The Long Journey Home: A Forgotten Treasure

Have you ever gone through old stuff in your attic and found an old ball or toy you haven't touched for years, only to start playing with it and realize how fun it actually was? That happened to me a few days ago, except it wasn't an attic of junk I was looking in. Instead, it was my Steam page, and what I rediscovered was The Long Journey Home.

I suspect this is going to be a bit more of an obscure title, so let me explain what it's about. This game, release almost exactly two years ago, pits you as the commander of the Daedalus Project, the first ever FTL flight. It's supposed to be a simple jump to Alpha Centauri and back, but it works too well and slingshots your hapless vessel to a distant region of space. I can name at least a few other games and TV shows that use this basic concept, but as with other games, story cliches don't matter if the gameplay is unique enough. If you want a better explanation, check out a YouTube video from when the game came out (I recommend this one as it shows the tutorial and initial story). I played it for two hours in total when it first came out, then never touched it until I saw a playthrough of it a few days ago and remembered how fun it was. Now I'm addicted and want to write my feelings down about this actually great game.

As you can probably see, we have a very good reason for leaving Earth.

As with games like Rimworld, your success is influenced by who you bring along initially. You choose your starting four crewmembers who each have a unique item to bring. Some are trinkets such as pet plants or laptops, while others are one-use boosts such as space bug repellent or repair kits. They're also fleshed out with distinct personalities via random chatter, and have unique training to help analyze whatever you find in the unknown.

Alessandra the engineer here reveals so much in just a few sentences.

You also choose your ship and lander configuration from three presets, each of which has different storage and hardware capacities. Finally, an ingame seed allows you to set up the universe you'll be playing in, and compare it with other travelers.

Once everything goes wrong a la every sci-fi dealing with experimental FTL drives, it's up to you to survive hostile environments and aliens with a bone to pick (sometimes literally), gather resources, and travel the ~30000 parsecs back to Earth[1].

Probably my favorite part of the game is the piloting. Unlike most other space games, you have to take orbital mechanics into account as you fly across the solar system, though thankfully it handles actual orbiting for you as long as you're close enough. You can even use slingshot maneuvers to save fuel and speed towards distant objects. Once in orbit, you can land on planets to gather the resources you need or even investigate ruins, though beware of hazards such as wind (AKA convection) and earthquakes.

I am going to find a way to include this awesome shot as a sci-fi book cover.

The graphics are also amazing, with a stylized, almost low-poly aesthetic that can be quite realistic and pretty at times. As a result, the aliens and the ships they pilot are just as striking and distinctive (more on them in a bit). Some shots (such as the one on the left) can even look like awe-inspiring sci-fi covers if things work out!

Of course, this part of the universe is far from empty. There are eight alien races you can meet and attempt to appease in various ways... though as a general rule, don't strip mine on their colonies and things will be fine! I found that out the hard way, and got my ship destroyed for it.
Perhaps my favorite are the Ilitza, a race of feminine humanoids. They are extremely decadent slave owners, and talk and act like dominatrices. I even managed to find coordinates to one of their space brothels from a derelict ship. Yeah... that was a thing that happened (sadly, I was too busy laughing as I read to take a screenshot).

If you substituted in an Orion slave girl for this tentacled
feminine humanoid, not much would change.

Of course, there's also the Entrope, the cute little robots who are more than happy to help repair your ship or replace a lander you foolishly destroyed. (Metaphysical side note: are they sentient enough to actually feel happiness? Or is it the same feigned happiness our relatively primitive robots today exhibit? Maybe I should do an analysis of robots from games I play...) The important thing is that none of the races are stock humanoids with ridges or different colored skin (like most "aliens" from Star Trek), and they're all unique and well-developed.

Arguably the only horribly bad thing about the game is the soundtrack. It's not that it's bad (it's in fact very good, though of course I'm a sucker for good soundtracks), it's that to my knowledge there's no way to listen to it outside of the game. There's no DLC for it and I've checked the game files to find the music, and came up with nada. If there is some brave soul who's found the music and uploaded it to YouTube, or if the composer has a sample on his/her site or channel, then do let me know.


So that's my two cents on how I rediscovered The Long Journey Home after two years of ignoring it, and then finding out it's pretty good after I found out what the heck I was actually doing. (Also, I didn't talk about some things such as combat simply because they're not great but they aren't terrible. If I talked about everything in this game, it would be seven paragraphs of "this thing exists, it is okay". And we don't want that, do we?)

[1] Although the exact distance you travel at the start varies between playthroughs, 30,000 parsecs comes out to about 97,486 lightyears. For comparison, the Milky Way is about 100,000 lightyears in diameter, so the ship would either be flung to the other side of the galaxy or just outside it. Of course, the game shows several galaxy/nebula-like sectors as opposed to an image of the Milky Way, but I suppose it's creative license. Maybe they're inside our own galaxy?

