Welcome back to our System Hack! We’ve moved into the detail part of this hack, actually nailing down what everything in the game is and how it works. Now that we’ve nailed down what the skills are, it’s time to talk about Resources and Items, how they’re made, and what they do. Later on this leads us to part 3, where we lock down the tech tree and more specific base stations. After that’s all situated, it might be time to prototype this thing as a game.

RimWorld does give a guide in terms of what level of simplification we should go for. Resources like ‘compacted steel’ and ‘compacted machinery’ sidestep massive parts of the metal and machining supply chain, and also end up neatly creating resource constraints at different stages of the RimWorld gameplay loop. We’re not necessarily restricted by the same intent with our designs; this game is still an RPG at its heart and things like trading and finding more resources aren’t necessarily constrained to a single map and random events. With no (or at least much less) dead-ending, it’s okay to make the resources palette a bit broader and a bit more interesting.

Materials

No matter how you break up resources there’s always a bit of overlap. Wood will be a key building material, but trees are plants. There will be more discussion of trees in the next section, but it’s worth noting them here as we’re talking about materials. Wood will be, for the most part, pretty easy: You chop down trees and can mill them into lumber. Thanks to wood being fairly plentiful, it will likely play a key role in buildings and some items through much of the tech tree, just like in real life.

Next basic material is going to be stone, and like wood it’s mostly a one-off and mostly plentiful. RimWorld details several different kinds of stone, but until you get into pretty intense optimization of your walls and art, those differences are modest and we don’t need to replicate them. We can also include two derivative materials: brick and cement. There is kind of cement and concrete in RimWorld, but it’s not its own resource. This once again gives us some more options later in the tech tree without being too sprawling.

Metals are where things have a little room to be interesting, but once again we want to keep the complexity to a modest level. Using some basic history, we can establish a very simple three-stage tech progression for structural metals: Bronze, to Iron (and steel), to Aluminum. This should cover most metal items and enough granularity to be interesting but not so much that it’s overwhelming. While bronze may be superseded fairly completely in certain applications, copper will remain relevant throughout the tech tree. Steel will have relevance even after aluminum can be smelted.

As implied above there will also be the three precious metals of antiquity, copper, silver, and gold. Mostly trade goods, hard to find and mine, silver and gold will be currency and also potentially see use in more advanced tech items. While RimWorld has the ubiquitous ‘components’ for generic manufactured parts, for this game I’d like to split that into ‘hardware’ and ‘electronics’. Hardware is going to be mostly structural metals, and electronics will be composed of conducting metals and plastic. Instead of making different parts for ‘components’ and ‘advanced components’, I think that hardware can be split into ‘primitive’, ‘standard’, and ‘advanced’, while electronics will be ‘standard’ and ‘advanced’. As the colony develops more advanced hardware and electronics, they’ll just supersede the old version; some items will have a more advanced type as a prerequisite.

I did mention plastics, which means there’s going to be oil in this game. This is kind of a necessity as I wasn’t going to put in ‘boomalopes’ or the like. Like modern developments, both coal and oil can be found and exploited, as well as natural gas at higher tech levels. Plastics can be produced here, though at higher tech levels there will also be bioplastic which will come from plants. One use of plastics will be to make structural materials, we’ll keep it simple and make fiberglass and carbon fiber. Glass will come from sand, while carbon fibers will be produced from plastic.

Plants and Animals

A major source of materials will be plants and animals, either foraged and hunted or cultivated in your colony. In addition to wood (as mentioned above), wild plants will provide small amounts of nuts and berries for food, as well as medicinal herbs (I’m not going to go the ‘healroot’ direction, but will still abstract to a single resource). Wild animals can be hunted, providing meat and hides which can be tanned for leather.

Animals in your colony are going to be largely the same, except that farmed animals also produce other resources like wool, milk, and eggs. Animals will need to be fed and watered, and like in RimWorld grazing will be an option for feeding animals (though not the only one). Water resources aren’t covered in RimWorld, but the lack of modeling water is mostly covered by ‘land fertility’ which feeds back into how effectively plants grow, thereby constraining both animal and crop cultivation. Water resources will be a good proxy for this in the absence of a map.

