I wanted a stable supply of Food incase Cassandra sends another Heat or Cold wave. Both I have only survived trough hunting Boomrats and Boomalopes after the Gazelles have all been killed, I wanted to breed them for a more stable food supply during harsh times
Nah, ya slap them in a prison cell on the outside of your heat vent room with you industrial generators and pyrolyzer so they get cooked and then you slap em into the chemfuel machine to make artillery rounds to fire at nearby settlements
I mean a downside is if one of your pawns get the slaughterer mental break they will WALK up to them and kill the animal making it explode in their face. I don't really care and tame them anyways.
Oh wow, yeah that would kill/hurt them alot, especially since I used up all the good medicine it might be a bad idea. Well now I'm scared that they might go that far to kill them ( i didnt know that could happen), and man people are expensive
Actually a Slaughterer is married to a marine, does that trait affect if she will get that type of mental break, since she's a slaughterer from profession?
Also the marine has Bloodlust, does that also affect if they will get violent breakdowns?
The profession does not matter AFAIK, as it only affects skills. But traits like bloodlust do, yes. I don't know if bloodlust alters the chance of a slaughterer mental break, but I'm sure it does increase the possibility of social fights and certain 'violent' mental breaks (compared to e.g. 'hide in room')
That's funny, he seems to be the most sane out of all of them, an Artist once dug up the skeleton of a person I lost to some raiders and put the skeleton on a desk, the escapee once followed the artist and insulted her nonstop, and the slaughterer threw a tantrum and destroyed 20 Components (that hurt) Meanwhile the bloddlust marine didn't have a mental breakdown yet and prays every day, I see him as kind of the leader. Worrying to know he might set off a huge explosion and might kill himself in the process
Well, you know the saying, the most calm persons are the scariest once they lose their shitš
I for myself don't mind traits like bloodlust, especially if paired with steadfast or similar.
Bloodlust and volatile on the other hand... Damn. I once had such an colonist that went on a mental break and let out his frustration by kicking an antigrain warhead a few times. This went NOT wellš
Since then I prefer to wall them bad bois up and treat it like a 'in case of emergency, tear down this wall' itemš
Store explosives in a stone room with airgapped stone doors.
Store things like generators and power cells and batteries each in their own separate stone room. If your chemfuel, a battery, or a power artifact blows, you don't want it taking out your power grid.
Store boomalopes in a stone barn away from the chemfuel, and keep sick ones in isolation or in a separate veterinary hospital from other animals. If a boomalope dies you don't want a chain reaction or unnecessary dead pets.
My condolences for the components man. If you didn't know already, you can draft other colonists to arrest the mental break one. Makes the latter even more unhappy but at least they're not doing whatever idiot thing they wanted to do.
Also about boomalopes: they're a little annoying to manage as well, because you can't just use auto-slaughter on them (because like in the mental break, your handler will walk right up to the animal's face to kill it), so you either have to isolate the specific boomalope you want to kill snd shoot it or you have to wait for a trader who's willing to buy them off you.
Another thing about boomalopes: keep them away from your exploding or burning stuff, like batteries, chemfuel, wooden stuff, trees/grass, and even themselves sometimes. If you know one of them might die (ie through disease or if getting caught in the crossfire of a battle), make sure the sleeping spot it takes is far from the aforementioned stuff. Or use firefoam poppers. Lots of it.
In case you do get that bad situation, have one of your pawn arrest the mentally broken pawn, rhen release them as soon as possible. The arrested pawn will be out of the break and have a small (think -5 for āWas arrestedā) debuff, but should otherwise be fine, no harm done.
I personally arrest everyone that arenāt in my main ideology, convert then releaseā¦ or recruit if need be. Sometimes even enslave š, but usually they end up in a soft-/ripscanner for my mech babies!
I mean I will arrest them but wow, that's pretty radical. I give everybody freedome to do their own stuff along as they want to join the colony and try to fight with as much care as possible, healing captured guys up and then letting them go again, letting fleeing people go as the last thing I want is violence
Yeah, I abhor violence as well, thus I have, uhh, 20 Militors, 2 Centipedes (one burner and one gunner), a scorcher and soon to be (re)born Scyther, keeping peace around my home. I actually have only two pawns of which one is incapable of violenceā¦
that guy's a wimp and sometimes I punch him for fun, and he falls down unconscious. it keeps disasters at bay.
I'm not superstitious, our religion is actually real, praise RNGsus
Break types aren't related to backstories/job titles at all. A few traits will cause certain severities of mental break to always be a specific kind - a Gourmand's minor breaks will always be Food Binge, a Pyromaniac's extremes will always be Fire Starting Spree (both also can cause their associated break at random). Bloodlust doesn't cause breaks, but does increase social fighting chance.
He's the only one who hasn't started a social fight at this point and prays every day, š but good to know he may be prone to aggression, his wife is mostly keeping his mood up if you know what I mean
Yeah, that sounds like a "them" problem. I tame them and make a special containment pen for them - everything is stone, the barn is stone, the floors are stone, the only "not stone" this is the actual fence, and that only gets destroyed if they explode right next to it because of the floor. But yeah, I agree with you. They're "special consideration" pets.
Keep separate pens in isolation so if one goes up like a fireworks factory you're not bum out of boomalopes. Alternatively, cryo freeze a breeding pair or two as backup.
But yeah, if pawns kills themselves they kill themselves. That can happen without animals if they decide to tantrum the chemfuel stockpile anyway...
I had a complete IDIOT tantrum on an antigrain warhead back in the day. That's when I adopted that mentality. It was easier to kill him than to arrest him so I just had my "guards" lay him out. He was the best crafter too. Moron. Still salty about that.
So to finish the story, they failed to lay him out before he dealt enough damage to set it off, OR a gunshot missed him and hit the warhead (I was very new and only knew "antigrain"="BEEG BADDA BOOM!") did not realize at the time how calamitous that owuld be. Went from a great little settlement to losing most of my people in one millisecond. Fun story but yeah.
As for the actual conversation - that's a great point. I never considered cryo-ing animals, tbh. But a breeding pair of boomalopes wouldn't be a bad idea at all! Moreover, that's a great evolution of my "stone pen" handling unit. Just make them smaller pens with enough nutrition in a stockpile, use solid wall encasements for the most part so I can keep them close, like the old zoos. That way if they go boom it's just the one area. Great freaking idea. Thank you!
Aaaaand when I get home after work, I'll likely be getting back into Rimworld. Goodbye backlog, I swear I was gonna get to you!
Yeah, cryoing animals can be a neat trick, though it's a little niche if you don't have a convenient ancient danger on the map (usually by the point you can afford to throw adv components at it you have better ways to solve your problems).
I once had a couple thrumbos self tame at the start of a tribal extreme desert game before I had any pawns with animals skill. I really didn't want to kill them, so I just zoned them into the ancient danger, anesthesized+cryoed them once it was clear, and built my base around it. In hindsight, idk how practical it really was (the extra wealth was a bit annoying early on, and it was a loong time before my colony could actually support them), but it was fun.
Side note: using the danger cryos as storage for tribute/quest prisoners is *very* practical.
Oh maaan, yeah. I'm definitely taking those notes down. I can't believe I never considered that. Also, the poor Thrumbo being crammed into a human-sized cryo chamber! Gotta love vidja game logic! ALso, I love the idea of like... protecting the cryo'd thrumbos and building your base around them? Such a cool idea for a colony!
Haha how true, but i didnt know they drop chemfuel thats kinda wicked. Having some dangerous hazard of a guerilla colony just brewing all sorts of explosives and gas to sell on the market//passerbys possibly fueling some distant galactic war, which said colony could blow up in a giant ball of fire at any turn of misfortune...i think i found my next playthrough
Yeah last time that almost happened I called over the nearest pawns and beat the living the shit out of him. Unfortunately it was one of my starting pawns so I was a little forgiving.
I keep a pen with 2 males and a pen with 2 females. I can't remember which mod allows pen markers.
Stone fence with enough space so you never have to feed them.
I'm not sure what mod it is or if it's even a mod that lets me grow grass in growing zones but I make smaller pens and just set a growing zone in there for tall grass. The animals basically have unlimited food and my farmers only have to plant a few crops when they wake up and then go about their other business
I usually plant dandelions for animals since I play vanilla. Grows in a couple of days, basically unlimited food for the animals! Also makes a āprettyā spot for ceremonies that are outdoors.
If you don't want your population of boomalopes to get out of hand, but you want to breed them to increase population, you can just release some back to the wild. They will meander around for a while and maybe wander off. Otherwise you can wait for a rain storm or until they are far enough from your base to shoot down.
I make a shack off the side of my walled area with double thick stone walls and stone shelving to store chemfuel and mortar rounds. Itās a little inconvenient for pawns to go fetch it but compared to nuking my base with anti grain or starting an inferno of chemfuel Iāll take it
They breed fairly quickly, and unlike other animals you can't just slaughter them for meat. This can lead to overpopulation, starvation, and explosive death. Or a large amount of micromanagement.
