Difference between revisions of "Naked Brutality Guide"

Revision as of 19:23, 19 November 2019

In the Naked Brutality scenario, you start with absolutely nothing, not even clothes.

Because of this, it is possibly the hardest scenario of all.

Scenario Parameter

Summary: Naked, alone and utterly unprepared. Can you survive?
Description: You went under anaesthetic for a minor surgery. Now you've awoken in a drop pod crashing into a distant planet. You're naked, alone and utterly unprepared. Can you survive?

Start with one person, chosen from eight
- They will be 'New Arrivals'
Start with no items
Colonist arrives naked

Starting colonist

Skills

You must choose a colonist that is capable of survival skills. They don't need to be good at them, but they must be able to do so at the very least. This includes:

Dumb labor: Hauling, cleaning and refueling.
Construction: Building shelter to live in and deconstructing ruins for building materials. You need 3 Construction to build a spike trap.
Medicine: Treating oneself when injured or sick. High skill is more important as you have to rely on herbal medicine scavenged from your surroundings.
Crafting: Making equipment and misc crafting. You need to craft your own starting equipment as you don't start with any. You need 2 Crafting to make a short bow.
Violence: Defending oneself from mad animals or raiders, as well as hunting for food.

If the colonist doesn't have these skills then it's best that you reroll until you have one that does. You don't need them to be interested or skilled in any of them, but if you do then it's a plus. Passion in skills you'll be using a lot, such as construction or plant cutting, can also help your colonist's mood.

Some skills will make survival easier, but are not essential:

Cooking: Making meals out of raw food and butchering creatures. You can eat raw food in a pinch but it's not a good idea to do so. Higher cooking skill and a clean kitchen both reduce the chance of food poisoning.
Growing: Growing crops. While you can subsist on hunting and gathering alone very early on, you will eventually need to start planting crops to feed your colonists. In a biome with winter it is best to plant as soon as possible.
Social: Recruiting new colonists and trading. If you are lucky enough to capture a raider then you can use your Social skills to recruit them - if you can spare the food and the time.
Mining: Extracting mineral resources. More useful after settling down to begin expansion, though mining rare minerals early on can help you trade for things that are hard to make.

Some other skills are better left for future colonists:

Animals: Training animals isn't quite a necessity early-game, but will greatly compliment you in combat, provided you have sufficient food to train animals. Most animals also have a revenge chance on tame fail. With a lone animal and a skilled colonist it may be worth the risk, but a lone colonist is no match for a herd of vengeful muffalo.
Intellectual: Unless you started off in an extreme environment and need essential research (such as Hydroponics) then it's better that you focus on building up a working shelter for survival first, as research merely assists survival.
Artistic: Early on you should not be making sculptures yet.

Traits

Besides this, you should also have a colonist with a decent trait selection.

These traits are especially harmful:

Gourmand: This trait will certainly make starting off harder- you will need to rush food production in order to keep this one colonist fed, which isn't good.
Pyromaniac: This universally hated trait is even more dangerous in a naked brutality start because if your lone colonist breaks, nothing but the rain can extinguish the fires started.
Volatile: Having your lone colonist break down is not a good thing to happen, as this will put them right out of action, stagnating progress.

Some traits are more helpful:

Industrious: Finishing your work faster means you can get more done. This is especially useful if only 1 colonist's doing everything.
Fast learner: Improving your skills faster is very handy, as 1 colonist doing everything gives ample opportunity to train up skills.

At the beginning

It is essential that you solve the basic needs for survival first. In RimWorld, that is food, shelter and security.

Shelter

This is one of the few situations where it's an acceptable risk to build wooden walls. A wood structure is better than nothing. However, it is still vulnerable to fire. Hopefully you will be able to upgrade it to stone before lightning or raiders take the decision out of your hands.

If you are on a map that has ruins, however, choosing one of the larger ruins and adding a roof and wooden doors can get your colonist indoors quickly and save you some time. If it is large enough, you can even put your first catch-all stockpile inside with the colonist for the first day or two. Otherwise, even a small roof over an outdoor stockpile is helpful, especially to slow the deterioration of your first scavenged food and herbal medicine.

If you are in a cold biome or starting in winter, building a shelter around a steam geyser will help you save on wood. In extreme cold biomes it may be the only option to survive the first few days. Once you are able to expand your structure, keeping the steam vent in a separate room lets you keep it as an optional source of heat. In warm weather, the roof can be removed. In cold weather, replacing the roof and adding a vent that leads to your living space can get you heat without using wood or electricity.

A dedicated storage/warehouse is not strictly necessary at this point, however it is better that you build one - that is, once you take care of other things.

Building a few spike traps on the corners of your shelter or on a nearby choke point is a good idea. If your biome has plentiful wood, wooden spike traps are excellent for this. Even if you don't have a weapon, you can flee past the traps to trick an enemy into pathing across them, or hide inside until a manhunting animal steps on one of them.

