Ship to the Stars (ending)

Ship to the stars is an ending available in all versions of the game. One or more colonists can escape the planet by leaving on a ship. Note that this vehicle is distinct from the gravship.

Briefing

The event is offered as both an unnamed task (you build the ship on your colony map) and a quest called "Ship to the Stars" where you travel to a remote ship that is already constructed and power it up. Both versions result in the same ending.

Requirements:

• Have a functional ship. Either travel to the journey offer, or build your own ship.
• Activate the ship reactor, which takes 15 days. During this time, you will be assaulted by many raids. The Ship Startup event will have 10 cycles of 1.5 days each. During each cycle, you may be attacked by either 1 or 2 raids, randomly. That makes the minimum possible number of Ship Launch raids during the event 10 and the maximum 20. This is completely independent from, and in addition to, your storyteller, who will send their own raids on their normal schedule. The Ship Launch raids have a minimum of 500 Raid points.
• Each colonist or animal requires their own ship cryptosleep casket to leave the planet, which may be desired on a personal level. The journey offer ship has space for 18 colonists. Only one loaded casket is required to launch the ship.

Failure conditions:

• Destruction of the ship reactor. Failure simply means that you will have to do the process over again. The game won't end, so long as colonists are still alive.

Journey Offer Failure:
These following factors will make the journey offer ship unavailable or invalid:

• Destruction of any vital ship part. If you can rebuild the ship part, then everything is fine.
• The Ship to the Stars quest does not generate. (There is a minimum distance - spawning near the center on a smaller 30% map can rarely cause spawn to be invalid. Being surrounded by impassible ocean/mountain may also cause generation to fail)
• Doing the archonexus chain of quests - this makes the journey offer invalid.

You can still build your own ship, possibly using the components of the old one.

Obtaining a ship

There are two ways to get a functional spaceship:

• The journey offer (the actual "Ship to the Stars" quest).
• Building your own ship.

Traveling to the journey offer

Journey offer event ship.

You will receive the Ship to the Stars quest in roughly 20 days from colony start. The quest creates an event space within 200 to 800 tiles from your original settlement, usually as far away as possible. This means that a world generated with 30% map coverage will make traveling to the event tile a much less arduous task than a world with 100% coverage.

You can reach the ship as soon as the quest spawns and you have the physical ability to make the trip. However, the ship itself is worth about 55000, which is in addition to the wealth from your defenses and colonists. Wealth directly contributes towards the size of the raiders via the raid points mechanic - tribals stuck with short bows are ill advised to enter the ship's tile.

There are multiple approaches to actually reaching the ship:

• Make the one-way trip.

This trip can take anywhere from a quadrum to 2 years, depending on the map and map coverage. Pack food. Or pack valuables and plan to buy food. In addition, colonists will automatically forage for food, so long as the biome supports it - see Foraged Food Amount for factors. A tribal colony with multiple colonists great at Plants could survive off foraging alone, but only when the biomes support foraging.

Each baseline colonist requires 32 pemmican / berries or 2 packaged survival meals per day. Ambushes, mental breaks, food poisoning, and the season can all slow the caravan down, so bring more than what the game's estimated travel time states. In practice, you can also buy food with light and valuable goods like silver, gold, and drugs, so long as at least 1 friendly faction base is within your path. Alternatively, you can settle down for a short while to get more food - see the next subsection for details.

Usual caravan tips apply. Bring bedrolls so that your colonists do not sleep on the ground (construct the bedroll, then uninstall it to bring as an item). Mental breaks slow the caravan down, but minor and major breaks are otherwise harmless. And due to the lowered expectations moodlets, colonists will be somewhat happy. Horses or other ridable pack animals like donkeys are highly recommended to speed up the trip, though they must be fed when unable to graze.

• Be nomadic, creating multiple settlements.

Any passible tile not adjacent to a faction base can be settled, for as long or as little as you want. Whenever it's a pitstop to hunt animals and grow a batch of rice, or a semi-permanent encampment, settling can be a viable means to travel to the destination. You could play the entire game this way if so desired.

It is also possible to camp instead of settling. Camps are generated without any ores, and enemies will eventually spot the camp, but camps can be a good way to hunt, grow, and cook food.

• Relay to the location with transport pods or passenger shuttles.

Pod launchers and transport pods take a total of 110 steel, 2 components, and 150 chemfuel to carry 150kg of weight to 66 tiles. As one drop won't be enough to make it to the ship, you will need to settle at the landing site and build another set of pods. Steel can be mined or deconstructed at the landing site, reducing the weight per pod to 9kg.

Transport pods are faster than traveling, but require pods to be researched, and a lot of components. With many colonists, it can get very expensive to launch all the pods, even without considering the steel. You should have a great miner and good construction pawn, and ways to regulate mood between the relays. An alternative is to simply use 1 set of transport pods to make the trip faster, traveling the rest of the way by foot.

