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.

Crops growing in a warmed greenhouse won't be affected, so you may build some to negate the effects of cold snaps in crop growth.

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.

Eclipse

A short-lasting event that causes the outdoor brightness to greatly lower over its duration.

Overall, this event does not cause much harm on its own, however when combined with other events it can complicate matters.

Power

It has a greater impact on colonies reliant on solar panels, which will barely function during an eclipse.

To counter this, build wind turbines which continue to produce power without light, and geothermal generators which provides constant power 24/7. These help to fill out part of the energy deficit caused by your solar panels not functioning.

Building additional batteries to help collect power when sunlight is plenty may ease the situation a little.

Flashstorm

During flashstorms, lightning rapidly strikes a small area, setting it on fire. In plant-rich areas, the fire can spread across the map, potentially causing great damage. It also delays the presence of rain, giving time for the fire to spread before being put out.

Active extinguishing

If you have spare colonists on hand, you can direct them to preemptively extinguish the fires before they spread out of control.

Draw a home area over the area affected by the flashstorm, and colonists will automatically go and put out the fires. If they are fast enough, the 3x3 squares of fire left behind by the lightning will be contained without much spreading.

Solar flare

A highly disruptive event that shuts down all electrical devices with electromagnetic pulses. Its disruptive potential is magnified should another event coincide with it, such as heat waves, and the fact that it cannot be countered (i.e. no ways to prevent shutdown of electronics in the basegame) does not help either. Devices not using power are immune.

It chiefly affects early-mid to late-game colonies that have electric appliances in them. Colonies extensively reliant on electricity, such as those using hydroponics farming or turrets, are especially affected.

Hydroponics

Plants in a shut down hydroponics system will quickly die. Salvaging them isn't particularly effective as they wither away faster than colonists can harvest all of them, but it's still better than nothing.

Fueled alternatives

Some production buildings have a fueled variant that consumes wood instead of power, and are immune to solar flares. This allows for production to continue during solar flares.

For lighting, torch lamps also work, though they emit a softer light.

However, these all take up additional space, so they may not be worth building. If you are encountering additional power issues then they may be worth a try.

Freezers

Another structure hit hard with flares, freezers will malfunction completely, as opposed to heat waves in which a well-built freezer may still be able to retain sub-zero temperatures.

Double-walling freezers helps keep in the cold for slightly longer.

Temperature control

If temperatures are outside comfortable range, you can remedy this using the more traditional campfires or passive coolers. However, since solar flares don't last too long, this may be worth the effort only if colonists are at serious risk of hypothermia or heatstroke.

Toxic fallout

A persistent event that poisons the atmosphere with toxins, slowly sickening animals and humans, killing plants, as well as slightly reducing brightness outside.

This is a highly dangerous event across all stages of the game, severely punishing outdoor activity and killing crops.

Staying indoors

Unless necessary, you should have everyone (including animals) stay underneath a roof so they won't be affected by the toxic fallout. For those that do need to get out, make sure to limit their exposure and give them plenty of time to recover.

Crops

You can still continue to grow crops, but slowly. To maximize the chances of successful harvest, grow fast-growing crops such as rice.

Volcanic winter

A long-lasting event where volcanic ash obscures the sun, slowly causing daylight level to drop to 86% of normal values. Because of this, plants will grow slower, solar panels will not generate as much electricity and temperatures will drop.

Crops

Volcanic winters won't kill plants outright, unless temperatures drop too low. You may want to expand your growing zones so you can keep up food production.

Like cold snaps, building warmed and lighted greenhouses can help with crop growth during volcanic winters.

Power

Since solar panels won't work as effectively during a volcanic winter, you should consider having alternative sources of power, as said in the Eclipse section above.

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Guides

Progression

Quickstart Guides • Basics • Intermediate Midgame Guide • Advanced Endgame Guide • Ending the game

Scenarios

Lost Tribe Guide • Rich Explorer Guide • Naked Brutality Guide • The Mechanitor Guide

Survival

Extreme Heat Guide • Extreme Cold Guide • Extreme Desert Guide • Ice Sheet Guide • Sea Ice Guide • Events Guide

Combat

Defense tactics • Offense tactics • Weapon Guide

Construction

Colony Building Guide • Defense structures

Production

Food production • Money making guide

Other

Skill Training • Permadeath save conversion guide •
Ideology Min-Maxing