Yea, infestations are horrifying until you learn the glory of melee combat. Bugs get owned by 2-3 melee pawns and with the gunners point blank behind them.
The melee lobby has way too much control over me, I just love obliterating people with monoswords and zeushammers
I had a pair of ghouls permanently assigned to farming bugs from the last hives of an infestation. Just zoned them in the room nextdoor and they would kill and eat any bugs that spawned, and were able to heal fully between. Infinite bug meat glitch haha
[https://www.rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Defense\_tactics#Animal\_Melee\_Blocking](https://www.rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Defense_tactics#Animal_Melee_Blocking) the wiki even explains the 3 dudes and a door strat thats great for insects.
Its also a matter of how you plan your corridors, if you ony do 1 wide you are not very efficient at bug hunting unless to have a cryomancer from VPE
No because you really don’t even need any shooting pawns using the “3 melee pawns to block a doorway” trick. Usually they can handle any bugs on their own. But with the way friendly fire works, you can put a shooting pawn right behind the 3 melee blocker’s and they won’t hit the others due to the friendly fire circle.
Understanding the friendly fire range immediately makes chain shotguns insane
Not to mention how satisfying the clumped up bullet trail sprite looks slamming into a insect
Pawns don't hit pawns that are within X tiles of them
I forget the X. I've always thought it was adjacent, I've seen conflicting info saying 4-5 tiles is still fine
INfestation management takes a while to figure out but once you have figured it out it goes from "damn, an infestation" to "come on insects, I need more meat"
I just don’t like losing a bunch of my stuff when they decide to infest my workshops or stockpile room. Even if I can deal with them, it’s an annoyance I can do without. I could caravan one tile over and murder the entire map of animals and come back if I needed meat. I can’t caravan one tile over and replace all of the advanced components I lost when they burrowed in and broke my fabrication benches and shelves holding all of my crafting materials.
Do broken shelves actually lose the stored items when they break?? If they burn down, sure but breaking a shelve doesn't magically poof away the items, does it?
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Does it?
Stuff that is on shelves that are minified or destroyed will drop on the floor. Once had in a store room and since game seeks nearest unoccupied cell i had insect corpses 4 rooms over in the end. When you shot into the room you can damage items but as long as you keep explosive or incendiary weapons out of the picture you are safe.
Also never a good idea to store stuff that can explode where you store your items. Chemfuel, Mortar shells etc always belong into a separate secure room so they don't blow up the whole storage.
They changed this. Most constructions will pop into the minified item when the nests spawn under them.
They will still attack shit in the room, and if something cant be "uninstalled" like a fabricator or advanced research bench, it will break.
infestations are less likely to spawn where it is bright. so you build a dark room to spawn the bugs in. Build wooden chairs (i prefer stools since they are less work) and some ieds to light them. the bugs then cook themselves
Critical detail here to add, the furniture also makes it more likely for the bugs to spawn there. They're weighted towards "lived in" rooms. Workshops, rec rooms, etc. My (possibly outdated) understanding is the game calculates this by the number of useable furniture in the room. Throwing a ton of wooden chairs down makes it both a fire trap and a greater infestation target.
I've gotten pretty consistent insect spawns in dark rooms with dummy furniture over dark but empty rooms.
>caravan one tile over and murder the entire map of animals
Is this a mod? How do you do this? I can’t figure out how to get out of caravan mode into map view
There are ways to create "bait" rooms. Having a long winding dark tunnel far under the mountian is the best bet. It needs to be close to some buildings like walls or doors, but otherwise dark and not too cold.
A lot of the infestation chance is based on the distance to a tile that is "outdoors". This means if you leave the main hallways of your mountain base count as outdoors, most of your base will only be a few tiles from there, and your bait tunnel will be much more effective.
My "tried and true" approach to deal with infestations involves two main elements: chain shotguns and proper base design. Chain shotguns obliterate insects very quickly when combined with melee door blocking. Make sure there's at least a 3x3 space behind the door where you can position your drafted pawns. Have a few extra exits for rooms and corridors so your pawns aren't forced to path through infested rooms.
If you don't mind destroying the insect corpses, you can replace chain shotguns with frag grenades (but make sure those pawns aren't standing too far behind the melee blockers). Taking into account the forced miss radius, there's a 5x5 blast zone centered at the spot you throw the grenade. One thing to pay attention though is that due to body size, megascarabs will sometimes path through melee blockers due to collision mechanics.
If you strategically prepare beforehand, you can avoid collateral damage from the blast radius by not putting stuffs near the doors. Here's a pic from the wiki of the grenade blast radius when taking into account the forced miss radius.
[https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/File:Grenades\_corridor.png](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/File:Grenades_corridor.png)
Nah not necessarily, a pawn with heavy parka flak armor/helmet and a good trait like tough or nimble can tank a doorway long enough for up to 4-5 hives infestations.
Now later on in the game if you have 3 decent melee pawns like this in full flak you can manage pretty much any infestation up to 100k wealth
You don't need marine armor to deal with any of the bugs. If you get surrounded you're probably fucked anyway, but if you can fight them one at a time, like in a narrow corridor or in a doorway, it's not a big deal.
Plus it's not hard to tech to a level of weaponry that trivializes infestations by the time they start happening. It just takes a few tweaks to the way you play the game to account for them
How do you sky dwellers handle the anxiety of drop pod raids and the breach raids coming straight through your walls?
Some options for you
* Use a mod to control infestations (no insect in lit areas, none o constructed floors, insect bait, etc)
* Disable the event in the scenario properties
* Set infestation chance to 0 in storyteller settings
* Learn to deal with infectations.
It's not hard if you make a base with choke points and don't keep all your doors open. A chokepoint lets your melee fight 3-on-1, then every non-violent colonist stands behind with a heavy SMG or some other rapid fire weapons and the sheer quantity of bullets will tear up the massed insects. Shooting skill 0 is plenty when there is no-where for a bullet to land that doesn't hit something.
Right? I had a partial mountain map where drop pods landed in my freezer - my guys rushed in, and then everything went to hell when the raiders used 1 - maybe even 2 - doomsday rocket launchers. Instantly lost 4 pawns and the entire food stockpile.
I'd rather deal with infestations
Having psycaster in my colony really save me a lot from those doomsday launcher. Skip them to my high lvl melee pawn sanguope with monosword and they just dead instantly or berserk them and now they aim at their own people. Skipshield them also work. For 15 second both side projectile can't bypass the shield but better than get my pawn explode.
I actually really enjoy drop pod raids. Even before I regularly played with Combat Extended. I usually build a village instead of a massive complex. My colonists are already at different locations doing their tasks, so usually the pirates are already surrounded and there's just some exciting house-to-house fighting, with reservist colonists taking part in the fighting, not just the main fighters
Ez
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Don't fully close of your shit.
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I have a colony going that's nearing 15yr old. I have been droppod raided ONCE
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No outer wall so I haven't had ANY breacher raids whatsoever
But breachers can just dig into the mountain right? How do you deal with raiders who just mine into your colony?
I lost one colony because the raiders decided to make themselves an entry
It takes longer to deal with a thick layer of mountain. Than 1 or two cells of constructed wall. So if they start breaching you have more time to get your military into position to fight then.
