Telescope

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A telescope is a recreation item that provides "Telescope study" recreation to a single colonist using it, with a power of 120%. It also slowly increases the Intellectual skill. It can only be obtained through trade.

Acquisition

Telescopes cannot be crafted, instead they are only available through trade or as a reward from quests.

Summary

Telescopes can only be used if the tile that they are placed on is unroofed. Note that the interaction spot need not be unroofed.

Using a telescope slowly increases the Intellectual skill of the user at a rate of 0.004 XP per 1 tick (0.02 secs)

A pawn must have a Sight capacity above 0% to use a telescope.

Analysis

A telescope is a useful item to obtain if you need to increase recreational variety. While all telescopes only have 120% recreational power, they provide a unique Recreation "study" type that cannot be obtained from any other item. This means the lack of accrued boredom more than makes up for a base recreation power between tier one and two recreational items and unaffected by quality modifiers.

Colonists using a telescope will also gain a small amount of Intellectual skill, however this is generally not enough to warrant specific action from the player.

Placement

While the description states that it must be placed "outside", a telescope can be placed on any unroofed tile. Furthermore, only the telescope tile itself needs to be unroofed; the interaction tile can remain roofed. Thus, a colonist can be kept both indoors and out of the weather by simply unroofing a single tile inside the usual rec room and even gain the usual "impressive rec room" mood buff. A chair can also be placed on the interaction tile to provide comfort to colonist using it.

Trivia

Despite being uncraftable, there is a partial recipe defined for the telescope in the game files. Namely, 50 steel and 1 component. It is possible this is used to calculate the amount deconstruction returns, or it may simply be cut content.