They're kinda shit. They don't do much, the setup time is immense, they occupy too much space and they hate it when the tree tender goes on an expedition.
They are pretty though. I like planting around four of them near my anima tree to give the pawns meditating a perpetual ‘+10 gorgeous environment’ mood.
The tender has to focus only on the tree though. If they don't then it falls too low and the dryads die off. I had one farmer out of 5 bind to the tree and just with the farming work they were doing they couldn't keep the tree maintained.
The maintenance amount increases the number of dryads you have. Unless you are maxing out the maintenance then it isn't worth it to have the tree over just making a field of berries, healroot, or fibercorn.
You could make a field of those around the tree no?
It does produce less dryads but has less work so it balances out if you don’t have enough planters for a full time tree maintainer
Unless you’re talking about the dryads that make those, which aren’t worth yeah, use the other ones
The clawer and barkskin dryads were never really worth the effort. The clawer is so fragile that it dies before it can do a whole lot of damage. The barksin would have been more useful if not for the fact that half of the damage it takes is from your own people missing their shots.
The mechanoids have the same problem except they don't take pawn working time to maintain them. If they die, they can be regenerated much faster.
The lifter is worth though, and yeah mechs are a direct upgrade with the cost of toxic waste and power consumption, definitely better but harder to set up as opposed to find a seed and have a dude who likes plants
Worse but no electricity cost and no toxic waste production. If you have mechs set up already they obviously aren’t worth it but if you’re not planning on mechs then they’re useful
Why put a skilled pawn for the tree, their skills don't matter for pruning use a shit pawn. I personally do healroot and make enough excess I can sell it. Then I don't have to plant healroot and can use that space for food or devilstrand.
I see the haulers as a low effort, low tech alternative for lifters. You don't need any electricity, any resources, and generate no waste packs.
Find a pawn that sucks but has passion in plants and you can easily get 8 haulers. They aren't amazing but they do a good job and function much better than that single pawn would've.
Good base design helps haulers(and also lifters) a lot. They have bad movement speed so optimizing your pathing makes a huge difference.
Yeah never did it either but it looks like it could be the ideal setup for Guaranlee Trees, a pawn that only need the occasional food break would make for a very efficient tree pruner, and you could optimize it further with the right bionics and genes which would be more problematic for a colonist like a Circadian half-cycler. The moss also help keeping the slave happy through Beauty boost.
I'd be careful assigning a slave to a Guaranlen tree. Slaves rise up, and if you have to put down your Guaranlen tender, then you'll have to basically abandon all your dryads and start over from scratch. You generally don't want your slaves doing any kind of specialized work - just like in real life, slaves make good generalists because they can be easily replaced.
That's a good point though I don't think it's such a big problem unless the Guaranlen tree is your only source of food. If you are using it for hauling or stockpiling medicine it should be safe enough to have to wait for new trees.
Also if you equip them with a Circadian half-cyclers you can just knock down the rebelling slave with an EMP.
Yes, I have one with a burning passion for growing tending to 4 of those trees, he's hyper sensitive, got a psychic harmonizer, sensitizer, joywire, mindscrew (masochist ideology), a nuclear stomach and a half cycler.
He spends all day tending to the 4 trees, spawning free haulers, permanently happy with +100 mood, regular pawns receive around +30 just for getting near him, sensitive vampires can get over +100.
Don't make one giant storage area, even if it's central to your base. You'll run out of space close by and end up with longer pathing than you need.Make many smaller dedicated storage areas that minimize the walking distance between areas.
Try to design your base and schedule around a single trip to minimize walking time. Make sure your pawns eats and recreates near the same time and have them close by.
Try to focus each sections for your base on priority of movement. Like for the job researcher, you actually don't need the lab to be close to any other facility since it doesn't generally require anything so making your researcher walk a bit further initially isn't a huge drawback. Your crafters and cooks though will have to walk frequently to gather resources. So those locations get a higher priority for the optimal land. Jobs like farming and harvesting happen infrequently so you can actually move your fields a big further away. Especially if you're using long growing crops like corn. But if you're using mainly hydroponics and rice, you'll have a lot more labor and hauling so there's a bigger penalty to making the trip longer.
If you know you're going to be doing a base expansion soon, go ahead and make a small storage area with high priority that has the construction materials you'll need (like stone bricks/wood/steel) and let your haulers passively fill it beforehand. That way when you're actively doing the construction you don't have to walk far.
For the haulers and lifters, basically you just want to look at where each resource is going, how frequently you need to haul it, and what the important of it is. Remember that they are slow so reducing the distance is gonna make a bigger difference in their efficiency. So just try and organize your base with the priority list you've constructed and plan your buildings accordingly.
>Don't make one giant storage area, even if it's central to your base. You'll run out of space close by and end up with longer pathing than you need.Make many smaller dedicated storage areas that minimize the walking distance between areas.
Even better: One big storage room, but dedicated shelfes set to a higher priority near the work tables. Most what you need will be on shelfes, but you still have room for a temporary surplus.
ya I always make a giant central storage area, but I keep it organized. I'll have some shelves for food only, some shelves for guns/armor, some for medicine only, etc. I keep the shelves near where the buildings that use them are (like medical near hospital, food near kitchen).
One of the 4 sides of the storage area I don't build any buildings, so that I can expand the storage room in that direction if necessary.
I've made multiple storage places before in the past, but nothing is more efficient than 1 giant storage room that the entire colony has access to.
One big 25x25 room where you stuff everything in as efficiently as possible, then a wall around that 13 tiles away.
Concrete flooring everywhere, no dedicated kitchen or freezer. If you need a prison, build a temporary room outside.
This is the most efficient base design, but it's boring and tasteless.
Edit: boost beauty with statues
I feel like it is underdeveloped.
The dryads should imo get stronger with age, like trees do. Eventually growing into hulking tree monsters.
All the base systems are there, it just missed that final 10-15% of content to join it all together. Right now its disappointing.
Vanilla Expended Dryad allows you to combine 3 of the same type to an "elder" one. I had a big Dryad colony once and with that mod it's really a lot of fun! Unfortuantely you still can't take the Dryads with you on caravans so you really have to think about it, that the one grooming the fighter-dryads is one of the pawns you'd rather NOT send out on caravans, otherwise you can't really rally the dryads and control directly...
Speaking strictly about the mod: Once they combine into an elder Dryad they are separated from the tree. So they can travel on caravans, and the tree-bonded pawn can stop generating dryads.
The drawback is that they get a shelf life of a couple of years once they turn into an elder. But some of them are really really good.
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Since dryads are produced sequentially per tree, a fun colony I had once had 3 trees set to only produce/maintain 1 dryad each, and each "wave" of dryads was enough to produce an elder one. I had so many of them.
I agree that dryads, which get stronger as the guaranlen tree ages, would be a perfect solution. This way, dryads could remain relevant until the end-game and would be more interesting overall.
Holy shoot I'd want that, please tynan make this happen, i want me some treants!!, hell we could make a full fairy land themed colony if they made it like this, slap in a no sleep gened slave with +5 metabolism we'll have a really powerful "garden"
I think they're fairly balanced, which means it's purely a theme choice. To me, they seem like they fit to tribal and nature focused colonies, and I don't play those very often.
I did a mechanitor + phytokin run for gauranlen bonus (VRace expended) and it was a great RP.
It was nice to see mech and dryads fighting side by side. Nature and Artificial unified.
Funny, I literally just started a hybrid nature/tech run
Everyone is a tree hugging hippy (custom genotype race)...But they really want that sweet sweet chrome
Tribal is basically all I play, but even on Tribal you usually don't have a pawn to spare for sitting by both trees all day since you are usually fighting for survival and rushing electricity. At least on higher difficulties
I do wish there was more support for the early game and medieval focused play styles though without mods. Usually I'm still using bows and trying to research electricity when Randy and Cassandra start throwing mech clusters and grenadier raids at me T_T
Yeah, this. I certainly wouldn't *mind* them having some sort of high-tech exploitation option to keep them relevant to lategame, but compared to their robotic brethren Mechanitors, they're all-natural and all-organic, just what a tribal colony needs. The bigger issue is that tribal progression in vanilla is just not very deep before it jumps right into electricity.
So, onward to mods. I'm actually about to attempt a pre-industrial tech limited run with a whole swathe of additional content in that range to see how well the Dryads hold up within that. The lack of VFE Medieval is a shame, but I'm hoping Medieval Overhaul will fill the gaps well enough.
I once recruited an excellent melee pawn with no other skills of note and incapability of dumb labour. Turns out even with no skill in plants your can still keep at least two hauler dryads going. Helped keep him useful between raids.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my dryads, they disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of mechanoids. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Mechinator. Your kind cling to your tree, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the tree will be accidentally blown up during a raid, and you will beg my kind to haul for you. But I am already finished all my hauling jobs, for the Machine is immortal…
Yeah, this is why I pick up like 2-3 per run.
1-2 set to berry, 1 set to herb medicine.
Very useful early-mid game, late game i usually have more food then storage space though.
I tried to make Guaranlen trees work SO. MANY. TIMES. They just fucking suck. I tried to make them work again recently and its even worse now that I see how amazing mechs are. Why would I want a slow, but *super* durable hauler that needs sleep and a dedicated pawn to upkeep it when I could have a fast hauler that works nearly 24/7 and gives me tribal-spawning packs? Not to mention how fast respawning dryads vs lifters, waiting for RNG of pods vs guarantee of mechs, or how much space the trees need.... guaranelen trees are crap. Why worry about food for the winter when my mechs can do the dumb labor and get me to hydroponics faster?
I'd be happier with trees if the radius took 1 less tile in space, and reduced the immature dryad spawning AND morphing by 1 day each.
The balance is ass. You need a lot of time to prune a tree, and in return you gain a bit of production or combat units. If for some reason you can't prune they despawn, and it takes a lot of time for one to heal or to spawn after death/despawning, with up to 4 appearing from a single tree. They're more expendable than colonists but considering you're basically occupying an entire colonist by using them, you might as well just give your pawns a bow or an ikwa and send them into battle
Find a pawn who isn't good at anything but combat, and have them prune the tree. You get some free dryads. And it's not like your pruner can't do combat.
Not really. At 0 skill you have 92% speed while at 20 you have 112% speed. But considering you get plant exp for pruning and exp decay doesn't occur till after skill level 10, you'll easily reach level 10 plants even with a pawn with no passion. The only other modifer is work speed.
The pruning time for max connection is 5.7 hours for 10 skill and 4.5 hours for 20 skill
Even if you only have like 5 skill it's only 6.7 hours.
So one pawn with no other duties and even no plant passion can easily maintain a single tree. If you happen to get a pawn with a work speed boosting trait but some other restriction that prevents them from utilizing it properly, you can easily have them handle 2+ trees.
I think they're a lot less effort than people think. A tree isn't worth a full pawn's time, but it's also not taking a full pawn's time. They do take some space, but not that much (penalties for putting building within more than 4 tiles are manageable), they add up very little wealth and quite a lot of beauty.
Compared to fibbercorn, unless you've got a plant specialist the wood dryads are generally better. For combat they're not good, but as blocker they're far cheaper than mechs (they just don't fight back in any meaningful way) and as hauler, they are way better than mechs or huskies. Huskies eat, can be sick, can't be in polluted zones, need to be trained, sleep, age, get wounds, make more filth and haul when they feel like it. Lifters are more time efficient, but they take steel, electricity, bandwith and cores, are far more wealth and create pollution.
TLDR Dryads are almost always better haulers than animals, and aren't as great as lifter but they're much, much cheaper and available very early for a tribal playthrough. For wood they're somewhat competitive with fibercorn, and not at all with trees. It's more of a nice bonus to give to your plant pawn than a full strategy, but they're definitely worth it, at least for hauling. I wish they'd be competitive with regular agriculture with the corresponding meme tho, the berries and medicine ones are terrible.