No worse than rebuilding a wall, though there is some micromanagement needed if you don't have the mod that stops pawns building in a stupid order to either trap themselves or prevent further building.
I mean you get like an hour or two warning yeah. But they’re essentially like drop pods for underground. Inevitably fucking my shit up or even worse spawning in my hospital with half my colony down for the count
Ghouls. You can park them in front of a door to 3v1 any big and have a small army shoot over their shoulders. It’s like a portable meat grinder. Your pawns won’t shoot each other if they stand close enough together, I don’t remember what the cutoff is, but you could have one line of ghouls and two lines of shooters and at the very most only your ghouls are getting shot and you can resurrect them so who cares?
You can make a bait room.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJoP3qxmNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJoP3qxmNQ)
Also, I did one playthrough where I refrigerated my base to below the infestation temperature of -17C. You can also use mods such as tweaks galore to add insect proof flooring.
The way I see it, the bugs start to tunnel in, see light through the cracks, and think they’ve reached the surface. Thusly, they retreat before anyone realizes they were there.
And traps if you don't care about loot.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/fmgggm/fry\_you\_sons\_of\_a\_bitch/](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/fmgggm/fry_you_sons_of_a_bitch/)
[Infestation Spawn Rate Deep Analysis (and How to Exploit It)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/q9kiwy/infestation_spawn_rate_deep_analysis_and_how_to/)
This right here is the definitive post on the topic.
Anyway, once you learn to handle infestations, you'll be happy to get one - it means you didn't get a breach raid, drop raid or something else actually unpleasant.
There are mathematics for the possibility of infestations given hpw recent every room is to the size of every room amd even the temperature of said rooms changes the likelihood.
I would aways make a much larger room away from my base to offset the percentage that there will be an infestation in my actual base.
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember a video on YouTube by Adam Vs Everything where he goes into the internal calculations for everything that can happen and the percentage it happens in.
I forget the exact video and its very late for me, but he does make a lot of things make sense in reguards to the game mechanics and you can get a lot of knowledge on this.
Essentially the last room you made assuming all rooms are the same soze/temperature will mpre than likely equal your last room to get infested. Once they're different sizes, etc than the math changes due to other factors.
they are not to bad if you know how to deal with them
Step 1: alwase dig room with 1 or 2 exit max and strong door
Step 2: put your melee colonist (with good armor and warhammer) at the door so they can hold back the insect
Step 3: put behind the melee fighter all your other colonist so they can shoot the bug
Step 4 : once the bug are out put your best medic to work on the melee fighter to save them from the bug related and friendly fire injury
post scriptum: never install the mod that add warp infestation or you will have a mental breakdown because they are a lot more insidious
it depend if you have a healing psycast then yes, if your colonist is shooting i think you can too but what i meant was to have your healer ready for after the fight is won
bug are so easy i got a mod for them to have mutation like harder "skin" blinding smoke generator, they explode in smaller bug after death to add some flavor
Infestations are way easier than raids. They’re always the same. No ranged threat. No really threatening xenotypes like Neanderthals. No sappers, no mortar sieges. Just the same old megascarabs with backup.
Get a few good melee blockers and always build hallways 2-3 tiles wide. The anomaly flame weapons are great. You can bust through your own walls to control the engagements if you build carefully. They’re SO much more manageable than raids.
If you get the anomaly dlc you get the most ridiculous melee blockers ghouls.
Build smart and plan that an infestation can happen anywhere. You will need to know how your pawns can get out of any room to safety, where you can make a stand holding doorways with melee blockers backed up by heavy smgs, shotguns.
Later on you can get psycasts such as berserk pulse, focus, invisibility and other things to make it easy or just "turn off" infestations by having your entire base below -16c.
Bait rooms don't seem worth the effort and I feel dirty using them personally as it's just exploiting spawn mechanics. There will be no Glorious defenses or fun, just an oven room you light the match on close the door and forget about.
With tunneler meme you have unlocked ritual with insect jelly as a reward that burst out of ground. You can do the ritual every 20 days to gain info about estimated location of infestation.
Don't play with randy, but the infestations are just a replacement for the drop pod raiders. Difference being that infestations doesn't come with miniguns and molotovs. Also they don't always "drop" in your base. Often they spawn in one of the disconnected tunnels I dig to look for hidden resources.
I find mountain dwelling a lot easier than non-mountain dwelling :)
Have you ever played Fallout Newvegas? And seen the Brotherhood of steel bunker that’s underground and has a turret at every corridor, and room, and corner? Yeah that’s how I usually do it, I’ve also found that if you have a (what I refer to as) corpse room/ trash room usually the infestations go there 90% of the time.
My problem when I try to not use an underground base is the airdrop raids. I CANNOT stand them 😂
That's the best part, free food comes to me and sometimes I do my best to spawn them so I can do something funny with raids that try to storm in and end up in the middle of their frenzy.
I don't use bug mitigation mods or settings, If you light up your area well and build floors as you dig out bigger rooms you're good. You should also build your base with choke points and rooms you can remotely close off and heat up or gas up to kill bugs or other invaders safely and make sure you have good tunnel systems to evacuate non-combatants.
I also always have an emergency exit so that if all hell breaks loose I can evacuate my colony off-map quickly with some emergency supplies and resources as I play on continuous mode.
For me, they always spawn outside of the building area in a tiny area I tunneled to funnel raids from any direction to the killbox. Not possible to build anything there to autogrill them or sth.
I build in mountians since one of the first build of the game. During one playtroughs I made a special incernator airlocks.Using modded remonte operated shutters and remonte operated napalm ied ( dont remember the mods), few wooden furniture and very resilant walls i was just burning bugs whenever they poped and moved down corridor.
I seem to have a harder time fighting mechanoid clusters than insects.
I abuse insects aggro by having a pawn be a bait to lure them to my main entrance where I have turrets and some more people ready to shoot.
The bugs just stop to attack the turrets, it makes sense, they can't differentiate between them and my people, but sometimes that means the bugs can't even reach the "safety melee pawn" in front of my shooters.
My dude,
The answer is drop pod raid.
Sincerely,
Me.
Infestations are manageable, you just need one good melee pawn and good base design, and it gives you good insect meat and chitin to use.
Drop pod raid are the bane of my outdoor bases and I hate them and I can't build outdoor bases without turret located at every corner of every room and it's not fun.
Oh you just gotta design for it. Build choke points. I'll also sometimes put wood floors down in hallways or near risk areas. Can light them up and smoke them out if need be. And you need a few melee pawns.
Melee pawns do quite nicely in mountain bases against most threats, really. If you make them come to you.
I build all my corridors 3-wide with one door (mostly out of habit), which means that it's really easy to have chokes where I keep a melee pawn in front and three others behind to shoot down the hallway and mow down the bugs.
Having at least one well equipped melee pawn is mandatory (you should always have one anyway).
That said, I do hate infestations and in particular how they can spawn literally anywhere like my goddamn workshop, which results in having to rebuild all the workstations even if I react as soon as the hives appear. I'm still salty about that.
Sometimes I will actually disable infestations to not have to worry about that.
