Uusimaa, FinlandRe: Storyteller settings, note that you are permitted to change the storyteller and difficulty during the run to suit your purposes. For example, if you depend on the game generating a big raid, but you don’t want to deal with mood problems. The least radical setting (in terms of gameplay difficulty) will be used when labeling the submission.
I have considered this possibility more than a few times, but no. Prepare carefully not only allows for the creation of unfair “perfect” cyborgs that might be never generatable by the game, but allowing any mod also puts god-mode type control of the game into the hands of the mod author (who may release new versions at any time), and that’s just a disaster for a speedrun site. We can choose to trust the game creator. But we do not have the resources to monitor mod authors and check the source code (if released) for secret exploits and the such. There is also the possibility of counterfeit mods, which is impossible to verify from a video.
The rules currently allow you to stand there for hours just hitting “randomize” without punishing your clock (as long as you don’t cut the recording), and apparently, the new release (beta19) also has relative stable and reproducible pawn generation from a world-seed. The current scheme may be inconvenient, but it is fair.
To speed up practice, you can use devmode/mods to set your pawns to whatever configuration you like, but you cannot submit such videos.
Based on the newest idea for money-making (https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/guide/v7km1) I am thinking of the following kind of plan:
— Crashlanded start. This gives you:
⸺ 800 silver
⸺ 300 wood
⸺ 450 steel
— World needs:
⸺ A small amount of rich soil
⸺ Throughout year growing
⸺ Plenty of friendly faction bases nearby
⸺ Moderate amount of wood
⸺ Some steel ores, some silver ores, some valuable ores
— Divided between the three colonists are the following skills:
⸺ 1 × max-social
⸺ 3 × max-artist (or at least 1)
⸺ 3 × max-construct (or at least 1)
⸺ 1 × some mining
⸺ 1 × some plants skill
⸺ 1 × some cooking skill
— Plant:
⸺ Rice field
— Construct:
⸺ 3 × beds (cost: 130 wood)
⸺ 3 × sculptor’s tables sharing the interaction spots with other things (cost: 150 steel, 225 wood)
⸺ 1 × dining table (cost: 28 wood)
⸺ 2 × tool cabinets (cost: 400 steel)
⸺ 2 × dining chairs (cost: 180 wood)
⸺ 1 × standing lamp (cost: 20 steel)
⸺ 1 × wood-fired generator (cost: 100 steel, 2 component)
⸺ 1 × orbital trade beacon (cost: 40 steel, 1 component)
⸺ 1 × comms console (cost: 120 steel, 4 component)
⸺ walls, doors, beds
— Layout:
⸺ Something like this: 
The campfire is for cooking.
— Sketch:
⸺ In the beginning you can only make one sculpture, so only build one sculptor table at first. Concentrate on the other tasks.
⸺ Start with the basic things: Rice field, beds, walls, doors. Mine some steel and silver. Mine all plasteel, uranium, gold and jade you can find. Deconstruct walls to yield bricks. Sell bricks as soon as you can ($70.2 per 100). Sell any plasteel ($702 per 100), uranium ($468 per 100) and jade ($390 per 100) you come by, using your level 20 healthy social person.
⸺ As soon as you can, build the comms console so you can sell the first sculpture as soon as it’s ready. If it’s masterwork or better, it will immediately finance two new sculptures. Otherwise you need to mine more silver or sell some other stuff, unless you already have a comfortable buffer of silver. Allow only max-artists to work on sculptures. Note that a silver small sculpture only weighs 3 kg, so you can carry plenty in a caravan.
⸺ Keep basic tasks running (sowing etc). Otherwise keep making sculptures. Use trading opportunities.
⸺ ??? Profit
⸺ Once you’ve got ~120000 silver or more, deconstruct your recreation items and begin constructing the wondrous room as described earlier. 15x15 interior dimensions + a few more empty squares, wooden walls & door; fill it with silver chairs (allow only the max-constructor(s) to work). Walls whatever, floors silver. 1 silver horseshoe pin. Meticulous cleaning.
Well, needs testing :P If you come by gold during mining, don’t sell it, but use it in the construction. Chairs if you get at least 450. Floors otherwise. It will cut your budget significantly.
(May need lots of adjusting depending on things discovered when actually trying it out.)
So far the best recipe I have found, in terms of labor, is the following (gold-based budget):
— Room size: 9x8 (interior dimension) — Wall materials: Any will do, including wood. Skip corners if you like. You will need 2×8 + 2×9 walls, some of which can be doors. — Floor material: Any will do, including concrete, as long as there is a floor. — Masterclass constructor, so that each built item is at least “good”. — Build 69 golden dining chairs. Cost: 31050 gold. Chairs of any kind do not reduce space, a vital component in impressiveness. This means the room will be full of chairs except for three spots. — Build 1 golden horseshoes pin. Cost: 100 gold. Build this last. This causes the room to count as “rec room”, needed for the thought.
All chairs were at least “good” quality. A level 20 constructor will make most chairs “good”, maybe one in every hundred were only “normal”.
