- "Everyone is dead or gone. This story is over. Perhaps someone else will find a use for the ruins of this place."—Game Over screen blurb
Despite Rimworld being basically a toned-down Dwarf Fortress in a hard sci-fi setting, there is no shortage of things that could consign your colony to the overfilling bin of prematurely ended stories.
- Some common medical practices both in-universe and by players are rather questionable when you stop and think about it:
- One often-recommended method of dealing with addiction is to cut off the person's legs.note This is also recommended to keep prisoners from escaping.
- Luciferium greatly increases the physical health of the subject and reverses injuries and aging effects, at the cost of being immediately and permanently addictive, with withdrawal causing insanity and eventual death, and the addiction persisting even beyond its subject's death and resurrection. Its flavour text calls it "the Devil's Bargain", and with good reason.
- One of the best ways to make money while training Medical skill for your doctor is to capture a bunch of raiders from a faction you don't mind having hate you forever, then amputate all their limbs and surgically remove every organ they don't need to survive, including a lung, kidney, and both eyes, before finally slapping two peg legs on them and sending them off to avoid the penalty for having an 'innocent' prisoner die. As mentioned in Quotes this is not only good training, it's very profitable since the harvested organs are worth more to traders than the prisoner would have been as a slave. And if you do this on one of the raider factions that can't be befriended at all, there is a tiny chance that they will send the same raider to your base again, and this time they'll obviously be at a huge disadvantage.
- Most of the situations that end a colony are quite nightmarish.
- Imagine the colonists going about their day within a well-fortified bunker, secure from outside threats, only to suddenly have hordes of gigantic insects suddenly tear through the walls, floors, and ceilings. They swarm over the security teams and rip the entire colony.
- Pirate raiders storming into the colony, intent on pure destruction. Not only will they steal your wealth, but they will set fire to your crop fields and destroy art and furniture and recreational objects. They don't just want to loot and pillage, they want to wipe you out completely. And best not to dwell on what happens to the survivors who the pirates kidnap....
- Similar to the pirates, there's the mechanoids. These murderous robots only want to destroy every trace of your colony. They will mercilessly kill anyone they find on the map, and after everyone is dead or has fled, they will systematically roam around the colony and destroy everything you've built until the only trace of the colony left are burnt floors, broken stones, and the charred corpses of your colonists.
- It is entirely possible that the death of the colony comes from a gradual downward spiral of tantrums and madness as stress and negative mood effects pile on due to outside threats. Psychic ships, blight, toxic fallout, and solar flares can cause the slow death of a colony through starvation and driving people mad, and as casualties mount the problem can only get worse until some colonists have mental breakdowns. Insane colonists can flee into the wild, try to kill each other, or go on berserk rampages where they will set fire to chemfuel or artillery shells, causing the entire colony to go up in flames.
- Let's start with your "colonists". Most of them are not grizzled veterans of countless struggles, neither are they highly disciplined super soldiers who never panic. You are in control of undisciplined and whiny average joes who'd suddenly found themselves marooned on a dangerous world due to an unspecified incident that happened to their Sleeper Starship and possessing a variety of professions, traits, and quirks unsuitable to outdoor survival unaided. Your task, should your colony survive long enough, is to eventually build a spaceship so that they can leave while at the same time fending off not only external threats and diseases but the stresses of living on the Rim.
- One scenario have your colony start as a group of five tribals who are fleeing mechanoids that destroyed their village. Imagine that you were only minding your business when a group of strange monsters start attacking your village. Arrows and javelins bounce off their metallic carapaces and warriors who get within striking distance of their scythes are disemboweled, their blood painting the dwellings red. Strange weapons that might as well have been magical spew fiery death that rendered leather shields and wooden armor useless even add they set the village ablaze. As the mechanoids begin butchering your people regardless of age and sex, you're forced to gather whoever you can and leave the rest to their fate. You eventually establish a new village to start over, yet you are painfully aware that you will soon meet those machines again...
- The non-raid events can spell doom to an unprepared colony. This is particular true if several are stacked on each other in a Disaster Dominoes of suffering and frustration and none of them care if your colonists are already upset due to eating without a table. On harder difficulties and in the right climate, the Rim can become a veritable Death World.
