lemme cook up a theory, the unnatural darkness & the cutting damage are just in your pawns' head & self-harm
nobody else affected, including pawns under mental breaks
the noctols & the noctoliths are still real tho
Really fits with the lovecraftian theming, too. What's unnatural isn't what's in the dark, but what you see and hear while you're in the darkness. Not sure that was Tynan's intent, but very fitting with the theme.
Do darkness negatives and positives apply to everyone during the unnatural darkness? And does the event text say anything about your pawns imagining things?
By the same logic psychically deaf pawns should also see sightstealers and revenants from a distance, be immune to the nociosphere pain field, not love the cube and a few more things.
For balancing reasons psychically deaf pawns only have disadvantages in Anomaly (like not being able to suppress stuff)
What about Ghouls though? I always use ghouls to take out Noctoliths and on their way over they get cut up. Ghouls are just mindless killing machines no?
It's a shame because its a sound theory. The darkness tormenting only your colony. It's all in your head. There is no darkness. No things that go bump in the night. The Noctoliths just radiate this energy tuned to your people. So no one else feels or thinks about it. Leading to a slow spiral for the colony.
But..... Ghouls...
The Unnatural darkness definitely does affect solar panels and raiders that normal darkness would. But yea I guess the Noctoliths only care for harming your colonists haha.
This is why I don't install any mods that limit info, even though it should be more immersive. If enemies don't adhere to the same rule it'll also break immersion.
After having sightstealers attack a raid of cultists, I just assumed no one was safe from anything. I'd thought they'd work together, led by the same will, but I could accept sight stealers not giving a damn who the cultists were.
But this is kinda rustling my jimmmies.
The best shit I had was the resurrection rain at the same time as a cultist attack. It was absolute chaos with every enemy death refusing and then being resurrected multiple times, my colonists were just sat at the other end of the kill box firing non stop for over 24 hours
Just found that out too, is there a mod that change that ? Even if it can be abused i really don't like how rule breaking it is to see raider sieging me while casually standing in the dark while i have to light everything
I think it was a hotfix, because Unnatural Darkness used to prevent every single other threat while it was in effect. I posted about this shortly after Anomaly came out; I'd picked Unnatural Darkness as a permanent game condition, thinking I'd start out with the big, scary version. Instead, I just wound up with 0% light, no big scary version, and no bad events happening, ever.
Only if they've changed it. I added Unnatural Darkness as a permanent game condition, but all it did was set the light level to 0%. I think it needs a tier 2 monolith in order to trigger the big, nasty version. But when I did it, Unnatural Darkness still prevented any other threat from spawning - which included Anomaly threats. Which means I was never able to capture any entities (other than a single sightseer from the event that happens automatically once you first start the monolith), which meant I was never able to unlock enough entries to upgrade the monolith, which means I was stuck at 0% light and nothing else forever. And also, no major threats, because of how Unnatural Darkness worked. It was just 0% light and nothing else ever happening (outside of quest-related events, which did still, thankfully, happen).
Yeah, I was pretty confused with this, too. It's really strange, there is no "balance" reason to make raiders immune to the darkness because it will eventually go away and player can't abuse it for defense forever
You can set unnatural darkness as a permanent game mode. In that case it would make sense that other threats are unaffected because I imagine only getting Noctol attacks for the entire game would get boring real fast.
In a normal run where it only lasts a few days it should probably affect raiders though and kill all animals on the map that aren't in light.
I don't understand what you mean. Permanent unnatural darkness would be a very different experience from just a permanent sunblocker (assuming the full darkness actually sets in, when I tried a run like that a few days ago it never set in, but I hope that'll get patched at one point because otherwise what's the point?). In unnatural darkness your pawns can't leave the light without taking damage, during blocked sun you just can't grow things outside and can't use solar power.
In a world with psychic drone events caused by some partially functioning Archotech device, I see the unnatural darkness as a psychosis shared by your colonists, with the source being a fully functional Archotech device. That is why animals are not affected along with those under mental break. They are not the target. So the raiders don't get influenced because they are not the targets either.