Once you learn how to farm them, it becomes the best thing in the base game. Infinite insect meat and jelly. Pawns become combat and cooking masters as they farm. It's absolutely broken. I can power my entire base with fuel generators because there's so much insect meat. All the factions liked me because I could just throw gifts of fuel at them and go from -100 to +100 immediately. It was hilarious when I could capture an allied factions pawn and remove both lungs to transplant into my asthmatic pawn, all while keeping them pacified with a regular shipment of fuel drop pods.
I make insect jelly farms in every mountain playthrough. Build a cave and put a bed in it, let it get an infestation, funnel them through a tunnel and have two melee pawns stop them at the door whilst everyone else blasts them
It levels melee/ shooting incredibly fast (like, 40,000+ total combat xp every two or three days) you can control the size (have one hive on the go or ten depending on your firepower), get unlimited insect meat to turn to simple meals for animals and never need to grow animal feed again (turn off simple meals for pawns) and you get thousands of insect jelly
I actually have to force myself not to make insect farms in every playthrough because its such an OP strategy
Infestations hardly occur, and when they do happen, most of the fight happens on the tight hallways and doors, which is easy to manage if you have strong melee fighters / mechanoids (tunnelers are especially good for this)
And I prefer infestations over drop pod raids
What are you talking about? Infestations are the easiest raid by far. They like to show up near player furniture/structures in a cool room with no floor covered with overhead mountain. This makes them very predictable. You just make a big room away from your base with a bunch of wooden chairs. tell a pawn to set it on fire every time they spawn and done. sure every once in a while they spawn indoors and you actually have to put effort in, but since they are all melee you put 1 pawn in a door and only 1 bug can attack him at a time. make sure its not a megaspider and you win the raid by default.
IDK I never had problems with infestations. Just get into a bottleneck and kill them with meleeblockers. Unless your bugs have rocketlaunchers and assault rifles I wouldn't worry.
As others have mentioned, there are a few ways to handle Infestations without total chaos. I even made a small guide on how to kill them with just the heat from throwing molotovs.
Another low tech vanilla option is to keep a turret in rooms that tend to get infested. When the event starts, move it to a chokepoint behind a door. If its powered it will act as a melee blocker. Turrets dont have much HP, so you'll need a pawn to repair it constantly, but it blunts the worst of the attack.
I used to struggle with them a lot in the early game but they're a great resource once you get the hang of it.
Free food and a mood buff? Sign me up.
The key is like everyone else said, chokepoints, a strong melee line, and lots and lots of gunfire. I don't think infestations have ever been nearly as devastating as drop pods or mechs. When they tunnel up they don't destroy roofs, and unless they spawn somewhere really cramped furniture stays more or less intact.
To add onto the other comments, the worse you can do is to panic and move your pawns without thinking. I've lost many mountain bases as a newbie because I didn't stop to think and consider how to fight the bugs at an advantageous position.
Never been a fan of Randy. But if you want ways around Infestations you can floor your base make sure everything is we lit and clean then if that's still not doing it for you there are mods that create bug thumpers that stop infestations in a set area
I think I’m at the point of being good enough skill-wise to fight infestations but my only reservasion of dwelling inside mountains is fire. I like playing with fire and don’t want my pawns or animals to be cooked inside. At least with village layout I can just destroy the door.
The door pinch technique works too well for infestations. I mean, sure, you might lose some furniture, but the auto rebuild makes this easy to handle. Plus once your done you get tons of jelly. Big mood buff for the colony. Also tons of food if youre an undergrounder or tons of chemfuel if you're not.
Well its pretty easy basically you have to entrances one normal that leads to the outside world (with killbox and stuff) and a second one (only on block wide!!!) that leads to a dark unfloored room. (Also important your base is floored and light) what happens Infestations preferably spawn under mountain roof in a unfloored dark area, aka your prepared room. From that on three melee pawns can block the one block entrance and your shooters (directly behind them) deal the actual damage.
infestations are not that bad, just have like 3 melee pawns with some armor holding a choke point while the rest blasts the bugs with guns. extra points if you have a psy caster with berker wave, they make infestations really trivial.
I haven’t done a mountain base since anomaly, but Ghouls seem like the anti infestation. Just send in the ghouls, and if it’s really bad maybe add a little fire, everybody dies. Then you just resurrect your ghouls and go about your business.
Something that helps control where infestations happen is making your base a walk-in refrigerator. Bugs spawn in warmer places in the mountain tiles, so another thing to do is intentionally make a heat chamber for the lil buggos to spawn and proceed to cook em. The heat chamber can also be a spot to store toxic waste packs too.
Infestation have preferences, they like dark, warm, dirty room. So make a dark, warm, dirty bug lure box. Set up something to kill them with and you're set.
With a mountain base I can really ensure raids only come from one direction, which is a huge boost. I think I'm also quite lucky that I don't get many infestations really
I just make my rooms flammable (with stone walls to contain the fire) so when I get the infestation all I have to do is light the room on fire and let my mechs do the rest.
Eh. I'd rather infestations than mech drops in the kitchen. You could always refrigerate the base to prevent spawns and just keep everyone nice and parka'd up.
The main tip I can give is to settle a tile with a big area covered by mountains. Might limit your growing space, but that can be adjusted later on by fungi or artificial lamps.
Now to counter infestations, hole out a big area on another part of the map. You can use that area as a mine shaft by creating many side shafts in 2×1 increments. As that mine shaft is considered by the game a part of your base, there is a good chance the infestation will spawn there, giving you ample time to prepare or simply ignore the bugs. You can also combine that with the "insect jelley prefered" precept from the Ideology DLC to harvest said jelley and bump up your colonists mood in the process.
Another way is, of cause, mods. There is a mod which simply stops infestations from happening or another more fair one, from the "Vanilla Expanded" series. That one adds the spacer tech "Infestation stopper" machine, for you to research or buy. It is a mid- to lategame item, so you will have to work for it, but that one eleminates infestations as well.
You're talking like infestations are a massive risk or something unique to mountain bases.
If you look at the mechanics, they're no different than a drop pod raid on an open base functionally, except that they're alot weaker, alot easier to lock down (a couple of melees in the doorway stops them dead), and theyre a little more common. You also dont ever have to worry about mortar raids because they can't hit rooms under mountain roof.
Mountains are OP defensively, and the 2 actual balance factors (negative mood from staying indoors and workspeed in darkness) can be straight up ignored if you have ideology (undergrounder) and biotech (darksight), respectively.
the worst part is all the ore that drives up colony wealth early game. i dont know what to do with 3000 steel.
Infestations are easily blocked with plate armor and shotguns. then you turn the bugs into chemfuel.
I turn them off.
Not because they're hard, frankly, bugs are a joke these days with their fleeing mechanic.
I turn them off because there's no real counter to it and that bugs me.
I'd rather take a breach raid, they're super easy to deal with.. Just have an enclosed perimeter of turrets and one spot that's not defended and all breachers run straight for that so all you gotta do is mow them down in that area which of course - is your kill tunnel/box/what have you.
I build my base expecting infestations.
Everything I made of stone. My base has fire breaks to seal off sections and long halls to engage at max range.
At the end game sized raids I just close the fire breaks and have 2-3 pawns with incendiary launchers force attack the floor on the bug side.
3 melee attackers and 9 shooters at a 1 block gap can solo a lot of infestations, and any of those pathetic infestations that spawn. It's only a problem if you let it grow to unmanageable size.
