[Critch]

Yeah, Ideology seems to be the best of the DLC. Biotech seems to be mainly late game changes (other than the human variants) and I found Royalty mainly annoying so actively avoid most of it's options. With Royalty you can attain titles for your colonists from the Empire. All that really means is that your pawn will complain more about the furniture in their bedroom, not the kind of room a Lord should be living in. In return they'll get psychic powers that I always forget to use anyway.

So basegame is bestgame when cost is included.

And on with the story:

Looking back at the logs Gerbil didnt get his legs cut off with a sword, he got them crushed and destroyed with a big spiky club. Pity, Honey could have eaten them if they'd been cut off but they were just a dangly, stringy mush at the end of his stolen corpse when he was dragged away. His faction were also less than impressed when they sent a shuttle to bring him home and got the news that he was now an ornament stuck on a skull spike at a hostile tribe's camp.

Yet Another Useless Arrival
Not long after the whole Gerbil incident a new Paleal resident turned up. He didn't ask if he could stay, he just turned up and said "I live here now." He was a runaway, a refugee from a Yttakin camp, a little furry boy. His name was Shaott, a 6 year-old packing a revolver. He's rated 0 for shooting but he would still be the first line of defense since he brought his own gun. It's probably not worth getting to know him, he'll be dead soon. One problem with Shaott was that he had the Yttakin religion, so he wouldn't eat meat or kill animals. If a raid didn't kill him being a picky eater might have, but luckily he accidentally ate a bison sausage and his religious certainty dropped from "fanatical" to "I'm not sure I believe any of this rubbish". He may be the first person to convert to a new religion just for the sausages.

Things calmed down for a while, the days were taken up with Honey in class teaching the new kid Rim skills, which sounds like the kind of thing that would get a teacher arrested. Luckily the classroom with desks and a blackboard was one of the few rooms that survived the fires and bugs intact. When not teaching in class, Honey did basic maintenance around the camp and reattached the main power circuit with the geothermal generator in the north ending the power blackout problems. Just like in real life six year olds are useless parasites, so all Shaott did when not in class was wander around and draw chalk pictures on the ground. Occasionally, very occasionally, he would do some cleaning. Parts of the camp were still covered in old gore, human and insectoid blood on the floors and up the walls so there was plenty of cleaning to do.

Nom-nom-nominous
At the start of Spring food became the main issue. The camp didn't have much and what it did have was starting to rot, Honey had been ordered to rebuild the freezer room during the winter season but had never completed it. That wasn't a problem in winter when it was below freezing outside so all the vents could be opened to let the freezing outside air in, but it was spring and the temperatures were rising so the "freezer" room was heating up. Honey needed to boost her construction skills to build cooler units, that was why she hadn't completed the freezer in the winter, she didn't have the skills. A quick course of rebuilding walls around the camp to boost her construction skills and she could build the coolers. Nothing teaches electronics like building a wall. With Shaott being Yttakin, a variety of furry humans genetically engineered to work on frozen planets, the moment the freezer got to -3 celsius he vanished off to the freezer and spent most of his time in their drawing on the floor. The game is good for little details like that.

With it being spring the camp should have been a hive of crop planting activity but Honey (on account of being too good to get her hands dirty) and Shaott (on account of being 6 years old) were both hopeless. Planting was slow going, and made slower by a wild animal that was inside the settlement. A Boomalope was walking free inside the walls, a large antelope/cow like creature but rather than milk Boomalopes produce chemfuel. They explode in a fireball when they die so they're a problem to get rid off. They're also a problem in that Honey and Shaott would slowly plant a few rice plants each day and the moment the rice sprouted the Boomalope would eat them.

So starvation might be a good bet in the "what eventually kills off Paleal" sweepstakes.

Defense is the Best Form of Defense
In the olden days when Paleal was up and running as a functioning settlement there was a colonist called Daniel. In his pre-stranded-on-Rimworld life he'd been a scientist and was as smart as a bag of foxes. He didn't like being outdoors (I cant remember what the trait is called, but he had it) so he spent all his time indoors at his research desk or in his bedroom which was next door to his research room. Thanks to Daniel's diligence, Paleal had rushed through a lot of the early tech tree and had a big pile of techs they could use. When the insectoids turned up Daniel didn't have a gun, he wasn't keen on using guns so he held the line as a melee combatant cracking insectoids with his hammer. Obviously he was one of the first dead and his body burned up in the fires too. But a sooty stain on the floor wasn't the only mark he left on the colony, his research was still available. The research desk was still there covered in his papers, so Paleal knew how to build automatic mini-turrets, auto-guns on stationary tripods that could be set up to defend points.

When Rimworld first came out, mini-turrets were the meta. Build a row of them and raids would melt. In my first few attempts playing the game responding to a raid would mean sending out the colonists to man the barricades but the raid would have to get past the mini-turret line first so unless it was a fair-sized raid the colonists would come back complaining about being cold and hungry but without having fired a shot. Mini-turrets would deal with most front-on raids on their own, anything that actually got as far as the colonists would be seriously softened up. They've been nerfed now, lower fire rate, less damage and more repairs after firing, but with Honey's construction book-learning she could now build them. She built a couple to protect the Paleal front door, doing some kind of mental gymnastics that as a pacifist shooting somebody was wrong but building an auto-turret to shoot them for you was completely ok. So at least the next raid wont come in completely unopposed, the town would not have to depend on a gun-toting toddler.

One problem with mini-turrets is that they need to be powered, any disruption to the power supply and they'll turn off. So better hope the next raid doesn't turn up during a solar flare or other electrical problem.

(As an aside with my one long-term settlement (27 years before it eventually got wiped out) the beginning of the end was when the auto-turrets failed due to an electrical problem. The population was about twenty, but half of them were out of camp on a trade-caravan to another settlement when a pack of man-eating polar bears turned up. The half who were out on the caravan were the ones who could fight too, the weaklings were the ones left safely at home with the auto-turrets to defend them. With no mini-turret defenses the bears stormed the camp and killed almost everybody. When the caravan came back the bears had moved on but only one colonist had survived the attack. That was Doc, the imaginatively named camp doctor, she was torn up and had lost a leg but was still just about alive. The strange thing was she was a masochist so she got a mood boost from pain, she was having the best time possible being in agony after being torn apart with bear claws. The pain gave her the highest positive mood I've seen a colonist have.)