Rimworld: The Great Chicken Cult, Part 1: At Hell's Gate

Welcome to the first part of the Great Chicken Cult playthrough! This will chart our first few days on the planet in a roughly chronological order as we attempt to survive in the middle of a harsh lava field added by the Nature's Pretty Sweet Mod.
I've already tried this with a poison forest added by different biome mod (Advanced Biomes), only to have everyone rendered unconscious by the fifth day. Thankfully, other than the annoying lava pools that will burn your colonists to death, the lava field isn't too hard thus far.

Also, one thing I didn't discuss last time is Rimworld's AI storytellers. They govern the frequency and severity of the events you get, and the vanilla game comes with three: Cassandra Classic, Phoebe Chillax, and Randy Random. The first two give you a typical increasing difficulty curve so you don't get immediately overwhelmed (Phoebe gives you more time to prepare), but this isn't the case with Randy. For him, there are no rules and anything goes, meaning you can find yourself overwhelmed by a tricky event before you're equipped to deal with it. Fun times ahead!

Our World

 After decades in cryptosleep, the last survivors of the Great Chicken Cult arrived at the desolate rimworld known as Mirzam Al Saif. Since they had focused more on leaving Ararobos V rather than getting good equipment, the ship was only able to do a full scan of a single continent before the sensors shorted out and comedically exploded. Thankfully, the scan was detailed enough for them to find a suitable location to set up shop.

The map sure has changed since the first playthrough in Alpha 16, huh? Now we have roads, rivers,
and named terrain features! Also, the grey "terra incognita" from earlier versions is gone, which is a fairly
nice touch.

In order to hide from any pursuing authorities that would arrive in a century, the cultists decided to settle at the foot of a dormant volcano. A river passing through the area would be more than sufficient to gather water, and the hotspot just below the crust would allow for small geothermal vents to erupt that could be tapped for power. Unfortunately, lava pools from the volcano could be an issue...

Dramatis Personae

Rimworld colonies can literally live or die based on the initial people you choose and their skills/traits. Thanks to Prepare Carefully, you can make this a lot easier on yourself by deciding exactly who you want to bring and what to start them with. Of course, you could give everyone max skills or high-tech weaponry, but I decided to not change my starters too much and keep things balanced (except for  giving them Ni'Hal pistols as starter guns to give a slight edge).

So, who are these four brave cultists? I'm glad you asked...

Shadow Bulosan

This isn't even the weirdest Widow backstory; one is that the individual was a zookeeper.
That's not too bad, until you consider that the zoo they worked at housed sapient aliens instead of animals!

Catrice "Shadow" Bulosan is a Widow and the only non-human to escape Ararobos V. Although only sufficiently competent in most areas, she has the highest social skill and most interesting/messed up backstory of the group. She was (and still technically is) part of a fertility cult sanctioned by the Widow government that helped indoctrinate alien mates for reproduction, whether going to other civilizations or a processing center. Regardless of how she found them, she has become skilled in the art of enticement and has herself borne many children.  This led her to Ararobos V, where she quickly fell in with the Chicken Cult and agreed to become their primary spokeswoman (or spokespider?)

Willy Sutherland

I'm tempted to change it to Willie since it's wrong to spell it with a
"y" to me, but that'll only make it worse when he inevitably dies.

Willy Sutherland is the youngest member of the group at age 16 (in biological terms). He was born on a utopian glitterworld, living a fairly luxurious if uninteresting life. However, he wasn't so great at school and learned few skills. He is, however, fairly skilled with plants and cooking, although his green thumb pales in comparison to...

Scarlett Saccente

Surely nobody will notice that I took this after all the other screenshots, right?

Scarlett Saccente is a pudgy gardener. After a childhood where she was allowed to immerse herself in song and music, she became a gardener working at the grounds of a mansion along with many other maids and butlers. Her botany has also allowed her to become skilled with medicinal herbs, making her a fairly competent medic who has a burning passion (literally) to learn more and improve her skills. Combined with the medical power armor she picked up to make her look official and carry medicinal supplies, she'll be the one patching up people and aliens when they get hurt.

Louie Kalowick

No, I'm not going to say his real name! A) I don't know how, and B)
I don't think it's an actual name, at least not one I can Google easily.

Finally is the oldest member of the starting group, Louie Kalowick (although he's only 40; I specifically set the maximum allowed age of starting colonists to be 55 in this scenario since many old people in this game have crippling chronic health issues such as bad backs or cataracts). He was born in a massive subterranean colony on an otherwise barren planet (fairly similar to the Widow homeworld, incidentally) and became so proficient at mining that he can identify and dig through rocks based on smell alone. However, his vision has become impaired from years in darkness, and is utterly rubbish at shooting or aiming.