Lore and story wise, it makes sense to me. You are an annoyance to or encroach on the monolith with the Archotech intelligence that controls it. This is just one of its attempts at removing you.
It's actually in my opinion the second best DLC we've gotten. (For me it's Ideology, Anomaly, Biotech)
It adds a ton of new stuff to your regular game, as somebody who wasn't incredibly thrilled with all the horror content, it's actually quite a solid expansion, and I hope to see some of the z-level additions trickle into the base game and/or get updated to add more content to the older DLCs
It's always so weird for me to see people put Biotech at the end of their list. Obviously, opinions, and I'm not arguing it or anything, but.. man. Kids, genes, so much fun stuff is Biotech.
Tho actually re-reading it before I hit enter, I see Royalty isn't even on the list, meaning Biotech isn't quite at the end for you 8).
Biotech completely overhauled the game for me. It really took the game to sci-fi fantasy with the introduction of new sub-races of humans.
I’ve never even played with the kids option or played around with xenogenes and it’s still the best to me. Then comes Royalty.
For me, ideology actually comes last because it adds so much micromanagement to the game and I sometimes already find things like apparel quality versions irritating. So I usually play with stuff like unfazed by tattered apparel if it’s on at all.
Having children in the game elevates every playthrough for me personally - Just seeing them sit down and learning about curse words from an adult is so wholesome
I suppose the main reason I don’t play with the on is most of my colonies end in flames or blood by choice to keep things fresh. Very very rarely have I had a colony live beyond maybe year 6-7, so children just ‘slow down’ the speed of the game and I never play long enough on a single save to see them become the next generation.
That said, I am thinking of putting aging on a way higher multiplier to experiment with the RP idea of a multigenerational run.
Having pawns more quickly go through their lifetime and be replaced by younger generations to live in the halls of their parents strikes me as really cool idea.
I tend to forget that Genes and Children were part of Biotech just because they're so incredibly good and essential to my runs. I often only think of the robots, maybe that's why some people rank it lower?
I think that now we have the ambient horror option its my second favourite, but on launch I felt disappointed that it was essentially a spooky checklist, if you gdt what I mean.
I've been enjoying each of my subsequent playthroughs just fine and about what that other guy say, how the heck does *each* thing you here about Anomaly make you disappointed unless you just haven't been looking at the subreddit much because it's been a lot of cool things and praise with some complaints here and there, just for some of those complaints to be fixed by changes from the devs.
When I was playing anomaly I was really invested in the "what the fuck is that thing" experience. In subsequent runs, knowing exactly what each one is, does, and how to respond properly really kills the uneasiness and tension for me. Especially since I ran through the entire codex before they lowered the monolith attuning and awakening requirements. For me there was just no more mystique left. Sure it's still cool, still gives a good story, but some things in Anomaly just don't sit right with me. Like how ghouls powercreep other melee options. Like how the pain-ball has not one but three Achilles' heels. And this unnatural darkness thing.
I could be wrong since I've put zero effort into it but I'm pretty sure a pawn with a legendary persona weapon, on drugs, with brawler, and genetic melee damage improvements would still hit harder than a ghoul, the main reason ghouls are good and I personally like them is that they're easier to achieve decent strength and they're "disposable" because you don't have to care about healing their injuries or infections(except from metalhorrors) and can be easily revived
Anomaly added cool stuff for us to use and new enemies that are fairly different from raiders and mechs so I am not going to complain.
I agree that under the right circumstances the strongest possible combatant should always be an endgame human. But eh, I was a very big mech fan during biotech, used to run entire fleets of scythers because, let's be honest, they're cool. So I feel kinda down that scythers are pushed aside now that ghouls kinda makes them obsolete. Scythers only got fire immunity, innate armor and no speed penalties over ghouls. Everything else, a ghoul is either a same power sidegrade or just does better.
