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I have a very particular style of playing Rimworld (a colony sim game of 'here are some procedurally generated characters, guide them through some procedurally generated problems'). I load up my play with Things I Like, which include Things I Find Fun, Things That Make My Life Easier, and Things That Make My Life More Difficult In Fun Ways, and then play it from neolithic tech level.
Critical to the "things that I find fun" in this context is "aliens". In earlier versions of Rimworld this was done with the Humanoid Alien Races framework (despite the fact that Official Rimworld Lore says that there are no known aliens, we do not care); in current version of Rimworld with expansions there are basically transhumanist aliens, genetically engineered but can be made compatible with Teh Lore.
I of course run with both of these, and bonus fun happens when a HAR race picks up a Biotech genotype and goes extremely sideways.
So. A caravan came in with a pair of Syrchalis Harpies for sale, and I purchased them; they were a HAR alien that I did not have in my colony. I think both of them had variant genotypes, but I only remember one of them - who had the "pixie" xenotype from a fantasy races biotech mod which is psychically powerful but physically frail. I had not thought through this.
You see, the Syrchalis Harpies have a particular quirk - they don't require joy activities to be happy, but if they don't do a violence every so often they potentially go berserk. (I often manage this by, if a raid hasn't been in for a bit, sending one off to kill a local wildlife. We can use the meat, anyway.)
This combines poorly with tiny, brittle pawns with hollow bones. I am not sure whether I had extra stacked quirks on top of the 'pixie' xenotype but every time that this pawn took damage she took a lot of damage, and every time she fell down, she took damage.
Let us add to this another thing: this pawn happened to be a nudist.
Which meant she refused to put on either protective gear or a coat.
And for some reason that I did not bother to track down, she started getting hypothermia at temperatures below 24C.
My base is at a perfectly sensible 17C, because I dug it into a mountain and the temperatures are nice and stable there.
I did not discover this for a while, because the thing that I noticed first was an interaction with a different Make My Life More Complicated mod, which is Some Things Float, which, among other things, makes a) stuff come floating downstream in my river and b) sometimes pawns slip and fall and also start floating downriver and/or drowning.
Which combined with Water Is Cold that when idiot pawns get in the water rather than using the bridges, they get chilled, lose their manipulation stat, which makes it easier for them to lose their balance, which means they fall over in the river. Etc.
So my tiny angry harpy fell over in the river and broke her leg so hard it came off.
I could not for the life of me figure out how she lost her leg. I put a peg leg on her and let her carry on with her life. Only ... she kept getting mad, so I would get her up to go fight something, and then when I looked away she would fall over and break something else. Including eventually her peg leg, which I did not bother to replace.
She fell over and her arm fell off. I put her back together and stared at her, and moved her bed to the kitchen so she would stop getting frostbite in her toes, but as soon as she left the kitchen and went anywhere else, she would fall down again, and break something else.
... eventually I turned her loose and she finally fell over and her head fell off and that was that.
(Then the game crashed in the middle of her funeral but such is Rimworld sometimes.)
Critical to the "things that I find fun" in this context is "aliens". In earlier versions of Rimworld this was done with the Humanoid Alien Races framework (despite the fact that Official Rimworld Lore says that there are no known aliens, we do not care); in current version of Rimworld with expansions there are basically transhumanist aliens, genetically engineered but can be made compatible with Teh Lore.
I of course run with both of these, and bonus fun happens when a HAR race picks up a Biotech genotype and goes extremely sideways.
So. A caravan came in with a pair of Syrchalis Harpies for sale, and I purchased them; they were a HAR alien that I did not have in my colony. I think both of them had variant genotypes, but I only remember one of them - who had the "pixie" xenotype from a fantasy races biotech mod which is psychically powerful but physically frail. I had not thought through this.
You see, the Syrchalis Harpies have a particular quirk - they don't require joy activities to be happy, but if they don't do a violence every so often they potentially go berserk. (I often manage this by, if a raid hasn't been in for a bit, sending one off to kill a local wildlife. We can use the meat, anyway.)
This combines poorly with tiny, brittle pawns with hollow bones. I am not sure whether I had extra stacked quirks on top of the 'pixie' xenotype but every time that this pawn took damage she took a lot of damage, and every time she fell down, she took damage.
Let us add to this another thing: this pawn happened to be a nudist.
Which meant she refused to put on either protective gear or a coat.
And for some reason that I did not bother to track down, she started getting hypothermia at temperatures below 24C.
My base is at a perfectly sensible 17C, because I dug it into a mountain and the temperatures are nice and stable there.
I did not discover this for a while, because the thing that I noticed first was an interaction with a different Make My Life More Complicated mod, which is Some Things Float, which, among other things, makes a) stuff come floating downstream in my river and b) sometimes pawns slip and fall and also start floating downriver and/or drowning.
Which combined with Water Is Cold that when idiot pawns get in the water rather than using the bridges, they get chilled, lose their manipulation stat, which makes it easier for them to lose their balance, which means they fall over in the river. Etc.
So my tiny angry harpy fell over in the river and broke her leg so hard it came off.
I could not for the life of me figure out how she lost her leg. I put a peg leg on her and let her carry on with her life. Only ... she kept getting mad, so I would get her up to go fight something, and then when I looked away she would fall over and break something else. Including eventually her peg leg, which I did not bother to replace.
She fell over and her arm fell off. I put her back together and stared at her, and moved her bed to the kitchen so she would stop getting frostbite in her toes, but as soon as she left the kitchen and went anywhere else, she would fall down again, and break something else.
... eventually I turned her loose and she finally fell over and her head fell off and that was that.
(Then the game crashed in the middle of her funeral but such is Rimworld sometimes.)
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