Ten Years Already?!

It's nearing the end of 2008, and a crazy young child eagerly turns on his television set to the Discovery Channel. He's into a strange show called The Future is Wild, which he has on DVD but is about to see on television for the first time, having seen its airing on an electronic TV guide. What he doesn't realize is that his life is about to change forever, for alongside this airing is a feature on an upcoming game called SPORE, where the player is able to evolve a creature from a tiny cartoony microbe to a spacefaring civilization. As a creative sort, he is immediately enticed by this and sets out to buy it as soon as possible. It isn't a long or hard wait, for the game comes out on September 7 and he's able to buy it on the weekend of the 13th. Once he boots it up on his computer, everything changes...

In case you couldn't tell, that's the story of how I came to play SPORE. It's hard to believe that it came out ten years today, and that I'm still playing it to an extent (mostly I just wait for anybody to come back and turn Pokemonkab's objectively mediocre creations into equally objective masterpieces). Not only that, but it's still my favorite game of all time because of how much you can do, though there are other games that have and still threaten to usurp that title (recently Rimworld, Stellaris, No Man's Sky, and The Sims 3).

Sadly, the reason that it doesn't feel like ten years since I started playing is because the game has been abandoned since 2011, when EA focused on Darkspore, which in my honest opinion is unworthy of having "Spore" in its title. Coincidentally, that's also the year I  began Spore the Next Level, with its many eye-gouge-out-inducing Artemis Fowl crossovers and the foundations of the Revolution Universe (though that wouldn't come into being until 2013).
Although EA has since discontinued updating the game, it is still supported by the amazing MaxisBazajaytee (PRAISE HIM), the servers are still online (though sometimes feel like they're being held together by duct tape and bubble gum), and plenty of talented creators are still making awesome creations that deserve their place on the MPN list. Unfortunately, the MPN Adventures list is a mess since any adventure that gets at least one play gets on there, although I have seen a few good ones here and there recently. Contrary to popular belief, the game isn't dead yet!

What Could Have Been

Thinking how long it's been since EA left Spore to wither makes me wonder what it would be like in a parallel universe where Spore was supported to the present day. By now we'd be on Spore 2 or 3, and the original game would have gotten quite a few expansion packs. The one true expansion we did get, Galactic Adventures, was simply amazing and made the game so much better, so one wonders how good future ones would have been. Presumably, we would've gotten the promised Aquatic Stage that a few people still clamor for to this very day, 13 years after Will Wright's presentation at GDC. However, the possibilities of alternate universe expansions are as endless as the game itself:

• A Planet/Solar System editor like GA's Adventure Creator, only inside Core Spore (perhaps part of an endgame God Stage)?
• A recent browsing of SporeWiki for ideas mentioned a cut "Terraforming Stage" that has nothing to do with the Space Stage; rather, it's in between the Civilization and Space Stage and sees your species attempting to reverse the effects of climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation you produced trying to conquer the world.
• I've always wanted to have more exploration/depth of your solar system. Currently, it's always the same configuration (in no particular order): a yellow star with a barren world, a gas giant, a T1 world with a crashed ship, and a your homeworld with a barren moon (sometimes a strange Cube Planet). You always visit the T1 planet, scan said ship, go to a neighboring system, and leave your home system behind FOREVER. This is fine because there's not much there, but I've always wanted to have an intermediate Solar Stage where you explore neighboring planets, colonize them, and make your way to inventing FTL travel.
• Patches to fix various annoying bugs, especially the one where the oceans disappear on planets you've terraformed (I worked hard on that!) and an outfit-replacing glitch with the Hologram Scout and GA that makes it literally unusable.
• More exploration of planets. Although the Hologram Scout has always existed (though, as menntioned, GA makes it impossible to use) and GA let you beam down to certain adventure planets, I think it'd be cool to send away teams to any planet's surface with allied ships on "foot" or in a vehicle. You could even have extras who wear red shirts and get killed to prove how dangerous said planet is and what a terrible mistake you've made!
• More parts packs like Creepy and Cute and the infamous Bot Parts that add interesting and wacky ways to create new creatures.
• Something completely out of left-field that radically changes the game like GA did.

In conclusion, it's been a long ten years and so much has changed. Unfortunately, Spore hasn't been able to change ever since EA/Maxis abandoned it, and it's a shame because there's so much that could've been done to fix the game and make awesome new expansion packs. In two years, No Man's Sky went from terrible and boring to amazing thanks to post-release support; after two years, Spore was practically abandoned in favor of the inferior Darkspore... which I will always blame for "killing" Spore.

(Speaking of No Man's Sky, I'm not going to delve into the similarity between the pre-release hype and release day disappointment between the two games. At least not yet.)