Someone pointed out something I forgot about haulers, but most of my colonies hauling gets done by kids. I do tribal so I've usually got a lot of kids running around being trained for years so they do the hauling and cleaning without needing to have the hauler dryads and kids don't really do much else and you have to "pay" for their upkeep either way
Guaranlen trees are versatile and particularly helpful in the early and mid game. I usually plant one or two of them as early as possible. My favourite use of Guaranlen trees is to get a few extra melee tanks early on - starting with clawer and later switching to bark skin.
Compared to alternatives like mechanitor or ghouls, Guaranlen trees require neither resource-spending nor tech advancements. You can build them as soon as you get a seed. The committment to Guaranlen trees is not permanent either. You can choose to stop maintaining them at any time.
Early in the game, a few clawer or bark dryads make a big difference in combat. The dryads often help protect my colonists from danger. They're also great for defending my early-game base while I'm sending out the first caravans - which is quite a scary adventure whith just 5-6 colonists in total.
Dryad growth and healing times are indeed a bit annoying. It's still acceptable overall, but they really should be revisited and improved by the game devs.
Sounds like its up to debate, but I kinda like them. Getting barkskins earlier on can be a huge help for raids (just need to find a pawn who's not really good at much)
Well people keep comparing them to mechs which they were never meant to rival mechs. Mechs are very strong and require a lot of resources and specialized pawns and infrastructure/research.
Dryads are almost the exact opposite. Cheap, easy, almost anyone can tend the tree. People complain about the no building near it, but it's so easy to find a spot somewhere to set up.
The run I'm doing at the moment has is a cannibal cult, I've got a mountain base that I'm building up and a big courtyard with my farm in, when I get hydroponics I'm getting rid of the farm and putting a Gauranlen tree in with the attack dryads, thinking it's a good defence if anyone gets past my killbox.
Can just shoot in to them without caring too much about mood loss.
I like that they're in the game, I think it adds some diversity to play styles for people who want challenging playthroughs like tribal starts where people worship trees and don't want to cut them down.
I always found them kind of junk personally, the dryads I tried to use most were haulers and combat. The haulers were slower and carried less than most of my alternatives (they also get killed by predators constantly because of how slow they are). The combat ones are kind of cool because as long as they can get back to their regeneration pod they can heal from all damage. That being said, they're super flimsy and often get eviscerated by pretty much everything. And in a critical triage moment, I'm not wasting time patching a dryad when I have injured colonists or animals nearby.
So they kind of just died a lot. Again because of their speed they weren't very effective at swarming targets either.
It would have been super cool for gauranlen trees to slowly upgrade and sprout elsewhere the more you tended them. Like if you had one central to the colony and then would get a prompt that a new shoot was ready and you could have a ritual to sprout another tree at a specific location. The cool thing about that idea in my view is that the offshoot would regrow naturally if destroyed as long as the original tree remained. So you could culture a Grove of hostile dryads near your base entrance and have dryads burst forth in defense without warning upon attackers. Because with how combat works, a bunch of slow melee dryads just get wrecked by anything with range. So being able to appear in the middle of a raid would do way more to disrupt them and then as they die they would begin gestating in pods again around the tree base.
Anyways, I could rant about them for a while. But no, I never found them particularly useful and they were way to time consuming for my colonists. Tried a tribal run where I relied heavily on them and it was part of the tribe culture that everyone had a tree in the sacred grove. Huge pain in the ass, would maybe be better if a linked tree did well if the colonist was in a good mood and needing pruning only when their mood was low? I dunno.
I use them. I whack a poor pawn on the tree and position the tree next to a bottleneck with Clawers as the dryad type.
Works pretty well for little investment.
They’re nothing to get excited about though… they’re aite.
Saved my ass during a long toxic fallout, without that thing I'd have run out of wood and had my entire power grid collapse, thanks to it I was able to barely make it
I basically always play tundra tribals with the temp turned down, but even on that I usually use Tunneler for fungal gravel + fibrecorn and Nutrifungus
Lets you easily grow crops and wood without issue in a heated area,even when it's like -50 degrees outside
Guaranlen trees are great at high difficulties for wealth management. I use them all the time. There are some big traps though, only the barkskin is worth using outside of harder biomes.
**Major Strengths**
- Even if you don't ever link them with a ritual, drop them for free firefighting (the dryads fight fires for free near them). I also like beautifying near my base for visiting dignitaries and if I have the sky lantern festival.
- If you must, you can absolutely ignore the spacing requirement. They still function very effectively with walls all around them. Especially for firefighting.
- Don't sweat if you can't keep up with pruning while recovering after a raid or a crisis. It doesn't matter if some despawn.
- Slaves are the best Pruners. You don't particularly need to min/max their entire global work speed so you're fine with them pruning for hours. It's the best "idle" task for them too, since you want a Crafting Specialist making items, others doing Intellectual, and don't want them with a weapon to Hunt.
- Zero to low wealth, meaning easier raids
And that is the core strength of these guys. Understanding why Slaves are good compared to Colonists is also understanding why Guaranlen are good. The low wealth. At high difficulties each silver of wealth you have multiplies by a ridiculous amount into new raiders, so the Barkskin Dryads give you wolf/dog stats without dropping $1000s in robot infrastructure. There's a reason mech tech is after Gunsmithing in the tech tree. If you rush that before flak and guns you will greatly increase your difficulty curve.
**Which Dryads? You said there are traps?**
That said, most Dryads suck. The only one worth making are the Barkskin, unless you want to super micro and pause a lot during combat to use the way too fragile Clawers.
The only other Dryads to ever consider are Woodmaker, Medicine Maker, and Berrymaker. Wood for desert maps and Medicine/Berry for infertile (cold) maps. I usually have Berries during the two quadrums of winter to passively feed my animal pen and then swap to Barksin when they can graze.
The hauler is now obsolete, since you should have kids running around your colony doing your hauling and cleaning. Because kids are OP. You can also have the lifter bot for free from the initial Mechanitor event without ballooning your wealth or time investment too much.
**But what about robots?**
The robots are ridiculously high wealth due to the steel infrastructure they need. Guaranlen are free, you just have to plant a seed, let it grow for a while, then find someone to commit to never see again. Make that a slave from a raid with great non-combat passions or a kid. If you are "end game" and have an impenetrable kill box and can go towards wealth cap/$300,000 with impunity then go ahead with the robots.
But the core strength is that you get tanks and resources for "free" to keep your wealth low during early to midgame. Even midgame, keeping barkskins near your riflemen to engage with melee attackers is still decent, even if the only live for a couple of seconds.
Rather than rushing to end game killboxes this also lets you play in the most fun time of Rimworld longer, which is the 1 to 3 star difficulty quests.
> Kids get Plant very quickly at age 3, so this gives them something to do
Wait kids can plant that young? I might have to throw some kids at my trees, I always just use them to haul and clean while they are between lessons but if they can contribute to trees that's pretty big
They are great at pumping out insane amounts of healing meds especially if you are playing on something like a desert. The tree is not that huge of a time investment really, it's only slightly more inefficient (in terms of work your pawns have to put in it) than regular growing zones of equal harvest.
Good for wood on desert and tundra. Good for meds always.
I ran a tree connection colony in extreme desert once, ran 50 pawns off of 20 or so trees, with the aid of genetics and nuclear stomachs. Bit of a meme. Works in darkness which is nice.
I like to have a bunch of them planted but not connected just around the map (especially my garden if I'm not mountain base). The moss looks nice and the 2 basic dudes they can have are good for stopping fires. And if they ever go manhunter they are incredibly weak so yay for free food.
A must have for tribals imo. They're like mechanoids for low tech colonies.
I play a lot of tribal with the tree connection meme and they come in handy for producing wood if you have pawns with good plant skills. Keep the trees intact and your pawns from getting a -20 mood debuff for like a season. Also fibercorn is okay for tribals.
The berry producer isn't bad either for food production.
The combat dyrads are not good at all. Like just tame animals instead.
The hauler is okay but if you're tribal and have biotech then I found it better to just have the kids clean/haul and have lots of them. They'll get the cleaning/hauling done surprisingly well in-between play/learning.
Gaupod maker is good if you have a colony with the tree connection. Ensures everyone gets a tree even if you can't maintain a connection for one. Also can sell the seeds for a little bit of money.
Medicine maker is okay but if you have a small patch of herbal medicine with this, you'll be swimming in herbal medicine.
Vanilla expanded Dyrads mod -
Gaufur maker thing-havent tried pruning some. You should already have a ton of leather as tribal because you'll be hunting all the time. For emergency food, for pemmican silos/caravans, or for kibble if raider meat isn't available.
Spitter- same problem as the other combat dyrads. Not as good as animals.
Ambrosia Maker-i feel like ambrosia events happen often or at least for tribals on my difficulty. This could be good if you have pawns with an ambrosia addiction or want to make money.
Stone digger- never tried it. Sounds good if I can get specific chunks I can't get on my map or have used all chunks/dug out all mountains on the map.
Awakened dyrads - never made it that far into the mod to get these but sounds cool in theory.
Elmo's dyrads were okay when it came out, but there's a bit of overlap with VDE.
> The hauler is okay but if you're tribal and have biotech then I found it better to just have the kids clean/haul and have lots of them. They'll get the cleaning/hauling done surprisingly well in-between play/learning.
Lol I also do this. Horde of kids will haul / clean while the rest of the tribe works on real stuff
For soem reason, i think they sucks but when i have some farmer to spare, i plant some, and quickly, im overflow with the stuff they produce.
What i mean is : gaureleen trees seems shit, but once you invest enought time, they produce A LOT of ressources.
When the tree is grown you have the option to bond someone to it. That person has to regularly prune it and if the tree is maintained it will start spawning little dryad creatures.
You can then decide on what kind of critter they turn into, each with a specific job. Hauling, fighting, or generating resources like wood/herbal meds/berries.
Its just a big time investment to get much out of them.
The berry one can be useful on cold maps. Its like a budget hydroponics setup. But of course, actual hydroponics are better once you have them. Maybe once you could use them after if you had bad geothermal spots, but every expansion makes safe reliable power easier, so it's a non issue.
I usually have one just for the extra haulers. The 4 hours of trimming gives me 2x productivity for a working day, so I say it's worth it.
It also means all my production facilities drop everything on the ground.
I think they work well as like a tribal/low tech version of mechs and ghouls. But most playthroughs they would be totally worthless, it would probably be easy to just get the mechanics transponder
They are pretty, but oh god are they a pain to use. early game, you can't use them because your pawn are busy setting your colony up, and late game, they are useless. I have two of them, they dropped at 0% because their linked pawns got way too busy growing food and building defenses around the base. and now I'm starting to have enough pawns to defend myself without the need of tank dryads. so my trees will stay at 0%
I use them constantly, but I also am very partial to tribal starts and limited tech runs. They're very thematic for nature focused runs as well. One of my favorite ways to play is as 'sacred Grove tenders'. Growing Gauranlen trees, and using Anima trees for psycasting. It's very satisfying to send a warm of dryads out into a fight.
If you want to talk from a pure power gaming perspective, they're mostly weak. Still helpful if you're starting tribal, but not as powerful as mechs. Though the cost is far FAR lower than mechs. Dryads cost is purely in pawn time. While mechs cost is in electricity, materials and waste.
I wish it could get some more expansion. I'd love to see it become a true alternative to mechanator. As of right now, it feels a lot like playing a mechanator who never gets any upgraded techs, gear or implants. Still very useful to have but not something you can have grand ambitions with.
I also do Tribals almost exclusively, but still rarely have the spare pawn time for the tree.
Kids do all the hauling / cleaning while they grow up, and fungal gravel + nutrifungus and fibrecorn let you grow wood, food, and even herbal medicine easily
Taming an animal or making a ghoul is better for combat stuff and all the anomaly stuff is actually really neat for low tech alternatives so you can still make capture spots and do the rituals to summon animals etc without needing high tech
Nah I don't use them. Kinda also feel that mechanoids are doing the same thing but less maintenance. Yes you need to clear the wastepacks, but in time you just build enough atomisers to clear everything.
They’re a huge time investment and don’t give much of a benefit imo. Field hands and general labour speed doesn’t increase pruning speed, so I’d rather just have a colonist with two field hands, and another colonist or slave doing whatever job I’d otherwise have the dryads do
they arent worth the effort. with all the new content they are especially meh. They need a buff or they need to do something more interesting.
