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!