In any case, let's wish a happy decennial anniversary to my favorite game, one that shaped me into who I am for better or worse.

No Man's Sky: The NEXT Leap Forward

Le Recap

Flash back for a moment to the summer of 2016: The United States was not yet in control of an idiotic dictator, the Olympics were going on in Brazil, and I was still producing Spore the Next Level². In the midst of all these events, there was one game on everyone's minds: No Man's Sky, seemingly the most awesome space exploration game that had been and ever would be, offering quintillions of procedurally-generated worlds to explore. In the middle of August, it finally came out... only for humanity's collectively high expectations to be unfulfilled.

The general reaction to No Man's Sky when it released two years ago.

As for me, I had no interest in the game and nothing but contempt for the spam of hype it generated on the Internet, so I was somewhat glad when people didn't keep talking about it. In fact, as many of you may know, I made a joke post on this very blog that alleged the game was part of a sinister world domination conspiracy, only to realize that the game was okay upon seeing quill18 (my personal favorite Youtuber) play it. I kept thinking about getting it, but the high price ($60 USD) always turned me away since I didn't have a reliable source of income.

At release, the game was near-universally scorned for not living up to the hype of the advertising and hype it generated (which I never saw save for a Stephen Colbert segment, so I can't and don't make any judgments about said advertising), especially when it came to multiplayer and seeing other explorers in the game. Epithets like "No Man's Lie" and "No Man's Buy" became all the rage, and judging by some people's over-the-top reactions you'd think that the developers (Hello Games) murdered a hospital's worth of unborn babies. They did not, and continued developing the game, adding new features such as base building, vehicles, photo mode, better graphics and owning the colossal freighters you can find in outer space. Despite that, the game flew mostly under my radar over time and I stopped thinking about buying it completely and regarded it as a cautionary tale of hype and high expectations.

A year later (or a year ago, funny that), I rediscovered the game when Hello Games pushed out a new update, Atlas Rises, adding in (among many other things) rudimentary multiplayer where you can see people as "ghosts", reworked progression, and a subplot to the game's main story. Having heard far more positive things about it and discovering it was on sale for under $25, far more affordable than its usual price and a better reflection of its quality, I decided to finally give No Man's Sky a try. Another reason I bought it was Starbound's 1.3 update catastrophically broke several mods I was using, and No Man's Sky helped scratch the itch for space games I had. Although fun for about a month, I felt it was still rather lacking in some areas, a bit boring and repetitive, and was burdened by its failed hype campaign a year previously. Once I figured out how to fix Starbound, I went back to playing that that and left No Man's Sky behind for good... or so I thought...

Another Year, Another Update

Following a pattern of attracting my attention with new updates and then disappearing under my radar, No Man's Sky came back into my life two weeks ago with the update simply titled NEXT, an update that finally added the promised multiplayer, the ability to see your character and interact with others, and an overhaul of crafting and progression. In complete contrast to the release version, NEXT has drawn a significant influx of positive reviews, with some praising it as a "redemption story" and leading one fan to create a colossal monument of lead developer Sean Murray that's visible from space in the same way the Great Wall of China isn't.

The two features from the patch notes that finally drew me in were a rework to base building that allows you to have multiple bases across planets and systems like Starbound (previously, you could only have one base on a single planet) and planetary rings that make planets stand out and look sci-fi-y (yes, that's a thing now). I went in and found the game to be indeed much better than what I'd played a year previously, and since then I've been having tons of fun. The game feels more organic and complete in a way that's hard to describe; perhaps because interlinked systems come together and just work.

Is the game perfect? No, there are some performance issues, graphical bugs I've noticed, and I don't think it's worth the $60. However, as mentioned before, I do think it has substantially improved in many ways. I'll list some of the highlights I've found the best alongside cool photos I've taken:

• Space combat feels far easier than in Atlas Rises, where I kept getting hammered by space pirates and needed to be a pacifist. Now, flying your ship feels smoother and the pirates are much less threatening. I've actually grown to like space combat a lot to the point where I'll be a space mercenary and accept contracts to blow the suckers into the sky.
• A feature added in Atlas Rises was the ability to own multiple starships when you managed to get the millions of units (the game's currency) needed to buy off a freighter captain. Now you have access to this immediately for free, allowing you to purchase a wide range of ships. Specializing them for combat, hauling, or exploring is encouraged.

