Events Guide

This Events Guide is about surviving natural events and other non-raider hazards that the game throws at you. To defend your base against offensive threats, see Defense tactics.

Basics[edit]

A successful colony should be able to stand up against most events without problem. This includes several aspects.

Crops and food[edit]

Cold temperatures, blight, and toxic fallout can kill plants, as well as fire if it is allowed to spread. Regular heat, on the other hand, can't kill crops under default temperature settings, but can stifle their growth. Light levels are another major factor in plant growth. Crops can't grow in places with light level below 50%, and some events can lower light levels.

Having a greenhouse (enclosed room with a sun lamp + heaters) will protect your crops from every event except blight, while letting you grow food in winter, making your food production stable. Hydroponics basins are not required, although hydroponics does make food output more stable by making crops grow faster.

In the early game, before a greenhouse is made, keeping a stockpile of food is useful in case of hard times. Stock up at least 20 days of food, with more the shorter the growing season, so you can survive the winter or extended events such as volcanic winters. A freezer will be essential for storing meat and animal products, but crops last for 40 days unfrozen, so a freezer is not necessary for them.

While stocking on food, consider the animals as well, as outdoors plants may be rendered inedible, or it's not safe to go outside for food.

Power[edit]

Solar panels and wind turbines are unreliable sources of power. Batteries are practically a must when using solar or wind, yet even with batteries, the power can occasionally run out. Solar panels, whilst reliable in most cases, can go out during an eclipse. Wind is inherently variable. While both are unreliable alone, using solar and wind together will reduce the chance of the colony being completely powerless.

Other sources of power like the wood-fired generator, geothermal generator, etc. are generally independent of events. In the early game, before geothermal is researched, you may want to have a wood-fired generator but turned off unless the colony runs out of power.

Blight[edit]

Blight infects crops, resulting in the crops generating no yield and spreading the blight other crops. The only option is to remove the blighted plants. Blight is unavoidable unless you're in orbit. Cutting the plants is the simplest solution when this occurs happens.

Keeping your crop fields separated with at least a 4-tile gap will prevent blight from spreading between them. Blight will only strike one field at a time, as long as they are sufficiently separated. Devilstrand and trees are immune to blight and won't spread it, so to save space, it is possible to to place 4-tile rows of blight-immune crops between your fields. It is also a good idea to have multiple growing zones for important plants, so that one blight doesn't wipe out your production.

Cold snap[edit]

A cold snap sends temperatures plummeting, reducing temperatures by 20 °C for 1.5 to 3.5 days. It has a 30 day cooldown.

The main threat of cold snaps is hypothermia, which strikes early-game bases much harder. Campfires and [heater]]s will improve the indoors temperature. To protect colonists from the cold while outside, make jackets, dusters, or in harsher conditions, parkas, and give them to colonists who spend the most time outdoors. While you can rotate your ill-equipped workers to allow recovery from the cold, it's not recommended to do so due to frostbite.

Crop death is also an issue, and can disrupt bases that lack greenhouses. When a cold snap starts, immediately harvest any viable crops exposed to the outside, as crops that have reached 65% maturity can provide some produce from harvesting it. Crops begin to die at -10C/14F. Crops in a greenhouse won't be affected, assuming the heaters are enough to warm up the room they are in.

Food[edit]

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.

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.

Any animal except wargs can eat simple meals. So you can feed simple meals to grazing animals even if you have only meat available.

Eclipse[edit]

A short-lasting event that causes the outdoor brightness to greatly lower over its duration. This event does not cause much harm on its own, however when combined with other events it can complicate matters.

It has a great impact on colonies reliant on solar panels, which will barely function during an eclipse. To counter this, have alternate sources of power like wind turbines. wood-fired generators, chemfuel powered generators, and geothermal generators available. Building additional batteries to help collect power when sunlight is plenty may ease the situation a little.

Crops grown outdoors are slightly slowed, which will have minimal impact on well-stocked bases, but can be dangerous for a base critically low on food.

Flashstorm[edit]

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.

Some ways to help manage the fire before it goes out of control include:

Proactive extinguishing: It may be possible, but time-consuming, to extinguish the fires as soon as the lightning hits, preventing its spread. 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. Be sure to remove home area afterwards, or else you may find your janitors out in the hinterlands cleaning dirt. Firefoam pop packs make this easier.
Firebreaks: The best way to prevent fire from impacting your base is prevention. Having a 4-tile gap of fireproof floor, e.g., concrete or flagstone, will prevent fires unless a direct lightning strike occurs.
Firefoam: Firefoam poppers, firefoam pop packs, and foam turrets can protect essential rooms from fire. Keep in mind that firefoam poppers are rather costly and one-use, and the latter two require chemfuel.