Gotchas: — Dirt reduces beauty, which may cause the room to be knocked down a step in impressiveness. The impressiveness score must be a tiny bit above 240 in order to get the wondrous rating. Surround the room with liberal amounts of any kind of floor you like, including concrete, to minimize the amount of dirt carried in. Or make sure you employ a meticulous cleaning slave. — As far as I know, it does not matter where in the room everything is. The horseshoes pin is an exception. Make sure the horseshoes pin is far away enough from at least one of the walls (i.e. there’s space to stand at least 5 tiles away from it). Do not put it in the middle of the room. — Make sure the horseshoes pin is the only remaining form of entertainment available. — Make sure you build the horseshoes pin last, and keep your pawns away from any other recreation room as well, until the room attains the “wondrous” status. — Make sure the pawn does not have an existing "rec room" thought from some other room, when you finish building the wondrous room. If they have a "slightly impressive rec room" thought and they do rec activity in a wondrous room, the "slightly impressive rec room" 24-hour timeout gets recharged instead of giving them a new "wondrous rec room" thought. This is a bug in the game.
Instead of a rec room, you could go for a medical bed (hospital), a table (dining room), or a bed (bedroom or prison), but the horseshoe pin only takes one floor tile. An animal bed (barn) does not have an associated thought, nor do kitchens, tombs, workshops, laboratories etc.
Wall materials, or floor materials under door, are irrelevant. For reducing dirt, you should have a cheap floor under the door though.
TODO: Test with stone sculptures.
Ideas for training constructors without consuming resources: — Neurotrainer mech serums (if only) — Build the world full of graves — Have someone practice firing at a certain spot in wall, and have your constructor simultaneously repair the wall from the other side. This is difficult to balance right.
Ideas for making money: — Drugs (esp. smokeleaf joints, as you don’t need neutroanime that you cannot source locally) — Organ trade (massive tribal raids! Don’t play peaceful mode). — Huge fields, day-around cook duty, sell fine meals — Shearing of woolly animals (e.g. go tame some alpacas) — Beer (but it takes a lot of work) — Stone sculptures (they take a lot of work, too, but if you live in a mountaineous map…) — Wood sculptures (if you live in a dense forest) — Clothes sale (massive tribal raids! Remember to strip before you kill). — Remember to caravan to trading towns. They give you more money than any traders accessible without leaving your map tile. — Max social stat + cowboy/bowler hat or tribal headdress. — Mining (each silver block gives you 35 silver) — See also: https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/guide/v7km1
Slightly hindered by the fact that an average trader only carries about 2000 silver. You need to trade 50 times to get 100000…
https://www.speedrun.com/smb2ce#14_Stopwatches The video link for run https://www.speedrun.com/smb2ce/run/y8q54n5y takes to a twitch page that does not load.
Mining, deep mining, trading, and deconstructing golden objects (traded, ancient dangers, spaceship). For some ideas, look at how https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/y2q5pljy managed to get enough gold for a spaceship. Granted that’s a tiny amount compared to what might go into decorating, but.
I was unable to validate the formula on that page versus Beta19, but here are some of my findings:
— Simply increasing the room size does not give more impressiveness. In fact, a huge room that is entirely golden-floored is less impressive than a smaller room that is golden-floored. There is a balance point and it seems to be around 100~120 space. — Silver-plating your floors will boost the impressiveness a great deal, but it is not enough by itself. Gold-plating the floors is a much faster way to gain impressiveness, but it also gets really expensive really quick. Sterile tiles increase the cleanliness, but the added cleanness factor does not have as high effect to impressiveness as does the beauty & wealth of silver tiles. — Even awful sculptures (negative beauty) can generate impressiveness, if they are made of expensive materials. Conversely, masterwork sculptures generate impressiveness even if they are made of stone. — Wall materials do not matter. Don’t make jade walls. (EDIT: In 1.0 they do matter.) — Floor material under doors does not matter.
Based on my short test I don’t have a minmaxed theory for a wonderously impressive room yet. But the amount of wealth you must put into it seems to be in 50k—150k range. The actual amount depends on the other factors.
You need to try it offline first (as in, without timer) and make plans. Use devmode if necessary to try out different things. Once you know what you must do, start practicing. Yes, it is very difficult.
Things to keep in mind: -- Craft quality -- Different materials -- Space -- Floors -- Plant pots, sculptures -- Wealth -- Cleaning -- You can exchange money to goods
RimWorld version Beta19 has been released by Ludeon.
Because there are have been lots of assorted changes, I have moved the old Escape runs into a Misc category and created a new category for Beta19 escape runs.
The most important difference that comes to my mind is that Advanced components must now be built on a different bench. This affects at least build% runs. There is also a way to explicitly request a AI Core quest now.
The integration of allow-tool into the game should also affect other categories a bit, but for now I have not separated the runs for different versions in those categories. I suspect the Craft-oriented challenges may need to be separated, because the work amount for at least some craft/build tasks were changed radically.
Input and critical analysis is appreciated.
A link to the official release notice: https://ludeon.com/blog/2018/08/rimworld-beta-19-released/
Taming a thrumbo is way too dependent on RNG, as is crafting a legendary item. And the latter will be almost impossible in the upcoming 1.0, without an inspiration at least, and they come randomly.