• Speaking of freighters, owning them is now as easy as answering a distress call and fighting off a pirate raid on one of them. Granted, you'll have to fight waves of enemy ships to get it for free, but as I mentioned space combat is now easier and more fun, so this wasn't a problem for me.
• Alongside freighters are support frigates, large ships you can send off to the corners of the galaxy on specialized expeditions. My freighter started with a trade vessel (upper middle of the photo to the right) that I've successfully sent off on two lucrative trade missions that progressed over an hour of real time and gave me untold thousands of units. Additionally, you can recruit more frigates of various specializations via cash like with new ships, though they can be quite pricey. It makes you feel more like a ship commander and can be a good way to earn money and/or kill time on your adventures.
• Resources have been reworked, and you'll need to refine and craft a lot more to get valuable items such as thruster fuel for take off, "chromatic metal" that has several uses, and pure ferrite for base building. Although it's harder to get what you need, the old system always felt a bit too easy, plus it makes things a bit more interesting.
• You've always been able to find free crashed ships at the price of your old one and whatever it
  
  had in it, but since Atlas Rises (I think) you need to repair their inventory slots with your hard-earned units. Now you'll need tons of resources to fix said slots and make your ship fully-armed and operational, making you feel like a car hobbyist repairing an antique automobile. I'm still in the process of repairing my Pride of Sutikh hauler ship, which still requires a lot of magnetized ferrite, chromatic metal, and tech modules to restore it to its old glory.
• The best part about the NEXT update is the reworked graphics. In the release version, everything had an ugly pea soup hue to it which I never liked and made things uninteresting. Now the game feels a lot more vibrant, colorful, and attractive, helped by the addition of full volumetric clouds and even rings to the skies of planets.
• As I mentioned earlier, there is now a fully-integrated multiplayer where you can meet others, team up with them, or even be a big jerk. I'm not a big fan of multiplayer personally, but I do like the idea of it, especially since it prompted the addition of...
• Character customization! Prior to NEXT, you lacked a character model and thus there was no ability to know who or what you were (although I always assumed the player was a human). You start off as an astronaut in an orange suit, but via a space station module you can become a burly Vy'keen warrior, a small Gek trader, a robotic Korvax, or a strange Traveler*. I stuck with the "Anomaly" astronaut look, but donned a cool helmet (complete with gold visor to protect against solar exposure) and a slick blue suit.
• *It should be noted that the game's developers are British and spell it as "Traveller". However, for this blog, I prefer to use American spellings since that's what I'm most familiar with and what my spellchecker prefers. 
• Planets still aren't as varied as they could be when it comes to flora and fauna, but nevertheless come in enough interesting combinations of colors, water levels, and KILLER DEATH SENTINELS to look different. I've come to accept that the problem of low variety is a with the concept of procedural generation in general and not No Man's Sky. It's not so bad with artificial constructs like buildings and ships, but with creatures it's an issue since scanning and naming them is a big part of progression, albeit less so in NEXT since money is not as big of a reward as it was unless you get scanner upgrades.
• As mentioned before, bases can now be built on any planet provided you have the resources to build a base computer to claim the area. In Atlas Rises, you could only build a single base in a flat predetermined area on one planet. Now, a base computer allows you to set up shop anywhere in a vast array of landscapes, such as on an island on a verdant planet like I did. I can't stress enough how appealing this is to someone as creative as myself, to the point I'm thinking about starting a game on Creative Mode just to check out cool planets and build equally cool bases on them.

In Summation

Despite being buggy, boring, not much to look at, and lacking at release, No Man's Sky has benefited from continued support over the last two years and has become an excellent (albeit still imperfect) space game that is currently one of my most-played on Steam. A special thanks must go to Hello Games for persevering and supporting the game despite the vitriolic criticisms at release, rather than simply shrugging and deciding "that's it, we made a game that sucks, let's try something else". The graphics, crafting, base building, and multiplayer are now far better than anything before in this game, and I can confidently say that NEXT is a tremendous improvement that makes the game what it should've been two years ago. (Although, have they ever heard of beta/early access?)

Rimworld: The Great Chicken Cult, Part 2.5: ERROR ERROR ERROR

I hate to be the bearer of bad news regarding the Chicken Cult playthrough (even if nobody will read this), but I'll say it anyways: the 100+ mods I have for Rimworld have reached critical mass and rendered the save unloadable. On one hand, I had accepted that our inability to keep food preserved thanks to the Freezer of Doom being as hot and unbearable as the outdoors today (at the time of writing, of course). On the other hand, I did want to go back in and attempt to save the colony by having Scarlett and Willy start growing food, something I neglected for one reason or another.

In the end, mod incompatibilities and the permadeath mode I chose have forced me to end the playthrough prematurely. The sheer amount of mods have even made me unable to generate a new map to play on, which is why I will be resetting everything and heading into the unstable branch to take a sneak peak at 1.0 ahead of its inevitable release. As I mentioned last time, the Orassan and Ni'Hal mods have been updated so I don't get mod withdrawal, and there are a few other quality-of-life mods to look at. Never again will I gorge myself on so many mods, most of which I barely use anyways. I probably won't write a playthrough on this blog until the proper 1.0 release; this is just for me to start over and see what awesome new stuff is coming.

