The Iron Curtain Barrier Generator is a large power-grid-driven colony defense structure. It projects a red defensive barrier around itself and converts stored energy from your colony’s power grid into practical protection against external threats such as projectiles, explosions, orbital bombardments, energy beams, hostile skyfallers, and tornadoes.
Its core idea is simple: turn your power infrastructure into a safety perimeter. The barrier’s defensive strength depends on your colony’s power generation, stored energy capacity, and the radius you choose to maintain.
{Main Features}
- Intercepts incoming projectiles
- Suppresses explosions inside the barrier
- Intercepts orbital bombardments and similar strike explosions
- Blocks beam/laser damage
- Redirects hostile skyfallers outside the barrier
- Disperses tornadoes that enter the field
- Protects targets inside the barrier from falling-roof/falling-debris damage
{Power-Grid-Driven Mechanics}
The Iron Curtain uses stored energy from the connected power grid as its defensive resource. The generator includes a built-in 10000 Wd capacitor, which functions as part of the vanilla power grid and works together with other batteries on the same grid. This is mainly so the barrier does not end up with a glorious 0-capacity shield just because someone decided that generators alone were enough and never built any batteries.
A larger radius means higher continuous upkeep.
- Upkeep = current radius × 500 W
- Damage-based interception consumes stored grid energy based on incoming damage
- Stored grid energy determines how many interceptions the barrier can sustain in a row
- Power generators replenish stored energy, while batteries increase the barrier’s ability to stay under pressure
In other words, the strength of the Iron Curtain comes from your colony’s power system. Wider coverage means higher continuous power cost, and it also means you need more serious power generation and energy storage behind it.
{How to Use}
[Research and Construction]
Research Shield Belt and Fabrication to unlock the Iron Curtain Barrier Generator research. Once researched, the generator can be built from the Security category. After construction, connect it to a power grid and let the grid build up enough stored energy for the barrier to function properly.
[Radius Control]
Select the building to adjust the barrier radius. A smaller radius is suitable for protecting critical structures with lower upkeep. A larger radius can cover an entire colony, but it will significantly increase continuous power consumption. Choose the radius according to your colony’s current power generation and stored energy capacity.
{Functional Scope}
The Iron Curtain is a wide-area defensive barrier designed to handle external threats that ordinary walls, turrets, and basic shield systems often struggle with, including shells, explosions, beams, airstrikes, hostile skyfallers, and tornadoes. Its functional scope is focused on external physical threats and direct damage interception. Things like solar flares, infestations, and similar non-direct threats are outside the current design scope.
{Falling Roof Note}
Because the author’s technical skill is, regrettably, not infinite, some explosions may still destroy roofs even when the barrier suppresses the actual explosion damage. To avoid the deeply stupid situation where the explosion is blocked but a colonist gets killed by the roof falling on their head, the barrier also prevents falling-roof and falling-debris damage inside its radius as a workaround. If the roof is still torn away, just consider it shockwave leakage that the barrier did not fully absorb.
{Compatibility}
[Requirements and Version]
- Requires Harmony
- Built for RimWorld 1.6
- Supports English and Simplified Chinese
- Safe to add to existing saves
[Mod Compatibility]
This mod should be compatible with most weapon, explosion, and event mods. Some highly custom damage systems, special beam implementations, or scripted events may bypass vanilla damage handling, and may therefore fall outside the barrier’s coverage.
If you find a weapon or event that bypasses the barrier, please report the mod name, weapon/event name, and relevant log information in the comments.
{Credits, Notes and Design Motivation}
The motivation behind this mod is fairly simple: many high-intensity content mods like to add raids and events that involve shield-piercing, wall-piercing, map-edge bombardments, or other lovely little ways to delete the center of your colony from a very safe distance. Vanilla high/low shield mechanics are mainly built around standard shells, and they often cannot do much against these more exotic threats.
United Manufacturing and its AT Field provide an excellent solution to this problem, and they were an important source of design inspiration for this mod. Experienced mod authors are experienced for a reason; a lot of those complex mechanics were genuinely worth learning from. However, United Manufacturing is a high-power content mod as a whole, with weapons, turrets, armor, implants, defensive structures, and many other systems built around that power level. For my own preferred gameplay, the overall scope and strength of that package can make a large part of normal defense planning, raid pressure, and colony layout matter much less.
The Iron Curtain Barrier Generator is my own take on that idea. It keeps the goal of dealing with unusual external threats, but ties the protection to the colony’s power grid and stored energy capacity. In a mostly vanilla game, vanilla-scale power infrastructure should be enough for vanilla-scale threats. In a heavily modded high-threat environment, well, if you are already playing with that much firepower and event intensity, building more generators and batteries is probably fair enough.