Passenger shuttles carry more weight and can be reused so long as there is enough chemfuel. By carrying sufficient chemfuel, it is possible for a shuttle to reach the ship location without needing to temporarily settle on a tile or form a caravan.

• The farskip psycast.

Farskip will send a non-burdened caravan of any size anywhere on the world, so long as another conscious colonist is already there. This is a very easy method to bringing everybody to the journey destination, so long as you have a level 5+ psycaster that actually has far skip.

Send 1 pawn alone to the ship. This pawn should not be the farskip user. When the pawn is (almost) there, send a caravan with the farskipper along with your rest of the colony, including food and supplies. You can leave a pawn at the colony if you feel the need to go back at any time. This strategy can be combined with transport pods to make it faster, or a passenger shuttle to make it trivially easy.

• The gravship:

The gravship allows you to transport an entire colony's worth of supplies and buildings to a new location. This is the option with the least hassle, since all your production facilities will be brought to the ship site.

Building the ship

Minimum amount of resources to create a functional ship, with space for 1 colonist. 8x13 in size.

To build a ship, you will need:

• The following projects researched: Starflight Basics, Starflight Sensors, Vacuum Cryptosleep Casket, Starship Reactor, Johnson-Tanaka Drive, and Machine Persuasion. This will require 21,800 research points, not counting any prerequisites. For tribes, research is doubled.
• A total of 3 ship engines, a ship computer core, a ship reactor, a sensor cluster, and as many ship cryptosleep caskets as desired (at least 1). A ship structural beam is required for ship caskets and only ship caskets - each beam can support 8 caskets. Ship parts cannot be built over a roof, though they can be roofed over afterwards.
• The minimum possible resources for a ship are  1740 steel,  740 plasteel,  294 uranium,  42 advanced component,  12 component,  74 gold, and  1 persona core.

To get the resources for the ship, most players will use either a deep drill + ground-penetrating scanner or a long-range mineral scanner. You can also get supplies from traders, though each trader only has so much material. Generally, the most difficult material to get are the advanced components - you'll want multiple crafters and multiple fabrication benches to manufacture them.

The persona core is also a troublesome item. The most consistent way to get one is to ask any faction with 40+ goodwill on the comms console, for the cost of 1500 silver. This spawns an item stash quest, which will be guarded by a few raiders. You can also get one through regularly generated quests.

Notably, the ship reactor can be activated as soon as it is built. As gathering the supplies and actually constructing the other ship parts increases your wealth, it is technically optimal to start the reactor without the other ship parts. This also makes it easier to build 3-4 layers of walls around it, practically making it a non-target outside of breachers or sieges.

• Forming a second colony

It is possible to form a second (third, fourth...) colony solely for the purpose of the ship. To have access to multiple colonies, change the maximum colony setting (in Options/Gameplay). Transport pods, passenger shuttles, or gravships from your main colony will provide necessary supplies. The ultimate goal is to minimize wealth, decreasing the size of raids. This also increases the relative strength of certain defenses, like traps, turrets, and the immediate military aid from a comms console.

N.B. There is a minimum of 500 raid points for any raid caused by the ship launch, no matter how much wealth you have. Before accounting for colonist count or other factors, you can have up to 94,000 "storyteller wealth" in Strive to Survive difficulty (100% threat scale) before raids start to become bigger. At the maximum of 500% threat scale, you have a leeway of roughly 30,000 wealth. Values will become smaller for each colonist you have. Storyteller wealth is similar to colony wealth, but buildings only count as half.

Ideally, you should send 1-2 pawns with good Plants, Construction, and Medical into a temperate/warm biome, so they can be self-sustaining. A mountain tile can be good for its natural defense - while the ship cannot be built under overhead mountain, you can use the mountainous terrain as protection. Build the reactor (and possibly the rest of the ship), surround it in multiple layers of walls, and prepare for the ship launch.

The downside is pretty simple: work. Setting up another base is a lot of extra time, both for the player and colonists. You won't have access to any pre-existing defenses in your colony, so you will have to rebuild accordingly. Plus, you will lose mood bonuses from impressive Dining / Recreation / Bedrooms, unless you bring some sculptures in. Ultimately, you should not have to feel forced to establish a second colony.

Ship launch

The ship launch is the 15-day activation period of the ship reactor. You will be hit with constant human and mechanoid raids, 10-20 in total plus threats that may be normally fired via the storyteller. If the ship is complete and remains intact, then your colonists can board the ship and leave the rimworld.

The ship launch event is broken into 10 cycles of 1.5 days each. Each 1.5 day cycle sends one or two raids with a 50% chance for each option. The ship launch raids now have 500 Raid Points minimum, which is roughly equivalent to 8 human enemies. Some Storyteller fired threats will still fire during the ship launch.