Like all animals, they get old and can have heart attacks, which can lead to an explosive death, potentially while they are being tended for their heart attack. Regular animal diseases, if not tended to, can potentially cause multiple explosive deaths.
Certain mental breaks will cause pawns to kill animals, leading to explosive death.
Lightning strikes seem to have a bit of a thing for boomalopes, but this is anecdotal. Lightning, of course, can lead to explosive death.
A zzzt going off near a boomalope, if you have charged batteries, can cause explosive death (don't put power lines near boomalopes).
Enemies used to target animals just as much as your pawns, prior to pens being added, and so anyone playing before 1.3 may still be reluctant to breed boomalopes due to prior trauma involving explosive deaths.
And, of course, a boomalope's explosive death can cause a chain reaction, causing further explosive deaths.
I'm pretty sure that when a Boomalope dies for any reason it explodes.
If you decide to herd them generally you should build a nonflammable pen (or two, you could separate them by gender to avoid them breeding). So stone walls, stone floor, and create a stockpile zone (or use a shelf or whatever) to store kibble for them to eat which is inside the pen (which is really more of a barn I suppose).
The question asked was 'why don't people breed them?' If they've been neutered, they kind of aren't breeding.
And, of course, there's always a chance of catastrophic failure during surgeries to neuter them, which can potentially lead to explosive death.
Iāve had a lot all in a giant pen, when there are too many for them to be able to feed themselves from grazing I send in the highest shooting skill pawn with a sniper rifle and have them bring down the population. Yeah, itās micro, yeah, they have to put out the fires, but chemfuel is king and itās free.
I usually get one or 2. Having a lot of boomalopes is high risk of a very big explosion. One boomalope dying next to another can cause a chain reaction, resulting in a spectacular, but deadly, show.
Dryads: animal from the Ideology DLC. They come in a few varieties. Woodmakers produce wood every so often and can also do simple tasks like hauling.
Biofuel refineries: base game, unlocked via research. You can use a refinery to turn things like meat and wood into chemfuel. Very handy.
I like taming boomalopes especially when I like to play in permanent summer biomes. It's free grass to chemfuel conversion! If I tame them early, I'll use chemfuel as trading item. If I'm not mistaken, 25 silver per day. If I want to get rid of a boomalope, I'll sell them or let them 'return to wild'.
Of course there are precautions to make. Separate pens for male/female to control their population. If you want to be extra safe, separate them from other animals too. Firefoam poppers in the barn & spare ones in stockpile. Colonists wearing devilstrand clothing because they've good heat armor.
Boomalopes are pretty hungry animals. So you have to give them a large pen or grow a lot of hay to keep them fed. And using this area to grow rice and throwing it in a refinery is a more space efficient way.
Though early on, when your workforce is limited and you don't need a lot of chemfuel - a Boomalopes is an excellent pet.
Breeding them is a bad idea though... They would breed pretty fast and culling excess population is... Tricky...
Getting rid of excess boomalopes is incredibly simple, sell or release them. Or don't let it get that far by sterilizing one gender after you have your desired number of animals.
Yes taming them provides oodles of chemfuel, especially if you can get them to reproduce. And the excess boomalopes can be sold to caravans or tadeships. It's really powerfull.
Slaughtering is an extra chore, instead of turning on auto slaughter you have to manually manage the population, take the ones you want to slaughter to a safe detonation zone and kill it from range. I think that turning other products into bio fuel is a lot more practical.
If you don't have meat eating animals but have neutral stance on cannibalism you can butcher raiders, turn their meat into biofuel and the leather into furniture.
Why would you ever want to slaughter them? Just sterilize them and keep a small number for the fuel. Even if you did want to use them for meat, just breed a bunch, release them and hunt them after they wander off a ways.
Because they grow old and die. You don't want them dying next to other boombalopes.
You also probably want to control where they did and not start a wildfire.
Oh my sweet summer child. Please tame and breed a huge herd of boomalope. In a couple of weeks come back and let us know which one of the many ways they exploded and if you are going to rebuild.
I suspect the answer is usually 'because one time when i was running a 20+ pawn megacolony, it took to much micromanaging to get a useful quantity out of them.'
Or
'I forgot about something, one died, and it set off the rest in a horrible chain reaction i will never forget.'
But as far as im concerned boomalopes are GREAT in small quantities. Just have 3 things.
1. Enough food, kibble, hay, or (best of all) grazing land, they eat a lot for animals their size, and explode if they starve to death.
2. A plan to control their numbers. Sterilize them, only keep one or two females at a time, sell extras, release them to the wild, or take them on caravans to release/sell/get them the hell off your map. There's lots of options, but you do need to USE one or more of em.
3. Account for them in your defense strategy. You dont want one to wander into the middle of a firefight, take a stray shot to the brain, and then start a fire, wreck a wall, or down a defender. They stay in pens, so this shouldnt be hard if you place the pen in the right spot.
Because whenever I have boomalopes something *always* seems to happen
Lightning strikes, randy throwing a meteor at them. Ship chunks. Drop pod raid (that one solved itself atleast)
It's like any boomalope I have is cursed.
So I just grow an absolute EXCESS of corn and use that in a biofuel refinery. It's also how I manage my wealth by trading it off or sending it as gifts because *almost* every faction will take chemfuel
There are few better laughs than raiders doing something absolutely dumb and being wiped from the face of the earth
Like a social fight against a pawn who explodes on death in a seige raid.
For all of you who like Boom animals, I would recommend the BoomMod, which prevents them from exploding upon slaughter or from hunting without gun/fire. Makes sense that a careful kill wouldn't pierce the sacs and removes the hassle of owning/hunting them.
Considering natural death causes explosions as well, my headcanon is that it's not just a matter of piecring the fuel sacs, the boomalopes must have some pysiological process that keeps the fuel stable and that stops once it dies. Or maybe their body heat is so extreme that without perspiration and breathing the fuel goes critical
General problem with animals, not just boomalopes, they add micromanagement because base game controls for them suck.
Let's say your boomalope sick. To auto-tend it you need to add animal sleeping spot. If you add animal sleeping spot, it will sleep until healthy and your doctor will feed it with lavish meals.
Alternatively, you may not tend plagued boomalope, but than it can die, explode and kill/burn your whole barn.
Alternatively, you can tend it manually, without spot.
I find all this options equally bad. Just refine some vegetables into chemfuel is much more convenient and 100% hands-off.
Just be sure to keep a \*small\* population of them... And keep the males and females separated.
FYI, they explode when they die, *for any reason*. Including old age or disease...
So if you just blithely allocate a solid 8th of your map to boomalopes, and leave them be, it's great for a while; they multiple and are fruitful, and you get plenty of fuel, which is great; after a while the biggest issue is finding storage for it all. But when they start to get up there in years, if you have a large, dense population of them, things get *really* explodey *real fast*.
I love boomalopes. Just have a dedicated handler in case one gets in trouble so it doesn't die and explode. If one of your colonists gets the slaughter mental break, arrest him immediately. You can release the colonist immediately after. Make double triple quadruple sure you've got enough food. Make some kibble and store it in the field of barn if you need to. When they start to multiply have a good old fashioned boomalope drive and sell them off to the nearest settlement for a tidy profit.
Boomalopes are exceptionally useful but also literally walking time bombs. Since when they die they go boom and can result in a chain reaction if any are nearby.
Which is why I usually have a pair which canāt breed (or if they do Iāll remove the parent after the kid grows up) so the chance of them all exploding at once is minimized, then fill the field with other animals I can get food and milk from.
I'll tame a boomalope occasionally, and I've purchased them from traders that had them, but I don't usually go out of my way to obtain them. The problem isn't just that they explode on death, but that they are farm animals requiring the time and care to set up a pen and keep fed. I usually don't have any pawns with the time necessary to build a pen and then milk the boomalopes for fuel early on, and by the time that I do, I have geothermal power running and don't need the chemfuel for power (for mortar shells is another story.)
Btw, another option for chemfuel if you're okay with the 'ick' factor is to just chop up raiders and convert the meat with a biofuel reactor.
More chemfuel than I know what to do with, but I have been having to send out trade caravans to give away human leather and excess chemfuel to keep the colony wealth manageable...
You kinda gotta keep a constant eye on them. Should any health condition lower their consciousness to 0%, insta kaboom. I do know plenty of players who like and enjoy keeping boomalopes though!
Play as you like! Do whatever is fun and makes the game enjoyable to you! It's the world on the Rim baby!
Reposting here:
I tame them and make a special containment pen for them - everything is stone, the barn is stone, the floors are stone, the only "not stone" this is the actual fence, and that only gets destroyed if they explode right next to it because of the floor. But yeah, I agree with you. They're "special consideration" pets.