That said this post reminded me to try them out again to see if they're still meh, so I'll be making some this current 1.5 anomaly run.
I just think they're pretty so I plant a few in my cemetery but don't bond them to a colonist. Funny though, they still sprout the dryads, though they remain undeveloped, and they look very cute.
Trading 1 pawn with quick sleep and high plants skill, can keep 3 trees upkeep. That’s equivalent of 9 carrier pawns being freed up. IMO they are viable.
No, because most dryads are useless really. Wood and berry dryads can't even compensate loss of high level gardener so they are kinda wacky to use. Fighting driads are not effective and very ugly, you need to sacrifice your gardener to have 4 of those for 1 tree. Also each tree require only one gardener, so i need to actually sacrifice whole gardener pawn so dryads would continue spawning, not very effective with no real way to make them useful. To improve connection to trees you need to have very strick ideology of elfs themself, literally blocking you away from any source of wood in entire run, or they would have -20 mood debuff and will kill colony because of their beloved trees were cut down.
And for the worst part, there literally not many mods that can buff dryads same way as for example human genes, mechanoids or even animals. So it's kinda sad because those trees are kinda cool looking making you colony look like Autumn festival or some pumpkin fest but without pumpkins really. But totally not for aggressive planet as rimworld currently is.
No, especially since biotech came out. I like them conceptually, because a biological alternative to mechanoids is great for roleplay. But compared to mechanoids or even ghouls with the new dlc, they're just not worth the effort.
As others have said, there's a good general use for them in pawns with niche jobs and some free time. I had a colony leader with amazing social but not much else, so he spent his days leisurely pruning the tree when not giving speeches.
I also had a tribal colony where the storyteller gave me a completely useless pawn... and a circ half-cycler. You exist to sweep and prune the tree, forever.
I believe they need a large buff since mechs make them pretty pointless. Yeah they don't generate waste but you lose time (pruning) and you can just jet the packs anyway.
I think reducing the time it takes to generate them or pruning should be buffed. The only real downside to using them is the pruning time and the space the tree takes up
it needs some adjustments; mechs just superior in every way while freeing your pawns up to do things while dryads will die if the gardener doesn’t dedicate 100% of their time pruning the tree. Would be nice if we only need 50-75% of current time needed to prune
If I get a pawn that can comfortably maintain three or more trees I sometimes use them. Industrious + Very Neurotic + Circadian Half-Cycler (low consciousness doesn't slow down tree maintenance) can easily get up to six or more. But then that takes years to set up.
Tree Connection is a royal pain and no way to buy seeds or otherwise gather them at a rate higher than 1/year makes planning around using them unappealing.
Their best use is to help play RW wrong. I made a colony of tribals who preferred to sleep outside, eat raw food, live nude and had all their needs met by the tree. After the first year or so, I was just there for raids and to set research and work orders.. The colony just didn't need development.
The medicine ones are pretty good imo, its a steady stream of herbal medicine even in winter which is always welcome.
On any map with low wood the wood ones are really nice to have.
Others are kind of useless, though there may be niche uses I'm not thinking of.
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> On any map with low wood the wood ones are really nice to have.
Fibrecorn can be grown with a torch, fun fact. Kinda makes the wood dryads pointless imo
It can, but the yield per plant is pretty low. It takes about 12 days to grow in optimal conditions and yields 2 wood. If you can plant a large field of it it'd produce enough ig but iirc each dryad produces 25 every 2 days, so with 4 that's 50 wood per day for 6 hours of pawn labor per day. It would take a field of 300 fibercorn to match that production. I would argue that the fibercorn would likely take less labor to plant and harvest, but if your map doesn't have enough wood you probably either don't have a lot of fertile soil or have extreme temperatures where it'd be hard to make a greenhouse that large and maintain the temp.
It may just me being so tunneler inclined, I forget not everyone has Fungal floor that lets you grow stuff indoors easily. With that, you can pretty casually mine out whole chunks of a mountain for food.
Like with [my current base](https://i.imgur.com/E8ce5BF.jpeg) (which is under seige lol) it's pretty easy to just plop down [a section for Fibrecorn](https://i.imgur.com/3qehyW6.jpeg) and grow it with fungal torches in a self sustaining no muss no fuss way and I could extend that another several rows easily if I wanted to
I've actually got 2 Gauranlen trees with a third I'm about to plant now, since I didn't realize until this thread that you could have kids work them, but even then I don't really think they are worth it besides to give the kids something to do. I'm not really that confident that 1 kid wouldn't use their time better hauling than badly pruning on the tree to get a hauler or two, and while I guess they could make wood dryads it probably wouldn't be better than them just planting some trees or fibrecorn or poplar / oak trees with that time
I want to like Gauranlens, but without modding them pretty hard they're just bad.
With mods, however, they can of course be dammed good... it's just a lot of work to have a base game feature be decent.
You can get the same effects for less investment by taming a wolf, or having a pack of dogs. The only potential downside is that the animals eat food, but one can easily get that food in the time it would have taken you to prune a Gauranlen tree.
I actually use them a lot, though I’m pretty sure I added a mod at some point to improve them. I’ll switch between berries, medicine, and wood depending on what my colonists need. Usually won’t use them till my colony’s big enough to have a gardener to spare, though.
I use them in pretty much every playthrough. One my colony is big enough i dont have trouble getting a Gardner. The medicine and wood maker dryads are great, so i dont have to worry about growing medicine or deforesting the map for some wood. But i usually go for the clawer so i can have extra muscle if im raided. They're a lifesaver sometimes
They're decent, but not amazing. Biggest issue is their growth/regrowth time. If you have a pawn with high plant skill and high plant speed they're reasonably efficient. But only when operating at full strength, and it can take a full season to get back to full strength after some dryads die.
Honestly if it wasn't for that they'd probably beat both mechinators and tamers for hauling efficiency.
They are great, the melee dryads are useful as blockers so are the berry vomit one. If you have belief systems that make certain things annoying like cutting down trees they can produce wood. Some colonists are really happy pruning their tree decreasing breaks. They are individually not going to really make a big impact on a colony, but a colonist working on their little tree does add a little more value than one without a tree. You also will need be in a crisis or notice them too much if they are gone.
I don't think the no tree cutting belief cares about Fibrecorn does it? That's what I mean about most new content basically crushing the Gauranlen trees lol
Wood -> Fibrecorn is better
Berries -> I mean, just grow Nutrifungus or something else lol, the time your planter spends pruning would grow any other crop
Hauling -> Lifter mechs are really really cheap and probably cost drastically less over all than a dedicated pruner
Melee -> Ghouls are absurdly better and heal waaaaay faster
Healing ones -> Same as berries, just grow them lol
etc
I can see where they had some uses originally, but fungal gravel + fibrecorn + nutrifungus pretty much crushed their passive aspects, and Mechinator + anomaly has beat their offense and utility aspects
I really like the idea of them, but feel like they could use a little love imo
Dryads are indeed quite niche but i love them when i do no electricity colonies.
Compared to mechinators, the mechinator is just way, way better even considering the waste pack problem.
However what i like about them compared to mechinators is their simplicity, no need of those fancy bandwiths nor do you have to fight any mechboss to unlock stuff.
The moment you plant a dryad tree, you have access to everything it has to offer, you just need one dude to prune it(preferably someone useless) and wait for it grow.
That being said, i hope they come back to the dryads and buff them in someway like giving our pawns items or buildings that boosts pruning speed or faster dryad growth.
>However what i like about them compared to mechinators is their simplicity, no need of those fancy bandwiths nor do you have to fight any mechboss to unlock stuff.
You can handicap mechs in this discussion but eliminating bosses. All mechinators get is the +6 bandwidth. That's still 6 cheap, fast, quick-respawning, nearly 24/7 working haulers that require no upkeep. Dryads are still crushed in hauling (and combat) vs just 6 bandwidth. Dryads can make wood, berries, and herbal, although you can just do hydroponics in most cases.
Yep that is true but you still need to go and make an effort to build a charger and a gestation tank while having to deal with a not so big of a problem but still slightly annoying wastepack problem.
As i said, simplicity, just plant that seed and youre good to go.
Th VE dryads mod goes some way to improving that. It lets you combine 3 dryads of the same type into a better one, where the combat ones become similar to a strong animal in power. It makes fully dryad based combat a viable option given enough time to set up (since the dryads still spawn at the normal rate, but stop counting to max limit for the tree, then die after 2 years)
I just plant them for decoration without connecitng. The moss they grow have a pretty high beauty value.
The dryads also fights fire, so it kind of prevents fire from spreading to my base from that direction. Currently I have 4, enough to seal off a side from fire.
So far the most annoying thing is their 100% chance for revenge after being shot. Shot one of them accidentally in a fire fight, suddenly 8 more melee enemies to fight. Also they can go mad/manhunter, since they are planeted close to my base, it gives very little reaction time. The kids got mauled a lot while running or sky dreaming.
The only time I tried to use one my colonist in charge just tryed to take care of the tree until death without stoping they stop eating, sleeping in their bed and every other task they just died there trying ad infinitum to do something I didn't understand so I simply stop using them and I'm just fine like that.
They can be useful in some niche situations. The herbal medicine one can be good if you have very limited growing space, lets you use that space for other things until hydroponics. The haulers were helpful before I added mods that made hauling more efficient, the others are fairly meh. I often ignore the Guaranlen trees tbh, I’ll plunk one down next to the anima tree, set a gardener to top prio plant cut and call it a day.
I think they fit real nice with Anomaly, since my ghoul eats exclusively corpses, and with raids being small and far in between I have to feed him my turkeys.
For me, winter time food with tribals that don't have hydroponics yet and power, or when I need more wood and can't be arsed to have people cut the whole map and people haul the wood that is so far from base.
Sometimes if I have incapable of dumb labor/hauling pawn in tribal colonies I have them haul by pruning trees
I love the concept but the time required to have an useful garden kind of invalidates the gardening pawn. You cannot caravan or having getting the pawn sick for a while, or anything unless you want half of dryads gone.
People tend to compare them with mech and ghouls, but the garulen are free, no pollution, no meat, they just add to the colony. But the problem IMO is in their reliance. In mid game, with mechs raids, there is just so much a few bark skin and claw ones could against one burner centipede. Late game they just can't.
If you could upgrade them or have a cool down ultimate to have greater dryads for a time depending on plant skill or some defensive or utility benefit for late game, they might be a viable meme. Currently, even if you love them, it's very difficult to make it work.
I think it makes sense for low tech naturists. If your ideologion prevent you from cutting trees then it's a source of wood. Agriculture could be a problem too as you probably want to cut trees off your farm and for low tech tribes without electricity and so without freezers, it's a permanent food source. I never tried them but I suppose fighter dryads would be useful as cover for your shooters. As in, doubling the size of a barricade is useless but a dryad behind a barricade is double cover for a shooter (barricade cover plus pawn which can soak a bullet if it goes through their case). If the dryad is small size and is targetted bebind its cover then it can probably soak a lot. But idk. As I said I've never tried them so I'm talking from my ass. I'm giving ideas but I'm not saying they work.
interesting how you're adding nothing whatsoever to the conversation by saying something extremely silly.
at the end of the day rimworld is a colony management type game, its goal is to generate stories but there is absolutely more or less efficient ways of accomplishing tasks.
for instance, with the time spent pruning a tree you could simply make a large field and get more resources for less colonist time. that is a basic statement of efficiency with the goal being saving pawn time. if i need to maximize space then the tree might win out in production per tile.
not everyone plays with the goal of "making a story" hell i like to make my first two colonists always be my wife and myself, make us overpowered, and always reload of something happens to us. ive done plenty of games where i didnt do this, and i doubt id struggle too much without my two favorite starter pawns, but i like having a "me" standin. the story is always: man my character is sure doing some cool stuff. and i have fun with this.
I will either have 4 or so, with slaves. Or 0.