Years later, he moved to a glitterworld (although probably not the same one Willy grew up on) and became an architect alongside an intelligent AI that handed technical aspects. This allowed him to focus on the artistry of architecture but prevented him from getting into the nitty-grittiness of construction sites.

Baptism by Fire

NB: In prior versions, time was measured in 15-day long "seasons" from Spring to Winter.
Alpha 17, the version before this one, changed these seasons to "quadrums" that stay constant,
whereas seasons change depending on whether you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere of the planet. Neat!

On the morning of the 6th of Aprimay, the pods containing the cultists made their preprogrammed descent to the mountainous lava fields that would be their new home. Immediately, I took a survey of the location and found it to be simply sublime: the fresh river was flowing to the west, the mountains would create an excellent chokepoint to deal with attackers, and there was an old steel house that could serve as a temporary shelter until we built up the base. Unfortunately, one problem became immediate: the pools of lava. Shadow nearly burned to death when she attempted to cross one to get some herbal medicine Scarlett brought along. I had to act quickly and manually moved her to a rocky outcropping by the lava and had her dig a path to freedom with Louie's help. (I was too busy panicking and supervising to take a screenshot; sorry). Needless to say, I quickly banned walking in lava.
Other than that, however, the first day was fairly uneventful.

The first night on Mirzam Al Saif. We've hauled some supplies to the patched-up steel house,
designated a part of the river to gather water (not shown), and secured our food.

Acts of Aggression

While we had no immediate intentions of attacking the other denizens of the planet just yet, it became clear that many of them did not return those feelings. Two days later, after we built a kitchen and powered it with solar panels and a small geothermal plant, we received a garbled radio call from a Widow named Inga Gmeiner. She was being pursued by a pirate and requested refuge at our colony. Since I was hesitant about food and water supplies and wasn't confident in our defenses just yet, I declined her offer and left her to the mercy of the pirates.

In retrospect, I probably could've taken Inga in and fought off the pirate (in Rimworld, regardless
of difficulty or AI storyteller, the first raider will always be a nude meleer). However, as later events will show, we did enough fighting that day to last us the next quadrum.

Later that same day, the first of many raiders arrived. It was only a lone tribeswoman named Sea Urchin (called Sea for short for some reason), armed with nothing but a club. However, the fact that we had no defenses to stop her was rather disconcerting. Upon discovering that she was great with animals, I ordered Louie and Shadow to melee her with their uranium gladii (note: radiation poisoning isn't in Rimworld yet), while Scarlett took potshots with her Ni'Hal pistol. The situation was resolved quickly with no injuries on our side and Sea Urchin successfully downed so that she could be captured. Unfortunately, tribespeople in Rimworld are fairly hard to recruit due to linguistic and technological gaps, but at least with Sea Urchin there was a very slight chance.

Medusa

No sooner was Sea Urchin brought to the old steel house than Randy Random decided to delve into his bag of tricks and give us yet another potential recruit. Not far from our base, a drop pod fairly like the ones we'd arrived in crashed into a patch of soil. Out came a young female Ni'Hal, unconscious and barely clinging to life. Although the Ni'Hal were notorious for their intolerance of all alien life, we of the Chicken Cult were willing to overlook this in our dealings of them. Indeed, many of them who joined us quickly renounced their xenophobia to a degree that they could at least tolerate being in the same room as other aliens. Out of this mercy, we rescued her and had Shadow patch up her wounds in the kitchen (note to self: get actual hospital).

The description for the Staggeringly Ugly trait is golden: "[Colonist] is staggeringly ugly.
[Their] face looks like a cross between a drawing by an untalented child, a
malformed fetus in a jar of formaldehyde, and a piece of modern art.
Others must exert conscious effort to look at [them] while conversing.

The Ni'Hal fully regained consciousness two days later and told us her story. Her name was Dezarae Phoenix, although most called her Dez. She had worked as a teacher at a Ni'Hal colony, and was forced to teach her students the horrors of alien life and instill them with unflinching loyalty to the Ni'Hal Conglomerate. She found herself disagreeing with these views, and quickly found that the authorities had destroyed her house and erased her from state records in retribution. She was able to book passage to a distant rimworld for safety, which turned out to be this one. She assured us that her story was true and she did not harbor the fanatic xenophobia her race was infamous for, and was grateful enough that we were able to overcome this and save her; in return, she would join us and help out. I was more than willing to accept... despite the fact that she is quite literally staggeringly ugly. Thankfully, the game's graphics are insufficient to show this ugliness, which I'm willing to bet could drive people mad in real life.

This is already a face only a mother could love; I don't
want to know what the ugly version of this looks like.

Dez decided to rest off the injuries she'd sustained in the crash before she got to work, but unfortunately at some point I got impatient and ordered her to get up and go to work since the worst of her wounds had been treated. This proved to be a colossal mistake with serious ramifications.