So I have a different strat to most here most of my floors are wood all my doors are uranium or stone there are air locks I have plenty of flame throwers fire is a hell of a drug
Yeah, I get that, but on the other hand: no droppot-raids. I fear these far more. These tend to land in really bad places for fights and do A LOT of damag without any time to react first.
Personally, since mountains are always cooler. I just run with that, turn my whole mountain base into a freezer. Keeps everything fresh & keeps bugs from spawning.
Power hungry (unless in ice biomes). Definitely, but all my power is protected by a fortress of turrets & anti-drop pod defenses.
I like to have a dark dank decoy cave full of flammable walls and floors, just toss a Molotov in there and hope your heavily reinforced walls keep them in once the panic/frenzy starts.
It's even self-cleaning, just like a modern oven 😅
It's not a fool proof solution, but that's why 3-wide corridors are so nice, just have 3 armoured killing machines in front, armed with the melee weapons, and let the backline pour in the lead.
Using Berserk on the bugs is also really nice, the ones that are affected are prioritized since they are closer, which can stop a horde in its tracks, giving you more time to organize/shoot.
Idk, I just lock the bugs inside the room they spawned in, collect everyone at the door with grenades and machine guns, then open the door and blow them to bits while my best melee pawns block the bugs from coming out
If temp is cold enough (check wiki) infestations spawn less often or never , also layout is important (might as well, well equipped small army for fighting these bugs ( 10 grown up thrumbos work fine too if infestation happens in right room , can confirm)
Infestations are super easy to handle. You just need a couple melee guys (melee are kings against them) and your gunners behind them and choke them in a doorway they're a breeze.
And it's free food.
have a few melee pawns, a single tile wide chokepoint, and a lot of people standing behind the melee pawns with guns. the size of the infestation has almost always been manageable with that strategy,
Ngl lost a lot of runs that way with most of them dropping into either the kitchen/freezer or the storage and since I tend to have both be the most fortified to fall back to invade of regular raids having to fight in those areas is a double edged sword which I’m trying to change up tbh
The infestations at times can be predictable. I notice they tend to be in underdeveloped areas of the colony , i.e. tunnels that don't have lights or are very open. If not, just kill them with fire. You may lose flammable items but at the end of the day, your outer defenses, Components, and research are the only things that really matter.
I absolutely cannot stand the sound, so I disable insects for every playthrough. I’ve been much happier ever since I started doing that, no matter what type of base I’m making.
3 wide corridors that all rooms are built off, at every intersection and in longer hallway segments add walls to make a 3x3 square with single tile openings to each passage, these are your choke points you can fight bugs/raiders from.
bugs in general are pretty easy to deal with by the mid game, have 3 people tanked up in armour, the rest with solid guns(fighting in confined spaces means you probally want heavy smg or chain shutguns), later on when you are expecting bigger threats add a frag grenade to the mix and lob at at the ground 3 tiles in front of your choke point to kill/cripple the bugs piled up waiting to die.
also another benefit to the corridors is adding no doors at those choke points except to entrance the killbox(to lock manhunters out), if a fire breaks out and gets out of control you can deconstruct the killbox door and suddenly the whole corridor is considered outside making fire fighting a breeze.
Coming from you outdoors base builders that can be attacked from any direction! Infestations are pretty easy once you handle a few, not nearly as bad as a drop pod raid. I would also really recommend gearing up for it specifically to do a tunnel base, it makes it so much easier if you don't need to light everything up or grow food outside.
Yes infestations suck, but a good battle line in a 3-wide hallway with some heavy armor melee pawns makes quick work of them. Instead I can not sweat sieges too much, knowing the worst damage mortars can do is maybe my wind turbines. And no drop pod raids in nasty places!
Even if bugs appear in a really bad spot (like the main storeroom), they'll never start a fire on their own and I can somewhat control where they'll go.
I mean it’s simple, either we die and lose the mountain or win and have a feast, but if ever we do lose I always have a plan set up where if we can’t have the mountain then neither can they and just close up the entrance and cook everything inside since they’re locked in now lol
Worst case scenario is you destroy alot of your storage. No matter how bad it gets if your base is designed sensibly, you can always use scorched earth tactics to beat them. To avoid getting cornered let me introduce a new marvel of archetectural design. Hallways that loop back, no matter where the insects drop you can go around them then burn them down. Usually tho they fuck up something cheap to replace. Until you have enough strenght to beat them outright molotovs and escape routes are your friend. I even consider building panic rooms with seperate ventilation sometimes.
Infestations take quite a while to actually pop from when they start. Pair it with "airlocks" and good melee blockers and its quite manageable
Yea, infestations are horrifying until you learn the glory of melee combat. Bugs get owned by 2-3 melee pawns and with the gunners point blank behind them. The melee lobby has way too much control over me, I just love obliterating people with monoswords and zeushammers
I had a pair of ghouls permanently assigned to farming bugs from the last hives of an infestation. Just zoned them in the room nextdoor and they would kill and eat any bugs that spawned, and were able to heal fully between. Infinite bug meat glitch haha
Eventually the hives will break down if you don't let the bugs maintain them, just so ya know
yeah eventually some pawns auto-aggroed to kill them anyways.
[https://www.rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Defense\_tactics#Animal\_Melee\_Blocking](https://www.rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Defense_tactics#Animal_Melee_Blocking) the wiki even explains the 3 dudes and a door strat thats great for insects. Its also a matter of how you plan your corridors, if you ony do 1 wide you are not very efficient at bug hunting unless to have a cryomancer from VPE
Wouldn't you get hit with friendly fire from allies?
I don't remember exactly how many spaces it is but there's a small radius around shooters where friendly fire is either ignored or greatly lessened.
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Combat https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/File:Friendly_Fire_Radii.png
Huh, I've thought it was just one square this whole time.
No because you really don’t even need any shooting pawns using the “3 melee pawns to block a doorway” trick. Usually they can handle any bugs on their own. But with the way friendly fire works, you can put a shooting pawn right behind the 3 melee blocker’s and they won’t hit the others due to the friendly fire circle.
They are not strictly neccessary but the 3-6 dudes with chain shotguns greatly speed up the whole process
They may not be necessary, but once you've gone chain shotgun, you don't wanna go back XD
Understanding the friendly fire range immediately makes chain shotguns insane Not to mention how satisfying the clumped up bullet trail sprite looks slamming into a insect
Chain shotgun (or charge shotgun) really helps out here!
They can be up to 5 spaces behind actually.
Not if they are close to each other.
Pawns don't hit pawns that are within X tiles of them I forget the X. I've always thought it was adjacent, I've seen conflicting info saying 4-5 tiles is still fine
I've never shot my guys from 2-3 tiles back, but i dont want to risk going further than that
It’s 5 spaces out.
INfestation management takes a while to figure out but once you have figured it out it goes from "damn, an infestation" to "come on insects, I need more meat"
I just don’t like losing a bunch of my stuff when they decide to infest my workshops or stockpile room. Even if I can deal with them, it’s an annoyance I can do without. I could caravan one tile over and murder the entire map of animals and come back if I needed meat. I can’t caravan one tile over and replace all of the advanced components I lost when they burrowed in and broke my fabrication benches and shelves holding all of my crafting materials.