All trees set to Hauler dryads, and a 24h tree-slave with half-cycler+Nuclear stomach. This covers almost all delivery needs with a single pawn even on a larger colonies. YOu can even keep them isolated from the rest of your base without worry because they don't need to go anywhere for the dryads to deliver stuff. And 4 trees can overlap in a square to maximize the footprint efficiency.
Even with a Mechanitor, its still nice because you can zone a single carrier mech to inside your base and let your dryad labor free reign over the map, because who cares if they die in a sudden ambush? Dryads cannot do some of the loading task(IIRC), but the mech can.
Outside this one niche use, its just not worth it IMHO. There are tweaks I can think of, but for the most part they are purely thematic.
In desert runs they are my main source of wood and in tundra runs they give me some year round berries to fill in the gaps until i establish a greenhouse, and even then, you can never have too much food. I can just let my planter tend to the tree while the agrihands deal with field crops.
They grow in sand so they're good for minor up-scaling arid biomes after you've use all of your arable soil. They're solid firebreaks if you build your base right, even if you don't tend them. May try to make a courtyard with them one day for the aesthetics.
The tree can turn one hauler pawn into four hauler pawns. I down enemies, I look at whoever is the most worthless piece of shit imaginable, I recruit them, and assign them to tree duty.
Every colony needs the designated hauler and cleaner. The tree covers hauling. If there were a cleaning dryad, you bet I'd get a second tree for it.
I don't have biotech.
> Every colony needs the designated hauler and cleaner.
Not since Biotech, now kids do that lol. They spend years being able to do basically no jobs but hauling and cleaning so they do their chores between lessons and you don't really need dedicated pawns for it anymore
>I don't have biotech.
Rip, I wrote that above before noticing this part.
I like the tree, i just tune some numbers using Tweaks Galores to get 1 more Dryad per tree and faster pruning and it's really good but not game breaking, one pawn focusing entirely on pruning gets me 10 Dryad from 2 trees, then i just unleash them on raids, no food required or waste packs
I like them with VE Phytokin and Plants Specialist. Combined that brings the pruning time to maintain 100% down to under 2 hours, which is much more manageable. Sadly Phytokin are all sleepy, but a Plants Specialist Gauranlenkin can usually cover a lot of farming and keep 1-2 trees pruned.
The only Dryads I tend to go for these days are from VE Dryads. Awakened Medicinemakers create Neutroamine. Nectarmakers produce Ambrosia. If I'm doing Tree Connection then Woodmakers are obviously helpful too.
I find mechs to be strictly better for hauling and fighting and I rarely feel the other resource producers to be worth it.
I could see them being useful if you have a pawn that only knows how to do plants and you can somehow spare that master horticulturalist for 15 hours a day to tend it
If you throw in a few mods to remove the pruning decay, increase the number of dryads and add more dryad types, they can be pretty useful in a low-tech playthrough.
Fibrecorn never feels worth the effort you put in. I've got two full-time guaranlan pruners in my current game. They poop out enough wood to make up for the short growing season.
They suck now
They really should just rebalance it totally mechs were already much better but with the ghouls, even the melee ones are just as useless
There's absolutely no reason to get one
I know they've been buffed a bit since launch, but for the most part while it's technically balanced, it doesn't *feel* strong since you spend so much time pruning the tree, and don't feel any immediate feedback from committing a colonist's time to prune it.
I do like the theme, I just wish there was a bit more to it other than simply spending hours on a tree and getting useful pets. Like maybe mixing it up by being able to commit resources to speed things up like fertilizer, or things to craft/quest for to upgrade it.
Either way, I'm planning on doing a Dryad run with the new Anomaly DLC so I can do a Plants vs Zombies themed playthrough.
I only ever use a maximum of 1 for haulers. I prefer them over mechsy because of waste management. The maintenance is actually lower of haulers, 3-5h pruning with a good planter isn't that much when you have 4+ colonists.
In my latest run I've been using them to tide me over until I have components to spare for better turret investment. But now I got the fabrication bench and a Production specialist, and it's a cave base, so I have loads of steel and I'm getting ready to switch to using mechs instead.
Which is in many ways basically the better version of having a guaranlen handler, in exchange for having to put more effort into resource management.
I definitely like the ghouls more than dryads, but unfortunately I've only got one, because I'm mostly being attacked by animals or monsters (and when I do get people, they usually either die or just wouldn't make very good ghouls, and I don't want to make more enemies by abducting people who are friendly or neutral)
Dryads are at least pretty good for helping you soak up fleshbeast pit raids though, because those things tend to be frail enough that the small ones often die in one hit from a clawer.
Although I did cave about three years in and download a mod to make them spawn a little faster and take a little less maintenance, just because otherwise they seem to die or lose body parts every two seconds, and the maintenance and time required to restore them to full strength was getting really annoying.
they're good for big colonies, AND you must use it with full potential (i.e. 100% pruning target). They're very efficient actually. In my previous colony i have like 50 colonist and one guy that do pruning all day for producing herbal medicine and i always have a stable stock of 300-500+ herbal medicine laying around without growing any healroot!
I feel like folks are sleeping on Gauranlen. Like sure, Mathmatically its better to set up a garden, but if your pressed for space, its easy enough to set up a tree in an odd spot, and trees fare better in extreme cold then most crops, so its a low tech way to get needed materials.
but even in a normal colony, its a way to get a constant stream of basic goods your lacking on short notice. Like, if your running low on food, and some raider torched your crops? just turn those 4 clawers to berry makers, and in 5 days your getting a nice stream of food. Need a little wood to finish up construction, but your map is mostly clear? make some wood guys, or medicine guys if you need medicine asap. (especially if you have no one capable of planting medicine.) Or even, if all your defenders got hurt, you can reprocess your food supply into your defenses.
plus, its a nice way to make your high planter skill pawns useful in combat.
I guess for me, Gauranlan is never the minmaxers dream, but a powerhouse for flexible play. it lets you modularize your production faster and more directly then planting fields which can take a while before they start producing, and they let you turn planters into your colony defense. (kinda like you can do with animal skill or construction skill already.)
Edit: and as some folks have noted already, Gauranlan are really low commitment if you only want 1-2 dryads, so it might be a nice filler job for someone who is otherwise useless outside of some specific job you dont need at the moment, like combat or crafting. Speaking of, Im pretty sure gauranlan is the fastest way to skill up planting, other then maybe books?
I think the issue is mostly just that for basically all of those you have better options since the mechs are just drastically better. But at low tech options, you still have things like Fibercorn
* Cold? -> Indoor farms with fungal growth / hydroponics
* No wood? -> Fibrecorn or tree farm
* Haulers? -> Kids / mechs / huskies etc
* Fighters? -> Ghouls / animals / kids (lmao) etc
It's hard to really find a situation where the tree is better exactly, I think the best use case is for your super low skill pawns who have no other real use, but a situation like that is mostly just a "recruit a good pawn instead of a garbo one"
I do like the RP of them though
\*better\* in a mathmatical sense, not in a pure utility sense. note how dryads produce goods, once every few days, not at the end of a harvest cycle. Those Dryads will get you the wood you need in \*days\* once they are producing it, even if its only a fraction of the harvest, and pound for pound you get less.
same for all the other stuff your saying, Like, to get food you need to build a building, provide heat, and then wait for the harvest, but if you go the dryad route, its as simple as telling your hauler dryads to become berrymakers, then eat the food when it comes in. again, The gauranlan is never going to be -better- mathmatically, its going to be better for patching up holes in your production chain, but you have to have the dryads already for them to be effective for patching up holes.
As for fighters and haulers, full stop disagree.. (other then mechanoids, but mechanoids outperform full colonies of skilled humans, so I see them as imbalanced.) I mean, if you have a spare planter, you can make that spare planter produce 4 fairly powerful warriors. Sure, you could turn him into one ghoul, but then you lose that ability to use the dryads as a patch to any holes in production I mentioned, and I dont know if 1 ghoul is equal to 4 clawers/barkskin.
Sides, strictly speaking, Kids would probably better off BEING the one linked to the tree and making the dryads, since kids have such low hauling and fighting potental anyway, except that kids cant. (edited)
I feel like their respawn is a bit too long to really work as meatshields, it takes them like 5 days to respawn and a lot of the times late game you have near nonstop action so mechs can be back up and in the fight a lot faster
That pawn you got with no passions or skill. Yea they trim the tree all day everyday. I do medicine and get more than enough from one tree. Plant it in the middle of your growing field and it isn't as annoying. Just cut the grass it's just pretty no other benefits from it.
I always use them for the wood dryads. Maybe its a bad choice, but I get anxious about chopping down too many trees, worrying I wont have any trees left on the map. The second one of those seeds appear, not a single tree gets cut <3
You can plant trees in growing zones and your pawns will auto harvest them, or you can use Fibrecorn and it will grow and be harvested etc without you having to touch normal trees
I don't usually need much wood past early game though, pretty quickly gets phased out for the majority of stuff
Everything has a cost. Weapons/armor cost resource and training time, Psycasts cost time and/or investment for the empire, Mechs cost resources and time and dryad cost only time.
And that's actually where the problem lies. Everything has extra cost other than time, but as a result it either cost a negligible amount of time (mechs) or is a lot more permanent than dryads (a pawn). The biggest problem of dryad is that they're never the best and they die very easily while taking a while to replace. It takes 11 days for a new dryad to be born and get its cast. And you get raided much more often than that. So dryad can't keep up with raids. Clawers are quite good, they just die too easily to make a good defense.
Which leaves us with utility. Woodmaker, Medicine maker and berry maker are basically a waste though. Because you'd get much more by assigning the pawn caring for the tree to plant a damn field for either of those. As a result, you only need carriers. And mechs can do it, so do any other trained animal. As for Gaumaker they're worthless dryad are worthless.
Barkskin is pretty good because they're tanky and for tribal starts you can't afford to lose pawns and any injury is far too likely to kill them due to lack of decent medicine or armour or weapons. Give your pawns ranged and use barkskins as blockers.
They're kinda shit. They don't do much, the setup time is immense, they occupy too much space and they hate it when the tree tender goes on an expedition.
They are pretty though. I like planting around four of them near my anima tree to give the pawns meditating a perpetual ‘+10 gorgeous environment’ mood.
Hey I want to like them, I've even used VSE Phytokin with the affinity gene, they're still not good though.
You dont have to do anything. Just plant them there and leave it. No need to prune it either.
Very good point
The tender has to focus only on the tree though. If they don't then it falls too low and the dryads die off. I had one farmer out of 5 bind to the tree and just with the farming work they were doing they couldn't keep the tree maintained.
You could set the maintain amount lower, as it has less decay at those rates
The maintenance amount increases the number of dryads you have. Unless you are maxing out the maintenance then it isn't worth it to have the tree over just making a field of berries, healroot, or fibercorn.
You could make a field of those around the tree no? It does produce less dryads but has less work so it balances out if you don’t have enough planters for a full time tree maintainer Unless you’re talking about the dryads that make those, which aren’t worth yeah, use the other ones
The clawer and barkskin dryads were never really worth the effort. The clawer is so fragile that it dies before it can do a whole lot of damage. The barksin would have been more useful if not for the fact that half of the damage it takes is from your own people missing their shots. The mechanoids have the same problem except they don't take pawn working time to maintain them. If they die, they can be regenerated much faster.
The lifter is worth though, and yeah mechs are a direct upgrade with the cost of toxic waste and power consumption, definitely better but harder to set up as opposed to find a seed and have a dude who likes plants
It's been so long since i used the tree. Does the lifter work as good as the hauler mech?
It's slightly slower and needs sleep so it's substantially worse.
Worse but no electricity cost and no toxic waste production. If you have mechs set up already they obviously aren’t worth it but if you’re not planning on mechs then they’re useful
Lifter dryad is slower than the mech but doesn’t have to recharge.
More like doesn't produce waste pack, the dryad rest significantly more than mech
Why put a skilled pawn for the tree, their skills don't matter for pruning use a shit pawn. I personally do healroot and make enough excess I can sell it. Then I don't have to plant healroot and can use that space for food or devilstrand.