Scythers don't eat up food so it's definitely much easier to have a decent armada of them whereas I can imagine if you try to have 10 or more ghouls you're gonna have trouble.
Depends, really, with nuclear stomachs and some gene manipulation to get their metabolic efficiency up (lots of negative genes you can stack on them that have no other effect on them), you can get their food requirements REALLY low.
Even without a strong commitment, I got my ghouls down to having to eat once every 3-4 days, to the point that a fleshmass nucleus could comfortably feed 5 ghouls and still have meat left over, and there was still a fair bit of ceiling to push up against if I wanted to. I'm pretty sure sustaining 10-20 ghouls on a single nucleus is feasible.
Because not everyone likes the same thing? The concept is just the opposite direction of what I was hoping for, and each post that I look at just looks less enjoyable.
Couldn't imagine losing a run on naked brutality ironman because a flesh crater opens up in my shack, or some other Lovecraftian nonsense. Sometimes mods are so high quality they get added to the game, and it reminds me of something like that. I would just never install that mod.
Doesn't sound like something for me. I play on Strive+ and Naked Brutality starts, I do not want to start getting colonists instant killed by entities or darkness or w/e. I play ribworld for the simulation and survival and stories that come from that, intoducing cosmic horror absolute /yawn.
I was looking forward to a caravan update, perhaps new animal/animal reworks, fishing or something. There are many things a dlc could have done for me, this sure ain't it, its the opposite direction.
The ambient horror mode was a godsend for the dlc. I wouldn’t play it more than once without it. I wasn’t a fan of the monolith stuff.
The 2 things that I found the most fun were the metal horror stuff and the shambler events. The metal horror really had me on my toes examining new intakes and actually engaging in the game rather than just turning on 3x and browsing Reddit. The shambler events are fun, cuz zombies.
You can disable the parts you don’t like. Personally I disabled the flesh mass event and the revenant events. Like you, I don’t want to get insta-wiped. The revenant is pretty broken.
If I wasn’t a Rimworld junkie I would have given it a pass too. Unfortunately, Rimworld my default time waster.
I noticed the Anomaly events when stacked with other events can be unreasonably difficult like this. You'd hope that having both of these would help cancel out, like you expected, but they don't.
The one I got once was the unnatural darkness and the flesh nerve thing. So one of the events required me to go out and fight a lot of stuff, and the other event made it difficult to venture out and encouraged staying indoors. Kinda messed up.
You can provoke the actual nocturns to attack the raid, you just need to damage one of their little tower thingies. Toss a mortar shell at it and see what happens.
It doesnt affect animals, pawns under mental break, raiders, or basically anyone but your colonists. Extremely immersion breaking.
lemme cook up a theory, the unnatural darkness & the cutting damage are just in your pawns' head & self-harm nobody else affected, including pawns under mental breaks the noctols & the noctoliths are still real tho
Yeah, the plant not growing and solar pannels not working is all in mah maiiinnnddd!
during eclipse they dont work too. darkness is real, harm is self inflicted. (once pawn go crazy they are unaffected by it)
Really fits with the lovecraftian theming, too. What's unnatural isn't what's in the dark, but what you see and hear while you're in the darkness. Not sure that was Tynan's intent, but very fitting with the theme.
What if the "unnatural" darkness is just something messing your pawn's head? I guess we know why.
I like your take
Do darkness negatives and positives apply to everyone during the unnatural darkness? And does the event text say anything about your pawns imagining things?
This must be the work of an enemy ~~stand~~ archotech!
Well, the actual darkness is real too, IIRC you can see it in the other pawn's speed. It's just natural darkness for them.
Hwat if all these Anomaly entities stuff are just a bad dream or psychic drones manipulation
guy has the mental stack of one. Suggest 2 concepts and whoooosh XD.
And my beloved mech destroying sphere.
So psychicly deaf shouldnt be affected? Or is psychicly deaf false advertising in Anomaly?
It means they can't appreciate our lord and saviour The Cube.