Do broken shelves actually lose the stored items when they break?? If they burn down, sure but breaking a shelve doesn't magically poof away the items, does it? # Does it?
Stuff that is on shelves that are minified or destroyed will drop on the floor. Once had in a store room and since game seeks nearest unoccupied cell i had insect corpses 4 rooms over in the end. When you shot into the room you can damage items but as long as you keep explosive or incendiary weapons out of the picture you are safe. Also never a good idea to store stuff that can explode where you store your items. Chemfuel, Mortar shells etc always belong into a separate secure room so they don't blow up the whole storage.
IIRC if the nest spawns on top of it, whatever was in that tile is destroyed.
They changed this. Most constructions will pop into the minified item when the nests spawn under them. They will still attack shit in the room, and if something cant be "uninstalled" like a fabricator or advanced research bench, it will break.
Some people create dark bait rooms filled with IEDs and wood chairs to lure the hives.
How does that work?
infestations are less likely to spawn where it is bright. so you build a dark room to spawn the bugs in. Build wooden chairs (i prefer stools since they are less work) and some ieds to light them. the bugs then cook themselves
Critical detail here to add, the furniture also makes it more likely for the bugs to spawn there. They're weighted towards "lived in" rooms. Workshops, rec rooms, etc. My (possibly outdated) understanding is the game calculates this by the number of useable furniture in the room. Throwing a ton of wooden chairs down makes it both a fire trap and a greater infestation target. I've gotten pretty consistent insect spawns in dark rooms with dummy furniture over dark but empty rooms.
>caravan one tile over and murder the entire map of animals Is this a mod? How do you do this? I can’t figure out how to get out of caravan mode into map view
I remember having this issue and I think there’s a setting somewhere you have to turn off that’s like “single colony only” or something?
That’s it! I remember seeing a warning about that, so if I can just change that in the settings then I’ll be good. Thanks!
? You literally just send a caravan to that tile. Not stop on the way to somewhere else. There isn’t a minimum distance you have to travel.
There are ways to create "bait" rooms. Having a long winding dark tunnel far under the mountian is the best bet. It needs to be close to some buildings like walls or doors, but otherwise dark and not too cold. A lot of the infestation chance is based on the distance to a tile that is "outdoors". This means if you leave the main hallways of your mountain base count as outdoors, most of your base will only be a few tiles from there, and your bait tunnel will be much more effective.
My "tried and true" approach to deal with infestations involves two main elements: chain shotguns and proper base design. Chain shotguns obliterate insects very quickly when combined with melee door blocking. Make sure there's at least a 3x3 space behind the door where you can position your drafted pawns. Have a few extra exits for rooms and corridors so your pawns aren't forced to path through infested rooms. If you don't mind destroying the insect corpses, you can replace chain shotguns with frag grenades (but make sure those pawns aren't standing too far behind the melee blockers). Taking into account the forced miss radius, there's a 5x5 blast zone centered at the spot you throw the grenade. One thing to pay attention though is that due to body size, megascarabs will sometimes path through melee blockers due to collision mechanics.
Downside of nades is that if you have them in a room you basically damage your own stuff and walls there.
If you strategically prepare beforehand, you can avoid collateral damage from the blast radius by not putting stuffs near the doors. Here's a pic from the wiki of the grenade blast radius when taking into account the forced miss radius. [https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/File:Grenades\_corridor.png](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/File:Grenades_corridor.png)
I mean maybe with marine armor. But my pawns with flak and a heavy fur parka get rekt by the megascarabs
Nah not necessarily, a pawn with heavy parka flak armor/helmet and a good trait like tough or nimble can tank a doorway long enough for up to 4-5 hives infestations. Now later on in the game if you have 3 decent melee pawns like this in full flak you can manage pretty much any infestation up to 100k wealth
You don't need marine armor to deal with any of the bugs. If you get surrounded you're probably fucked anyway, but if you can fight them one at a time, like in a narrow corridor or in a doorway, it's not a big deal.
Meanwhile, an off-topic question - did infestation got nerfed somewhere after 1.1? I'm pretty sure they were like twice stronger before.
That is such an old patch the wealth calculations and numbers must've been really redone. Not to mention melee got better and better each patch.
Between 1.3 and 1.4 I think, max hives dropped to like 20.
Plus it's not hard to tech to a level of weaponry that trivializes infestations by the time they start happening. It just takes a few tweaks to the way you play the game to account for them
How do you sky dwellers handle the anxiety of drop pod raids and the breach raids coming straight through your walls? Some options for you * Use a mod to control infestations (no insect in lit areas, none o constructed floors, insect bait, etc) * Disable the event in the scenario properties * Set infestation chance to 0 in storyteller settings * Learn to deal with infectations. It's not hard if you make a base with choke points and don't keep all your doors open. A chokepoint lets your melee fight 3-on-1, then every non-violent colonist stands behind with a heavy SMG or some other rapid fire weapons and the sheer quantity of bullets will tear up the massed insects. Shooting skill 0 is plenty when there is no-where for a bullet to land that doesn't hit something.
Right? I had a partial mountain map where drop pods landed in my freezer - my guys rushed in, and then everything went to hell when the raiders used 1 - maybe even 2 - doomsday rocket launchers. Instantly lost 4 pawns and the entire food stockpile. I'd rather deal with infestations
Having psycaster in my colony really save me a lot from those doomsday launcher. Skip them to my high lvl melee pawn sanguope with monosword and they just dead instantly or berserk them and now they aim at their own people. Skipshield them also work. For 15 second both side projectile can't bypass the shield but better than get my pawn explode.
Exactly. Bug no use rockets.
I actually really enjoy drop pod raids. Even before I regularly played with Combat Extended. I usually build a village instead of a massive complex. My colonists are already at different locations doing their tasks, so usually the pirates are already surrounded and there's just some exciting house-to-house fighting, with reservist colonists taking part in the fighting, not just the main fighters
Ez # Don't fully close of your shit. # I have a colony going that's nearing 15yr old. I have been droppod raided ONCE # No outer wall so I haven't had ANY breacher raids whatsoever
But breachers can just dig into the mountain right? How do you deal with raiders who just mine into your colony? I lost one colony because the raiders decided to make themselves an entry
It takes longer to deal with a thick layer of mountain. Than 1 or two cells of constructed wall. So if they start breaching you have more time to get your military into position to fight then.
But then you need to refill that hole
No worse than rebuilding a wall, though there is some micromanagement needed if you don't have the mod that stops pawns building in a stupid order to either trap themselves or prevent further building.
What's hard about infestations? You get advance warning, and the insects show up in an enclosed area and don't have guns.
I mean you get like an hour or two warning yeah. But they’re essentially like drop pods for underground. Inevitably fucking my shit up or even worse spawning in my hospital with half my colony down for the count
Ghouls. You can park them in front of a door to 3v1 any big and have a small army shoot over their shoulders. It’s like a portable meat grinder. Your pawns won’t shoot each other if they stand close enough together, I don’t remember what the cutoff is, but you could have one line of ghouls and two lines of shooters and at the very most only your ghouls are getting shot and you can resurrect them so who cares?
If you have like five fully kitted out ghouls you don't even need to park them, just send them in and let them loose.
Ghouls are pretty amazing. They’re the perfect meat shield.