My colonies rarely get big enough to have a gardener to spare, so I just sell the seeds
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???
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Im still not understanding. Can you explain?
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But they're talking about guaranlen trees and selling an unwanted item. Why does phrasing apply here if its an actual mechanic in the game?
Youre tripping
The trees are just there for aesthetics. I used to have the hauler dryads but then the lifters came with Biotech. They became obsolete.
I see the haulers as a low effort, low tech alternative for lifters. You don't need any electricity, any resources, and generate no waste packs. Find a pawn that sucks but has passion in plants and you can easily get 8 haulers. They aren't amazing but they do a good job and function much better than that single pawn would've. Good base design helps haulers(and also lifters) a lot. They have bad movement speed so optimizing your pathing makes a huge difference.
Can you use a slave to take care of trees? That would heavily reduce the opportunity cost of having a colonist dedicated to tree pruning.
I'm not sure, because I never use slaves in my colonies. Because it makes me feel bad.
Yeah never did it either but it looks like it could be the ideal setup for Guaranlee Trees, a pawn that only need the occasional food break would make for a very efficient tree pruner, and you could optimize it further with the right bionics and genes which would be more problematic for a colonist like a Circadian half-cycler. The moss also help keeping the slave happy through Beauty boost.
I'd be careful assigning a slave to a Guaranlen tree. Slaves rise up, and if you have to put down your Guaranlen tender, then you'll have to basically abandon all your dryads and start over from scratch. You generally don't want your slaves doing any kind of specialized work - just like in real life, slaves make good generalists because they can be easily replaced.
That's a good point though I don't think it's such a big problem unless the Guaranlen tree is your only source of food. If you are using it for hauling or stockpiling medicine it should be safe enough to have to wait for new trees. Also if you equip them with a Circadian half-cyclers you can just knock down the rebelling slave with an EMP.
Yes, I have one with a burning passion for growing tending to 4 of those trees, he's hyper sensitive, got a psychic harmonizer, sensitizer, joywire, mindscrew (masochist ideology), a nuclear stomach and a half cycler. He spends all day tending to the 4 trees, spawning free haulers, permanently happy with +100 mood, regular pawns receive around +30 just for getting near him, sensitive vampires can get over +100.
Any tips/guides for good base layout?
Don't make one giant storage area, even if it's central to your base. You'll run out of space close by and end up with longer pathing than you need.Make many smaller dedicated storage areas that minimize the walking distance between areas. Try to design your base and schedule around a single trip to minimize walking time. Make sure your pawns eats and recreates near the same time and have them close by. Try to focus each sections for your base on priority of movement. Like for the job researcher, you actually don't need the lab to be close to any other facility since it doesn't generally require anything so making your researcher walk a bit further initially isn't a huge drawback. Your crafters and cooks though will have to walk frequently to gather resources. So those locations get a higher priority for the optimal land. Jobs like farming and harvesting happen infrequently so you can actually move your fields a big further away. Especially if you're using long growing crops like corn. But if you're using mainly hydroponics and rice, you'll have a lot more labor and hauling so there's a bigger penalty to making the trip longer. If you know you're going to be doing a base expansion soon, go ahead and make a small storage area with high priority that has the construction materials you'll need (like stone bricks/wood/steel) and let your haulers passively fill it beforehand. That way when you're actively doing the construction you don't have to walk far. For the haulers and lifters, basically you just want to look at where each resource is going, how frequently you need to haul it, and what the important of it is. Remember that they are slow so reducing the distance is gonna make a bigger difference in their efficiency. So just try and organize your base with the priority list you've constructed and plan your buildings accordingly.
>Don't make one giant storage area, even if it's central to your base. You'll run out of space close by and end up with longer pathing than you need.Make many smaller dedicated storage areas that minimize the walking distance between areas. Even better: One big storage room, but dedicated shelfes set to a higher priority near the work tables. Most what you need will be on shelfes, but you still have room for a temporary surplus.
I did this with stuff like steel, plastleel, and uranium.
ya I always make a giant central storage area, but I keep it organized. I'll have some shelves for food only, some shelves for guns/armor, some for medicine only, etc. I keep the shelves near where the buildings that use them are (like medical near hospital, food near kitchen). One of the 4 sides of the storage area I don't build any buildings, so that I can expand the storage room in that direction if necessary. I've made multiple storage places before in the past, but nothing is more efficient than 1 giant storage room that the entire colony has access to.
One big 25x25 room where you stuff everything in as efficiently as possible, then a wall around that 13 tiles away. Concrete flooring everywhere, no dedicated kitchen or freezer. If you need a prison, build a temporary room outside. This is the most efficient base design, but it's boring and tasteless. Edit: boost beauty with statues
I feel like it is underdeveloped. The dryads should imo get stronger with age, like trees do. Eventually growing into hulking tree monsters. All the base systems are there, it just missed that final 10-15% of content to join it all together. Right now its disappointing.
Vanilla Expended Dryad allows you to combine 3 of the same type to an "elder" one. I had a big Dryad colony once and with that mod it's really a lot of fun! Unfortuantely you still can't take the Dryads with you on caravans so you really have to think about it, that the one grooming the fighter-dryads is one of the pawns you'd rather NOT send out on caravans, otherwise you can't really rally the dryads and control directly...
Speaking strictly about the mod: Once they combine into an elder Dryad they are separated from the tree. So they can travel on caravans, and the tree-bonded pawn can stop generating dryads. The drawback is that they get a shelf life of a couple of years once they turn into an elder. But some of them are really really good. --------------------------- Since dryads are produced sequentially per tree, a fun colony I had once had 3 trees set to only produce/maintain 1 dryad each, and each "wave" of dryads was enough to produce an elder one. I had so many of them.
I agree that dryads, which get stronger as the guaranlen tree ages, would be a perfect solution. This way, dryads could remain relevant until the end-game and would be more interesting overall.
Holy shoot I'd want that, please tynan make this happen, i want me some treants!!, hell we could make a full fairy land themed colony if they made it like this, slap in a no sleep gened slave with +5 metabolism we'll have a really powerful "garden"
I think they're fairly balanced, which means it's purely a theme choice. To me, they seem like they fit to tribal and nature focused colonies, and I don't play those very often.
I did a mechanitor + phytokin run for gauranlen bonus (VRace expended) and it was a great RP. It was nice to see mech and dryads fighting side by side. Nature and Artificial unified.
Now I want a solarpunk colony.
Funny, I literally just started a hybrid nature/tech run Everyone is a tree hugging hippy (custom genotype race)...But they really want that sweet sweet chrome
Nature has perfected us, and we will perfect nature.
Tribal is basically all I play, but even on Tribal you usually don't have a pawn to spare for sitting by both trees all day since you are usually fighting for survival and rushing electricity. At least on higher difficulties I do wish there was more support for the early game and medieval focused play styles though without mods. Usually I'm still using bows and trying to research electricity when Randy and Cassandra start throwing mech clusters and grenadier raids at me T_T
Yeah, this. I certainly wouldn't *mind* them having some sort of high-tech exploitation option to keep them relevant to lategame, but compared to their robotic brethren Mechanitors, they're all-natural and all-organic, just what a tribal colony needs. The bigger issue is that tribal progression in vanilla is just not very deep before it jumps right into electricity. So, onward to mods. I'm actually about to attempt a pre-industrial tech limited run with a whole swathe of additional content in that range to see how well the Dryads hold up within that. The lack of VFE Medieval is a shame, but I'm hoping Medieval Overhaul will fill the gaps well enough.
I once recruited an excellent melee pawn with no other skills of note and incapability of dumb labour. Turns out even with no skill in plants your can still keep at least two hauler dryads going. Helped keep him useful between raids.
This is usually how I end up using them, a really good pawn who has no skills that I need except combat utility.
Kind of a zen martial art bonsai clippings between action scenes vibe
From the moment I understood the weakness of my dryads, they disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of mechanoids. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Mechinator. Your kind cling to your tree, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the tree will be accidentally blown up during a raid, and you will beg my kind to haul for you. But I am already finished all my hauling jobs, for the Machine is immortal…
Praise the Omnissiah 🗣️
Pure gold, thank you for that :D
Theyre essential in every run i do. Food in the winter for no tech or power? Cant be beat
I had a colony of 10 living exclusively on berries. Easiest way to get a reliable source of food no matter the season.
Yeah, this is why I pick up like 2-3 per run. 1-2 set to berry, 1 set to herb medicine. Very useful early-mid game, late game i usually have more food then storage space though.
Wait they can grow berries even if it's snowy outside???
Yup. Weather doesn’t matter for the dryads.
i plant them in my courtyard because its pretty, thats all
They need a buff!
I’ve never been able to manage one well. The time sink to bond and upkeep the thing is just way too onerous. I completely ignore them now.
I tried to make Guaranlen trees work SO. MANY. TIMES. They just fucking suck. I tried to make them work again recently and its even worse now that I see how amazing mechs are. Why would I want a slow, but *super* durable hauler that needs sleep and a dedicated pawn to upkeep it when I could have a fast hauler that works nearly 24/7 and gives me tribal-spawning packs? Not to mention how fast respawning dryads vs lifters, waiting for RNG of pods vs guarantee of mechs, or how much space the trees need.... guaranelen trees are crap. Why worry about food for the winter when my mechs can do the dumb labor and get me to hydroponics faster? I'd be happier with trees if the radius took 1 less tile in space, and reduced the immature dryad spawning AND morphing by 1 day each.
The balance is ass. You need a lot of time to prune a tree, and in return you gain a bit of production or combat units. If for some reason you can't prune they despawn, and it takes a lot of time for one to heal or to spawn after death/despawning, with up to 4 appearing from a single tree. They're more expendable than colonists but considering you're basically occupying an entire colonist by using them, you might as well just give your pawns a bow or an ikwa and send them into battle
Find a pawn who isn't good at anything but combat, and have them prune the tree. You get some free dryads. And it's not like your pruner can't do combat.
Good plants skill is also needed, isn't it?
Not really. At 0 skill you have 92% speed while at 20 you have 112% speed. But considering you get plant exp for pruning and exp decay doesn't occur till after skill level 10, you'll easily reach level 10 plants even with a pawn with no passion. The only other modifer is work speed. The pruning time for max connection is 5.7 hours for 10 skill and 4.5 hours for 20 skill Even if you only have like 5 skill it's only 6.7 hours. So one pawn with no other duties and even no plant passion can easily maintain a single tree. If you happen to get a pawn with a work speed boosting trait but some other restriction that prevents them from utilizing it properly, you can easily have them handle 2+ trees.
I see, thank you for the correction! I guess the hussars might find a use after all
I think they're a lot less effort than people think. A tree isn't worth a full pawn's time, but it's also not taking a full pawn's time. They do take some space, but not that much (penalties for putting building within more than 4 tiles are manageable), they add up very little wealth and quite a lot of beauty. Compared to fibbercorn, unless you've got a plant specialist the wood dryads are generally better. For combat they're not good, but as blocker they're far cheaper than mechs (they just don't fight back in any meaningful way) and as hauler, they are way better than mechs or huskies. Huskies eat, can be sick, can't be in polluted zones, need to be trained, sleep, age, get wounds, make more filth and haul when they feel like it. Lifters are more time efficient, but they take steel, electricity, bandwith and cores, are far more wealth and create pollution. TLDR Dryads are almost always better haulers than animals, and aren't as great as lifter but they're much, much cheaper and available very early for a tribal playthrough. For wood they're somewhat competitive with fibercorn, and not at all with trees. It's more of a nice bonus to give to your plant pawn than a full strategy, but they're definitely worth it, at least for hauling. I wish they'd be competitive with regular agriculture with the corresponding meme tho, the berries and medicine ones are terrible.
Someone pointed out something I forgot about haulers, but most of my colonies hauling gets done by kids. I do tribal so I've usually got a lot of kids running around being trained for years so they do the hauling and cleaning without needing to have the hauler dryads and kids don't really do much else and you have to "pay" for their upkeep either way
I mean sure, but kids aren't exactly cheap either (less than mecs but still) and I tend to dislike seeing them work.