So what did happen to the Revenant Poultry Disciples? We'll never know for sure in actual gameplay terms, but here's what I think happened:

The Headcanon Ending

During the relative time and peace, the five colonists quickly realized they were in for a hard time, and packed up what they had and left Hell's Gate behind. Eventually, they followed the river to a temperate coast. There, they were able to rebuild and start growing food alongside what little meals and raw food remained from both the Freezer of Doom and their long trek through the mountains. From this new base, they were able to slowly recruit members thanks to Shadow's high social skills and spread their ways to their neighbors.

Years passed, and the Great Chicken Cult spread once more across Mirzam Al Saif, although the isolation of the bases and factions hampered the rate at which people and aliens could be won over. Once it did happen, though, the hundreds of disciples banded together in a concentrated effort to rid the planet of evil by killing the pesky pirates and forcing the local Ni'Hal purity brigades to realize the futility of their mass purging via forceful means. The original four lived just long enough to see their dreams become a reality; they died peacefully and were honored as the founders of a great new reality. By the time their pursuers from Ararobos V arrived over a century after their initial departure, they found the planet populated almost entirely by worshipers of poultry. Around that time, starships began leaving the planet to spread the ways of the chicken further, some even fitted with stolen Orassan wormhole modulators. The Age of the Chicken had begun...

(This may or may not be plausible; if anyone reads this, feel free to supply your own possible ending for the Revenant Poultry Disciples.)

Rimworld: The Great Chicken Cult, Part 2: Man (and Spider and Lizard) vs. Nature

Welcome to the second part of The Great Chicken Cult playthrough. Not long after the last part, a few mods updated and I added a handful more, namely one that adds vehicles to the game (because it never made sense that you could build starships but not cars and trucks) and another that allows you to pacify berserk colonists without having to knock them out with a pistol. In terms of updates, Ni'Hal refugees are less likely to fall from the sky like Dez did (in other words, future refugees will probably be humans or one of the other races), and Orassans have a new production table alongside more varied backstories. They apparently can also show up alongside normal human space pirates, but whether or not they come with their overpowered weaponry remains to be seen.

Having briefly gone over some changes, let us return to Hell's Gate and further chronicle the exploits of the Revenant Poultry Disciples. Rereading Part 1 is highly recommended.

The Freezer of Doom

Overall, little of note happened in this session, so expect this to be a shorter post. There were no raiders or guests that turned up (other than some passing travelers that I chose to ignore), and the climate stayed fairly normal with the exception of red volcanic smoke and ash spewed out by the volcano. In theory, this would be detrimental to the health of my colonists, but I didn't notice any health effects (due to either them not being outside long enough to be poisoned or weather not being implemented yet in the Nature's Pretty Sweet mod).
Meanwhile, the last of Dez's injuries finally healed, meaning she was able to become a productive member of our colony again and have less of a risk of snapping and going after our chickens.

Louie pieces together some steel deadfall traps for defense.

With no external threats, I was free to build up Hell's Gate. In addition to completing most of the traps with what little steel Louie and Shadow managed to mine out (yes, you mine steel out of mountains in this game instead of smelting it from iron and carbon), we had all the time in the world to deal with the colony's biggest liability: the overheated, steam vent-filled fridge.

I sadly didn't get a picture of the door catching fire (and I can't reload
the save to get one), so you'll have to settle for this.

A walk-in freezer is an absolute necessity to long-term survival in Rimworld, as it allows raw and prepared foods to be stored without having to worry about them decomposing. The ideal temperature for this is at 0 °C (32 °F), but our fridge often reached 100°F or higher! In addition to spoiling our food extremely quickly, the high temperatures in the "freezer" gave anyone who came in it heatstroke, and poor Louie nearly overheated to death.

I also discovered steam vents themselves had a far more destructive side effect, namely that they could heat things to the point where they could literally spontaneously combust. I found this out the hard way when I discovered a steam vent right under a wooden door, which had nowhere to vent its heat except onto the door. This drove temperatures up so high that the door caught fire, but thankfully the colonists got around to putting it out. At this point, my patience ran out and I became determined to get rid of the steam vents once and for all. I realized that although floor tiles could not be placed above the vents, the stone under them could be smoothed to create a decent floor. Although meant to beautify a place to placate colonists, I decided it could create a fireproof plug over the vent and cool the room down.
After the task was done, I immediately smiled: I had at last triumphed over the challenge of the steam vents and made the freezer safe and cold again. Unfortunately, the smile faded when I discovered that smoothing the floor did nothing to stop the steam vents, meaning the freezer was still dangerously hot.
However, just as I was about to cordon off the area forever and find a spot with less steam vents to build a new freezer, it turned out that someone had an unexpected ability to tolerate the heat: Shadow.

