The traps and the turrets helped a lot. Only a couple dead mechs, the militors partly because I rushed them ahead and caused a lot of friendly fire (despite them being at most like 4 foot tall according to ingame appearance, how does that work?)
>>534086990
No and yes respectively. Rimworld does not respect thermodynamics and you can make infinite power with a full hydroponics setup + biofuel refinery. I do have a bunh of grav generators, but they account for only 25% of my power production, the rest being chemfuel from my hydroponics and now these archean trees.
You don't even need hydroponics necessarily (though I have 2 full hydroponics bays too): a single sun lamp in rich soil (such as that of an archean tree) can create a growing zone with 100 rice plants. A rice plant in rich soil produces 1.52 rice per day, for a total of 152 rice/day -- 1064 rice a week, from a single sun lamp. A chemfuel generator requires 30 fuel every 7 days, and 75 rice can be refined into 35 chemfuel. Assuming you need 4kW to keep sun lamp, chemfuel refinery and heaters running, you'd need 4 generators and approx. 300 rice a week to keep them running, leaving you with 700 rice/week surplus that you can use for nutrition or more energy if you want.