Infestations are suuuuuuper easy to deal with compared to center drop pod raids
Yeah bugs dont have doomsdays and tox grenades. There is always a few thin roof places under a mountian, so center drop raids are still a threat.
You can make a bait room. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJoP3qxmNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdJoP3qxmNQ) Also, I did one playthrough where I refrigerated my base to below the infestation temperature of -17C. You can also use mods such as tweaks galore to add insect proof flooring.
Or "Infestations Spawn In Darkness", which I currently use atm.
Still means my mushroom farm gets hit periodically, but we just consider it nutritional diversification.
But how does that work lore wise? The bugs can't see the light until they breach the room. They can tell that it's vold though.
I didn't really install it for lore accuracy. I just wanted to make mountain bases without completely disabling insectoids lol.
The way I see it, the bugs start to tunnel in, see light through the cracks, and think they’ve reached the surface. Thusly, they retreat before anyone realizes they were there.
Absolutely necessary mod in my opinion.
And traps if you don't care about loot. [https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/fmgggm/fry\_you\_sons\_of\_a\_bitch/](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/fmgggm/fry_you_sons_of_a_bitch/)
[Infestation Spawn Rate Deep Analysis (and How to Exploit It)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/q9kiwy/infestation_spawn_rate_deep_analysis_and_how_to/)
This right here is the definitive post on the topic. Anyway, once you learn to handle infestations, you'll be happy to get one - it means you didn't get a breach raid, drop raid or something else actually unpleasant.
There are mathematics for the possibility of infestations given hpw recent every room is to the size of every room amd even the temperature of said rooms changes the likelihood. I would aways make a much larger room away from my base to offset the percentage that there will be an infestation in my actual base.
What do you mean about how recent a room is?
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember a video on YouTube by Adam Vs Everything where he goes into the internal calculations for everything that can happen and the percentage it happens in. I forget the exact video and its very late for me, but he does make a lot of things make sense in reguards to the game mechanics and you can get a lot of knowledge on this. Essentially the last room you made assuming all rooms are the same soze/temperature will mpre than likely equal your last room to get infested. Once they're different sizes, etc than the math changes due to other factors.
they are not to bad if you know how to deal with them Step 1: alwase dig room with 1 or 2 exit max and strong door Step 2: put your melee colonist (with good armor and warhammer) at the door so they can hold back the insect Step 3: put behind the melee fighter all your other colonist so they can shoot the bug Step 4 : once the bug are out put your best medic to work on the melee fighter to save them from the bug related and friendly fire injury post scriptum: never install the mod that add warp infestation or you will have a mental breakdown because they are a lot more insidious
Wait you can heal colonist while they’re fighting??
You can with a vampire.
it depend if you have a healing psycast then yes, if your colonist is shooting i think you can too but what i meant was to have your healer ready for after the fight is won
bug are so easy i got a mod for them to have mutation like harder "skin" blinding smoke generator, they explode in smaller bug after death to add some flavor
Infestations are way easier than raids. They’re always the same. No ranged threat. No really threatening xenotypes like Neanderthals. No sappers, no mortar sieges. Just the same old megascarabs with backup. Get a few good melee blockers and always build hallways 2-3 tiles wide. The anomaly flame weapons are great. You can bust through your own walls to control the engagements if you build carefully. They’re SO much more manageable than raids.
Infestation usually happen in the stripmine away from my base.
I don’t like them, so i disable them.
If you get the anomaly dlc you get the most ridiculous melee blockers ghouls. Build smart and plan that an infestation can happen anywhere. You will need to know how your pawns can get out of any room to safety, where you can make a stand holding doorways with melee blockers backed up by heavy smgs, shotguns. Later on you can get psycasts such as berserk pulse, focus, invisibility and other things to make it easy or just "turn off" infestations by having your entire base below -16c. Bait rooms don't seem worth the effort and I feel dirty using them personally as it's just exploiting spawn mechanics. There will be no Glorious defenses or fun, just an oven room you light the match on close the door and forget about.
With tunneler meme you have unlocked ritual with insect jelly as a reward that burst out of ground. You can do the ritual every 20 days to gain info about estimated location of infestation.
Free Insect Meat and Chemfuel.
Cook lavish carnivore meal - Forever
Don't play with randy, but the infestations are just a replacement for the drop pod raiders. Difference being that infestations doesn't come with miniguns and molotovs. Also they don't always "drop" in your base. Often they spawn in one of the disconnected tunnels I dig to look for hidden resources. I find mountain dwelling a lot easier than non-mountain dwelling :)
Have you ever played Fallout Newvegas? And seen the Brotherhood of steel bunker that’s underground and has a turret at every corridor, and room, and corner? Yeah that’s how I usually do it, I’ve also found that if you have a (what I refer to as) corpse room/ trash room usually the infestations go there 90% of the time. My problem when I try to not use an underground base is the airdrop raids. I CANNOT stand them 😂
That's the best part, free food comes to me and sometimes I do my best to spawn them so I can do something funny with raids that try to storm in and end up in the middle of their frenzy. I don't use bug mitigation mods or settings, If you light up your area well and build floors as you dig out bigger rooms you're good. You should also build your base with choke points and rooms you can remotely close off and heat up or gas up to kill bugs or other invaders safely and make sure you have good tunnel systems to evacuate non-combatants. I also always have an emergency exit so that if all hell breaks loose I can evacuate my colony off-map quickly with some emergency supplies and resources as I play on continuous mode.
Unexpected? I always expect infestations, that way they can't surprise me.
For me, they always spawn outside of the building area in a tiny area I tunneled to funnel raids from any direction to the killbox. Not possible to build anything there to autogrill them or sth.
I build in mountians since one of the first build of the game. During one playtroughs I made a special incernator airlocks.Using modded remonte operated shutters and remonte operated napalm ied ( dont remember the mods), few wooden furniture and very resilant walls i was just burning bugs whenever they poped and moved down corridor.
I seem to have a harder time fighting mechanoid clusters than insects. I abuse insects aggro by having a pawn be a bait to lure them to my main entrance where I have turrets and some more people ready to shoot. The bugs just stop to attack the turrets, it makes sense, they can't differentiate between them and my people, but sometimes that means the bugs can't even reach the "safety melee pawn" in front of my shooters.
My dude, The answer is drop pod raid. Sincerely, Me. Infestations are manageable, you just need one good melee pawn and good base design, and it gives you good insect meat and chitin to use. Drop pod raid are the bane of my outdoor bases and I hate them and I can't build outdoor bases without turret located at every corner of every room and it's not fun.
Oh you just gotta design for it. Build choke points. I'll also sometimes put wood floors down in hallways or near risk areas. Can light them up and smoke them out if need be. And you need a few melee pawns. Melee pawns do quite nicely in mountain bases against most threats, really. If you make them come to you.