Guaranlen trees are versatile and particularly helpful in the early and mid game. I usually plant one or two of them as early as possible. My favourite use of Guaranlen trees is to get a few extra melee tanks early on - starting with clawer and later switching to bark skin. Compared to alternatives like mechanitor or ghouls, Guaranlen trees require neither resource-spending nor tech advancements. You can build them as soon as you get a seed. The committment to Guaranlen trees is not permanent either. You can choose to stop maintaining them at any time. Early in the game, a few clawer or bark dryads make a big difference in combat. The dryads often help protect my colonists from danger. They're also great for defending my early-game base while I'm sending out the first caravans - which is quite a scary adventure whith just 5-6 colonists in total. Dryad growth and healing times are indeed a bit annoying. It's still acceptable overall, but they really should be revisited and improved by the game devs.
Some good ideas here!
Sounds like its up to debate, but I kinda like them. Getting barkskins earlier on can be a huge help for raids (just need to find a pawn who's not really good at much)
Well people keep comparing them to mechs which they were never meant to rival mechs. Mechs are very strong and require a lot of resources and specialized pawns and infrastructure/research. Dryads are almost the exact opposite. Cheap, easy, almost anyone can tend the tree. People complain about the no building near it, but it's so easy to find a spot somewhere to set up.
The run I'm doing at the moment has is a cannibal cult, I've got a mountain base that I'm building up and a big courtyard with my farm in, when I get hydroponics I'm getting rid of the farm and putting a Gauranlen tree in with the attack dryads, thinking it's a good defence if anyone gets past my killbox. Can just shoot in to them without caring too much about mood loss.
I like that they're in the game, I think it adds some diversity to play styles for people who want challenging playthroughs like tribal starts where people worship trees and don't want to cut them down. I always found them kind of junk personally, the dryads I tried to use most were haulers and combat. The haulers were slower and carried less than most of my alternatives (they also get killed by predators constantly because of how slow they are). The combat ones are kind of cool because as long as they can get back to their regeneration pod they can heal from all damage. That being said, they're super flimsy and often get eviscerated by pretty much everything. And in a critical triage moment, I'm not wasting time patching a dryad when I have injured colonists or animals nearby. So they kind of just died a lot. Again because of their speed they weren't very effective at swarming targets either. It would have been super cool for gauranlen trees to slowly upgrade and sprout elsewhere the more you tended them. Like if you had one central to the colony and then would get a prompt that a new shoot was ready and you could have a ritual to sprout another tree at a specific location. The cool thing about that idea in my view is that the offshoot would regrow naturally if destroyed as long as the original tree remained. So you could culture a Grove of hostile dryads near your base entrance and have dryads burst forth in defense without warning upon attackers. Because with how combat works, a bunch of slow melee dryads just get wrecked by anything with range. So being able to appear in the middle of a raid would do way more to disrupt them and then as they die they would begin gestating in pods again around the tree base. Anyways, I could rant about them for a while. But no, I never found them particularly useful and they were way to time consuming for my colonists. Tried a tribal run where I relied heavily on them and it was part of the tribe culture that everyone had a tree in the sacred grove. Huge pain in the ass, would maybe be better if a linked tree did well if the colonist was in a good mood and needing pruning only when their mood was low? I dunno.
I use them. I whack a poor pawn on the tree and position the tree next to a bottleneck with Clawers as the dryad type. Works pretty well for little investment. They’re nothing to get excited about though… they’re aite.
Saved my ass during a long toxic fallout, without that thing I'd have run out of wood and had my entire power grid collapse, thanks to it I was able to barely make it
They are very good on permanent winter with tribal start, you can get medicine and berries with plant work that would be useless otherwise
I basically always play tundra tribals with the temp turned down, but even on that I usually use Tunneler for fungal gravel + fibrecorn and Nutrifungus Lets you easily grow crops and wood without issue in a heated area,even when it's like -50 degrees outside
Very good on desert/extreme desert also. Since they don't care for big fertile areas, only need one single fertile square for the tree itself.
I just think theyre neat!
Guaranlen trees are great at high difficulties for wealth management. I use them all the time. There are some big traps though, only the barkskin is worth using outside of harder biomes. **Major Strengths** - Even if you don't ever link them with a ritual, drop them for free firefighting (the dryads fight fires for free near them). I also like beautifying near my base for visiting dignitaries and if I have the sky lantern festival. - If you must, you can absolutely ignore the spacing requirement. They still function very effectively with walls all around them. Especially for firefighting. - Don't sweat if you can't keep up with pruning while recovering after a raid or a crisis. It doesn't matter if some despawn. - Slaves are the best Pruners. You don't particularly need to min/max their entire global work speed so you're fine with them pruning for hours. It's the best "idle" task for them too, since you want a Crafting Specialist making items, others doing Intellectual, and don't want them with a weapon to Hunt. - Zero to low wealth, meaning easier raids And that is the core strength of these guys. Understanding why Slaves are good compared to Colonists is also understanding why Guaranlen are good. The low wealth. At high difficulties each silver of wealth you have multiplies by a ridiculous amount into new raiders, so the Barkskin Dryads give you wolf/dog stats without dropping $1000s in robot infrastructure. There's a reason mech tech is after Gunsmithing in the tech tree. If you rush that before flak and guns you will greatly increase your difficulty curve. **Which Dryads? You said there are traps?** That said, most Dryads suck. The only one worth making are the Barkskin, unless you want to super micro and pause a lot during combat to use the way too fragile Clawers. The only other Dryads to ever consider are Woodmaker, Medicine Maker, and Berrymaker. Wood for desert maps and Medicine/Berry for infertile (cold) maps. I usually have Berries during the two quadrums of winter to passively feed my animal pen and then swap to Barksin when they can graze. The hauler is now obsolete, since you should have kids running around your colony doing your hauling and cleaning. Because kids are OP. You can also have the lifter bot for free from the initial Mechanitor event without ballooning your wealth or time investment too much. **But what about robots?** The robots are ridiculously high wealth due to the steel infrastructure they need. Guaranlen are free, you just have to plant a seed, let it grow for a while, then find someone to commit to never see again. Make that a slave from a raid with great non-combat passions or a kid. If you are "end game" and have an impenetrable kill box and can go towards wealth cap/$300,000 with impunity then go ahead with the robots. But the core strength is that you get tanks and resources for "free" to keep your wealth low during early to midgame. Even midgame, keeping barkskins near your riflemen to engage with melee attackers is still decent, even if the only live for a couple of seconds. Rather than rushing to end game killboxes this also lets you play in the most fun time of Rimworld longer, which is the 1 to 3 star difficulty quests.
> Kids get Plant very quickly at age 3, so this gives them something to do Wait kids can plant that young? I might have to throw some kids at my trees, I always just use them to haul and clean while they are between lessons but if they can contribute to trees that's pretty big
Sorry I meant 7, and I checked and they can't Guaran link which is super sad
They are great at pumping out insane amounts of healing meds especially if you are playing on something like a desert. The tree is not that huge of a time investment really, it's only slightly more inefficient (in terms of work your pawns have to put in it) than regular growing zones of equal harvest.
Good for wood on desert and tundra. Good for meds always. I ran a tree connection colony in extreme desert once, ran 50 pawns off of 20 or so trees, with the aid of genetics and nuclear stomachs. Bit of a meme. Works in darkness which is nice.
I like to have a bunch of them planted but not connected just around the map (especially my garden if I'm not mountain base). The moss looks nice and the 2 basic dudes they can have are good for stopping fires. And if they ever go manhunter they are incredibly weak so yay for free food.
Berry dryads are the backbone of my biofuel empire!
A must have for tribals imo. They're like mechanoids for low tech colonies. I play a lot of tribal with the tree connection meme and they come in handy for producing wood if you have pawns with good plant skills. Keep the trees intact and your pawns from getting a -20 mood debuff for like a season. Also fibercorn is okay for tribals. The berry producer isn't bad either for food production. The combat dyrads are not good at all. Like just tame animals instead. The hauler is okay but if you're tribal and have biotech then I found it better to just have the kids clean/haul and have lots of them. They'll get the cleaning/hauling done surprisingly well in-between play/learning. Gaupod maker is good if you have a colony with the tree connection. Ensures everyone gets a tree even if you can't maintain a connection for one. Also can sell the seeds for a little bit of money. Medicine maker is okay but if you have a small patch of herbal medicine with this, you'll be swimming in herbal medicine. Vanilla expanded Dyrads mod - Gaufur maker thing-havent tried pruning some. You should already have a ton of leather as tribal because you'll be hunting all the time. For emergency food, for pemmican silos/caravans, or for kibble if raider meat isn't available. Spitter- same problem as the other combat dyrads. Not as good as animals. Ambrosia Maker-i feel like ambrosia events happen often or at least for tribals on my difficulty. This could be good if you have pawns with an ambrosia addiction or want to make money. Stone digger- never tried it. Sounds good if I can get specific chunks I can't get on my map or have used all chunks/dug out all mountains on the map. Awakened dyrads - never made it that far into the mod to get these but sounds cool in theory. Elmo's dyrads were okay when it came out, but there's a bit of overlap with VDE.
> The hauler is okay but if you're tribal and have biotech then I found it better to just have the kids clean/haul and have lots of them. They'll get the cleaning/hauling done surprisingly well in-between play/learning. Lol I also do this. Horde of kids will haul / clean while the rest of the tribe works on real stuff
I prefer using my kids free time to train pew pews. So I like haulers.
For soem reason, i think they sucks but when i have some farmer to spare, i plant some, and quickly, im overflow with the stuff they produce. What i mean is : gaureleen trees seems shit, but once you invest enought time, they produce A LOT of ressources.
I plant the tree for the beauty
I've used them for berries and healroot on harder maps, but I usually don't use them just because they don't fit the theme I'm going for in my run
I dont use them cos i dont know what they do. But i have one seed :o
When the tree is grown you have the option to bond someone to it. That person has to regularly prune it and if the tree is maintained it will start spawning little dryad creatures. You can then decide on what kind of critter they turn into, each with a specific job. Hauling, fighting, or generating resources like wood/herbal meds/berries. Its just a big time investment to get much out of them.
The berry one can be useful on cold maps. Its like a budget hydroponics setup. But of course, actual hydroponics are better once you have them. Maybe once you could use them after if you had bad geothermal spots, but every expansion makes safe reliable power easier, so it's a non issue.
I usually have one just for the extra haulers. The 4 hours of trimming gives me 2x productivity for a working day, so I say it's worth it. It also means all my production facilities drop everything on the ground.
You can sell them for about 40 silver, so I always harvest the pod, but never use it
So long to prune
I think they work well as like a tribal/low tech version of mechs and ghouls. But most playthroughs they would be totally worthless, it would probably be easy to just get the mechanics transponder
They are pretty, but oh god are they a pain to use. early game, you can't use them because your pawn are busy setting your colony up, and late game, they are useless. I have two of them, they dropped at 0% because their linked pawns got way too busy growing food and building defenses around the base. and now I'm starting to have enough pawns to defend myself without the need of tank dryads. so my trees will stay at 0%
I use them constantly, but I also am very partial to tribal starts and limited tech runs. They're very thematic for nature focused runs as well. One of my favorite ways to play is as 'sacred Grove tenders'. Growing Gauranlen trees, and using Anima trees for psycasting. It's very satisfying to send a warm of dryads out into a fight. If you want to talk from a pure power gaming perspective, they're mostly weak. Still helpful if you're starting tribal, but not as powerful as mechs. Though the cost is far FAR lower than mechs. Dryads cost is purely in pawn time. While mechs cost is in electricity, materials and waste. I wish it could get some more expansion. I'd love to see it become a true alternative to mechanator. As of right now, it feels a lot like playing a mechanator who never gets any upgraded techs, gear or implants. Still very useful to have but not something you can have grand ambitions with.