Upon seeing her not get heatstroke in the freezer, I discovered the scanty clothes she came with had unusual heat insulation, allowing her to be comfortable in temperatures in excess of 500 °F! Since this was more than enough to keep her from getting heatstroke, I made it so only Shadow could venture in and mine the freezer out, while I had Louie focus on safer tasks such as hollowing out bedrooms and mining steel.

 A Death in the Family

When Dez went berserk in the last part, one of her targets was a chicken named Declan. Although she was able to be incapacitated before she could do much damage, she managed to bruise his right leg and utterly shred his foot. This meant that he too was unable to walk and needed Scarlett to patch up his wounds. Unfortunately, she insisted that Declan needed human food instead of the haygrass our chicken preferred, and kept trying to feed him one of our precious survival meals (that never spoil, even when stored in an overheating freezer). Since I couldn't figure out a way to make sure he only got haygrass, I had to actively deny the poor rooster any food and unfortunately let him starve.

Thus, it was no surprise that Declan starved to death on Aprimay 13th. This was the colony's first brush with death since arrival, even if it was completely preventable and "only a chicken". However, the Chicken Cult never leaves anything to waste, and rather than commemorate him with a sarcophagus (as I usually do with slain animals), I simply ordered him to be butchered so that his sacrifice could at least help us survive on this remote planet a little while longer.

Scarlett atones for her sins and butchers Declan.

Managing the Essentials

Shadow doing colony management so I don't have to!

A few days after Declan's unfortunate death, we managed to install a management table in the kitchen/workroom. This is the key component of the Colony Manager mod, which allows you to designate areas to hunt and chop trees, as well as limit your livestock to prevent overpopulation. It came at an excellent time, since we were running low on food and the area had precious few animals to hunt. I ordered Shadow to flag any nearby animals larger than a rat to be hunted by Willy, a barely competent shooter at level 4.

Meanwhile, the fishing mod started to reveal itself as I built a small bridge across the river to easily access the other side and provide a spot for colonists to gather edible fish from. Since Scarlett was good with animals, she was the natural choice (no pun intended) to complete this task. She diligently walked to the bridge and began casting her rod, but unfortunately she only managed to snag some cloth and muffalo wool.

Scarlett fishing with the patience of a monk.

Conclusion

Hell's Gate at the end of the second session. Notice the faint
red clouds of lava smoke that supposedly can harm colonists.

In the intro to Part 1, I perhaps arrogantly stated the following:

"Thankfully, other than the annoying lava pools that will burn your colonists to death, the lava field isn't too hard thus far." -My deluded past self

 Boy, was I wrong! The lack of animals to hunt, the lack of trees to chop, the extremely high temperatures, the lava pools that burn your foolish colonists to death, and the annoying steam vents that superheat any room you foolishly build over all combine to make the volcano biome a challenge to survive in.
As I mentioned before, food supplies are starting to run low, and the lack of big game to hunt makes our situation all the more dire. We could begin resorting to cannibalism since many of the colonists are indeed cannibals who don't mind allowing corpses to be... used productively, but there haven't been any raids to give us prisoners, I don't want to tick off the other factions just yet, and I'm not keen on slaughtering our own colonists/chickens.

I'm also sadly losing interest in this playthrough, mostly since version 1.0 of Rimworld is on the horizon and I seriously doubt that this save will be compatible. There are also mod glitches/incompatibilities showing up and making it hard for me to prioritize work. I also think it's pretty obvious we'll just starve to death due to a lack of animals and a working freezer. I'm also bummed that nothing of note happened, even though I chose Randy Random to spice up the game with crazy events. While I could use development mode to force events to spawn and/or remove the steam vents in the freezer, that'd just break immersion and go against my rules for this game: just let the game run and see how long it is before we die comedically and horribly. With famine and starvation on the horizon, I think exactly that has happened.

In terms of future plans, I might continue this playthrough at least once to see if anything interesting happens or if we can recover from our famine (although I frankly thing both are unlikely). However, 1.0 is in unstable testing on Steam, and I met check that out since a few mods (most notably the Orassan and Ni'Hal mods, which are the two that prevent me getting mod withdrawal) have been updated in anticipation. Or I could wait and play the full 1.0 release after everything's been balanced and fixed, as I usually do when I hear a new game update is coming out. For now, enjoy and comment!

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.