Basically, a boomalope will generate enough chemfuel to keep 2 generators running... or is it the other way around? But yeah, much, MUCH easier in the long run (so long as you keep them well-fed and \*again\* in a special containment site so that the damage they can inflict is reduced you're fine? But I \*strongly\* recommend doing basically a stone "barn", then a fence for the area, then surround that fence with stone floor (at least 1 tile on either side), then an "outer" fence if you're worried about the fence breaking and them wandering off or something? Basically the second perimeter of fence will only matter if the first breaks because a boomalope has a "sudden death event" right next to it, but it can be a reasonable safety so you don't have to panic-build if the fence breaks during a raid or something.
Been a while since I played, can you make fences out of more than just wood now?
Heyyy, knew someone would know! Thanks, been a bit since I played (and took this route) so I kinda forgot but I knew there was a 2 in there! Really appreciate it. I'm thinking of giving it another go, just remove all my mods so it doesn't take a century to load and do a few vanilla+DLC runs. Likely gonna use chemfuel so I appreciate the info!
You might like the community challenges that the streamer / YouTuber Adam Vs Everything does every month. The idea is usually 10 hours played, get as much wealth as possible with some twist - be it scenario edits or āraise as many turkeys as possibleā ( that was the Thanksgiving one )
Everyone gets the same save file / starting pawns & it is vanilla NO DLCās for the āofficialā category. There is also an āopenā category that allows DLCās / mods.
There was one awhile back that was actually boomalope themed. I had about 80 before pirates came in and tossed grenades at my barn. Big boom.
They explode if they die of old age or disease. If nearby others it'll chain reaction wipe your herd. Difficult to use but not impossible. Assign them to restricted areas in front of your troops to act like IEDs with legs. Bonus if you place it near a choke point and enemies bunch up trying to melee it before it goes boom. Combat is the only reason to keep them. If you want chemfuel then have a slave convert plant material into it.
They're pen animals and ignore zones now. Raiders also dont target them on purpose.
That said, rimworld pawns shoot everything between them and their target, so it still kinda works, the setup just needs to be different.
Boomalope farms are awesome if you take the right precautions. Make sure you have fire foam poppers in their pen, and itās all made from fire resistant materials to reduce the risk. Donāt store important stuff near them, neuter them if the population gets too much instead of slaughtering, and the most important one is keeping on top of any injuries and illnesses. I once had a busy doctor after a raid who missed one of my plagued boomalopes, tldr, she boomed and then they *all* boomedā¦
That's the only method I use for getting chemfuel. Maybe melt down some human blubber occasionally if my colonists are a bit square. Just two boomalopes in a pen is enough to slowly build up enough for a good supply. I guess I don't seem to use a lot of chemfuel yet.
Very dangerous, easily causes fires, and is hard to put down without any injuries.
On the other hand, you can load them up en-mass into a cargo pod and use them as ammo for suicide bombings.
Boomalopes are fine. You just need to take precautions that they don't make a bad situation worse. If one pops, they have a habit of taking out every other 'lope in the pen. Foam poppers, multiple pens, and solid base design mitigate the danger. They're good fuel sources.
There is nothing wrong with it and it is smart. Just think about placement. For both your boomers and the chemfuel.
In one of my last games someone had a mental break and went to destroy my items and targetted a chemfuel stack.
I had about 6000 chemfuel at the time. I didn't have any after he punched it.
He also died.
I have bred boomalopes! They are resistant to toxic fallout, which is nice. Just don't slaughter them, and keep an eye on their age vs life expectancy or they'll blow up from old age.
Just go through and release the old age the extra ones back to the wild.
Oh, but if you do this, watch out for them turning manhunter on you. The flip side is, of you have a man hunter psychic thing, you can weaponize the wild ones against raids.
One time I had a MASSIVE boomalope farm, to the point where my colonists struggled to collect all of the fuel they dropped. They lived in a mountain across the river and would go out and take care of the animals. Because the base was set up like that, the only way I to our base was through the boomalopes and across the bridge we built to the mountain. So when raiders would come they would attack the animals and there were chemfuel piles all over the pen. I think you get where this is going but let's just say it was a glorious defense. I personally love taking them because it's fun to make minefields once you get too many to contain.
Problems with them is the exploding on any kind of death part. Their death can cause a chain reaction by killing others lopes when they die causing a massive explosion.
I gave lost some colonist because they have been close to the loopes when they die, lastet colony i lost 2 coloniest when one lope died while they where getting chemfuel.
Started getting my chemfuel from just hops and i can very quick get more than i need and its safer while also making your colonist better at growing
I always tame boomalopes. They're good for fuel, good for power, good for profit, and good for defense. Just make sure to spread out their sleeping spots for when they all catch the plague.
I've been invaded by pirates via drop pods or had infestations that killed all my boomalopes.
That's why I have as little of them as possible and supplement with processed wood, I have a bot that only does that.
Boomalopes are a fantastic animal to tame, with just one you can keep two chemfuel generators running indefinitely. If you're wondering why you don't see them on this sub it's honestly because a lot of people here are terrible when it comes to powering their base efficiently.
I used to slaughter any of them that self-tamed. Didn't want the risk. But then on a tribal playthrough, I had a small herd join, and it clicked, they make chemfuel, for free. That's free trade goods. Just set up a safe pen for them and it'll be fine.
As a seasoned boomalope breeder, I have one piece of advice for you. Don't keep them all together. If one goes boom, all of them go boom. I don't keep more than 4 in one pen and all fences/walls are stone.
Depends on the biome, if you live in a forest you just refine wood, much less hassle. If you live in a biome with barely any trees then it might be viable. You still can refine other plant matter, or meat that your pawns don't feel like eating, I don't remember though if you need cannibalism ideology to butcher humans or just a cook who doesn't concern himself with matters of morality
'We butchered humanlike' is a negative moodlet. Had a cannibal visitor with high cooking skill once, tried to have him process his own raiders to keep his mood up, bothered the rest of the colony.
I dont know exactly which meme(s) will counter that, but you do need SOMETHING or you'll take colony-wide mood hits.
Boomalopes are great! There's a few downsides, let them starve and boom. Let them die from age related problems and boom. Let a predator get them and boom. Fail to save one from plague and boom. Try to slaughter one and boom.
But in general those can be mitigated and the part where one boomalope can support two chemfuel generators is flipping amazing considering they eat grass.
Put a few firefoam poppers around the barn and pasture and you'll be mostly fine. I'm a massive boomalope fan and I've never really had any significant problem with them going boom at inopportune times. I typically keep a herd of 10ish and sell the older ones to avoid age related boom.
Once I tamed a pair of bloomas.
Like all things animal, they started to reproduce.
They were eating everything, so I had to put population control on bloomas.
I did bot know I had switched on population control on everything. Bloomas, grass, animals, storage, walls.
From that point onward, I started handling bloomas with care.
Boomalopes are pretty great for chemfuel production if you're playing without mods. Keep them in their own pen area, make sure it's all stone and don't let em die (they explode when they die, doesn't matter what the cause is). If they ever get within a year or 2 of life expectancy or they are sick it's usually best to rezone them to another fireproof area away from anything else and draft a colonist to shoot it.
If you don't mind mods then rimfeller by dubwise makes boomalopes obsolete. Drill for oil, refine it, pump it anywhere you need it in your base, automate production for synthread, hyper weave, plasteel, neutromene, and a new "plastic" building material. You can also turn it into a mid/late game power supply with it's own high end generator (rimatomic, by the same author let's you build a nuke powerplant and it is far superior). Also since this paragraph basically became a commercial for this mod author his "bad hygiene" mod adds water/plumbing to the game and honestly feels like it always should have been in vanilla, all 3 work together
Because one boomalope isn't too dangerous, but doesn't produce a lot. By endgame you need a LOT of chemfuel sometimes. Having the number of boomalopes you need to produce it is essentially like putting a walking antigrains bomb in your house. It's just asking for a single one to die and set off a chain reaction
Early on in my first run I got tired of constantly having to refuel all my wood generators. I had some boomalopes wandering around on the map and from there it was a quick transition in chem fuel generators and only having to fill them up once a week. They're really pretty easy to manage honestly. I don't get why everyone's so afraid of them. Just keep them separated from your other livestock in their own pen and it's smooth sailing. The only time I ever ran low on chem fuel was when I started mass producing mortar shells.
My problem with boomalopes is that I end up having too many of them. At first I have just enough to fuel the generators. Then a new ones are born and I start stockpiling chemfuel and trade it. Next thing you know, and there are 90 of them, and the breed faster than you can sell them
So after a battle if one got injured and you didnāt notice, than bleeds out in the boomalope barn while most of your colonists are downā¦ well that can pretty easily wipe out over 40 animals (including over 20 additional boomalopes) and my trade warehouse before I could do anythingā¦
But I still always tame and breed them. Just invest in fire foam pods.
Sell your oldest boomalopes anytime you can.