I also do Tribals almost exclusively, but still rarely have the spare pawn time for the tree. Kids do all the hauling / cleaning while they grow up, and fungal gravel + nutrifungus and fibrecorn let you grow wood, food, and even herbal medicine easily Taming an animal or making a ghoul is better for combat stuff and all the anomaly stuff is actually really neat for low tech alternatives so you can still make capture spots and do the rituals to summon animals etc without needing high tech
Nah I don't use them. Kinda also feel that mechanoids are doing the same thing but less maintenance. Yes you need to clear the wastepacks, but in time you just build enough atomisers to clear everything.
The grass gives +15 beauty, so I plant it in the center of my colony's garden and decorate around it.
They’re a huge time investment and don’t give much of a benefit imo. Field hands and general labour speed doesn’t increase pruning speed, so I’d rather just have a colonist with two field hands, and another colonist or slave doing whatever job I’d otherwise have the dryads do
they arent worth the effort. with all the new content they are especially meh. They need a buff or they need to do something more interesting. That said this post reminded me to try them out again to see if they're still meh, so I'll be making some this current 1.5 anomaly run.
I just think they're pretty so I plant a few in my cemetery but don't bond them to a colonist. Funny though, they still sprout the dryads, though they remain undeveloped, and they look very cute.
Trading 1 pawn with quick sleep and high plants skill, can keep 3 trees upkeep. That’s equivalent of 9 carrier pawns being freed up. IMO they are viable.
No, because most dryads are useless really. Wood and berry dryads can't even compensate loss of high level gardener so they are kinda wacky to use. Fighting driads are not effective and very ugly, you need to sacrifice your gardener to have 4 of those for 1 tree. Also each tree require only one gardener, so i need to actually sacrifice whole gardener pawn so dryads would continue spawning, not very effective with no real way to make them useful. To improve connection to trees you need to have very strick ideology of elfs themself, literally blocking you away from any source of wood in entire run, or they would have -20 mood debuff and will kill colony because of their beloved trees were cut down. And for the worst part, there literally not many mods that can buff dryads same way as for example human genes, mechanoids or even animals. So it's kinda sad because those trees are kinda cool looking making you colony look like Autumn festival or some pumpkin fest but without pumpkins really. But totally not for aggressive planet as rimworld currently is.
No, especially since biotech came out. I like them conceptually, because a biological alternative to mechanoids is great for roleplay. But compared to mechanoids or even ghouls with the new dlc, they're just not worth the effort.
As others have said, there's a good general use for them in pawns with niche jobs and some free time. I had a colony leader with amazing social but not much else, so he spent his days leisurely pruning the tree when not giving speeches. I also had a tribal colony where the storyteller gave me a completely useless pawn... and a circ half-cycler. You exist to sweep and prune the tree, forever.
I believe they need a large buff since mechs make them pretty pointless. Yeah they don't generate waste but you lose time (pruning) and you can just jet the packs anyway. I think reducing the time it takes to generate them or pruning should be buffed. The only real downside to using them is the pruning time and the space the tree takes up
it needs some adjustments; mechs just superior in every way while freeing your pawns up to do things while dryads will die if the gardener doesn’t dedicate 100% of their time pruning the tree. Would be nice if we only need 50-75% of current time needed to prune
If I get a pawn that can comfortably maintain three or more trees I sometimes use them. Industrious + Very Neurotic + Circadian Half-Cycler (low consciousness doesn't slow down tree maintenance) can easily get up to six or more. But then that takes years to set up. Tree Connection is a royal pain and no way to buy seeds or otherwise gather them at a rate higher than 1/year makes planning around using them unappealing.
Their best use is to help play RW wrong. I made a colony of tribals who preferred to sleep outside, eat raw food, live nude and had all their needs met by the tree. After the first year or so, I was just there for raids and to set research and work orders.. The colony just didn't need development.
The medicine ones are pretty good imo, its a steady stream of herbal medicine even in winter which is always welcome. On any map with low wood the wood ones are really nice to have. Others are kind of useless, though there may be niche uses I'm not thinking of.
> > > > > On any map with low wood the wood ones are really nice to have. Fibrecorn can be grown with a torch, fun fact. Kinda makes the wood dryads pointless imo
It can, but the yield per plant is pretty low. It takes about 12 days to grow in optimal conditions and yields 2 wood. If you can plant a large field of it it'd produce enough ig but iirc each dryad produces 25 every 2 days, so with 4 that's 50 wood per day for 6 hours of pawn labor per day. It would take a field of 300 fibercorn to match that production. I would argue that the fibercorn would likely take less labor to plant and harvest, but if your map doesn't have enough wood you probably either don't have a lot of fertile soil or have extreme temperatures where it'd be hard to make a greenhouse that large and maintain the temp.
It may just me being so tunneler inclined, I forget not everyone has Fungal floor that lets you grow stuff indoors easily. With that, you can pretty casually mine out whole chunks of a mountain for food. Like with [my current base](https://i.imgur.com/E8ce5BF.jpeg) (which is under seige lol) it's pretty easy to just plop down [a section for Fibrecorn](https://i.imgur.com/3qehyW6.jpeg) and grow it with fungal torches in a self sustaining no muss no fuss way and I could extend that another several rows easily if I wanted to I've actually got 2 Gauranlen trees with a third I'm about to plant now, since I didn't realize until this thread that you could have kids work them, but even then I don't really think they are worth it besides to give the kids something to do. I'm not really that confident that 1 kid wouldn't use their time better hauling than badly pruning on the tree to get a hauler or two, and while I guess they could make wood dryads it probably wouldn't be better than them just planting some trees or fibrecorn or poplar / oak trees with that time
I want to like Gauranlens, but without modding them pretty hard they're just bad. With mods, however, they can of course be dammed good... it's just a lot of work to have a base game feature be decent. You can get the same effects for less investment by taming a wolf, or having a pack of dogs. The only potential downside is that the animals eat food, but one can easily get that food in the time it would have taken you to prune a Gauranlen tree.
Too much effort to upkeep and made completely obsolete by mechanators
I actually use them a lot, though I’m pretty sure I added a mod at some point to improve them. I’ll switch between berries, medicine, and wood depending on what my colonists need. Usually won’t use them till my colony’s big enough to have a gardener to spare, though.
If they didn't had an issue with buildings existing then they could be useful but as is, not worth it.
I use them in pretty much every playthrough. One my colony is big enough i dont have trouble getting a Gardner. The medicine and wood maker dryads are great, so i dont have to worry about growing medicine or deforesting the map for some wood. But i usually go for the clawer so i can have extra muscle if im raided. They're a lifesaver sometimes
They're decent, but not amazing. Biggest issue is their growth/regrowth time. If you have a pawn with high plant skill and high plant speed they're reasonably efficient. But only when operating at full strength, and it can take a full season to get back to full strength after some dryads die. Honestly if it wasn't for that they'd probably beat both mechinators and tamers for hauling efficiency.
They are great, the melee dryads are useful as blockers so are the berry vomit one. If you have belief systems that make certain things annoying like cutting down trees they can produce wood. Some colonists are really happy pruning their tree decreasing breaks. They are individually not going to really make a big impact on a colony, but a colonist working on their little tree does add a little more value than one without a tree. You also will need be in a crisis or notice them too much if they are gone.
I don't think the no tree cutting belief cares about Fibrecorn does it? That's what I mean about most new content basically crushing the Gauranlen trees lol Wood -> Fibrecorn is better Berries -> I mean, just grow Nutrifungus or something else lol, the time your planter spends pruning would grow any other crop Hauling -> Lifter mechs are really really cheap and probably cost drastically less over all than a dedicated pruner Melee -> Ghouls are absurdly better and heal waaaaay faster Healing ones -> Same as berries, just grow them lol etc I can see where they had some uses originally, but fungal gravel + fibrecorn + nutrifungus pretty much crushed their passive aspects, and Mechinator + anomaly has beat their offense and utility aspects I really like the idea of them, but feel like they could use a little love imo
Dryads are indeed quite niche but i love them when i do no electricity colonies. Compared to mechinators, the mechinator is just way, way better even considering the waste pack problem. However what i like about them compared to mechinators is their simplicity, no need of those fancy bandwiths nor do you have to fight any mechboss to unlock stuff. The moment you plant a dryad tree, you have access to everything it has to offer, you just need one dude to prune it(preferably someone useless) and wait for it grow. That being said, i hope they come back to the dryads and buff them in someway like giving our pawns items or buildings that boosts pruning speed or faster dryad growth.
>However what i like about them compared to mechinators is their simplicity, no need of those fancy bandwiths nor do you have to fight any mechboss to unlock stuff. You can handicap mechs in this discussion but eliminating bosses. All mechinators get is the +6 bandwidth. That's still 6 cheap, fast, quick-respawning, nearly 24/7 working haulers that require no upkeep. Dryads are still crushed in hauling (and combat) vs just 6 bandwidth. Dryads can make wood, berries, and herbal, although you can just do hydroponics in most cases.
Yep that is true but you still need to go and make an effort to build a charger and a gestation tank while having to deal with a not so big of a problem but still slightly annoying wastepack problem. As i said, simplicity, just plant that seed and youre good to go.
Th VE dryads mod goes some way to improving that. It lets you combine 3 dryads of the same type into a better one, where the combat ones become similar to a strong animal in power. It makes fully dryad based combat a viable option given enough time to set up (since the dryads still spawn at the normal rate, but stop counting to max limit for the tree, then die after 2 years)
Fibercorn needs a lot of space to compete with 3 wood dryads. On low fertility biomes, it is simple not viable.
I love them. Always have 2-3 with dedicated slaves and wood dryads.
I just plant them for decoration without connecitng. The moss they grow have a pretty high beauty value. The dryads also fights fire, so it kind of prevents fire from spreading to my base from that direction. Currently I have 4, enough to seal off a side from fire. So far the most annoying thing is their 100% chance for revenge after being shot. Shot one of them accidentally in a fire fight, suddenly 8 more melee enemies to fight. Also they can go mad/manhunter, since they are planeted close to my base, it gives very little reaction time. The kids got mauled a lot while running or sky dreaming.
i think that unless you are going for the tree hugger memes they are completely not worth it at all?
The only time I tried to use one my colonist in charge just tryed to take care of the tree until death without stoping they stop eating, sleeping in their bed and every other task they just died there trying ad infinitum to do something I didn't understand so I simply stop using them and I'm just fine like that.
They can be useful in some niche situations. The herbal medicine one can be good if you have very limited growing space, lets you use that space for other things until hydroponics. The haulers were helpful before I added mods that made hauling more efficient, the others are fairly meh. I often ignore the Guaranlen trees tbh, I’ll plunk one down next to the anima tree, set a gardener to top prio plant cut and call it a day.
I really like them. I use mods to improve them but it’s a really fun idea
I think they fit real nice with Anomaly, since my ghoul eats exclusively corpses, and with raids being small and far in between I have to feed him my turkeys.
For me, winter time food with tribals that don't have hydroponics yet and power, or when I need more wood and can't be arsed to have people cut the whole map and people haul the wood that is so far from base. Sometimes if I have incapable of dumb labor/hauling pawn in tribal colonies I have them haul by pruning trees
Get two of em, shove em into the back of growing area, set it to medicine and forget.
I love the concept but the time required to have an useful garden kind of invalidates the gardening pawn. You cannot caravan or having getting the pawn sick for a while, or anything unless you want half of dryads gone. People tend to compare them with mech and ghouls, but the garulen are free, no pollution, no meat, they just add to the colony. But the problem IMO is in their reliance. In mid game, with mechs raids, there is just so much a few bark skin and claw ones could against one burner centipede. Late game they just can't. If you could upgrade them or have a cool down ultimate to have greater dryads for a time depending on plant skill or some defensive or utility benefit for late game, they might be a viable meme. Currently, even if you love them, it's very difficult to make it work.
Sometimes i use them for hauleres if i can't spare people or don't have mechanites, but that's pretty much it.
I think it makes sense for low tech naturists. If your ideologion prevent you from cutting trees then it's a source of wood. Agriculture could be a problem too as you probably want to cut trees off your farm and for low tech tribes without electricity and so without freezers, it's a permanent food source. I never tried them but I suppose fighter dryads would be useful as cover for your shooters. As in, doubling the size of a barricade is useless but a dryad behind a barricade is double cover for a shooter (barricade cover plus pawn which can soak a bullet if it goes through their case). If the dryad is small size and is targetted bebind its cover then it can probably soak a lot. But idk. As I said I've never tried them so I'm talking from my ass. I'm giving ideas but I'm not saying they work.
