.

How do Raiders Get In? Intruder Window! *rim(world)shot*

Emmie trades with the Orassans.

It was a normal spring day at Mewling-by-the-cliffs, with the exception of a small party of Orassan traders who'd arrived and were camping out by the newly-completed Raider-B-Gone Killbox™. Emmie, the sex slave who'd recently arrived, used her feminine charm to negotiate a purchase of some meals, steel, and a military helmet. However, the calm was shattered when a pirate scout named Mayumi showed up with the intention of raiding the colony, but thankfully she needed time to communicate with her superiors and analyze the defenses.

Finally, after a few hours, she decided to exploit an overlooked pass in the colony's defenses and charge straight on through. While I dreaded not closing the passage off, it turned out I didn't need to do anything: one moment Mayumi was charging through, and the next she was shot and incapacitated by one of the traders. 

Miyami got owned without me having to lift a finger! Thanks, Orassan traders!

Deciding she wasn't totally crap at working, I decided to see if I could convince her to join our little community. After building a prisoner compound (during which we stuffed Mayumi in a corridor of the main base-don't ask), we decided to let Vivis and Emmie at her to get the ex-raider on my side.

In the meantime, the pirates decided to go after a blacksmith named Hans-Joachim Saruma. He desperately called the colony for help. I pondered accepting his message: while we would get a new recruit without having to bother with chatting up, I had no way of knowing if he'd be good or not, and we didn't have the food to support another mouth... not to mention we'd have to deal with more pirates. I had no choice but to deny his request.

Here Comes the Bride

The day after the non-threatening raid, Chaz decided had known Vivis long enough to spend the rest of his life with her (that and I managed to get a nice double bed for them). While they were busy mining out the mountain to make a home, Chaz proposed to her outside. She eagerly accepted, and I decided to put a spot in the sleeping area-cum-workroom where they could have the ceremony performed at some point in the future.

Interlude: The Game Starts Rearing its Ugly Head

Even though I'm playing on a relatively low difficulty (since I'm still learning the game and I don't want to get my butt handed to me), the game still decided to annoy me slightly. Firstly, it decided to give me a mood-lowering psychic drone (as in buzzing sound drone, not UAV drone) that made all my female colonists annoyed. In other words, 3/4 of my people were now a bit more upset for a few days.

The game wasn't done yet; it then decided to have Arkab Nusakan's sun zorch the planet with a solar flare; making all our electronics go offline for a few hours. Thankfully, other than a few people upset from a lack of light, it didn't turn out to be too bad of a problem.

Worst of all were the short-outs of our power conduits; which set things on fire... including, at one point, Vivis and some of our crops. Despite being a pyromaniac, she wasn't too happy to herself be on fire, so Chaz had to once again play firefighter and make sure his fiancee didn't burn to a crisp.

But the worst came when a blight swept through the area and killed every single one of our hard-planted crops. Still, there was a silver lining: we did manage to get some crops harvested beforehand and we had plenty of meat thanks to Vivis' hunting, so all was well.

Also of note were the random raiders who came by, two of which bypassed my structure entirely and made me seal off the upper corners of the map. Another raider named Lavego (from one of the tribal villages) managed to survive the assault and we decided to recruit him as well, though he hasn't been as willing and I'm wondering about selling him into slavery... heh heh heh...

Poor Mayumi!

Remember Mayumi, the pirate who raided my colony only to be shot by space kitties with machine guns? Turns out Emmie was able to convince her to join her former enemies and perform basic tasks around the base. Unfortunately, a simple oversight in the game mechanics made her undoubtedly the most miserable one in our group. Allow me to explain:

In order to make sure you aren't totally overwhelmed during the first attack, the game makes your first opponent a nude meleer (regardless of difficulty), in this case Mayumi. Unfortunately, since she wasn't a nudist, she wasn't all too happy with having every single inch of bare skin on display for everyone to see (Emmie, of course, didn't mind), but thankfully Vivis stepped in and made her a basic outfit. To add to her misfortune, her nose had been blown clean off her face when she attacked, which only added to her innate ugliness. And now the icing on the cake: due to the abruptness of her recruitment, she didn't have a room of her own and thus had to be put in the temporary "quarters" (i.e. a sleeping spot in the hallway) where she'd

Mayumi sleeping in the hallway while things get... flashy and fiery outside.

previously been imprisoned. So in summation, she wasn't really happy. (Since she's somewhat on the verge of flipping out and making things unpleasant, I'm starting to wonder if she should take some happy-making drugs. There are quite a few that dropped in from outer space, and we could always grow our own. Then again, it's only a minor risk of her flipping out, so I may leave things as they are-if it ain't broke, don't fix it!)

Go North, Young Man (and Women)

Why couldn't it be somewhere nice, like Space Miami? Everybody parks their
ship in Space Miami!

On a midsummer morning, a peculiar message was received through the new communication console that'd been installed in the workroom. It came from an AI named Charlon Whitestone who'd known Chaz in the past, who said that "he" had a starship hidden away on the planet, and that it'd be ready to go as soon as the colonists found it. Vivis cross-referenced some coordinates in the message with the final scans of the Bengal, and found that the new ship was in a chilly location near the northern pole of the planet. It would be a long and dangerous journey to the northernmost wastes of the planet, and the colony barely had enough food to take a caravan to the Orassan base just on the other side of the mountains.

Closing Statements

Another part, another conclusion. I have little to say that hasn't already been said, other than keep your eye out for a journey to test out the caravan feature added in the last update that can be used for trading with friendlies or attacking your pirate foes, but I have too little food to make it worthwhile. I might just have to skip ahead somewhat until my food stores and higher; if I do, I'll make basically an interlude of some notable events that happened in the midtime (something as significant as Vivis and Chaz getting married will be its own thing, of course).