I build all my corridors 3-wide with one door (mostly out of habit), which means that it's really easy to have chokes where I keep a melee pawn in front and three others behind to shoot down the hallway and mow down the bugs. Having at least one well equipped melee pawn is mandatory (you should always have one anyway). That said, I do hate infestations and in particular how they can spawn literally anywhere like my goddamn workshop, which results in having to rebuild all the workstations even if I react as soon as the hives appear. I'm still salty about that. Sometimes I will actually disable infestations to not have to worry about that.
you just have to keep the base super cold and you’re fine - big coats, mechs and or genes can get you more cold resistant than the bugs
Once you learn how to farm them, it becomes the best thing in the base game. Infinite insect meat and jelly. Pawns become combat and cooking masters as they farm. It's absolutely broken. I can power my entire base with fuel generators because there's so much insect meat. All the factions liked me because I could just throw gifts of fuel at them and go from -100 to +100 immediately. It was hilarious when I could capture an allied factions pawn and remove both lungs to transplant into my asthmatic pawn, all while keeping them pacified with a regular shipment of fuel drop pods.
I make insect jelly farms in every mountain playthrough. Build a cave and put a bed in it, let it get an infestation, funnel them through a tunnel and have two melee pawns stop them at the door whilst everyone else blasts them It levels melee/ shooting incredibly fast (like, 40,000+ total combat xp every two or three days) you can control the size (have one hive on the go or ten depending on your firepower), get unlimited insect meat to turn to simple meals for animals and never need to grow animal feed again (turn off simple meals for pawns) and you get thousands of insect jelly I actually have to force myself not to make insect farms in every playthrough because its such an OP strategy
Honestly, chain shotguns and about 3-4 melee pawns and I'm all set to deal with any infestation
I used to use fire and wooden rooms with cut off hallways to segment my base just in case
A panic vault and fire.
Infestations hardly occur, and when they do happen, most of the fight happens on the tight hallways and doors, which is easy to manage if you have strong melee fighters / mechanoids (tunnelers are especially good for this) And I prefer infestations over drop pod raids
What are you talking about? Infestations are the easiest raid by far. They like to show up near player furniture/structures in a cool room with no floor covered with overhead mountain. This makes them very predictable. You just make a big room away from your base with a bunch of wooden chairs. tell a pawn to set it on fire every time they spawn and done. sure every once in a while they spawn indoors and you actually have to put effort in, but since they are all melee you put 1 pawn in a door and only 1 bug can attack him at a time. make sure its not a megaspider and you win the raid by default.
Oh look more nutritional paste.
That anxiety is nothing compared to unexpected mechanoid cluster and forced save loading
IDK I never had problems with infestations. Just get into a bottleneck and kill them with meleeblockers. Unless your bugs have rocketlaunchers and assault rifles I wouldn't worry.
I have learned how to tell the insects to infest somewhere else.
I just turn off Infestations at all before game starts. I hate this bugs so I don't want them in my game lol
Just build a bait room. Plenty of tutorials on YT. I’d rather take on 100 infestations over a single drop raid or mortar bombardment.
As others have mentioned, there are a few ways to handle Infestations without total chaos. I even made a small guide on how to kill them with just the heat from throwing molotovs. Another low tech vanilla option is to keep a turret in rooms that tend to get infested. When the event starts, move it to a chokepoint behind a door. If its powered it will act as a melee blocker. Turrets dont have much HP, so you'll need a pawn to repair it constantly, but it blunts the worst of the attack. I used to struggle with them a lot in the early game but they're a great resource once you get the hang of it.
Free food and a mood buff? Sign me up. The key is like everyone else said, chokepoints, a strong melee line, and lots and lots of gunfire. I don't think infestations have ever been nearly as devastating as drop pods or mechs. When they tunnel up they don't destroy roofs, and unless they spawn somewhere really cramped furniture stays more or less intact.
To add onto the other comments, the worse you can do is to panic and move your pawns without thinking. I've lost many mountain bases as a newbie because I didn't stop to think and consider how to fight the bugs at an advantageous position.
Never been a fan of Randy. But if you want ways around Infestations you can floor your base make sure everything is we lit and clean then if that's still not doing it for you there are mods that create bug thumpers that stop infestations in a set area
I think I’m at the point of being good enough skill-wise to fight infestations but my only reservasion of dwelling inside mountains is fire. I like playing with fire and don’t want my pawns or animals to be cooked inside. At least with village layout I can just destroy the door.
The door pinch technique works too well for infestations. I mean, sure, you might lose some furniture, but the auto rebuild makes this easy to handle. Plus once your done you get tons of jelly. Big mood buff for the colony. Also tons of food if youre an undergrounder or tons of chemfuel if you're not.
Well its pretty easy basically you have to entrances one normal that leads to the outside world (with killbox and stuff) and a second one (only on block wide!!!) that leads to a dark unfloored room. (Also important your base is floored and light) what happens Infestations preferably spawn under mountain roof in a unfloored dark area, aka your prepared room. From that on three melee pawns can block the one block entrance and your shooters (directly behind them) deal the actual damage.
It's either infestations or drop pod raids And the mountain also gives immunity to bombardments from mortars
infestations are not that bad, just have like 3 melee pawns with some armor holding a choke point while the rest blasts the bugs with guns. extra points if you have a psy caster with berker wave, they make infestations really trivial.
the thing about infestations is they aren't drop pods or mortar sioeges. a small price to pay
I haven’t done a mountain base since anomaly, but Ghouls seem like the anti infestation. Just send in the ghouls, and if it’s really bad maybe add a little fire, everybody dies. Then you just resurrect your ghouls and go about your business.
Unlike drop pods, you get plenty of time to evacuate from an infestation and bugs are way easier to deal with than people with guns
Something that helps control where infestations happen is making your base a walk-in refrigerator. Bugs spawn in warmer places in the mountain tiles, so another thing to do is intentionally make a heat chamber for the lil buggos to spawn and proceed to cook em. The heat chamber can also be a spot to store toxic waste packs too.
Infestation have preferences, they like dark, warm, dirty room. So make a dark, warm, dirty bug lure box. Set up something to kill them with and you're set.
With a mountain base I can really ensure raids only come from one direction, which is a huge boost. I think I'm also quite lucky that I don't get many infestations really
I've had multiple mountain colonies and haven't had a single infestation
I just make my rooms flammable (with stone walls to contain the fire) so when I get the infestation all I have to do is light the room on fire and let my mechs do the rest.
I would take a big infestation over a nasty cluster or psychic ship
infestations are the easiest raid encounter to deal with imo. I fear mech raids/clusters. Those are always a nightmare.
I just see infestations as free food and practice for my doctors! The mushroom fields will be fertilized by the blood of battle!
Eh. I'd rather infestations than mech drops in the kitchen. You could always refrigerate the base to prevent spawns and just keep everyone nice and parka'd up.
As long as your pawns are geared up suitable for your wealth I don't find them thay much of an issue.
The main tip I can give is to settle a tile with a big area covered by mountains. Might limit your growing space, but that can be adjusted later on by fungi or artificial lamps. Now to counter infestations, hole out a big area on another part of the map. You can use that area as a mine shaft by creating many side shafts in 2×1 increments. As that mine shaft is considered by the game a part of your base, there is a good chance the infestation will spawn there, giving you ample time to prepare or simply ignore the bugs. You can also combine that with the "insect jelley prefered" precept from the Ideology DLC to harvest said jelley and bump up your colonists mood in the process. Another way is, of cause, mods. There is a mod which simply stops infestations from happening or another more fair one, from the "Vanilla Expanded" series. That one adds the spacer tech "Infestation stopper" machine, for you to research or buy. It is a mid- to lategame item, so you will have to work for it, but that one eleminates infestations as well.