Launch preparations

• (Journey Offer) Make accommodations for your colonists.

Like with any colony, a great dining and recreation room goes a long way towards improving colonist mood. You can also take the time to make sculptures, grow food / drugs, and gather other supplies you'll need. Relax - you can take as long as you'd like to start the ship.

If needed, then weapons and armor can be created on site. Extra ship cryptosleep caskets and one ship engine can be deconstructed to make some charge rifles.

• Protect the ship.

That much is clear. Surrounding the ship with multiple layers of walls will keep it safe from most enemies. Raiders (other than breachers and sappers) will never target a wall if there is a combatant target (colonist, powered turret) they can access without a breaking a wall/door. Walling off the ship is harder with the journey offer ship, though 1-2 layers of walls are still recommended.

If you've built the ship on an established colony, then you should already have general defenses against raiders. If not, then build some. Make killboxes if so desired.

• (Optional) Take the devil's bargain.

Luciferium improves a colonist's overall performance, at the cost of permanent addiction. However, addiction - on a gameplay level - does not matter once you've entered space. 3 doses of luciferium are required per colonist to last the ship launch, if the ship is actually complete (i.e. don't do this with just a ship reactor).

Ship defense

Raids can happen as soon as you press the "Activate Reactor" button. The startup sound doesn't even have to complete for enemies to appear.

There isn't anything different about ship launch raids in particular. The ship is not some sort of special target - if you've surrounded it with walls, then it will be safe from ordinary raids. The raids will be just as large as a regular raid, with access to all of the same strategies and arrival methods.

At any point, a colony should be prepared to fight breachers, sappers, sieges, and drop pods landing directly into the base, as well as standard frontal attacks. Manhunter packs and infestations will not happen because of the ship launch, though the storyteller can still cause these events to happen. In Biotech, wealthier colonies should prepare for fighting all 3 mechanoid commanders.

Note that all those raider corpses and weapons will contribute towards raid points, making each successive raid of the ship launch that much larger. Fire is your best means of disposal, though an electric crematorium works when it's raining.

In addition to actually fighting the raids, you'll have to contend with a potentially much larger issue...

Mood management

Staying awake all night shooting at raiders isn't a particularly fun experience, at least for those without bloodlust. A drop pod raid ruining your recreation room will make everybody suffer. Even minor mental breaks can be devastating - having a colonist wander out of cover mid-fight is very dangerous. Therefore, avoiding mental breaks should be your #1 priority. Things can quickly spiral out of control if colonists die while your base is already in shambles.

• Set up a polyphasic schedule. This means alternating between Recreation and Sleep, and only Recreation and Sleep (ex. repeat 3 hours sleep, 5 hours recreation, three times). Colonists will still be able to work once both needs are satisfied, or if you prioritize the work task.
• Use fine meals or lavish meals. Lavish meals give +12 mood, and you can cook them before you start the reactor. Alternatively, you can have your colonists default to fine meals, and order them to eat a lavish meal once mood gets too low. Meals can be eaten regardless of how full a colonist is.
• Use drugs. Like with luciferium, drug addiction does not matter (on a gameplay level) once your colonists have left the planet, so long as you have some drug left. Note that hard drugs still have a risk of overdose. All drug moodlets stack completely, even for similar drugs like yayo and flake. You can set a drug policy for colonists to carry drugs, to be taken as needed.
  • Beer gives a +10 moodlet for only -2% Manipulation, if you drink only 1 or 2 a day. Psychite tea gives a +12 moodlet and ambrosia, +5, for no downsides so long as withdrawal is avoided.
  • Use wake-up if you need stuff done *immediately*, such as repairing the outer walls of your colony. It also gives a +5 moodlet and restores Rest.
  • Yayo gives +35 mood. Use if you need to stop mental breaks, now. Flake gives another +35 moodlet, but comes with a higher overdose chance. Use flake if yayo alone isn't enough.
• Use mind-numb serums. This is the safest option, as it will completly prevent mental breaks from happening, however it requires the Anomaly DLC and a non-neglible engagement with its content.

Conclusion

You've launched the ship! Your AI will now try to guide the ship to a safe place. It might find a prosperous planet for you in this system, Or, it may undertake a centuries-long journey to another star. It might even decide to hide under ice on an asteroid for a few thousand years, waiting for someone to build a new glitterworld here. You'll find out when you wake up.

— Endgame text for Ship Launch on new ship or from Journey Offer

After the ship is complete, and the reactor activated, you can set your colonists off to space. Each colonist or animal requires their own ship cryptosleep casket. Once you confirm the launch, you hear the roar of rocket engines as the screen fades to white. The credits roll as the ending theme song plays. The credits will list colonists who died to commemorate them.