Events Guide

This guide is about surviving natural events that the game throws at you. To defend your base against offensive threats, check Defense tactics.

Cold snap

A cold snap sends temperatures plummeting, reducing temperatures by 20 °C for several days.

The main threat of cold snaps is hypothermia, which strikes early-game bases much harder, and crop death, which can disrupt most bases across all stages.

Crops and plants

When a cold snap starts, immediately harvest any viable crops exposed to the outside. Once a crop reaches 65% maturity you can partially salvage produce from them, while if they die it will be lost.

Food

When all your crops are culled by the cold, you will need some time before you can harvest from your next batch of crops. Thus, keep a plentiful food storage on hand. Reserve at least 5 days' worth of food at the bare minimum.

Grazing animals may also starve as the grasses shrivel up, rendering them inedible. To combat this, keep haygrass or kibble handy, and forbid them, only allowing animals to eat them when crises arise. Since many also eat meals or produce, you will need to take this into account when stocking up food.

Keeping warm

To keep your colonists warm and protect them from the cold, make jackets, dusters, tuques or in harsher conditions parkas, and give them to colonists that do a lot of outdoor work (excluding growing, which is impossible in the cold weather). If you don't have enough fabric or technology to make better clothing, keep the rest of your colonists indoors, which you can warm up.

In early-game, you can chop down trees to make campfires for warmth. Later on, build enough heaters in each room to keep them warm even in cold snaps.

Heat wave

The opposite to a cold snap, this causes temperatures to rise by up to 17 °C for a few days.

The main danger arises from freezer failure, which can cause food to start spoiling in an inadequately cooled freezer that can't beat the heat. It can also cause heatstroke which greatly affects outdoor workers.

Since plants don't usually die except in the hottest of regions, this event is usually less damaging than cold snaps economically. However, extreme heat is less comfortable than extreme cold, and is slightly harder to beat.

Keeping cool

To keep your colonists cool and protect them from the heat, make cowboy hats, bowler hats and dusters. These three pieces of garments are the only ones that provide heat insulation.
If you don't have the technology to make these then you should rotate your outdoor workers so they have time to recover between exposure to heat.

Make sure you have enough coolers to keep cool even in the middle of a heat wave. In tribal starts it may be worth it to research passive coolers in order to cool down rooms before you have electricity.

Freezers

Double walling freezers helps with insulation against heat, helping your freezer stay functioning in heat waves. Make sure you don't block off the exhaust port of the coolers otherwise they won't function.

The more straightforward solution to this is to build even more coolers, though this will obviously increase power expenditure.