Gypsy Companions
Add a small bit of equipment at the beginning.
Works well with the other mod, Gypsy Leaf.
What it does
Creates a ship's chest and places it next to the crashed ship. Adds some inventory to the chest.
- 20 Construction robots
- 1 Survey suit
The Survey suit is something designed for doing planetary surveys, not for combat. It has some minimal equipment so that construction robots can be used, and that equipment is non-removable. The suit does filter out most poisons - something useful on alien planets, and pointless as protection against the biters of Nauvis.
Why
Part one, the real reason, is that the absolute beginning gets very tedious for me after the first 50 games. I do understand the reasoning for having it there, and for the first few games I even agree with it. I am not a speedrunner, yet even I find the chopping a couple hundred trees and mining a bunch of coal rocks boring eventually. The bots can handle that, and not really save much time. The early bots are slow and only carry limited amounts so waiting for them to bring in the wood, stone and coal, as well as the constant recharging, ends up saving very little time.
Part two, the 'logic', is that the ship crashed. It didn't burn up on reentry, or shatter into scrap metal on impact. It lost a few parts, and got rather bent out of shape, yet it is there to see. The ship has to have something survive the crash besides one soft-skin engineer. A score of bots and a planetary survey suit, which the engineer probably should have been wearing before the crash, seems well within reason.
With the limited use of the survey suit as 'armor' and the equipment being locked into the grid, the player will have to make strategic choices about upgrading their armor options with Military science pack research. The survey suit is good for building and worthless when the biters show up.
Part three, the practicalities, is that I like making reasonably tight builds. I can do this by hand well enough, yet the occasionally missed turning of a belt, or twist of an inserter can scramble the works. Bots just do it better. After all, they are the drones, I'm the engineer. I design, they build. The down side is that there are only 20 bots and until the research gets that far, there is no way to replace them. If they get destroyed in a biter battle, they're just gone.
Usage
Download the mod from the portal. Turn it on. Done. At the start of a new game everything will be done for you. There are no settings or options to deal with. If added to an existing save nothing happens. No Survey suit, no bots, no chest.
Removal
If removed from an existing save where it has had an effect, the Survey suit is removed, leaving the engineeer without armor, though there's no lost inventory slots, as it has none. The chest will reamin, reverting to normal chest behavior; minable and destructable. The bots will remain, though the ability to use them held in the Survey suit will be gone.
Issues
I don't play in multiplayer so there is no way for me to test this in that environment. I don't know if each player would get armor or how it would handle multiple identical commands to create a chest and add inventory to it. Best bet, don't do that.
AI Usage
None.
Contact
Ideas and suggestions can be handled on Discord https://discord.gg/Ud2Mg2akcC.