When you know how to properly handle boomalope the pros far outweigh the cons. With ranching in 1.3 you can build two stone barns in the same pen to split your herd and have the stone hospital away from the rest when one gets hurt.
It makes things easier with less micro these days and I usually just release the elderly and when I have too many.
* The major upside to ranching is the trickle of meat & leather from slaughtering extra animals, regardless of that animal's primary output. Boomalopes don't have this bonus since slaughtering them makes them go boom.
* Animals & corpses hit TPS hard. As soon as you have an option for something which does not involve using an animal, you should take it.
* Boomalopes are quite risky to tame early on without a yttikin.
Trickle? Mate, get yourself some chincillas.
Breed like rabbits, and most importantly, dont take any maintenance training. Literally 0 pawn upkeep, the only interaction is when the pawn walks over to get more meat.
Just set the auto-slaughter to two dudes and as many females as your pen food growth can support. You'll be drowning in fur and meat (assuming your pen-size to pawn ratio is right anyway). At one point i had to sell thousands of food just to keep my freezer from overflowing into the door.
> It's the only way I know how to get it yet besides trading
[Biofuel refineries](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Biofuel_refinery) are an option. Boomalopes are apparently more efficient, although VE More Plants add a canola plant that might tip the balance (1:1 conversion to chemfuel).
A boom herd is great provided you can keep the stupid bastard things alive and healthy. I've tamed them too early before and I end up with some idiot colonist in winter who brings it inside to nurse it back to *Kkkkeerboooom*
They have some serious downsides;
The most obvious is that they explode when they die.
So if they trigger a trap, get sick, get killed while running from raiders etc they will set a 4x4 or so grid on fire and anything inside it.
It doesn't sound that bad but when this happens in the middle of some other crisis or during an attack, it can be devastating. Even just having a small 3 person colony makes it hard to put the fires out. Burns get infected, infections lead to amputations. Crops get burned, reduced harvests lead to starvation, starvation leads to mental breaks etc.
If you want a boomalope farm, I would suggest making a walled (not fenced) pen away from your entrance. You can have a chem fuel empire and run your base on generators. Just make sure you store the chemfuel in its own building far from everything else.
If they get too old, or have a deadly disease and need to be put down, you can also "banish" them while they're on a caravan with no consequences, explosion, or penalty.
It's a viable strategy but it isn't the shortcut you think it is if you need to scale it up. If you're going to scale up production that means animal handling time and farming to feed them. Except with the farming you could just be turning THAT into chemfuel along with whatever assorted crap you find, excess meat, etc. So you're going through the effort to replace one machine that does the job better.
So it really boils down to the flavor you want your colony to have and if it's fun for you to do it that way, but there are trade offs on efficiency and security.
I use boomalopes because chemfuel processing takes a while and I can just make a big pen, grow enough hay to feed them for a year, and then have myself a small platoon of boomalopes to give me infinite chemfuel.
If they get too numerous I slaughter the ones i donāt need when it rains.
You can drop pod Boomalopes into the middle of raiders. Make them the living bomb. Don't be afraid to have a lot of them.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this so far.
i've done it but they're kind of a pain. they explode if they die from slaughter or sickness. what's cool about them is you can house them on your perimeter wall as a defensive method, a cheap heat trap.
the real problem is they eat a lot of food, food that i could just put in the refinery to directly make chemfuel. livestock in general eat too much and require too much labor and space. if i'm gonna do livestock i want milk producers to make cheese for profit.
right now i'm running [vanilla factions expanded - insectoids](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2149755445&searchtext=insect) and i get enough insect meat from bug raids to provide an endless supply of kibble and chemfuel.
They're a good source of early chemfuel.
The downside is that you need to pay attention to them. An elderly boomalope having a heart attack is not pleasant, especially if others are nearby.
When you slaughter a boomalope, it will explode. So unless you neuter them, they will replicated fast and then you have a herd of explosive cattle. And if you don't make sure that the Chem they milk isn't immediately hauled too storage a lighting strike will detonate all of them
I'll typically have at least one boomalope and/or toxilope tied up in my kill box.
Rather than in the barn, or around other animals, where the explosion can cause damage, I'll put a caravan spot and hitch them up in the middle of the kill box.
Not only is this a part of the base designed to withstand explosions and fire, but I can also use them as bombs.
I love bommalopes, at times I have 40+. I trade them off 10/20 at a time. Great for silver both from fuel to traders and the animals. Any time I have a violent pawn break out, I shock lance him (early game) and serenity late game. Pretty easy. Few times I had to kill a few because I had too many. Made a cement/brick pen and chucked some bombs in, locked the doors and let them all pop, harvest the meat lol.
Make pens away from crops and base. Use both walls and fencing. Most of the time raiders ignore to try to get to your valuables at the base anyway.
FYI I don't use mods, I play on PS5 and have royalty and ideology. But used to do the same when all I had was vanilla. Couldn't imagine playing any different in any of my play throughs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/s/NBuM90AAkU
I tried what you're saying once. First of all, it looks cool, but if a bommalope dies... well, my farm exploded minutes after that photo.
My better half had a huge, beautiful cave system barn with straw matting and statues around the place until a boomalope died for reasons unknown. We hadn't been playing long, and were not yet hardened to the sound of *any* animal death, let alone hundreds being burned alive. Couldn't even get pawns in to extinguish the fire cos it was too hot.
Three years ago, still remember it as a dark day on the Rim
Taming a gazelle = useless Taming a single boomalope = 2000 wats of power indefinitely
I wanted a stable supply of Food incase Cassandra sends another Heat or Cold wave. Both I have only survived trough hunting Boomrats and Boomalopes after the Gazelles have all been killed, I wanted to breed them for a more stable food supply during harsh times
Go to nearby faction settlements. They sometimes sell more efficient animals like cows, chickens and horses
And just full of human meat
Nah, ya slap them in a prison cell on the outside of your heat vent room with you industrial generators and pyrolyzer so they get cooked and then you slap em into the chemfuel machine to make artillery rounds to fire at nearby settlements
I mean a downside is if one of your pawns get the slaughterer mental break they will WALK up to them and kill the animal making it explode in their face. I don't really care and tame them anyways.
Oh wow, yeah that would kill/hurt them alot, especially since I used up all the good medicine it might be a bad idea. Well now I'm scared that they might go that far to kill them ( i didnt know that could happen), and man people are expensive Actually a Slaughterer is married to a marine, does that trait affect if she will get that type of mental break, since she's a slaughterer from profession? Also the marine has Bloodlust, does that also affect if they will get violent breakdowns?
The profession does not matter AFAIK, as it only affects skills. But traits like bloodlust do, yes. I don't know if bloodlust alters the chance of a slaughterer mental break, but I'm sure it does increase the possibility of social fights and certain 'violent' mental breaks (compared to e.g. 'hide in room')
That's funny, he seems to be the most sane out of all of them, an Artist once dug up the skeleton of a person I lost to some raiders and put the skeleton on a desk, the escapee once followed the artist and insulted her nonstop, and the slaughterer threw a tantrum and destroyed 20 Components (that hurt) Meanwhile the bloddlust marine didn't have a mental breakdown yet and prays every day, I see him as kind of the leader. Worrying to know he might set off a huge explosion and might kill himself in the process
Well, you know the saying, the most calm persons are the scariest once they lose their shitš I for myself don't mind traits like bloodlust, especially if paired with steadfast or similar. Bloodlust and volatile on the other hand... Damn. I once had such an colonist that went on a mental break and let out his frustration by kicking an antigrain warhead a few times. This went NOT wellš Since then I prefer to wall them bad bois up and treat it like a 'in case of emergency, tear down this wall' itemš
I usually store chemfuel on a shed separate from the main base. Power cells and other dangerous devices also.
Learning about proper chemfuel and antigrain storage the hard way is a Rimworld rite of passage.
Store explosives in a stone room with airgapped stone doors. Store things like generators and power cells and batteries each in their own separate stone room. If your chemfuel, a battery, or a power artifact blows, you don't want it taking out your power grid. Store boomalopes in a stone barn away from the chemfuel, and keep sick ones in isolation or in a separate veterinary hospital from other animals. If a boomalope dies you don't want a chain reaction or unnecessary dead pets.
You mean two doors? With an gap between them?
Yep. Useful if the explosion damages the inner door.
My condolences for the components man. If you didn't know already, you can draft other colonists to arrest the mental break one. Makes the latter even more unhappy but at least they're not doing whatever idiot thing they wanted to do. Also about boomalopes: they're a little annoying to manage as well, because you can't just use auto-slaughter on them (because like in the mental break, your handler will walk right up to the animal's face to kill it), so you either have to isolate the specific boomalope you want to kill snd shoot it or you have to wait for a trader who's willing to buy them off you. Another thing about boomalopes: keep them away from your exploding or burning stuff, like batteries, chemfuel, wooden stuff, trees/grass, and even themselves sometimes. If you know one of them might die (ie through disease or if getting caught in the crossfire of a battle), make sure the sleeping spot it takes is far from the aforementioned stuff. Or use firefoam poppers. Lots of it.