Crops will run the gamut, using RimWorld as a baseline. I’ve always been annoyed by the rice -> potato -> corn hierarchy in RimWorld because it’s wrong; rice is more nutrient dense than potato when looking at it on a per-acre basis. Also, rice, while it can grow quickly, is insanely water intensive, another thing not modeled. So instead of that, our baseline triptych for crops will be wheat -> potato -> corn, which is now accurate in terms of nutrient density and relative ease of growing. Rice will come in as a specialty crop which basically gives speed bonuses if you have enough water to do it. Like coffee, it may depend on hydroponics later in the tech tree.

Couple final crops to consider; we may include cotton as a crop for plant-based clothing, just like in RimWorld. Another crop will be sugar crops, likely sugar beets. Sugar will be useful not just for desserts but also augmenting food because our food items are going to take a different approach than that used in RimWorld.

Items

Your colonists will be producing items for their use, including food, weapons, and workstations. Certain things we’re going to want to gloss over; I’d likely want to model that colonists need clothing, but I don’t want to create an entire subsystem for it like in RimWorld. Instead, colonies will have upkeep tasks which will include clothing and tools. Fail to do the upkeep tasks, get penalties. Food will also be interesting; RimWorld takes all manner of meats, grains, and vegetables and boils them down into meals, and meals can be either vegetarian or not. I want to get rid of the vegetarian/not-vegetarian split, but instead build meals based on nutrients. Not going too crazy here, we’re going to have three macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein, and fat. While I focused on grains above, I’d imagine there would be three crop types: grains (carbs), beans (protein), and oil crops (fat). Foraging nuts and berries will gain you all three, but in small amounts. Meat will have protein and fat, but can be modified by sugar crops (as above) to become a meal with all three. This also means that dairy will have all three as well. The idea here is to make agriculture a bit more interesting, to make feeding your colonists something with multiple approaches and tradeoffs. After all is said and done, though, you’ll have meals, possibly with the same quality levels (simple, lavish, etc) to give morale bonuses.

Workstations will be fairly straightforward; each will have a material cost and a size requirement (if they need to be put inside a building). Other items, like weapons and vehicles, will work the same way. Like backgrounds in the previous article, the number of specific items is likely quite long; the key is to understand where they fall in the tech tree and how long they take to create. The tech tree is going to be roughly the same as RimWorld’s: First neolithic, then medieval, then industrial, then spacer, then ultratech. Ultratech is of course where things have more permission to get wild, but it’s also where we can make broader assumptions about cool inventions like bioreactors and matter assemblers that reduce the requirement for more and more specific resources. In fact, one could imagine that at the back half of the tech tree, materials requirements get less onerous.

The exchange for materials requirements will be energy requirements, and getting energy to workstations is going to change pretty significantly over the tech tree. One could imagine many workstations having a mechanical and an electrical version; the mechanical version would need to be powered by a mill (wind or water) or an engine, while the electrical version would need a power source. Power sources, like in RimWorld, would start with turbine generators and move to wind and solar; I probably wouldn’t include small nuclear reactors, but it’s certainly a possibility. You’d also need batteries, which could be another item modeled with existing resources; things like lead and lithium aren’t in the resources gamut we’ve currently defined, but I’d consider something to model these at a simplified level.

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While we’re once again not drilling down into a fully complete list, thinking about food, metals, and other building materials does give us a base palette with which we can detail out more items and think about what it’s going to look like moving through the tech tree. All of this will require revisiting when it comes time to balance out the game; of course one of the considerations is that homesteading in general is a lot harder in real life than we want to make it for a game, and the level of self-sufficiency being described here is totally unrealistic. With that in mind, even if we’re moving away from constructions like plasteel and boomalopes, we still want to provide an environment that will create challenge but also fun as players tackle how to manage their colony.

With base materials outlined and some ideas about workstations and how they work determined, the next article is going to go into that tech tree. How do colonists move through it, what’s included in it, and how granular do we want to go? From there, we should have enough to lock down basic lists and start building a minimum viable game. It’s certainly exciting times for Colony Sim Cortex, even as the complexity is multiplying. Keep following along with me, and in a few articles we might even get a game out of this System Hack!

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