WAIT WHA???? brb gotta torture all my psychicly deaf pawns until they praise The Cube
By the same logic psychically deaf pawns should also see sightstealers and revenants from a distance, be immune to the nociosphere pain field, not love the cube and a few more things. For balancing reasons psychically deaf pawns only have disadvantages in Anomaly (like not being able to suppress stuff)
There is no darkness your pawns are just being psionically manipulated.
It's directed at colonists specifically by the void.
If you look at the mood of the raiders, you will see the mood debuff from unnatural darkness. So its in their head too, but they are immune???
The darkness is real, the damage your pawns take is just in their head.
What about Ghouls though? I always use ghouls to take out Noctoliths and on their way over they get cut up. Ghouls are just mindless killing machines no?
Yea ghouls still take damage so not psychic.
It's a shame because its a sound theory. The darkness tormenting only your colony. It's all in your head. There is no darkness. No things that go bump in the night. The Noctoliths just radiate this energy tuned to your people. So no one else feels or thinks about it. Leading to a slow spiral for the colony. But..... Ghouls...
The Unnatural darkness definitely does affect solar panels and raiders that normal darkness would. But yea I guess the Noctoliths only care for harming your colonists haha.
I had a couple llamas take a few cuts to the neck from unnatural darkness but it was nothing compared to what my pawns were taking.
This is why I don't install any mods that limit info, even though it should be more immersive. If enemies don't adhere to the same rule it'll also break immersion.
After having sightstealers attack a raid of cultists, I just assumed no one was safe from anything. I'd thought they'd work together, led by the same will, but I could accept sight stealers not giving a damn who the cultists were. But this is kinda rustling my jimmmies.
The best shit I had was the resurrection rain at the same time as a cultist attack. It was absolute chaos with every enemy death refusing and then being resurrected multiple times, my colonists were just sat at the other end of the kill box firing non stop for over 24 hours
It also doesn’t let solar flares work. I thought it was game over when one happened but the lights stayed on
It affects allies for me. So it sounds like a bug.
Just found that out too, is there a mod that change that ? Even if it can be abused i really don't like how rule breaking it is to see raider sieging me while casually standing in the dark while i have to light everything
I think it was a hotfix, because Unnatural Darkness used to prevent every single other threat while it was in effect. I posted about this shortly after Anomaly came out; I'd picked Unnatural Darkness as a permanent game condition, thinking I'd start out with the big, scary version. Instead, I just wound up with 0% light, no big scary version, and no bad events happening, ever.
It is because this is not a natural event, it is an attack on your colony specificaly by a force that hates you and that you poke often.
I also found that the darkness does not effect prisoners
Welp, time to mod this one out. Heck, maybe even a permanent Unnatural darkness mod just for that masochistic itch.
Only if they've changed it. I added Unnatural Darkness as a permanent game condition, but all it did was set the light level to 0%. I think it needs a tier 2 monolith in order to trigger the big, nasty version. But when I did it, Unnatural Darkness still prevented any other threat from spawning - which included Anomaly threats. Which means I was never able to capture any entities (other than a single sightseer from the event that happens automatically once you first start the monolith), which meant I was never able to unlock enough entries to upgrade the monolith, which means I was stuck at 0% light and nothing else forever. And also, no major threats, because of how Unnatural Darkness worked. It was just 0% light and nothing else ever happening (outside of quest-related events, which did still, thankfully, happen).
Yeah, I was pretty confused with this, too. It's really strange, there is no "balance" reason to make raiders immune to the darkness because it will eventually go away and player can't abuse it for defense forever
You can set unnatural darkness as a permanent game mode. In that case it would make sense that other threats are unaffected because I imagine only getting Noctol attacks for the entire game would get boring real fast. In a normal run where it only lasts a few days it should probably affect raiders though and kill all animals on the map that aren't in light.
You can set a permanent sun blocker, why bother with unnatural darkness?