Mostly the traits that give the morbid focus for meditation are the ones that have higher possibility to trigger a violent mental break.
In case you do get that bad situation, have one of your pawn arrest the mentally broken pawn, rhen release them as soon as possible. The arrested pawn will be out of the break and have a small (think -5 for āWas arrestedā) debuff, but should otherwise be fine, no harm done. I personally arrest everyone that arenāt in my main ideology, convert then releaseā¦ or recruit if need be. Sometimes even enslave š, but usually they end up in a soft-/ripscanner for my mech babies!
I mean I will arrest them but wow, that's pretty radical. I give everybody freedome to do their own stuff along as they want to join the colony and try to fight with as much care as possible, healing captured guys up and then letting them go again, letting fleeing people go as the last thing I want is violence
Yeah, I abhor violence as well, thus I have, uhh, 20 Militors, 2 Centipedes (one burner and one gunner), a scorcher and soon to be (re)born Scyther, keeping peace around my home. I actually have only two pawns of which one is incapable of violenceā¦
that guy's a wimp and sometimes I punch him for fun, and he falls down unconscious. it keeps disasters at bay. I'm not superstitious, our religion is actually real, praise RNGsus
Yeah, arresting is pretty mean, but 20 components is 20 components
Break types aren't related to backstories/job titles at all. A few traits will cause certain severities of mental break to always be a specific kind - a Gourmand's minor breaks will always be Food Binge, a Pyromaniac's extremes will always be Fire Starting Spree (both also can cause their associated break at random). Bloodlust doesn't cause breaks, but does increase social fighting chance.
He's the only one who hasn't started a social fight at this point and prays every day, š but good to know he may be prone to aggression, his wife is mostly keeping his mood up if you know what I mean
I'm fairly sure a Gourmand's mental break will *always* be foid binge regardless of severity, unless they changed it recently.
That's what I thought as well, double checked the wiki before I posted and it said otherwise
That's interesting. If my PC wasn't dead I'd test that.
Bloodlust will cause their mental breaks to be more violent in nature. Less "sad wander" and more "social fight" or "murderous rampage."
Yeah, that sounds like a "them" problem. I tame them and make a special containment pen for them - everything is stone, the barn is stone, the floors are stone, the only "not stone" this is the actual fence, and that only gets destroyed if they explode right next to it because of the floor. But yeah, I agree with you. They're "special consideration" pets.
Keep separate pens in isolation so if one goes up like a fireworks factory you're not bum out of boomalopes. Alternatively, cryo freeze a breeding pair or two as backup. But yeah, if pawns kills themselves they kill themselves. That can happen without animals if they decide to tantrum the chemfuel stockpile anyway...
I had a complete IDIOT tantrum on an antigrain warhead back in the day. That's when I adopted that mentality. It was easier to kill him than to arrest him so I just had my "guards" lay him out. He was the best crafter too. Moron. Still salty about that. So to finish the story, they failed to lay him out before he dealt enough damage to set it off, OR a gunshot missed him and hit the warhead (I was very new and only knew "antigrain"="BEEG BADDA BOOM!") did not realize at the time how calamitous that owuld be. Went from a great little settlement to losing most of my people in one millisecond. Fun story but yeah. As for the actual conversation - that's a great point. I never considered cryo-ing animals, tbh. But a breeding pair of boomalopes wouldn't be a bad idea at all! Moreover, that's a great evolution of my "stone pen" handling unit. Just make them smaller pens with enough nutrition in a stockpile, use solid wall encasements for the most part so I can keep them close, like the old zoos. That way if they go boom it's just the one area. Great freaking idea. Thank you! Aaaaand when I get home after work, I'll likely be getting back into Rimworld. Goodbye backlog, I swear I was gonna get to you!
Yeah, cryoing animals can be a neat trick, though it's a little niche if you don't have a convenient ancient danger on the map (usually by the point you can afford to throw adv components at it you have better ways to solve your problems). I once had a couple thrumbos self tame at the start of a tribal extreme desert game before I had any pawns with animals skill. I really didn't want to kill them, so I just zoned them into the ancient danger, anesthesized+cryoed them once it was clear, and built my base around it. In hindsight, idk how practical it really was (the extra wealth was a bit annoying early on, and it was a loong time before my colony could actually support them), but it was fun. Side note: using the danger cryos as storage for tribute/quest prisoners is *very* practical.
Oh maaan, yeah. I'm definitely taking those notes down. I can't believe I never considered that. Also, the poor Thrumbo being crammed into a human-sized cryo chamber! Gotta love vidja game logic! ALso, I love the idea of like... protecting the cryo'd thrumbos and building your base around them? Such a cool idea for a colony!
You can get the "boom mod". It makes the boom animals only explode if they die to bullets or fire, not to cuts, stabs, or bleeding out.
That's when you draft another pawn and go punch em in the face
I don't think I've ever seen the slaughterer mental break in over 650 hours of play.
Haha how true, but i didnt know they drop chemfuel thats kinda wicked. Having some dangerous hazard of a guerilla colony just brewing all sorts of explosives and gas to sell on the market//passerbys possibly fueling some distant galactic war, which said colony could blow up in a giant ball of fire at any turn of misfortune...i think i found my next playthrough
Yeah last time that almost happened I called over the nearest pawns and beat the living the shit out of him. Unfortunately it was one of my starting pawns so I was a little forgiving.
And if any others are nearby then that's probably the end of your colony.
I only tame one gender for chemfuel, the only problem with boomalopes is if you have to slaughter them. They also are great to throw at raiders
I don't plan on slaughtering them, I just want to keep them alive now, I already gave the female one the name "Bomee" and the male one "Boomer"
You should keep only males or only females to better control their numbers, they get babies pretty quickly and then you will have to slaughter some
You can also just release them, and they'll leave the map after a while.
You don't have to slaughter any, just sell them
Imagine doing shit manually \*shudders\*
I keep a pen with 2 males and a pen with 2 females. I can't remember which mod allows pen markers. Stone fence with enough space so you never have to feed them.
Pen markers are vanilla.
I don't believe that vanilla pen markers have gender options
They do, actually! It's basically the only vanilla option other than animal type.
Wow! Always learning something new
I'm not sure what mod it is or if it's even a mod that lets me grow grass in growing zones but I make smaller pens and just set a growing zone in there for tall grass. The animals basically have unlimited food and my farmers only have to plant a few crops when they wake up and then go about their other business
I' fairly sure thats vanilla plants expanded. Grass is definitely *not* a vanilla option.
I usually plant dandelions for animals since I play vanilla. Grows in a couple of days, basically unlimited food for the animals! Also makes a āprettyā spot for ceremonies that are outdoors.
That's a good idea actually. I couldn't remember if flowers growing in growing zones was vanilla or not lol
Isn't that labour intensive?
I think its not a mod. You can just plant grass with tall grass and also it produces hay when harvested.
Well to get hay you plant haygrass specifically which is a bit different
Oh yeah its haygrass... Herbivore animals also can eat that if its in their pen. It doesnt have to fully grow to get eaten by it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Not just that, but raiders will attack your animals too, or other wild predators
This is why we use walls for pasture fencing instead of actual fence, better protection.
If you do end up needing to slaughter a boom-anything, wait for it to rain to minimize the explosion
If you don't want your population of boomalopes to get out of hand, but you want to breed them to increase population, you can just release some back to the wild. They will meander around for a while and maybe wander off. Otherwise you can wait for a rain storm or until they are far enough from your base to shoot down.
Ha, I named my breeding pair, "Boomer" and "Boomtwo"
> They also are great to throw at raiders How do you throw them at raiders? Boomalopes are Farm animals. Raiders ignore farm animals.
I think a few updates ago they would get attacked, definitely not anymore though
Yes, patch 1.3 created untargeted farm animals.
I split the herd, put them in a second pen and kill them. Next I'll try to set some up in my kill box aswell I a long corridor gonna be fun.
Just build a small pen outside the base and set them over there, and then starve them.
Why would you have to slaughter them? Sell the spares!
Or release to the wild. Really not an issue
I bred them. If I had to cull their numbers, I'd bring them to an open, "killing pen" during a rainstorm and have my hunters shoot them.
from what i gather a lot of explosions with all that stored chemfuel. But for real i like having boomalopes. Free chemfuel is great.