- Toxic Fallout: A distant factory spews harmful gases into the atmosphere and your colony is unfortunate to have a gigantic cloud of the stuff blanket the entire map. In addition of killing off any exposed plant life, including that corn you'd spent all summer growing, prolonged exposure to the fallout can result in dementia at best and cancer at worst. Even worse is the fact that the duration is randomized, meaning that you could very well be blanketed in miasma for years.
- Volcanic Winter: Much like the above, a volcanic winter can last for years and make farming and life in general very, very difficult. The event blurb says that it is caused by a supervolcano erupting.
- Solar Flare: Though not deadly to your colonists by itself, a solar flare can be dangerous when paired with a bad event such as a cold snap/heat wave or a mechanoid raid due to its main function: shutting off all electrical devices. This includes your turrets and coolers/heaters — you know, the things keeping your colony protected, your food refrigerated, and your rooms climate-controlled. Witness your colony succumbing to spoiling food and hypothermia/hyperthermia while a massive raid you cannot defend against bears down on you...
- Solar flares also shut off your hydroponics, and no plant you can grow can survive the full duration of a solar flare. If you didn't already have a significant food stockpile and are in an area inhospitable for hunting and foraging, like a lot of players who do challenge runs, your colonists might find themselves forced to eat their starving comrades as they wait for the next crop to grow.
- Psychic drone: A distant engine of hatred proceeds to Mind Rape every member of a randomized gender, potential making a bad situation even worse. You cannot even create a caravan to send to take it out. You're forced to endure it until it goes away, assuming that your base haven't succumbed to a tantrum spiral already.
- Psychic/Poison Ship: One day you're minding your business when a chunk of spacecraft lands somewhere on the map, even in the middle of your base if you're really unlucky. Contained within is either a hostile AI Core or damaged tanks containing poisonous gases. Both immediately begin a countdown wherein the former Mind Rapes everyone in the colony and periodically incites nearby wildlife into a frothing rage while the latter creates a slowly expanding cloud of death that kills all plant life it touches. If these ships aren't destroyed in time, things will get worse, either resulting in your colony being reduced to a smothering ruin filled with raving lunatics or the entire map being turned into a barren, poison-filled wasteland.
- Attacking the ships themselves is a whole other can of worms. The moment even a pebble scratches the surface, an army of killer robots is disgorged from their depths and immediately sent toward your terrified colonists. The size of the mechanoid force depends on the wealth of the colony at the precise moment the ship lands so even selling off your expensive items will only give the machines a poorer base whose walls will soon be painted red.
- Mechanoid Cluster: Exclusive to the Royalty DLC, these hostile encampments may appear as quest objectives but sometimes they show up at your map in drop pods and is immediately deployed unlike the raiders in the Siege event. While the deployed mechanoids themselves are dormant until attacked, a proximity alarm is tripped, or a countdown ends, they're far from the only threats. Other than the mortars that begin shelling your colony after a certain period of time, explosive and incendiary turrets that shred anyone who gets too close, and shield generators that block both bullets and mortar shells, there are special buildings that are guaranteed to make your colonists lives (even more) hellish. From automated factories that produce more mechanoids to reinforcement beacons to other buildings that Mind Rape your colonists and block out the sun, you will have your work cut out when assaulting these clusters. Some are so powerful that they can even affect tiles on the world map!
- As noted above, the players themselves can be a source of Nightmare Fuel, especially with delightful mods that allow them to commit virtual crimes against humanity to their heart's content. From enslaving captured pirates to turning them into biomass to fuel the next monster creation, one could easily say that the player is the real Big Bad of the game.
- In a recent update, a group of wanderers will visit your colony to work for you in exchange for food and shelter until they leave a few days later. They belong to no faction whatsoever and thus have no one to put up a fuss should anything happen to them. Sure, you can force them to stay and work for you longer, but nothing's stopping you from taking advantage of what are basically free volunteers for your schemes...