Equipment

At the beginning, you will need some form of weapon. In order to hunt effectively, a short bow is best. If your colonist has a crafting skill of 5 or higher, you can make a recurve bow, which has slightly longer range and higher damage than the short bow. Longer range and higher damage per shot mean slightly lower chance of animal revenge, and better likelihood you'll be able to flee successfully from vengeful prey. You will need to go hunting to gather meat and fabrics.

After you gather enough leather from hunting, you can make tribalwear to cover yourself up, using 60 of any textile. Tribalwear covers both torso and legs using fewer resources than a t-shirt and pants, so it is a more efficient choice in this scenario.

Not all clothing can be made from leather, but there are a few options for every biome even before you have planted and harvested cotton. A parka is the superior garment for dealing with cold, though it requires 80 of any material to make. A duster similarly requires 80 material to make, and is the most heat resistant garment. All hats which can be made from leather provide a small amount of cold protection, while the cowboy hat is the best for dealing with heat.

You may wish to build a leather bedroll if you are in a biome where wood is scarce, such as Desert or Tundra. If you've changed the scenario to have your sole colonist be Tribal, this will be your only option.

Food

Food can be gathered from plants around you, such as berries or agave. If you have a good grower you should also start growing crops now.

Rice is a good choice to provide constant food fast, but don't rely on rice extensively especially when you lack manpower. Planting slower growing plants with high yield is a good solution after you have secured enough food to wait for longer-growing plants to grow. Grow rice first, or strawberries if your colonist has 5 or higher skill in Plants. Then plant potatoes or corn. Potatoes are best if the soil is poor, for example, in a desert map where there is very little soil available. If your biome has winter, only plant corn if are confident you will have 20 full growing days before the temperature reaches -10C (14F) and kills them. Otherwise, stick with potatoes.

You will likely not have the time or extra resources to build walls around your crop fields at first. If your biome contains rich soil, you may wish to plant in those areas exclusively. Having more than one crop field in different locations can also help avoid having all your crops burn down if there is an unlucky lightning strike, or if a raider spawns close to your field while you are too far away to put out the fire. They shouldn't be too far from your shelter, however, to cut down on travel time for your colonist.

If you can place your growing zones in spots where there are a lot of trees, this lets you chop wood and plant crops at the same time.

Hunting / Scavenging

One effective hunting method is to draft your colonist and manually shoot all animals in a herd until they are bleeding, then let blood loss do its work. In the meantime, you can do other things. This is especially useful in a biome that has winter. Frozen corpses don't spoil. Wildlife will become scarce (with most of the few remaining animals being tough predators) or entirely absent as you approach the end of Decembary.

Search the map often, and check the locations of predators in the Wildlife tab - particularly if the predators are injured. You might also find a few dead animals, which aren't shown in the Wildlife tab. These may be either prey that wasn't completely consumed, or predators who succumbed to their injuries after their prey fought back. You can unforbid and butcher these corpses for free food and leather.

If your starting colonist has high melee skill and low shooting, it is also possible to manually draft them and hunt with a melee weapon. This may be effective for smaller game such as rats (but not boomrats!), or modestly-sized animals such as turkey or raccoons. Individual 0% revenge chance animals will fight back if you melee attack them, although you will be only fighting that one alpaca rather than angering the entire herd. Drafted melee hunting is not recommended for large or aggressive animals, however, or if you are on a biome such as Arid Shrubland which does not have healroot.

Melee hunting risks your colonist's health.

Medicine

Go to your colonist's Health tab and turn on self-tend. If the "Self-tend" check box is not turned on, your colonist will not treat their own injuries.

Harvest a few healroot as early as possible if they are available in your biome. If your colonist has 8 skill in Plants, it's a good idea to make a small growing zone and plant some. Keep adding one here and there as you can fit it in between other tasks until you have a decent stockpile. Poorly applied herbal medicine is still much, much better than bleeding to death from picking a fistfight with a squirrel. The quicker you tend an injury and the cleaner your living space, the lower the chance of infection.

Diseases and infections need to be treated IMMEDIATELY. With even a few points of medical skill, herbal medicine should be enough to keep your colonist alive. If you're away from your shelter and your biome has wild healroot, manually havesting the nearest healroot plant and self-tending right away is better than taking a long walk back and letting the infection counter run up.

Next step

Defense

Lack of equipment and manpower makes it harder to fight against raiders. Traps will help you a lot in the early stage; placing traps at chokepoints, and luring raiders to trigger them, make it much easier to win.

Check your raiders' Health tabs often. If they're more injured than your colonist, running around in circles until they're downed can help you win without risking further injury. Terrain can also be used to your advantage if you have even a slight lead on them and your speed is at least equal to theirs. Running across a wet or debris-filled area and turning around to take a shot at them while they're slowed can help you chip away at the raider's health.