Rimworld: The Great Chicken Cult, Prologue

The urbworlds: the wretched hives of scum and villainy dotting the galaxy. These city-covered industrial wastes are notorious for their overcrowded slums, bloodied streets, and choking smog. It is here that the darkest impulses of humanity are unleashed, like a genie uncorked from their magic lamp. Said impulses can fuel the rise of luciferium-dealing drug lords, oppressive mega-corporations, mafia families, or toughened street thugs that oppress and extort their local populations, making already horrible places even worse.
Many years ago, on the planet Ararobos V, exactly this did not happen. Instead, things took a far different path, a far more fowl path.

Nobody knows exactly where or how it started, but one day a new group came to power among the urban sprawl. They called themselves Those Blessed by Poultry, but most would come to know them as the Great Chicken Cult. Their tenets were simple: the humble chicken was the greatest animal of all, and could not be surpassed by any other. Its leader, the Great Poultry, stylized himself/herself as the one who could heed the bawks and clucks of the chickens, and pass on those instructions for their followers to heed. Those who did so correctly could expect redemption and salvation in this life and/or the next.

These simple beliefs attracted many followers from the slum archipelagos to the red-light provinces (you don't... you don't wanna know), all of different backgrounds and types. It did not matter who they were to the Great Poultry, for all were equal in the eyes of the chickens. All spectra of wealth, from the rich who lived in the highest apartment complexes to the downtrodden poor who had to make do in cardboard boxes, were accepted. It did not matter whether they preferred the opposite sex, the same sex, or both. All skin colors were tolerated, and both men and women received equal treatment under the auspices of the Great Poultry.

Some who joined the Cult were not even human.

A digitized version of a Chicken Cult standard recovered from a
crackdown in the New Detroit Precinct.

In just a scant few years, the Cult held de facto power over a quarter of the planet's landmass and showed no signs of slowing down. Its members were passionate and committed to the Great Poultry's cause, who had helped many redeem themselves thanks to the chickens. Ni'Hal could peacefully give up on their goals of galactic genocide, slum dwellers could become wealthy enough to get basic supplies, and criminals could be placated.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and even the Chicken Cult would find itself worn down by the ravaging winds of time over the years. Its leaders became decadent and stopped caring for the needs of its members, using their accumulated wealth to construct monuments to their egomania rather than help the needy. Rumors of the cult's sinister practices of eating and butchering the "unworthy" like their sacred chickens began to spread to the outside world, and previously forbidden acts such as lasciviousness and drug usage became more and more common.

Finally, the remaining authorities on Ararobos banded together to end the chicken madness once and for all. Crackdowns in Cult-controlled city centers began, followed by mass arrests. The streets and plazas quickly became battlegrounds as the cultists stood their ground, who were just as committed as when the first Great Poultry had spread their words to the masses.. In the end, though, their devotion to chickens proved worthless; as the authorities made their way to the Cult's HQ and killed the Great Poultry, along with every chicken they could find. It is far easier to destroy something than to create it, and exactly this had happened to the Chicken Cult. Years of preaching and clucking were undone within a single day, which ended with the final dissolution of the cult.

However, four disciples had managed to pool their wealth together and acquire a starship with which they could escape the planet and spread their word to the masses among the stars. During the final assault on the main base of operations, they grabbed several chickens and entered the ship's cryptosleep sarcophagi. After blasting off and leaving their world behind, they then set a course for the distant rimworlds on the boundaries of known space, where they could evade detection and begin the Chicken Cult anew. After decades of travel, a new Great Poultry shall rise again in the depths of the galaxy...

***

That's right, it's time for another playthrough of Rimworld on this blog! With a successful campaign of my own wrapped up and an even greater list of mods (which I'll provide in a bit), it is time to delve into insanity and use the game's built-in scenario editor to tell the story of a few remaining cultists who settle on a new world with ten of their finest chickens.

Unlike my earlier game, I'm not going to end it on my own terms; instead, I'll just play until either version 1.0 comes out and breaks everything or we get horribly murdered by raiders.

As promised, here's an outlined list of some of the notable mods I'll be using in this game that directly impact gameplay and aren't quality-of-life features on my end. (Since I have, like, 120 of them, listing them all here would be impossible. I might mention some more as they come up). They're all on the Steam Workshop if you think you'd like to try them out for yourself.

UPDATE: I have also uploaded the scenario itself to the Steam Workshop if you're so inclined to play it and discover the depths of my insanity. The public one is slightly modified version of the one I use that replaces the Ni'Hal pistols with vanilla revolvers so you can play it in vanilla. (Feel free to use Prepare Carefully if you have it in this scenario to replace the weapons as you see fit).