Befriending all factions however… How feasible is that? If I recall correctly, pirate bands naturally regress to −99 periodically no matter what you do.
I have decided to bar harvesting the AI rocket, by the rationale that deconstructing it counts as “using”, and using a rocket that you did not build yourself is already banned in build%. The little community feedback I have seen also slightly leans towards this side of the decision.
You are allowed to deconstruct & harvest anything else you come across though, including things like ancient defenses, turrets in enemy camps, golden statues purchased from orbital traders, and so on.
Harvesting the AI rocket is also permitted in any other category but not build%, unless prohibited by another rule. (Notably, the grand golden sculpture category might benefit from it in theory.)
I’m sure everyone has noticed already, but there is a sub-two-hour build% run now. It does not harvest the AI ship. And even then it looks almost like the limiting factor is research speed, not resource accumulation. Well, that, and component crafting speed. That said, it does have a fair share of bad luck too, including a berserk colonist getting oneshotted.
But over all, the run is totally something else. It includes so many unorthodox solutions, starting with colonists locked in an awkwardly long hug/kiss as they share research responsibilities. Recommended!
However, the is a validation/rules question that I need some input on. Are the deep ores always identical for same world seed & coordinate, or are they randomized? Because this player clearly knew where everything is. He went straight to the steel, plasteel and uranium deposits without ever using a ground scanner. If they are randomized, he must have used another computer to study the save file generated by the game, perhaps by building a ground scanner in the separate off-screen instance of the game launched using the same save file. Should this be allowed? Or is it not even relevant, because the world can be predicted?
I believe that is the sort of thing more applicable to casual streams and/or races. Compare to randomizer runs of FFV for example.
In case you haven’t already done so, remember to highlight your video on Twitch, or it will unrecoverably disappear in a couple of weeks. Also, next time please don’t play non-free music while streaming. Non-free music is a MAGNET for copyright torpedos, potentially retroactively sabotaging your videos.
The problem is that in some challenges, the subcategories obsolete each others, and in some other challenges, they don’t. For those categories where the storyteller makes no practical difference, it would be a waste to have separate leaderboards. I have been switching this back and forth the recent days, but I have not been able to figure out a good solution. The same goes for the biome, actually. And the startup scenario too. The Human leather hat challenge becomes quite different if you start with 1 colonist, but in the Escape category, there’s hardly significance.
Note that when you view the leaderboard, you can use the Filter button to choose runs of a particular subcategory. Things may bring forth runs that were otherwise “obsoleted”. Try for example, Startup Scenario: Lost Tribe, in the Escape category.
I agree on the RNG heavy. That’s why I forbid outsourcing where possible.
As for the drinking challenge, colonists can be forced to drink alcohol, and therefore the blackout status does not depend on RNG; the bulk of the task is in the alcohol brewing. Or do you mean you can get a colonist that begins the whole game already in blackout status?
The gold sculpture may be a bit too hard on RNG though. Gold is pretty hard to come by without trading, and we all know how random traders are. Same goes for the components one.
As for marriages, I am not sure, but I think you can pretty much force a couple to happen by influencing moods with things like working together and mutually performing rescues in a downed-situation. Haven’t really tested this theory though. I don’t think you can avoid random break-ups though.
As of 2018-07-05, I have changed the timer-start rule common to all categories to the date. The old rule was: Timer starts when you click “Start” on the character creation page. The new rule is: Timer starts, after the map has been generated, when you click “OK” and the scenario explanation dialog disappears, before you gain control of the colonists.
The purpose of this change is to take loading times out of the equation. There is still the dilemma of loading times when caravaning though.
Consequently, I have manually updated the timings for all runs submitted to the date. The timings for each run have changed by −16…0 seconds.
This affects the following runs: https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/y675176m by @Hadryx https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/z5ojl3dy by @Hadryx https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/pm34n5qz by @kilgoar ¹ https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/z5ojw0dy by @Hadryx https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/zq36v38y by @aironne https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/ywp1qv3z by @aironne https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/zq657q5y by @EVELog https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/z13n919m by @knewster https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/zpqvn08y by @shazza https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/yjkqg23m by @murmur999 https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/z5o63kny by @EVELog https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/yvgd68oy by @ulikethisname https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/z137wq7m by @CarpathianRunner https://www.speedrun.com/RimWorld/run/zx445lgy by @Salaminer
¹) The video for this run contains non-free music, and it has eaten a copyright torpedo. As a consequence, I was unable to re-verify the run and update the timings. The run entry still has old timings. Please do not put non-free music in your videos.
In the rules, is also now a non-enforced requirement that the verification video must include game audio. The precision of timing verification for videos without audio was coarser than the precision of timings for videos with audio, which may account to an error of ±2s. There are also other validation issues with videos that do not have audio or where the game audio (both music and sound effects) are not heard.
Video starting time rule has not changed. The video must still begin before you click “New colony”, and it must still prove that you have not activated mods, and it must still prove that you have not edited the scenario.