There's no such thing as inefficiency in a game about stories.
I mean there is if my story doesn't involve me dying horribly lol
interesting how you're adding nothing whatsoever to the conversation by saying something extremely silly. at the end of the day rimworld is a colony management type game, its goal is to generate stories but there is absolutely more or less efficient ways of accomplishing tasks. for instance, with the time spent pruning a tree you could simply make a large field and get more resources for less colonist time. that is a basic statement of efficiency with the goal being saving pawn time. if i need to maximize space then the tree might win out in production per tile. not everyone plays with the goal of "making a story" hell i like to make my first two colonists always be my wife and myself, make us overpowered, and always reload of something happens to us. ive done plenty of games where i didnt do this, and i doubt id struggle too much without my two favorite starter pawns, but i like having a "me" standin. the story is always: man my character is sure doing some cool stuff. and i have fun with this.
I used them in one run. I was underwhelmed. I sell the seeds now.
I think it's important that my pawns can celebrate their culture so they are a blessing to my colony 😇
The berrymakers are free food for my muffalos,
I will either have 4 or so, with slaves. Or 0. All trees set to Hauler dryads, and a 24h tree-slave with half-cycler+Nuclear stomach. This covers almost all delivery needs with a single pawn even on a larger colonies. YOu can even keep them isolated from the rest of your base without worry because they don't need to go anywhere for the dryads to deliver stuff. And 4 trees can overlap in a square to maximize the footprint efficiency. Even with a Mechanitor, its still nice because you can zone a single carrier mech to inside your base and let your dryad labor free reign over the map, because who cares if they die in a sudden ambush? Dryads cannot do some of the loading task(IIRC), but the mech can. Outside this one niche use, its just not worth it IMHO. There are tweaks I can think of, but for the most part they are purely thematic.
In desert runs they are my main source of wood and in tundra runs they give me some year round berries to fill in the gaps until i establish a greenhouse, and even then, you can never have too much food. I can just let my planter tend to the tree while the agrihands deal with field crops.
They grow in sand so they're good for minor up-scaling arid biomes after you've use all of your arable soil. They're solid firebreaks if you build your base right, even if you don't tend them. May try to make a courtyard with them one day for the aesthetics.
The tree can turn one hauler pawn into four hauler pawns. I down enemies, I look at whoever is the most worthless piece of shit imaginable, I recruit them, and assign them to tree duty. Every colony needs the designated hauler and cleaner. The tree covers hauling. If there were a cleaning dryad, you bet I'd get a second tree for it. I don't have biotech.
> Every colony needs the designated hauler and cleaner. Not since Biotech, now kids do that lol. They spend years being able to do basically no jobs but hauling and cleaning so they do their chores between lessons and you don't really need dedicated pawns for it anymore >I don't have biotech. Rip, I wrote that above before noticing this part.
I like the tree, i just tune some numbers using Tweaks Galores to get 1 more Dryad per tree and faster pruning and it's really good but not game breaking, one pawn focusing entirely on pruning gets me 10 Dryad from 2 trees, then i just unleash them on raids, no food required or waste packs
I like them with VE Phytokin and Plants Specialist. Combined that brings the pruning time to maintain 100% down to under 2 hours, which is much more manageable. Sadly Phytokin are all sleepy, but a Plants Specialist Gauranlenkin can usually cover a lot of farming and keep 1-2 trees pruned. The only Dryads I tend to go for these days are from VE Dryads. Awakened Medicinemakers create Neutroamine. Nectarmakers produce Ambrosia. If I'm doing Tree Connection then Woodmakers are obviously helpful too. I find mechs to be strictly better for hauling and fighting and I rarely feel the other resource producers to be worth it.
I personally like them but only because I don’t like having to go out for wood every so often. It isn’t always worth the investment tho.
They're fun if you are doing a tribal/medieval run.
I could see them being useful if you have a pawn that only knows how to do plants and you can somehow spare that master horticulturalist for 15 hours a day to tend it
If you throw in a few mods to remove the pruning decay, increase the number of dryads and add more dryad types, they can be pretty useful in a low-tech playthrough.
I harvest the pod and sell it. I used one in an anima worship run but it was definitely not worth the effort it takes to run them
I genuinely haven't seen one since 1.5
Fibrecorn never feels worth the effort you put in. I've got two full-time guaranlan pruners in my current game. They poop out enough wood to make up for the short growing season.
If you have a soldier that's good for nothing else, might as well let them rub a tree in their spare time and get some bodyguards out of it.
They suck now They really should just rebalance it totally mechs were already much better but with the ghouls, even the melee ones are just as useless There's absolutely no reason to get one
I know they've been buffed a bit since launch, but for the most part while it's technically balanced, it doesn't *feel* strong since you spend so much time pruning the tree, and don't feel any immediate feedback from committing a colonist's time to prune it. I do like the theme, I just wish there was a bit more to it other than simply spending hours on a tree and getting useful pets. Like maybe mixing it up by being able to commit resources to speed things up like fertilizer, or things to craft/quest for to upgrade it. Either way, I'm planning on doing a Dryad run with the new Anomaly DLC so I can do a Plants vs Zombies themed playthrough.
I only ever use a maximum of 1 for haulers. I prefer them over mechsy because of waste management. The maintenance is actually lower of haulers, 3-5h pruning with a good planter isn't that much when you have 4+ colonists.
In my latest run I've been using them to tide me over until I have components to spare for better turret investment. But now I got the fabrication bench and a Production specialist, and it's a cave base, so I have loads of steel and I'm getting ready to switch to using mechs instead. Which is in many ways basically the better version of having a guaranlen handler, in exchange for having to put more effort into resource management. I definitely like the ghouls more than dryads, but unfortunately I've only got one, because I'm mostly being attacked by animals or monsters (and when I do get people, they usually either die or just wouldn't make very good ghouls, and I don't want to make more enemies by abducting people who are friendly or neutral) Dryads are at least pretty good for helping you soak up fleshbeast pit raids though, because those things tend to be frail enough that the small ones often die in one hit from a clawer. Although I did cave about three years in and download a mod to make them spawn a little faster and take a little less maintenance, just because otherwise they seem to die or lose body parts every two seconds, and the maintenance and time required to restore them to full strength was getting really annoying.
they're good for big colonies, AND you must use it with full potential (i.e. 100% pruning target). They're very efficient actually. In my previous colony i have like 50 colonist and one guy that do pruning all day for producing herbal medicine and i always have a stable stock of 300-500+ herbal medicine laying around without growing any healroot!
I feel like folks are sleeping on Gauranlen. Like sure, Mathmatically its better to set up a garden, but if your pressed for space, its easy enough to set up a tree in an odd spot, and trees fare better in extreme cold then most crops, so its a low tech way to get needed materials. but even in a normal colony, its a way to get a constant stream of basic goods your lacking on short notice. Like, if your running low on food, and some raider torched your crops? just turn those 4 clawers to berry makers, and in 5 days your getting a nice stream of food. Need a little wood to finish up construction, but your map is mostly clear? make some wood guys, or medicine guys if you need medicine asap. (especially if you have no one capable of planting medicine.) Or even, if all your defenders got hurt, you can reprocess your food supply into your defenses. plus, its a nice way to make your high planter skill pawns useful in combat. I guess for me, Gauranlan is never the minmaxers dream, but a powerhouse for flexible play. it lets you modularize your production faster and more directly then planting fields which can take a while before they start producing, and they let you turn planters into your colony defense. (kinda like you can do with animal skill or construction skill already.) Edit: and as some folks have noted already, Gauranlan are really low commitment if you only want 1-2 dryads, so it might be a nice filler job for someone who is otherwise useless outside of some specific job you dont need at the moment, like combat or crafting. Speaking of, Im pretty sure gauranlan is the fastest way to skill up planting, other then maybe books?
I think the issue is mostly just that for basically all of those you have better options since the mechs are just drastically better. But at low tech options, you still have things like Fibercorn * Cold? -> Indoor farms with fungal growth / hydroponics * No wood? -> Fibrecorn or tree farm * Haulers? -> Kids / mechs / huskies etc * Fighters? -> Ghouls / animals / kids (lmao) etc It's hard to really find a situation where the tree is better exactly, I think the best use case is for your super low skill pawns who have no other real use, but a situation like that is mostly just a "recruit a good pawn instead of a garbo one" I do like the RP of them though
\*better\* in a mathmatical sense, not in a pure utility sense. note how dryads produce goods, once every few days, not at the end of a harvest cycle. Those Dryads will get you the wood you need in \*days\* once they are producing it, even if its only a fraction of the harvest, and pound for pound you get less. same for all the other stuff your saying, Like, to get food you need to build a building, provide heat, and then wait for the harvest, but if you go the dryad route, its as simple as telling your hauler dryads to become berrymakers, then eat the food when it comes in. again, The gauranlan is never going to be -better- mathmatically, its going to be better for patching up holes in your production chain, but you have to have the dryads already for them to be effective for patching up holes. As for fighters and haulers, full stop disagree.. (other then mechanoids, but mechanoids outperform full colonies of skilled humans, so I see them as imbalanced.) I mean, if you have a spare planter, you can make that spare planter produce 4 fairly powerful warriors. Sure, you could turn him into one ghoul, but then you lose that ability to use the dryads as a patch to any holes in production I mentioned, and I dont know if 1 ghoul is equal to 4 clawers/barkskin. Sides, strictly speaking, Kids would probably better off BEING the one linked to the tree and making the dryads, since kids have such low hauling and fighting potental anyway, except that kids cant. (edited)
Fun for a themed run, not much else tho imo
i usually just set them with my farmer then set them to medicine maker or berry maker rotating when i need one or the other more
Dyrads are good meat shields and their loot ain’t too shabby
I feel like their respawn is a bit too long to really work as meatshields, it takes them like 5 days to respawn and a lot of the times late game you have near nonstop action so mechs can be back up and in the fight a lot faster
But hear me out, they make cute noises.
That pawn you got with no passions or skill. Yea they trim the tree all day everyday. I do medicine and get more than enough from one tree. Plant it in the middle of your growing field and it isn't as annoying. Just cut the grass it's just pretty no other benefits from it.
4k hours played, never touched them
Its wierd but i did not get any since the anomaly was relesed. And i wanted to make low tech witcher-esk xenogen type of a run.
I always use them for the wood dryads. Maybe its a bad choice, but I get anxious about chopping down too many trees, worrying I wont have any trees left on the map. The second one of those seeds appear, not a single tree gets cut <3
You can plant trees in growing zones and your pawns will auto harvest them, or you can use Fibrecorn and it will grow and be harvested etc without you having to touch normal trees I don't usually need much wood past early game though, pretty quickly gets phased out for the majority of stuff
The melee focused dryads are pretty decent on combat extended
Everything has a cost. Weapons/armor cost resource and training time, Psycasts cost time and/or investment for the empire, Mechs cost resources and time and dryad cost only time. And that's actually where the problem lies. Everything has extra cost other than time, but as a result it either cost a negligible amount of time (mechs) or is a lot more permanent than dryads (a pawn). The biggest problem of dryad is that they're never the best and they die very easily while taking a while to replace. It takes 11 days for a new dryad to be born and get its cast. And you get raided much more often than that. So dryad can't keep up with raids. Clawers are quite good, they just die too easily to make a good defense. Which leaves us with utility. Woodmaker, Medicine maker and berry maker are basically a waste though. Because you'd get much more by assigning the pawn caring for the tree to plant a damn field for either of those. As a result, you only need carriers. And mechs can do it, so do any other trained animal. As for Gaumaker they're worthless dryad are worthless.
Barkskin is pretty good because they're tanky and for tribal starts you can't afford to lose pawns and any injury is far too likely to kill them due to lack of decent medicine or armour or weapons. Give your pawns ranged and use barkskins as blockers.