Heat wave[edit]

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

In the early game or during a power outage, passive coolers can work, but require an enclosed room to function. Electric coolers can be established once Electricity is available. Dusters can protect your colonists from heat outside, although cannot be established immediately.

In the early game, it is possible to partially or fully leave the colony for a while, although doing so because of a heatwave is just a little bit funny. It's not always safe to leave, and recreation and food are more difficult in a caravan. Swimming can reduce heatstroke levels if heatstroke is present, but colonists cannot manually be ordered to swim and swimming does not reduce the actual temperature.

Freezer failure can be dangerous if you're relying on meat or pre-frozen meals, or dangerous if your food is close to spoiling. The most straightforward solution is to build more coolers, at the cost of resources and power. Having the coolers set to different temperatures (e.g., one at -5 °C (23 °F) and another at -10 °C (14 °F)) will save power, as one will be in low-power mode. In addition, double walling the freezer will provide more cold insulation. Grown crops should not require freezers due to their 40 day shelf life.

Psychic drone[edit]

This event causes the mood of humans of a selected sex to drop by −12 to −40 mood, depending on the drone intensity, and then multiplied by their psychic sensitivity, over a few days. While low drones are not harmful, even the lowest drones can be very dangerous if the colony took massive damage, is on the verge of breaking, or both.

Social drugs and lavish meals can help counter smaller mood debuffs. Don't give too many drugs or they'll risk addiction. Yayo and/or flake can help in mood emergencies but always risks addiction and overdose.
Give colonists more recreation hours and spread them throughout the day. Setting your pawns to a polyphasic schedule (e.g., 4 hours of sleep, 4 hours of recreation, repeating 3 times) will maximize sleep, comfort, and recreation, making it an effective way to prevent especially vulnerable (naturally grumpy and psychic sensitive) pawns from breaking.
Using anesthetic or cryptosleep caskets (which can be found in ancient shrines) is another way to preserve pawns, at the cost of incapacitation. For sanguophages, deathrest is another way to avoid the psychic drone.

Psychic foil helmets are a niche item, that, if already obtained, can help with drones (especially for psychic sensitive pawn).

Solar flare[edit]

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 all colonies that have electric appliances in them. Colonies extensively reliant on electricity, such as those using hydroponics farming or turrets, are especially affected.

Crops[edit]

Plants in a shut down hydroponics system will die over time in case of power cut, but time required for them to die exceeds the time of solar flare, so this is not a problem you should worry about. The more dangerous problem for plants is cold, from which they die almost instantly. To avoid this, in advance put a campfire (prohibit refueling) with a stack of wood stored near it in hydroponic room. When a solar flare appears, manually order any pawn to fill a campfire. It has been tested in practice that one campfire is enough for a room of 20 hydroponic farms at -40 outside. Plants growing in a sheltered greenhouse with a sun lamp but not hydroponics just won't grow during the power outage, but still can die from cold.

Fueled alternatives[edit]

Some production buildings have a fueled variant that consumes wood instead of power, and are immune to solar flares. Keeping them unfueled, then turning them on when a solar flare happens, allows for production to continue during solar flares. 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[edit]

Freezers do not function at all in a solar flare, and passive coolers are unable to refrigerate food. While the maximum duration of the solar flare is not long enough to cause meat to rot, it can significantly impact the remaining rot time of the stored food, rot food that has not been immediately frozen after collection, and if the freezer cannot be brought down to temperature rapidly enough, rot can still occur after the solar flare has finished.

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

Temperature control[edit]

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.

Turrets and mechanoids[edit]

Colonies that rely on turrets and friendly mechanoids for their main combat power are most vulnerable to solar flares in the event of a raid. Turrets will not fire.

Combat mechanoids will still function, but may go out of control if relying on band nodes, which are turned off. Although the duration of the solar flare is not enough for them to go wild and become hostile, while it is going on the mechanoids will wander aimlessly around the settlement without the possibility of control. If the remaining bandwidth allows, you can disconnect from non-combat mechanoids to free up space for combat ones.