The first signs of trouble came with an omen courtesy of Randy Random. The day after Dez joined us, one of Mirzam Al Saif's moons passed in front of the sun, causing a solar eclipse. The direct consequence of this was the loss of solar power, though our steam plant could compensate for the loss.

Meanwhile, Dez was not feeling great. She was still in pain from the crash, and began feeling like her ugliness was causing the other cultists to ostracize her. She also preferred working at night, and the darkness caused by the eclipse was throwing her sense of night and day all out of whack. The poor mood caused by all of this quickly began adding up, and suddenly she just snapped.

Dez quickly flew into a murderous rage, threatening to murder anyone or anything that came close. Thankfully, none of those things were my colonists, who were wisely avoiding being in her general vicinity. Instead, she went after the recently-released Sea Urchin, and beat her into unconsciousness. Since I'd stopped caring about Sea Urchin at this point since she didn't have many skills other than animal handling and returning her to her people would be a sign of goodwill, I initially didn't care. After that, however, things became serious when Dez went after one of our chickens and began gouging into it with her claws. This was now a heinous and criminal act, since the First Commandment of the Great Poultry is "Thou shalt not harm or kill any sacred chicken". Ordinarily, punishment for killing a chicken would be a swift execution, but we were more lenient since we hadn't explained the rules to her yet, she was still new, and her mental instability meant she wasn't herself. I ordered Willy to lightly knock her out with the butt of her pistol in the hopes of not accidentally killing her. Thankfully, she was indeed KO'd but still alive, although she'd gotten more injuries in the process and would have to rest some more.

(Side note: In previous versions, this "injured berserk" spiral could lead to your downfall, but thankfully the catharsis of such a mental breaks makes this far less likely).

The Worst Freezer in the Universe

Although the packaged survival meals brought from the escape of Ararobos V could last for prolonged periods in the wildnerness (assuming chickens or wild animals didn't get at them first), they wouldn't last forever. Thus, I decided to dig out a walk-in freezer in the mountainside by our kitchen/sleeping area/hospital for Dez, along with some hallways and proper sleeping rooms. Unfortunately, I severely underestimated the impact of the area's geology on our building area: although the steam vents didn't block construction per se like marshy soil, water, or lava; they could still cause issues from the heat they released. I found this out the hard way when we built an AC unit for the freezer, only to discover it was unable to cool things off because I had "brilliantly" built my freezer around a steam vent. The now-contained hot air boiled the air around it to 200 °F (~93.333 °C for metric users) and threatened to give Willy and Louie heatstroke as they hollowed out space for us to live and store our food. Thankfully, I evacuated them in time and decided to wait until the vent calmed down enough to not immediately give everyone near it second-degree burns or worse.

"Build a base in a volcanic wasteland," they said. "It'll be fun," they said.
"You can freeze food really good," they said. Man, screw them.

In spite of these trials and tribulations, the last survivors of the Chicken Cult were managing to eke out a new existence in their new molten homeland. The wilderness of Mirzam Al Saif was a far cry from the urban sprawls they had been accustomed to, both in landscape as well as suitability. Here, there were no grocery stores, no recreation, and water had to be (for the time being) gathered directly from the nearby river. Additionally, several of the neighbors were hostile and the base's defenses were lacking at the moment. 

The Revenant Poultry Disciples officially begin their existence on
this rimworld while Shadow diligently works on a basic killbox for defense,
complete with traps and guns (which we start off with in this scenario).

However, they were confident that they could eventually overcome all this and begin their lives anew. As a sign of their dedication, they agreed to name themselves the Revenant Poultry Disciples, and dub their starting base Hell's Gate. From this aptly named base, they would begin a new Chicken Cult and proclaim the rise of a new Great Poultry, one who could mete fiery laser justice to all raider heathens!

Conclusion

Hell's Gate at the end of the sixth day after making planetfall.
Rainstorms have managed cooled the previously molten lava into solid basalt, allowing for
better passage

Despite the challenges of the Volcanic Fields biome, things are going surprisingly well for my chicken cultists. I also should point out I perhaps foolishly locked the game into "Permadeath" mode where I can't savescum to undo mistakes... even if they are minor ones such as digging hallways too wide, which in retrospect I could've and should've avoided). However, the tooltip for it does say that it makes the game more interesting, and I'm inclined to agree. Honestly, having the colony fall to its knees due to my inability to reload would be far more entertaining. Besides, I'm not looking to win per se like I did with my last game; I simply want to ride the winds of fate and see what horrible calamities befall us.

As usual, if anyone bothers to read this, feel free to put something in the comments, whether it's advice, funny suggestions, or simply a witty remark.