Colonial Shuttle

This mod will allow you to build shuttles, powered by the Vehicle Framework.

🔹Lean. The mod is balanced around what’s already available in the base game, on purpose—no existing building, item or an in-game mechanic will become entirely obsolete once you start using colonial shuttles. For instance, transport pods will remain more fuel-efficient.

🔹Straightforward upgrade options. More armor/cargo/passengers, a grenade launcher and an on-board subpersona that requires Biotech. Since you’ll be trading cargo capacity for upgrades, keep in mind that shuttles can’t fly with no available cargo capacity.

🔹Dynamic fuel consumption. The more cargo/passengers the shuttle is carrying, the higher is its chemfuel consumption, and vice versa, down to a minimum.

🔹Support for patterns and skins.

🔹Prisoners need to be arrested before you can use the “Load Pawn” gizmo on them. Add [RH2] CPERS: Arrest Here! to your mod list, so that you can arrest downed enemies without building a prison beforehand.

🔹Mechanoids can also be boarded via the “Load Pawn” gizmo. Biotech integration is basic, but it’s on the to-do list on the Vehicle Framework’s end.

🔹Dynamic fuel consumption means you have to prepare for trips. I’ll be implementing a better UI to decrease a cognitive load when dealing with this feature. Here’re some tips:

  🔸Take the amount of chemfuel equal to your shuttle’s current capacity every time you install an upgrade that increases the chemfuel consumption. Refuel en route if necessary.

  🔸If you prefer to be very specific, do some math (the author of this mod never does this and thinks it’s largely unnecessary, but it is an option):

1. For the purposes of fuel consumption, shuttles count loaded cargo, passengers and their inventories. Teenagers weigh 30 kg, adults — 60. 95 kg is a very rough weight of a well-equipped adult. Load your shuttle up to a maximum and fill up some or all passenger slots.
2. Click the “Launch” gizmo and hover the closest tile to see how much fuel you’ll be spending per tile with maximum load.
3. Solve a proportion. Say, you want to haul 190 kg: if 890 kg is your total weight aboard from step #1 and it costs 40 chemfuel per tile, 190 kg will cost 190 × 40 / 890 = ~8.5 chemfuel per tile.

🔹Cargo Racks (A) make the shuttle less fuel efficient for balancing reasons—it’s intended to have a fleet of specialized shuttles when necessary, but taking additional chemfuel as cargo is also an option. Some stats can also be tailored to your experience in the settings:

  🔸Go to Options→Mod options→Vehicle Framework→Vehicles tab, select the shuttle and change the default “Fuel Rate %” under “Launch Properties” to a percentage that works for you.

  🔸Click the “Stats” button and increase the base cargo or fuel capacity in case your mod list requires more.

  🔸All settings are revertible (the button is right below the cross that closes the window), so no harm can be done.

  🔸Upgrades cannot be customized.

🔹You might get a red error that’ll say “No free workers for BFS”—it’s harmless and can be ignored. That said, if you’ll encounter issues with vehicle reachability after getting the error, try regenerating region grids while you’re playing the game: go to “Mod options”→“Vehicle Framework”→“DevMode” tab and click the “Regenerate All Regions” button. Please let me know how it went.

🔹Vehicle Framework doesn’t handle turret accuracy the same way RimWorld does, which makes balancing offensive turrets challenging. The framework is under active development and I’m planning to take another look at possible turret upgrades in the future.

🔹Landed imperial shuttles are buildings with a cover effectiveness of 75%, so colonists can only shoot when they stand at the corners. Vehicles, on the other hand, never block line of sight, so colonial shuttles compensate with a cover effectiveness of 55% (like sandbags). If possible in the future, colonial shuttles will behave just like the imperial ones in terms of cover.

🔹This mod changes the imperial shuttle’s texture for consistency. If you want imperial shuttles to use textures from VFE: Empire or Vanilla Textures Expanded, load these mods after. If you want to apply these textures to colonial shuttles too, check Colonial Shuttle + VTE Texture Patch out.

🔹Save Our Ship 2 and RimNauts 2 are compatible, but colonial shuttles can’t travel into space, which is intentional—I tested it before and space travel was buggy, sometimes to a point of game-breaking. Save Our Ship 2 has three very similar shuttles that are tailored to the mod’s experience, so you probably won’t gain much if you decide to run SOS2 and Colonial Shuttle together.

🔹Vehicle Framework maintains its own list of incompatibilities here[docs.google.com]. At the time of this message, the list doesn’t mention issues with Auto Seller.

The MIT-licensed source is available on GitHub[github.com]. All non-derivative art assets are public domain and can be viewed on Figma[www.figma.com].

This mod woudn’t be possible without the hard work of @SmashPhil. Support him on Patreon[www.patreon.com] or check out the game he’s developing alongside @Roolo and @Oskar Potocki: