Crashed ship parts
Crashed ship parts drop as part of a map Event. A crashed ship part, accompanied by small fires if the surrounding tiles support fire, lands at a random unroofed location when the event triggers. These ship parts carry one of two negative effects, "psychic" or "defoliator" (see below).
In order to remove the effect, the ship part must be destroyed; but, predictably, it's not just as simple as that...
Mechanoids
Upon landing a group of mechanoids will spawn surrounding the ship, to defend it. The size of the group is dependent on colony wealth and storyteller difficulty - see raid points for further details. They will spawn in a "sleeping" state, and will awaken only if they or the ship take damage, or if a player-built structure is placed too close to the sleeping mechanoids. Unless pursuing nearby targets, they will only move about 30 tiles away before returning to the ship part, and not all will move as a unit to chase a threat. Once the ship part's health drops too low, however, all mechanoids will simply charge your colonists like a normal raid.
As long as nothing is damaged or built too close to the ship (see next), colonists can freely move, work, and even fight fires among the sleeping mechanoids. Note that mechanoids are immune to fire that open areas support, so these initial fires will not damage or wake them. Pawns set to 
Flee from danger will flee from sleeping mechanoids, but those set to 
Attack will not do so until they awaken.
The "no build" zone is 5x5 square centered on each sleeping mechanoid. Objects placed or built outside of this radius will not affect it, so, if the threat is not immediate (i.e. the negative mood or plant-killing can be endured for the time being), the colony can build defenses prior to triggering the ship. IEDs and spike traps can also be placed around the mechanoids and ship part to deal damage to them upon awakening.
Because of defending mechanoids' tendency to stay near the ship part, pawns equipped with sniper rifles can "kite" the defenders from a safe distance. This is done by advancing to fire at mechs around the ship part, retreating before they come close enough to shoot back, and advancing again once they return to the ship part. This is particularly effective against the slow-moving centipedes, whose firing range of 27 tiles pales in comparison to the 44.9 tile range of sniper rifles.
Waiting for passerby traders or raiders to engage the ship may be a viable strategy for colonies without access to stronger technologies such as mortars. However, the mechanoids must be woken up first by damaging the ship or building in the ship's vicinity.
Loot
When destroyed, either variety of ship part leaves:
4 steel slag chunk.
60 steel.
10 plasteel.
1 component.
1 advanced component.
This is in addition to any parts you can salvage from shredding defeated mechanoids.
- Minor bug: When the ship part is selected, there is a greyed-out "Deconstruct" button that, when mouse-hovered, states "You must defeat a mech cluster before you can deconstruct it" (sic). This is misleading, as you cannot "deconstruct" a Crashed Ship Part, and there is no deconstruction return defined in the game code.
Psychic ship
Ship part (psychic droner)
An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old.\n\nThis one contains a psychic disturbance device. Using incomprehensible archotechnologies, it generates a psychic signal that drives people and animals mad within a wide radius around itself. A mysterious crashed piece of a spaceship. It may contain exotic materials, computers, even AI personas. This kind of technology can be dangerous
Base Stats
Building
- Size
- 6 × 3
This ship part contains a hostile AI persona core that emits a psychic drone that negatively affects the mood of all humans on the map. This drone begins at a "low" -12, but grows progressively stronger the longer the ship part remains, therefore it is advisable to destroy the part as quickly as possible. A colonist's psychic sensitivity traits may worsen or lessen the effect of the drone.
The AI is also capable of emitting concentrated bursts of psychic energy, driving one colonist to an immediate mental break, or a localized blast that drives all animals in the immediate vicinity insane.
Psychic drone stages
| Psychic drone (level) | Onset | Mood effect | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | Initial | -12 | It's like a scratching at the back of my mind. A voice, whispering. I can only make out a few words, and I don't like them. |
| Medium | 2.5 days | -22 | I feel like someone is always just out of sight, speaking to me. The voice changes but the message doesn't. I'm supposed to hurt people. Make it go away! |
| High | 5 days | -30 | The voice is unbearably loud. It's hard to concentrate. I find myself talking back to it, yelling at it. But it just keeps shouting! |
| Extreme | 7.5 days | -40 | My heart pounds and I'm sweating. All I can think of is hurting and suffering and all these enemies around me. They're my nightmare, my nightmare, my nightmare... |
Defoliator ship
Ship part (defoliator)
An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old. This one contains a device which annihilates plant life near itself without directly affecting flesh creatures. These kinds of weapons are sometimes scattered across farmlands or forests to remove the enemy's food supply and hiding places without permanently ruining the territory. They're usually associated with orbital-drop mechanoid armies.
Base Stats
Building
- Size
- 6 × 3
- Note that this event was once called a "poison ship", and references to that may still be seen in the game or this Wiki.
Relatively harmless compared to the psychic ship, this ship part slowly poisons an expanding radius of ground around it, destroying any native flora and cultivated crops. This ship will also kill the anima tree
, gauranlen tree
, and Polux tree
.
The effect has a maximum radius of 100 tiles; the current area of effect can be seen by clicking on the ship part. If your crops are beyond this range and the mechanoids are not awakened, a defoliator ship can be safely ignored indefinitely.
If the Biotech DLC is installed, the ship part will additionally pollute 6 tiles in an expanding circle each day, around a radius of roughly 55 tiles. While the plant kill radius will vastly out-pace the pollution, polluted tiles will remain even after the ship part is destroyed.
A recently-arrived defoliator ship part, having defoliated some of its environment.
Defoliation radius is visible when the ship piece is selected.
Once the defoliator ship is deconstructed, growing zones harmed by poison can be replanted.
Trivia
Crashed ship part not only have a Flammability of 0%, but also take no damage from attacks with the Flame damage type. This is in contrast to, for example, a stone wall which will not be ignited by molotov cocktails but will take the 10 flame damage from the initial attack.
Version history
- NOTE: As of the 1.1 update, mechanoids now immediately spawn in a dormant state around the ship, as opposed to previously when they would spawn only as a result of the ship taking fire. Other than triggering a "Flee" response in your (non-drafted) colonists if they get too close, everything else, including previous strategies for combating them, appears to remain the same since the Mechanoids stay in that dormant state until provoked. It is likely in this update that the no build area was changed - previously the mechs would attack if building or placing an item within bulged rectangle around the ship part, with a base size of {14 wide × 9 high} plus an extra 1×6-tile row along the top/bottom of the ship part and an extra 1×3 column along each side.
- ? Prior to 2/08/22 - Description changed from "A mysterious crashed piece of a spaceship. It may contain exotic materials, computers, even AI personas. This kind of technology can be dangerous" -> "An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old. This one contains a psychic disturbance device. Using incomprehensible archotechnologies, it generates a psychic signal that drives people and animals mad within a wide radius around itself."
- ? Prior to 2/08/22 - Description changed from "A mysterious crashed piece of a spaceship. It may contain exotic materials, computers, even AI personas. This one seems to be poisoning the ground around it." -> "An ancient ship part, torn off of a craft of unknown origin. It might be thousands of years old. This one contains a device which annihilates plant life near itself without directly affecting flesh creatures. These kinds of weapons are sometimes scattered across farmlands or forests to remove the enemy's food supply and hiding places without permanently ruining the territory. They're usually associated with orbital-drop mechanoid armies."
- Some version ? prior to 25 July 2020 - Poison/defoliator ship no longer generates snow in the poisoned area.
- Version 1.1 or prior - poison ship renamed to defoliator ship.