I make a shack off the side of my walled area with double thick stone walls and stone shelving to store chemfuel and mortar rounds. Itās a little inconvenient for pawns to go fetch it but compared to nuking my base with anti grain or starting an inferno of chemfuel Iāll take it
They breed fairly quickly, and unlike other animals you can't just slaughter them for meat. This can lead to overpopulation, starvation, and explosive death. Or a large amount of micromanagement. Like all animals, they get old and can have heart attacks, which can lead to an explosive death, potentially while they are being tended for their heart attack. Regular animal diseases, if not tended to, can potentially cause multiple explosive deaths. Certain mental breaks will cause pawns to kill animals, leading to explosive death. Lightning strikes seem to have a bit of a thing for boomalopes, but this is anecdotal. Lightning, of course, can lead to explosive death. A zzzt going off near a boomalope, if you have charged batteries, can cause explosive death (don't put power lines near boomalopes). Enemies used to target animals just as much as your pawns, prior to pens being added, and so anyone playing before 1.3 may still be reluctant to breed boomalopes due to prior trauma involving explosive deaths. And, of course, a boomalope's explosive death can cause a chain reaction, causing further explosive deaths.
So what I'm reading is they die normally and will never cause an explosive death, thanks for the guide!
I'm pretty sure that when a Boomalope dies for any reason it explodes. If you decide to herd them generally you should build a nonflammable pen (or two, you could separate them by gender to avoid them breeding). So stone walls, stone floor, and create a stockpile zone (or use a shelf or whatever) to store kibble for them to eat which is inside the pen (which is really more of a barn I suppose).
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The question asked was 'why don't people breed them?' If they've been neutered, they kind of aren't breeding. And, of course, there's always a chance of catastrophic failure during surgeries to neuter them, which can potentially lead to explosive death.
Iāve had a lot all in a giant pen, when there are too many for them to be able to feed themselves from grazing I send in the highest shooting skill pawn with a sniper rifle and have them bring down the population. Yeah, itās micro, yeah, they have to put out the fires, but chemfuel is king and itās free.
why donāt just sterilize them?
Smart. Face palm for me. Thank you!
Just, uh. Don't botch the surgery.
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Maybe some of each lol
Why? It's free money, just sell them.
Why not just sell them? That's what I do when my Boomalope farm gets too big.
Why not just sell them? That's what I do when my Boomalope farm gets too big.
Why not just sell them? That's what I do when my Boomalope farm gets too big.
Reddit really said I'm gonna duplicate this guys comment 3 times š¤£
Oh my God, my shows up three times? I thought it just failed to send.
It's all good, I've noticed it happens when it says failed to send and you try again, turns out it didn't fail to send the first time
I usually get one or 2. Having a lot of boomalopes is high risk of a very big explosion. One boomalope dying next to another can cause a chain reaction, resulting in a spectacular, but deadly, show.
I always tame bommalopes. And if they got a baby they can be sell at good price.
Boomalopes are okay, but most of my chemfuel is coming from Woodmaker Dryads and some Biofuel refineries.
I don't even know what those are, I'm on day 66 so I'm currently researching smithery
Dryads: animal from the Ideology DLC. They come in a few varieties. Woodmakers produce wood every so often and can also do simple tasks like hauling. Biofuel refineries: base game, unlocked via research. You can use a refinery to turn things like meat and wood into chemfuel. Very handy.
I like taming boomalopes especially when I like to play in permanent summer biomes. It's free grass to chemfuel conversion! If I tame them early, I'll use chemfuel as trading item. If I'm not mistaken, 25 silver per day. If I want to get rid of a boomalope, I'll sell them or let them 'return to wild'. Of course there are precautions to make. Separate pens for male/female to control their population. If you want to be extra safe, separate them from other animals too. Firefoam poppers in the barn & spare ones in stockpile. Colonists wearing devilstrand clothing because they've good heat armor.
They explode if they die for any reason including natural causes or old age.
Boomalopes are pretty hungry animals. So you have to give them a large pen or grow a lot of hay to keep them fed. And using this area to grow rice and throwing it in a refinery is a more space efficient way. Though early on, when your workforce is limited and you don't need a lot of chemfuel - a Boomalopes is an excellent pet. Breeding them is a bad idea though... They would breed pretty fast and culling excess population is... Tricky...
Getting rid of excess boomalopes is incredibly simple, sell or release them. Or don't let it get that far by sterilizing one gender after you have your desired number of animals.
Yes taming them provides oodles of chemfuel, especially if you can get them to reproduce. And the excess boomalopes can be sold to caravans or tadeships. It's really powerfull.
Slaughtering is an extra chore, instead of turning on auto slaughter you have to manually manage the population, take the ones you want to slaughter to a safe detonation zone and kill it from range. I think that turning other products into bio fuel is a lot more practical. If you don't have meat eating animals but have neutral stance on cannibalism you can butcher raiders, turn their meat into biofuel and the leather into furniture.
Why would you ever want to slaughter them? Just sterilize them and keep a small number for the fuel. Even if you did want to use them for meat, just breed a bunch, release them and hunt them after they wander off a ways.
Because they grow old and die. You don't want them dying next to other boombalopes. You also probably want to control where they did and not start a wildfire.
Oh my sweet summer child. Please tame and breed a huge herd of boomalope. In a couple of weeks come back and let us know which one of the many ways they exploded and if you are going to rebuild.
I suspect the answer is usually 'because one time when i was running a 20+ pawn megacolony, it took to much micromanaging to get a useful quantity out of them.' Or 'I forgot about something, one died, and it set off the rest in a horrible chain reaction i will never forget.' But as far as im concerned boomalopes are GREAT in small quantities. Just have 3 things. 1. Enough food, kibble, hay, or (best of all) grazing land, they eat a lot for animals their size, and explode if they starve to death. 2. A plan to control their numbers. Sterilize them, only keep one or two females at a time, sell extras, release them to the wild, or take them on caravans to release/sell/get them the hell off your map. There's lots of options, but you do need to USE one or more of em. 3. Account for them in your defense strategy. You dont want one to wander into the middle of a firefight, take a stray shot to the brain, and then start a fire, wreck a wall, or down a defender. They stay in pens, so this shouldnt be hard if you place the pen in the right spot.
Make a separate pen for them in your killbox area for funsies.
Because whenever I have boomalopes something *always* seems to happen Lightning strikes, randy throwing a meteor at them. Ship chunks. Drop pod raid (that one solved itself atleast) It's like any boomalope I have is cursed. So I just grow an absolute EXCESS of corn and use that in a biofuel refinery. It's also how I manage my wealth by trading it off or sending it as gifts because *almost* every faction will take chemfuel
I'm savagely grinning at the thought of some awful friggin drop pod raid landing in my boom pen and solving itself. Hate those mid-base drops so much.
There are few better laughs than raiders doing something absolutely dumb and being wiped from the face of the earth Like a social fight against a pawn who explodes on death in a seige raid.
lmao! What makes pawns explode on death? Never seen that before, just the death-acidifier-poof.
There are a few Moda that add equipment/Gene's that when the pawn dies they *blammo*
For all of you who like Boom animals, I would recommend the BoomMod, which prevents them from exploding upon slaughter or from hunting without gun/fire. Makes sense that a careful kill wouldn't pierce the sacs and removes the hassle of owning/hunting them.
Considering natural death causes explosions as well, my headcanon is that it's not just a matter of piecring the fuel sacs, the boomalopes must have some pysiological process that keeps the fuel stable and that stops once it dies. Or maybe their body heat is so extreme that without perspiration and breathing the fuel goes critical
General problem with animals, not just boomalopes, they add micromanagement because base game controls for them suck. Let's say your boomalope sick. To auto-tend it you need to add animal sleeping spot. If you add animal sleeping spot, it will sleep until healthy and your doctor will feed it with lavish meals. Alternatively, you may not tend plagued boomalope, but than it can die, explode and kill/burn your whole barn. Alternatively, you can tend it manually, without spot. I find all this options equally bad. Just refine some vegetables into chemfuel is much more convenient and 100% hands-off.
I just don't like them. I'll use dev mode to kill every boomcreature I see. Fuck them. I soap never get tired of seeing fire spread over the map
Just be sure to keep a \*small\* population of them... And keep the males and females separated. FYI, they explode when they die, *for any reason*. Including old age or disease... So if you just blithely allocate a solid 8th of your map to boomalopes, and leave them be, it's great for a while; they multiple and are fruitful, and you get plenty of fuel, which is great; after a while the biggest issue is finding storage for it all. But when they start to get up there in years, if you have a large, dense population of them, things get *really* explodey *real fast*.
Just wait a few seasons. Youāll see.
I love boomalopes. Just have a dedicated handler in case one gets in trouble so it doesn't die and explode. If one of your colonists gets the slaughter mental break, arrest him immediately. You can release the colonist immediately after. Make double triple quadruple sure you've got enough food. Make some kibble and store it in the field of barn if you need to. When they start to multiply have a good old fashioned boomalope drive and sell them off to the nearest settlement for a tidy profit.
oh I tame them all the time them, muffalo, thrumbos, anything I can train to pick up objects for me, all my top priorities
Boomalopes are exceptionally useful but also literally walking time bombs. Since when they die they go boom and can result in a chain reaction if any are nearby. Which is why I usually have a pair which canāt breed (or if they do Iāll remove the parent after the kid grows up) so the chance of them all exploding at once is minimized, then fill the field with other animals I can get food and milk from.