One small bright side to this scenario is that with only one colonist and very low wealth, your raids will stay small (often just one raider) for quite some time.

New colonists

New colonists can join by chance, or you can encounter someone who can be saved and potentially join your colony. All AI storytellers, even Randy, consider 4 to be the "critical minimum" number of colonists. They will send you events which can potentially increase your number of colonists on a fairly regular basis until you reach this number. Those events will still happen afterwards, but less frequently.

Consider carefully if you will be able to obtain enough food or other resources to take on another colonist, or if the potential new arrival has traits that would make them more harmful than good. If the new arrival has terrible traits but is healthy enough to walk, you may need to banish them immediately. Murder instead of banishment is also an option, particularly if your colonist has traits that make this beneficial, such as Bloodlust or Cannibal.

Here are the ways a new colonist can be gained. An attempt has been made to list them in order from most risky to least risky, though this is somewhat subjective.

Prisoner rescue quest: Leave your home map to rescue a prisoner somewhere on the world map. The prisoner is guarded by hostile pawns and possibly turrets. A Naked Brutality starting colonist with excellent combat skills and a decent weapon might be able to pull this off. But dry lightning, raiders, etc. may destroy your base while you're gone.

Incapacitated refugee quest: Leave your home map to rescue an incapacitated person somewhere on the world map. More or less the same risks as the Prisoner rescue quest.

Capturing prisoners: This needs to be included for completeness, but note that it's dependent on player action, so it's not factored in as one of the "Storyteller events" that add new colonists. Taking a prisoner can gain you a new colonist, but will also use resources. In this scenario, the most important resource you have is your starting colonist's time. The time they spend wardening is also time they cannot spend hunting, harvesting and building defenses. More established colonies will likely capture and recruit prisoners as a matter of course, but it adds even more difficulty to the hectic first few quadrums of a Naked Brutality run.

Man in black: Also in a sense dependent on player action, though it does technically gain you a new colonist. This is an especially risky way to do so, as it only triggers when all of your colonists are downed. If you dislike the Man in black's skills and traits, you can always banish him later - provided your starting colonist survived.

Wild (human) wanders in: Any colonist with an Animals skill of 6 or higher can attempt to tame a wild human. Wild humans have a fairly high chance to turn manhunter on tame fail, and your colonist will be in close melee range if that happens. On the plus side, wild humans are always naked and unarmed. Note that they will harvest and eat un-walled crops if you simply ignore them.

Refugee chased: Since you only have one pawn and very few resources, even the slightly stronger raids that spawn for this event might still only be a single raider, or two or three relatively weak raiders. If you dislike the new colonist, banish them.

Transport pod crash:
- If the transport pod crash victim looks like an acceptable new colonist, you should always try to rescue them. They might already be a member of another planetary faction. Members of enemy factions and some members of friendly factions might need to be taken prisoner and recruited in order to join. However, an unaffiliated space refugee or a member of a friendly faction might choose to join your colony after you have rescued them.
- If they would not be a good addition to your colony, you may have to leave them to die. All transport pod crash victims arrive seriously injured and will die if not rescued. Be sure to strip their gear before they perish so it won't be tainted. This can be a highly efficient way to get weather-resistant gear without having to craft it, as transport pod crash victims will sometimes have good quality clothing, such as a duster or parka.

Wanderer joins: The best possible way to gain a colonist. If you like them, keep them. If you don't like them, take their stuff and then banish them. (Or let them keep some stuff if you're feeling generous.)

After you find an acceptable second colonist, things will start to be much smoother and easier.

Extreme Biomes Survival

The above will work fine in normal biomes, but if you start in extreme biomes, you will need a different set of survival tactics.

Generally, wood and Healroot is scarce or even nonexistent in Extreme Desert and Tundra, so you are unable to make bows for hunting. If you choose these biomes, it's better to choose a colonist with high melee skill instead of shooting.

Extreme Heat Biomes

The most dangerous threat in hot biomes is the temperature, rather than the lack of food. Heat waves will kill you for sure if you are unprepared.

You need to build a temperature controlled room as soon as possible. Simply a wind turbine and cooler already help.

If you start as a tribe (through changing the scenario), stock enough wood for the passive cooler. Planting saguaro cactus will provide a fast and reliable source of wood, helping you to build up your base and fuel for passive coolers, especially for extreme desert runs.

Food is actually not a big problem here. There's gravel everywhere that you can grow potato and other plants. You will have a hard time at the start but after the first harvest, things will go much better. Heat waves will slow down the growth rate of the plant but won't kill them, so the food supply is steady.

Keep an eye on wild animals. In deserts, there's only a few naturally grown plant for the animals to eat, so a group of camels will be a big threat to your farmland. Better hunt them down soonest or enclose the farmland with walls.