• Major Mods
• Races
• Orassans: The cold-loving space kitties are still here in full force with their old wormholes, orbital bombardment, and OP weapons alongside new Stellaris-inspired stuff such as Betharian power generators and neo-concrete fortifications.
• Ni'Hal: A race of genocidal space lizards whose sole motivation is to channel Donald Trump and kill all inferior aliens so they may have undisputed control over the galaxy. Like the Orassans, they come with overpowered weapons and armor, but theirs are a bit more balanced and easier to come by since they raid you a lot.
• Astoriel: These long-lived space elves are xenophobes like the Ni'Hal, only they have more of a "leave us alone and we will do the same to you" mentality.
• Widows: An all-female race of humanoid spiders who have a fungus living inside their pregnant bodies that augments their intelligence (yes). Being all-female, they must seek out compatible mates from other species (I like to imagine they have a preference for humans) to allow them to bear children ovovivoparously (meaning they incubate eggs in their bodies and then birth young live)... and then eat said mates when they're done doing it. They can produce their own silk (for a happiness bonus) that can be used for furniture, armor, or "interesting" sculptures.
• Androids: Sapient robots often with feminine appearance and programming who can either be built or encountered.
• Features
• Nature's Pretty Sweet: Adds new biomes such as salt flats, lava fields, and desert oases inspired by American national parks. Also, it revamps weather and water behavior in vanilla biomes.
• Expanded Prosthetics and Organ Engineering (EPOE): Make limb and organ replacements ranging from simple peg legs to uranium-augmented advanced bionics and cybernetics.
• Hospitality: Recruit otherwise useless visitors to your cause and/or entertain them by building guest rooms and amenities.
• No Water, No Life: Now your colonists need water as much as food.
• Colony Manager: A quality-of-life mod that automatically designates stuff so you don't have to.
• Work Tab: Allows you to set different priorities for individual tasks like never before, down to when things should be done.
• Apparello 2: Tons of new clothing options for your colonists.
• Can Wear Together: Now colonists can wear multiple of the new clothing items together.
• Bok Choy: Adds in everybody's favorite type of Chinese cabbage because I'm CRAAAAAAAZY
• Run and Gun: Colonists can move and shoot at the same time.
• Consolidated Traits: New special traits that you can find on your colonists, guests, and raiders. 
• Bananas!: Self-explanatory, adds the yellow fruit along with goodies such as banana power armor and banana peel traps for comedic purposes.
• Sometimes Raids Go Wrong: Now those annoying pirates and Ni'Hal Nazis can be randomly attacked by mechanoids, struck by meteors, or get chased by manhunting beasts.
• Mining Co. Spaceship: Call in orbital shuttles for air support, treating severe injuries, or getting critical supplies.
• Camera+: Better zoom-ins for epic screenshots.
• Training Enabler: Allows cats and chickens to be trained. GO GO ATTACK CHICKENS.
• Prepare Carefully: Carefully choose who and what you want to start out with, whether to make things easier or create a story.
• Tilled Soil: Allows you to till soil to better grow crops.
• Adjustable Trade Ships: Tweak the rate at which supply ships appear, from the message spam of the More Trade Ships mod to the lack of them in vanilla.
• RePower: Electric items use less power when not in use. It may sound simple, but boy does it end up saving a lot of electricity! That's why you should always turn everything off when you don't use it, kids.
• Rimstory: Chronicles everything that's happened in your game so far. This is gonna make writing this blog so much easier!
• Minor
• Smooth Stone Walls: Now you can properly dig into a mountain and build rooms without manually replacing walls.
• Basic Bridges: Self-explanatory, adds bridges you can use to walk over water.
• Fishing: An add-on to Basic Bridges that allows you to fish off of bridges and get a new food source.
• Archipelagos: Now you can play on small islands of various vanilla biomes. Works great with the above Bridges mod, since they were all made by the same author.
• Statue of Colonist: Be a proper sculptor and build statues of your various colonists.
• Winter Hats: New beanies, ski masks, and earmuffs to keep people cozy in the chill of winter.
• Rimsenal Rimhair, Nackblad Inc. Rimhair and Spoon's Hair Mod: Three mods that add new hairstyles into the game for more varied characters.
• Less Default Hairs: A slightly outdated but still functional mod that gets rid of some of the vanilla game's dumber-looking hairstyles so new ones are more likely. 
• Names Galore: Thousands of male and female names, surnames, and nicknames for... you guessed it, more varied characters
• TD Enhancement Pack: Various improvements to status messages and overlays for lighting, buildable terrain, and fertile ground.
• Replace Walls: Allows converting existing walls and doors into new types of material. Useful for beefing up your walls and defenses.
• More Floors: Adds some more flooring options to make your base prettier.
• Set-Up Camp: Allows you to create temporary camps when traveling via caravan so you can rest, make food, or heal up. 
• Camping Stuff: Allows you to make deployable tents and stoves that you can take on your caravan travels.
• Simple Raids: Removes sieges and sappers, mostly for my benefit so I can learn to use the new mods without being instantaneously killed.
• Efficient Lights: Reduces the power consumption of lights from 75 W to 25 W.