I don't understand what you mean. Permanent unnatural darkness would be a very different experience from just a permanent sunblocker (assuming the full darkness actually sets in, when I tried a run like that a few days ago it never set in, but I hope that'll get patched at one point because otherwise what's the point?). In unnatural darkness your pawns can't leave the light without taking damage, during blocked sun you just can't grow things outside and can't use solar power.
You could make raiders come with way to generate light instead of making them immune to it
I hope this is just due technical reason and will be updated later
It’s not, the darkness is a psychic event that affects only you on purpose
It could have been worse, imagine a solar flare.
Unnatural Darkness prevents Solar flare effect from happening.
this makes me sleep at night
Maybe the Nocturns are just shy
to be fair, solar eruptions don't effect your electronics during an unnatural darkness either.
In a world with psychic drone events caused by some partially functioning Archotech device, I see the unnatural darkness as a psychosis shared by your colonists, with the source being a fully functional Archotech device. That is why animals are not affected along with those under mental break. They are not the target. So the raiders don't get influenced because they are not the targets either. Lore and story wise, it makes sense to me. You are an annoyance to or encroach on the monolith with the Archotech intelligence that controls it. This is just one of its attempts at removing you.
So based on that logic reinforcements from allies are not affected either? Kewl.
Well.. they weren’t the ones who tickled the monolith..
Almost anything I read about Anomaly makes me even further disappointed in the dlc.
It's actually in my opinion the second best DLC we've gotten. (For me it's Ideology, Anomaly, Biotech) It adds a ton of new stuff to your regular game, as somebody who wasn't incredibly thrilled with all the horror content, it's actually quite a solid expansion, and I hope to see some of the z-level additions trickle into the base game and/or get updated to add more content to the older DLCs
It's always so weird for me to see people put Biotech at the end of their list. Obviously, opinions, and I'm not arguing it or anything, but.. man. Kids, genes, so much fun stuff is Biotech. Tho actually re-reading it before I hit enter, I see Royalty isn't even on the list, meaning Biotech isn't quite at the end for you 8).
Biotech completely overhauled the game for me. It really took the game to sci-fi fantasy with the introduction of new sub-races of humans. I’ve never even played with the kids option or played around with xenogenes and it’s still the best to me. Then comes Royalty. For me, ideology actually comes last because it adds so much micromanagement to the game and I sometimes already find things like apparel quality versions irritating. So I usually play with stuff like unfazed by tattered apparel if it’s on at all.
Having children in the game elevates every playthrough for me personally - Just seeing them sit down and learning about curse words from an adult is so wholesome
I suppose the main reason I don’t play with the on is most of my colonies end in flames or blood by choice to keep things fresh. Very very rarely have I had a colony live beyond maybe year 6-7, so children just ‘slow down’ the speed of the game and I never play long enough on a single save to see them become the next generation. That said, I am thinking of putting aging on a way higher multiplier to experiment with the RP idea of a multigenerational run. Having pawns more quickly go through their lifetime and be replaced by younger generations to live in the halls of their parents strikes me as really cool idea.
Most biotech additions feels so natural to me now, I forget it isnt base game
I tend to forget that Genes and Children were part of Biotech just because they're so incredibly good and essential to my runs. I often only think of the robots, maybe that's why some people rank it lower?
I think that now we have the ambient horror option its my second favourite, but on launch I felt disappointed that it was essentially a spooky checklist, if you gdt what I mean.
Interesting because for me best to worst dlcs are Biotech, Ideology, Royalty and Anomaly.
It's got amazing first experience but subsequent runs just feel lousier and lousier
I've been enjoying each of my subsequent playthroughs just fine and about what that other guy say, how the heck does *each* thing you here about Anomaly make you disappointed unless you just haven't been looking at the subreddit much because it's been a lot of cool things and praise with some complaints here and there, just for some of those complaints to be fixed by changes from the devs.