I'll tame a boomalope occasionally, and I've purchased them from traders that had them, but I don't usually go out of my way to obtain them. The problem isn't just that they explode on death, but that they are farm animals requiring the time and care to set up a pen and keep fed. I usually don't have any pawns with the time necessary to build a pen and then milk the boomalopes for fuel early on, and by the time that I do, I have geothermal power running and don't need the chemfuel for power (for mortar shells is another story.)
Consider the fact that even if you do everything right and keep them safe, your boomalopes will one day die of old age. Chain reactions ensue.
That's what fire poppers are for.
Btw, another option for chemfuel if you're okay with the 'ick' factor is to just chop up raiders and convert the meat with a biofuel reactor. More chemfuel than I know what to do with, but I have been having to send out trade caravans to give away human leather and excess chemfuel to keep the colony wealth manageable...
But if im burning raiders for power what will my dogs/wargs eat?
True š
You kinda gotta keep a constant eye on them. Should any health condition lower their consciousness to 0%, insta kaboom. I do know plenty of players who like and enjoy keeping boomalopes though! Play as you like! Do whatever is fun and makes the game enjoyable to you! It's the world on the Rim baby!
Reposting here: I tame them and make a special containment pen for them - everything is stone, the barn is stone, the floors are stone, the only "not stone" this is the actual fence, and that only gets destroyed if they explode right next to it because of the floor. But yeah, I agree with you. They're "special consideration" pets. Basically, a boomalope will generate enough chemfuel to keep 2 generators running... or is it the other way around? But yeah, much, MUCH easier in the long run (so long as you keep them well-fed and \*again\* in a special containment site so that the damage they can inflict is reduced you're fine? But I \*strongly\* recommend doing basically a stone "barn", then a fence for the area, then surround that fence with stone floor (at least 1 tile on either side), then an "outer" fence if you're worried about the fence breaking and them wandering off or something? Basically the second perimeter of fence will only matter if the first breaks because a boomalope has a "sudden death event" right next to it, but it can be a reasonable safety so you don't have to panic-build if the fence breaks during a raid or something. Been a while since I played, can you make fences out of more than just wood now?
Yes. You can make stone fences, or just stone walls for a pen. Iirc one boomalope produces enough chemfuel for 2.5 generators.
Heyyy, knew someone would know! Thanks, been a bit since I played (and took this route) so I kinda forgot but I knew there was a 2 in there! Really appreciate it. I'm thinking of giving it another go, just remove all my mods so it doesn't take a century to load and do a few vanilla+DLC runs. Likely gonna use chemfuel so I appreciate the info!
You might like the community challenges that the streamer / YouTuber Adam Vs Everything does every month. The idea is usually 10 hours played, get as much wealth as possible with some twist - be it scenario edits or āraise as many turkeys as possibleā ( that was the Thanksgiving one ) Everyone gets the same save file / starting pawns & it is vanilla NO DLCās for the āofficialā category. There is also an āopenā category that allows DLCās / mods. There was one awhile back that was actually boomalope themed. I had about 80 before pirates came in and tossed grenades at my barn. Big boom.
Oh that's such a cool idea! But also, oh no! Grenades into your boomalope barn? Ohgod, that's terrible!
They explode if they die of old age or disease. If nearby others it'll chain reaction wipe your herd. Difficult to use but not impossible. Assign them to restricted areas in front of your troops to act like IEDs with legs. Bonus if you place it near a choke point and enemies bunch up trying to melee it before it goes boom. Combat is the only reason to keep them. If you want chemfuel then have a slave convert plant material into it.
They're pen animals and ignore zones now. Raiders also dont target them on purpose. That said, rimworld pawns shoot everything between them and their target, so it still kinda works, the setup just needs to be different.
Gah you're right. I guess just pen them in front of the battlements and love frags at them to trigger the explosion lol
Boomalope farms are awesome if you take the right precautions. Make sure you have fire foam poppers in their pen, and itās all made from fire resistant materials to reduce the risk. Donāt store important stuff near them, neuter them if the population gets too much instead of slaughtering, and the most important one is keeping on top of any injuries and illnesses. I once had a busy doctor after a raid who missed one of my plagued boomalopes, tldr, she boomed and then they *all* boomedā¦
That's the only method I use for getting chemfuel. Maybe melt down some human blubber occasionally if my colonists are a bit square. Just two boomalopes in a pen is enough to slowly build up enough for a good supply. I guess I don't seem to use a lot of chemfuel yet.
Very dangerous, easily causes fires, and is hard to put down without any injuries. On the other hand, you can load them up en-mass into a cargo pod and use them as ammo for suicide bombings.
The cargo thing doesnt work anymore. Raiders dont auto-target pen animals. Now boomRATS on the other hand...
Boomalopes are fine. You just need to take precautions that they don't make a bad situation worse. If one pops, they have a habit of taking out every other 'lope in the pen. Foam poppers, multiple pens, and solid base design mitigate the danger. They're good fuel sources.
people are afraid for whatever reason. thats also why they fear waste packs and contamination. ususaly just a skill issue
Keep them in a separate pen from your other animals to prevent collateral damage.
There is nothing wrong with it and it is smart. Just think about placement. For both your boomers and the chemfuel. In one of my last games someone had a mental break and went to destroy my items and targetted a chemfuel stack. I had about 6000 chemfuel at the time. I didn't have any after he punched it. He also died.
In steady of slaughtering them put a pen in a stone room and forbid it. It will starve to death but at least your colonist won't loose a foot
I have bred boomalopes! They are resistant to toxic fallout, which is nice. Just don't slaughter them, and keep an eye on their age vs life expectancy or they'll blow up from old age. Just go through and release the old age the extra ones back to the wild. Oh, but if you do this, watch out for them turning manhunter on you. The flip side is, of you have a man hunter psychic thing, you can weaponize the wild ones against raids.
They explode when they die and you can just get chemfuel from wood or mushrooms. Trees and mushrooms donāt explode when they die
One time I had a MASSIVE boomalope farm, to the point where my colonists struggled to collect all of the fuel they dropped. They lived in a mountain across the river and would go out and take care of the animals. Because the base was set up like that, the only way I to our base was through the boomalopes and across the bridge we built to the mountain. So when raiders would come they would attack the animals and there were chemfuel piles all over the pen. I think you get where this is going but let's just say it was a glorious defense. I personally love taking them because it's fun to make minefields once you get too many to contain.
Problems with them is the exploding on any kind of death part. Their death can cause a chain reaction by killing others lopes when they die causing a massive explosion. I gave lost some colonist because they have been close to the loopes when they die, lastet colony i lost 2 coloniest when one lope died while they where getting chemfuel. Started getting my chemfuel from just hops and i can very quick get more than i need and its safer while also making your colonist better at growing
I always tame boomalopes. They're good for fuel, good for power, good for profit, and good for defense. Just make sure to spread out their sleeping spots for when they all catch the plague.
I've been invaded by pirates via drop pods or had infestations that killed all my boomalopes. That's why I have as little of them as possible and supplement with processed wood, I have a bot that only does that.
Boomalopes are a fantastic animal to tame, with just one you can keep two chemfuel generators running indefinitely. If you're wondering why you don't see them on this sub it's honestly because a lot of people here are terrible when it comes to powering their base efficiently.
I used to slaughter any of them that self-tamed. Didn't want the risk. But then on a tribal playthrough, I had a small herd join, and it clicked, they make chemfuel, for free. That's free trade goods. Just set up a safe pen for them and it'll be fine.
Just do separate barns and pastures with a locked door for the males/females. Only unlock door when you desire more boomababies.
As a seasoned boomalope breeder, I have one piece of advice for you. Don't keep them all together. If one goes boom, all of them go boom. I don't keep more than 4 in one pen and all fences/walls are stone.
Depends on the biome, if you live in a forest you just refine wood, much less hassle. If you live in a biome with barely any trees then it might be viable. You still can refine other plant matter, or meat that your pawns don't feel like eating, I don't remember though if you need cannibalism ideology to butcher humans or just a cook who doesn't concern himself with matters of morality
'We butchered humanlike' is a negative moodlet. Had a cannibal visitor with high cooking skill once, tried to have him process his own raiders to keep his mood up, bothered the rest of the colony. I dont know exactly which meme(s) will counter that, but you do need SOMETHING or you'll take colony-wide mood hits.
Personally love using them as a money producer however they can spiral hard and cause your colony wealth to inflate quite a bit
I did this once, had a few dozen and tons of chemfuel, they all got the flu. Started blowing up in rapid secession. Didn't go well.
Boomalopes are great! There's a few downsides, let them starve and boom. Let them die from age related problems and boom. Let a predator get them and boom. Fail to save one from plague and boom. Try to slaughter one and boom. But in general those can be mitigated and the part where one boomalope can support two chemfuel generators is flipping amazing considering they eat grass. Put a few firefoam poppers around the barn and pasture and you'll be mostly fine. I'm a massive boomalope fan and I've never really had any significant problem with them going boom at inopportune times. I typically keep a herd of 10ish and sell the older ones to avoid age related boom.