Toxic fallout[edit]

A persistent event that poisons the atmosphere with toxic dust, slowly sickening animals and humans - inflicting toxic buildup, killing plants, as well as slightly reducing brightness outside. This is a dangerous event across most stages of the game, severely punishing outdoor activity and killing crops. It lasts between 2.5 and 10.5 days, will not occur before Day 60 of the colony, and will not reoccur for 90 days.

Stay indoors[edit]

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.

Face masks will allow pawns to stay outside longer, and can be worn with simple helmets and flak helmets. Gas masks and vacsuit helmets provide even more protection. Late game colonies can use detoxifier lungs, detoxifier kidneys, or tox-related genes so that pawns are protected or immune to the fallout.

Hunt quickly[edit]

For approximately the first day of toxic fallout, wildlife can still be hunted and butchered. When the animals' toxic buildup gets too high, they will instantly rot upon death. After the first few days any surviving wildlife will flee the map entirely. Get all the meat you can while it's still possible to do so. Note that boomrats and boomalopes will not flee the map and can be hunted later, as they are not affected by toxic fallout.

Plan ahead[edit]

Set up a "roofed" allowed area before this event occurs. A roof extending one or two tiles around the edge of your base, and roofed walkways supported by pillars leading out to your crop fields or perimeter wall, will be a lifesaver. Any pawn whose toxic buildup goes from "initial" to "moderate" should be restricted to the roofed zone.

If possible, have a dirt-floor greenhouse set up and ready to go. You can build a sunlamp in the middle of a sunlamp-shaped crop field and make sure it is turned off until you need to build a roof over it and turn it on. You could also build a backup sunlamp, uninstall it and keep it in storage. This will allow you to quickly build a roof and power up a sunlamp over an existing crop field as soon as toxic fallout arrives.

Although it's best to surround a greenhouse with walls for protection from raiders, it's not strictly necessary. Even if you've just moved your colony to a brand new tile and get a long toxic fallout immediately upon arrival, you can throw down a couple roof support pillars, a sunlamp and a growing zone and start planting.

Crops[edit]

You can still continue to grow crops outdoors, but less successfully. To maximize the chances of successful harvest, grow fast-growing crops such as rice and harvest them quickly.

For a tribal colony that has not yet researched electricity, this may be the only option. However, most tribes will be able to research electricity within the first two or three years; toxic fallouts should not last more than a quadrum or so during that time.

Fallout retreat colony[edit]

Just make a quick caravan or passenger shuttle trip and move your people to another nearby world map tile, even 1 space away will work. This allows you to completely avoid the effects of toxic fallout. However, this also exposes your base to attack as there will be nobody left to defend. This requires raising the colony limit to 2 in the main game options menu.

Volcanic winter[edit]

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. Volcanic winters will last between 7.5 and 40 days, will not occur before Day 60 of the colony, and will not reoccur for 140 days.

Crops[edit]

In an extreme desert, rain is rare and soil is scarce. In other biomes, you should roof your emergency sun lamps.

Volcanic winters won't kill plants outright, but it still has the potential to kill plants should the temperatures drop. You may want to expand your growing zones so you can keep up food production.

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

Short circuits[edit]

Short circuits (Zzztt events) can occur if your colony has regular power conduits or if certain buildings like batteries are not roofed. They will cause fires and drain the batteries of the colony.

Short circuits can be avoided entirely by using hidden conduits and keep applicable buildings roofed, so they are not a threat as of 1.5.

Pre-1.5, short circuits can be dangerous if the power's out when a raid occurs. Using fireproof walls and installing firefoam poppers will help with the fire risk, and using stable power will help with batteries. Having a grid of batteries disconnected to the main grid via power switch can help for short-term outages.

Gray pall[edit]

Gray pall reduces the mood of colonists for 1-2 days. The mood loss is only -6 if unroofed, and halved if roofed, so gray pall is rarely dangerous unless the pawn is already in a bad mood.

Legacy events[edit]

Tornado[edit]

For those still playing Beta 18, a tornado can occasionally cut a path of destruction across the map, damaging everything in its way.

It is capable of wreaking havoc on even well-prepared bases, making it dangerous to face across all stages of the game. However, mountain bases are spared the wrath of the tornado as it can't get through the layers of overhead mountain.

Obviously you need to get your colonists out of the way of the tornado. It is easily outpaced by healthy colonists. Incapacitated colonists lying in bed should be moved elsewhere before they are stricken.

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