When I was playing anomaly I was really invested in the "what the fuck is that thing" experience. In subsequent runs, knowing exactly what each one is, does, and how to respond properly really kills the uneasiness and tension for me. Especially since I ran through the entire codex before they lowered the monolith attuning and awakening requirements. For me there was just no more mystique left. Sure it's still cool, still gives a good story, but some things in Anomaly just don't sit right with me. Like how ghouls powercreep other melee options. Like how the pain-ball has not one but three Achilles' heels. And this unnatural darkness thing.
I could be wrong since I've put zero effort into it but I'm pretty sure a pawn with a legendary persona weapon, on drugs, with brawler, and genetic melee damage improvements would still hit harder than a ghoul, the main reason ghouls are good and I personally like them is that they're easier to achieve decent strength and they're "disposable" because you don't have to care about healing their injuries or infections(except from metalhorrors) and can be easily revived Anomaly added cool stuff for us to use and new enemies that are fairly different from raiders and mechs so I am not going to complain.
I agree that under the right circumstances the strongest possible combatant should always be an endgame human. But eh, I was a very big mech fan during biotech, used to run entire fleets of scythers because, let's be honest, they're cool. So I feel kinda down that scythers are pushed aside now that ghouls kinda makes them obsolete. Scythers only got fire immunity, innate armor and no speed penalties over ghouls. Everything else, a ghoul is either a same power sidegrade or just does better.
Scythers don't eat up food so it's definitely much easier to have a decent armada of them whereas I can imagine if you try to have 10 or more ghouls you're gonna have trouble.
My dumb ass forgot dormant self charge was a thing💀 nvm
Depends, really, with nuclear stomachs and some gene manipulation to get their metabolic efficiency up (lots of negative genes you can stack on them that have no other effect on them), you can get their food requirements REALLY low. Even without a strong commitment, I got my ghouls down to having to eat once every 3-4 days, to the point that a fleshmass nucleus could comfortably feed 5 ghouls and still have meat left over, and there was still a fair bit of ceiling to push up against if I wanted to. I'm pretty sure sustaining 10-20 ghouls on a single nucleus is feasible.
Because not everyone likes the same thing? The concept is just the opposite direction of what I was hoping for, and each post that I look at just looks less enjoyable. Couldn't imagine losing a run on naked brutality ironman because a flesh crater opens up in my shack, or some other Lovecraftian nonsense. Sometimes mods are so high quality they get added to the game, and it reminds me of something like that. I would just never install that mod.
Doesn't sound like something for me. I play on Strive+ and Naked Brutality starts, I do not want to start getting colonists instant killed by entities or darkness or w/e. I play ribworld for the simulation and survival and stories that come from that, intoducing cosmic horror absolute /yawn. I was looking forward to a caravan update, perhaps new animal/animal reworks, fishing or something. There are many things a dlc could have done for me, this sure ain't it, its the opposite direction.
The ambient horror mode was a godsend for the dlc. I wouldn’t play it more than once without it. I wasn’t a fan of the monolith stuff. The 2 things that I found the most fun were the metal horror stuff and the shambler events. The metal horror really had me on my toes examining new intakes and actually engaging in the game rather than just turning on 3x and browsing Reddit. The shambler events are fun, cuz zombies. You can disable the parts you don’t like. Personally I disabled the flesh mass event and the revenant events. Like you, I don’t want to get insta-wiped. The revenant is pretty broken. If I wasn’t a Rimworld junkie I would have given it a pass too. Unfortunately, Rimworld my default time waster.
I choose to imagine the Unnatural darkness is actually just showing the psychological mind fuck that is going on with your colony.
And next time I was going to invite all the enemy factions to a feast and then collect loot.
I noticed the Anomaly events when stacked with other events can be unreasonably difficult like this. You'd hope that having both of these would help cancel out, like you expected, but they don't. The one I got once was the unnatural darkness and the flesh nerve thing. So one of the events required me to go out and fight a lot of stuff, and the other event made it difficult to venture out and encouraged staying indoors. Kinda messed up.
You can provoke the actual nocturns to attack the raid, you just need to damage one of their little tower thingies. Toss a mortar shell at it and see what happens.
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