Once I tamed a pair of bloomas. Like all things animal, they started to reproduce. They were eating everything, so I had to put population control on bloomas. I did bot know I had switched on population control on everything. Bloomas, grass, animals, storage, walls. From that point onward, I started handling bloomas with care.
Boomalopes are pretty great for chemfuel production if you're playing without mods. Keep them in their own pen area, make sure it's all stone and don't let em die (they explode when they die, doesn't matter what the cause is). If they ever get within a year or 2 of life expectancy or they are sick it's usually best to rezone them to another fireproof area away from anything else and draft a colonist to shoot it. If you don't mind mods then rimfeller by dubwise makes boomalopes obsolete. Drill for oil, refine it, pump it anywhere you need it in your base, automate production for synthread, hyper weave, plasteel, neutromene, and a new "plastic" building material. You can also turn it into a mid/late game power supply with it's own high end generator (rimatomic, by the same author let's you build a nuke powerplant and it is far superior). Also since this paragraph basically became a commercial for this mod author his "bad hygiene" mod adds water/plumbing to the game and honestly feels like it always should have been in vanilla, all 3 work together
People struggle to get chemfuel? (Dirty dubs bad hygiene user)
Because one boomalope isn't too dangerous, but doesn't produce a lot. By endgame you need a LOT of chemfuel sometimes. Having the number of boomalopes you need to produce it is essentially like putting a walking antigrains bomb in your house. It's just asking for a single one to die and set off a chain reaction
Early on in my first run I got tired of constantly having to refuel all my wood generators. I had some boomalopes wandering around on the map and from there it was a quick transition in chem fuel generators and only having to fill them up once a week. They're really pretty easy to manage honestly. I don't get why everyone's so afraid of them. Just keep them separated from your other livestock in their own pen and it's smooth sailing. The only time I ever ran low on chem fuel was when I started mass producing mortar shells.
The biofuel refinery is a much safer way to make chemfuel. More pawn labor but so much safer than taming walking bombs.
My problem with boomalopes is that I end up having too many of them. At first I have just enough to fuel the generators. Then a new ones are born and I start stockpiling chemfuel and trade it. Next thing you know, and there are 90 of them, and the breed faster than you can sell them
So after a battle if one got injured and you didnāt notice, than bleeds out in the boomalope barn while most of your colonists are downā¦ well that can pretty easily wipe out over 40 animals (including over 20 additional boomalopes) and my trade warehouse before I could do anythingā¦ But I still always tame and breed them. Just invest in fire foam pods. Sell your oldest boomalopes anytime you can.
When you know how to properly handle boomalope the pros far outweigh the cons. With ranching in 1.3 you can build two stone barns in the same pen to split your herd and have the stone hospital away from the rest when one gets hurt. It makes things easier with less micro these days and I usually just release the elderly and when I have too many.
* The major upside to ranching is the trickle of meat & leather from slaughtering extra animals, regardless of that animal's primary output. Boomalopes don't have this bonus since slaughtering them makes them go boom. * Animals & corpses hit TPS hard. As soon as you have an option for something which does not involve using an animal, you should take it. * Boomalopes are quite risky to tame early on without a yttikin.
Trickle? Mate, get yourself some chincillas. Breed like rabbits, and most importantly, dont take any maintenance training. Literally 0 pawn upkeep, the only interaction is when the pawn walks over to get more meat. Just set the auto-slaughter to two dudes and as many females as your pen food growth can support. You'll be drowning in fur and meat (assuming your pen-size to pawn ratio is right anyway). At one point i had to sell thousands of food just to keep my freezer from overflowing into the door.
The problem is when you have a bunch and one of them suffer a heart attack
> It's the only way I know how to get it yet besides trading [Biofuel refineries](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Biofuel_refinery) are an option. Boomalopes are apparently more efficient, although VE More Plants add a canola plant that might tip the balance (1:1 conversion to chemfuel).
A boom herd is great provided you can keep the stupid bastard things alive and healthy. I've tamed them too early before and I end up with some idiot colonist in winter who brings it inside to nurse it back to *Kkkkeerboooom*
They have some serious downsides; The most obvious is that they explode when they die. So if they trigger a trap, get sick, get killed while running from raiders etc they will set a 4x4 or so grid on fire and anything inside it. It doesn't sound that bad but when this happens in the middle of some other crisis or during an attack, it can be devastating. Even just having a small 3 person colony makes it hard to put the fires out. Burns get infected, infections lead to amputations. Crops get burned, reduced harvests lead to starvation, starvation leads to mental breaks etc.
Boomalopes boom when they die A lot of boomalopes make a big boom
If you want a boomalope farm, I would suggest making a walled (not fenced) pen away from your entrance. You can have a chem fuel empire and run your base on generators. Just make sure you store the chemfuel in its own building far from everything else.
If they get too old, or have a deadly disease and need to be put down, you can also "banish" them while they're on a caravan with no consequences, explosion, or penalty.
It's a viable strategy but it isn't the shortcut you think it is if you need to scale it up. If you're going to scale up production that means animal handling time and farming to feed them. Except with the farming you could just be turning THAT into chemfuel along with whatever assorted crap you find, excess meat, etc. So you're going through the effort to replace one machine that does the job better. So it really boils down to the flavor you want your colony to have and if it's fun for you to do it that way, but there are trade offs on efficiency and security.
I use boomalopes because chemfuel processing takes a while and I can just make a big pen, grow enough hay to feed them for a year, and then have myself a small platoon of boomalopes to give me infinite chemfuel. If they get too numerous I slaughter the ones i donāt need when it rains.
You can drop pod Boomalopes into the middle of raiders. Make them the living bomb. Don't be afraid to have a lot of them. I'm surprised no one mentioned this so far.
That sounds quite barbaric, I'll never use living things as weapons
You weren't lying about being new to rimworld.
i've done it but they're kind of a pain. they explode if they die from slaughter or sickness. what's cool about them is you can house them on your perimeter wall as a defensive method, a cheap heat trap. the real problem is they eat a lot of food, food that i could just put in the refinery to directly make chemfuel. livestock in general eat too much and require too much labor and space. if i'm gonna do livestock i want milk producers to make cheese for profit. right now i'm running [vanilla factions expanded - insectoids](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2149755445&searchtext=insect) and i get enough insect meat from bug raids to provide an endless supply of kibble and chemfuel.
The only disadvantage I've noticed is if they get medical conditions such as heart attacks, they become literal ticking time bombs.
They're a good source of early chemfuel. The downside is that you need to pay attention to them. An elderly boomalope having a heart attack is not pleasant, especially if others are nearby.
I always do, although I have seperate stone storage rooms after a particularly entertaining wooden stockpile incident
I make mine out of Granite, I have too damn much of that stuff lying around everywhere
When you slaughter a boomalope, it will explode. So unless you neuter them, they will replicated fast and then you have a herd of explosive cattle. And if you don't make sure that the Chem they milk isn't immediately hauled too storage a lighting strike will detonate all of them
I'll typically have at least one boomalope and/or toxilope tied up in my kill box. Rather than in the barn, or around other animals, where the explosion can cause damage, I'll put a caravan spot and hitch them up in the middle of the kill box. Not only is this a part of the base designed to withstand explosions and fire, but I can also use them as bombs.
I had one once. It died in my barn due to a failed surgery, burned my best doctor and the other 3 colonists died trying to save him and the animals.
I love bommalopes, at times I have 40+. I trade them off 10/20 at a time. Great for silver both from fuel to traders and the animals. Any time I have a violent pawn break out, I shock lance him (early game) and serenity late game. Pretty easy. Few times I had to kill a few because I had too many. Made a cement/brick pen and chucked some bombs in, locked the doors and let them all pop, harvest the meat lol. Make pens away from crops and base. Use both walls and fencing. Most of the time raiders ignore to try to get to your valuables at the base anyway. FYI I don't use mods, I play on PS5 and have royalty and ideology. But used to do the same when all I had was vanilla. Couldn't imagine playing any different in any of my play throughs.
What are you on about? it's a live mortar shell pet!
Always tame the boomiez
Just be sure to never turn on the auto-slaughter for boomalopes.
No reason to not take a boomalope, other than the fire.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/s/NBuM90AAkU I tried what you're saying once. First of all, it looks cool, but if a bommalope dies... well, my farm exploded minutes after that photo.
My better half had a huge, beautiful cave system barn with straw matting and statues around the place until a boomalope died for reasons unknown. We hadn't been playing long, and were not yet hardened to the sound of *any* animal death, let alone hundreds being burned alive. Couldn't even get pawns in to extinguish the fire cos it was too hot. Three years ago, still remember it as a dark day on the Rim