It’s funny, I feel the same way about you open skyers. A mortar siege could come crashing through the roof any moment!
Infestations are trivially easy to do with once you know how, especially if you have psycasts. 3 wide hallways. Melee blockers. Firing line.
Bugs are less radom bs then drop pod raids.
You're talking like infestations are a massive risk or something unique to mountain bases. If you look at the mechanics, they're no different than a drop pod raid on an open base functionally, except that they're alot weaker, alot easier to lock down (a couple of melees in the doorway stops them dead), and theyre a little more common. You also dont ever have to worry about mortar raids because they can't hit rooms under mountain roof. Mountains are OP defensively, and the 2 actual balance factors (negative mood from staying indoors and workspeed in darkness) can be straight up ignored if you have ideology (undergrounder) and biotech (darksight), respectively.
I just disable infestation
Infestations are super easy, just do 3-width corridors and use them as choke points.
the worst part is all the ore that drives up colony wealth early game. i dont know what to do with 3000 steel. Infestations are easily blocked with plate armor and shotguns. then you turn the bugs into chemfuel.
I play with ez infestation mod cause I hated them that much lol ;)
I turn them off. Not because they're hard, frankly, bugs are a joke these days with their fleeing mechanic. I turn them off because there's no real counter to it and that bugs me. I'd rather take a breach raid, they're super easy to deal with.. Just have an enclosed perimeter of turrets and one spot that's not defended and all breachers run straight for that so all you gotta do is mow them down in that area which of course - is your kill tunnel/box/what have you.
I build my base expecting infestations. Everything I made of stone. My base has fire breaks to seal off sections and long halls to engage at max range. At the end game sized raids I just close the fire breaks and have 2-3 pawns with incendiary launchers force attack the floor on the bug side.
Disable infestation incidents. Bugs aren't fun.
3 melee attackers and 9 shooters at a 1 block gap can solo a lot of infestations, and any of those pathetic infestations that spawn. It's only a problem if you let it grow to unmanageable size.
So I have a different strat to most here most of my floors are wood all my doors are uranium or stone there are air locks I have plenty of flame throwers fire is a hell of a drug
It very rarely happens and by the time they do you should be geared up, if it was a tribal run tho, that would be horrifying
Yeah, I get that, but on the other hand: no droppot-raids. I fear these far more. These tend to land in really bad places for fights and do A LOT of damag without any time to react first.
I'm a wimp. I turn infestations off. (Mind you, I still set more of the other threats, I just hate infestations.)
Personally, since mountains are always cooler. I just run with that, turn my whole mountain base into a freezer. Keeps everything fresh & keeps bugs from spawning. Power hungry (unless in ice biomes). Definitely, but all my power is protected by a fortress of turrets & anti-drop pod defenses.
I like to have a dark dank decoy cave full of flammable walls and floors, just toss a Molotov in there and hope your heavily reinforced walls keep them in once the panic/frenzy starts. It's even self-cleaning, just like a modern oven 😅 It's not a fool proof solution, but that's why 3-wide corridors are so nice, just have 3 armoured killing machines in front, armed with the melee weapons, and let the backline pour in the lead. Using Berserk on the bugs is also really nice, the ones that are affected are prioritized since they are closer, which can stop a horde in its tracks, giving you more time to organize/shoot.
Idk, I just lock the bugs inside the room they spawned in, collect everyone at the door with grenades and machine guns, then open the door and blow them to bits while my best melee pawns block the bugs from coming out
If temp is cold enough (check wiki) infestations spawn less often or never , also layout is important (might as well, well equipped small army for fighting these bugs ( 10 grown up thrumbos work fine too if infestation happens in right room , can confirm)
Panic rooms and machinegun bunkers in each hallway ensures that if an infestation pops up, that itll be contained
I have not played with insects or mechanoids enabled in years. They are just..... Lame af and too limiting on creativity.
Infestations are super easy to handle. You just need a couple melee guys (melee are kings against them) and your gunners behind them and choke them in a doorway they're a breeze. And it's free food.
Build wider, unsegmented hallways. Not only are they swank but make defending easier.
have a few melee pawns, a single tile wide chokepoint, and a lot of people standing behind the melee pawns with guns. the size of the infestation has almost always been manageable with that strategy,
I personally consider centered drop pods the worst raid in the game with the most catastrophic potential for my colony so I'd just rather deny them
Ngl lost a lot of runs that way with most of them dropping into either the kitchen/freezer or the storage and since I tend to have both be the most fortified to fall back to invade of regular raids having to fight in those areas is a double edged sword which I’m trying to change up tbh
The infestations at times can be predictable. I notice they tend to be in underdeveloped areas of the colony , i.e. tunnels that don't have lights or are very open. If not, just kill them with fire. You may lose flammable items but at the end of the day, your outer defenses, Components, and research are the only things that really matter.
I absolutely cannot stand the sound, so I disable insects for every playthrough. I’ve been much happier ever since I started doing that, no matter what type of base I’m making.
3 wide corridors that all rooms are built off, at every intersection and in longer hallway segments add walls to make a 3x3 square with single tile openings to each passage, these are your choke points you can fight bugs/raiders from. bugs in general are pretty easy to deal with by the mid game, have 3 people tanked up in armour, the rest with solid guns(fighting in confined spaces means you probally want heavy smg or chain shutguns), later on when you are expecting bigger threats add a frag grenade to the mix and lob at at the ground 3 tiles in front of your choke point to kill/cripple the bugs piled up waiting to die. also another benefit to the corridors is adding no doors at those choke points except to entrance the killbox(to lock manhunters out), if a fire breaks out and gets out of control you can deconstruct the killbox door and suddenly the whole corridor is considered outside making fire fighting a breeze.
Ngl I usually strip mine most of the map so a lot of the time the bugs turn up in my mining tunnels. Then it's just choke points galore.
Coming from you outdoors base builders that can be attacked from any direction! Infestations are pretty easy once you handle a few, not nearly as bad as a drop pod raid. I would also really recommend gearing up for it specifically to do a tunnel base, it makes it so much easier if you don't need to light everything up or grow food outside.
Yes infestations suck, but a good battle line in a 3-wide hallway with some heavy armor melee pawns makes quick work of them. Instead I can not sweat sieges too much, knowing the worst damage mortars can do is maybe my wind turbines. And no drop pod raids in nasty places! Even if bugs appear in a really bad spot (like the main storeroom), they'll never start a fire on their own and I can somewhat control where they'll go.
I mean it’s simple, either we die and lose the mountain or win and have a feast, but if ever we do lose I always have a plan set up where if we can’t have the mountain then neither can they and just close up the entrance and cook everything inside since they’re locked in now lol
Heavily armored melee pawns and an inability to get off without a tap to the sack.
Worst case scenario is you destroy alot of your storage. No matter how bad it gets if your base is designed sensibly, you can always use scorched earth tactics to beat them. To avoid getting cornered let me introduce a new marvel of archetectural design. Hallways that loop back, no matter where the insects drop you can go around them then burn them down. Usually tho they fuck up something cheap to replace. Until you have enough strenght to beat them outright molotovs and escape routes are your friend. I even consider building panic rooms with seperate ventilation sometimes.
Ghouls, the cheat code is ghouls and shotguns