- Outside threats aren't the only things that can spell doom to your colonists. The stresses of eking out a fragile existence on a strange world full of vicious enemies, killer machines, and foul diseases and parasites can send your colonists to the breaking point and can lead to your colony turning into a smoldering ruin filled with screaming lunatics. The particularly dangerous mental breaks are as followed:
- Wandering/Catatonia: Overwhelmed by the rigors of living in a colony, the colonist decides to either wander all over the map or goes into a state of shock so profound that they fall unconscious and have to be rescued. While these states aren't dangerous by themselves, your colonist could end up walking into a pack of animals hungry for human flesh or faint in the middle of battle. Wandering colonists will at least feed themselves, but with catatonia there is also the risk of a colonist starving to death if nobody can feed them.
- Murderous Rage: Blaming another colonist for their shitty predicament, your colonist goes into a state even worse than Berserk where they attack the individual in question with their fists or whatever melee weapon they have equipped until they are stopped or their victim is dead. Imagine the horror of trying to stop your best close quarters fighter, wearing marine armor and armed with a powerful warhammer, as he goes on a rampage in your colony and ends up killing your only doctor.
- Food/Drug Binge: In a desperate attempt to calm themselves, you colonist will stuff their faces with food or consume as much drugs as they could. This will result in a depleted food supply which could cause your entire colony to starve or a potentially fatal overdose. The latter is even worse as your colonist may end up snorting a case of luciferium, which is impossible to cure.
- Prison Break: Overwhelmed at the hopelessness of their situation, your colonist decides to free all of your captured pawns. This is especially problematic if you've captured a lot of raiders as you may not have enough time to subdue them all before they can grab weapons and wreak havoc on your colony.
- Fire-starting Spree: Exclusive to pawns with the Pyromaniac trait and the sole reason why most players put them very high on their "reject and/or kill on sight" list. Your crazy colonist begins to set any flammable materials they can get to ablaze, turning your colony into a fiery deathtrap if they are not stopped in time. This is especially true if they managed to get to your explosive and incendiary items such as mortar shells and chemfuel. The worst part is this mental break can start at any time, even when they're in a good mood, though this happens less frequently the happier they are.
- Going wild: The accumulation of mental stress has caused your colonist's mind to snap, causing them to reject all notions of civility and humanity and live the rest of their life as an animal. You cannot even arrest them or subdue them in any way to bring them back to their senses; you're actually required to tame them, like any other animal! They also require an above average handling skill to tame, so in certain cases it is impossible to get them back before they wander off the map, never to be seen again.
- An addendum for the above: you will encounter groups of people not affiliated with any of the major factions, including the aforementioned wild people. You with also encounter ruined buildings and furniture made of materials that are at your technological level to construct or above if you're playing as a tribe. How many colonies met an untimely end before you arrived? Who's to say that you won't soon join them?
- As you play Rimworld, it will soon become apparent that the world was once ruled over by an ancient spacefaring civilization. Factions ranging from tribes of humans armed with neolithic tools and weapons to more "modern" colonies, to even a crumbling remnant from the Royalty DLC, assuming it isn't merely what's left of a successor state, remain to colonize the world, tools and weapons too advanced to be constructed by anyone (barring through mods) and can only be purchased from traders, and rooms termed 'ancient dangers' containing cryosleep caskets with either their occupants intact or dead and eaten by insects. Armies of high-tech killer robots comb the world for organics to butcher, with some even guarding the aforementioned ancient dangers. Even the mountains themselves contained finished resources such as steel and compacted machinery that can actually be mined, heavily implying that they were once part of massive ancient structures. Nothing is known about what could've caused its collapse.
- The Storytellers, A.I.s who decide what event will affect your colony and how frequently, basically hold the fate of your colony in their hands. Phoebe Chillax is the easiest though even she has a little bite on higher difficulties. Cassandra Classic is the typical Storyteller who will give you a steadily increasing difficulty curve taking ranking your progress into account so that the challenges can be something you can handle. However, the absolutely worst (or best, depending on the player) is Randy Random. He doesn't care whether you actually can handle what he throws at you, only that it's fun to watch you struggle and hopefully surpass them. Or not; it's all for a great story to him. Randy doesn't give a shit if you're a village of tribals armed with nothing but bows and stone axes; if dropping a squad of marines armed with advanced armor and charge rifles into your hapless doctor's tent makes for a better story than gifting you twenty cases of beer, he'd do it.
- Several of the backstory options for pawns are horrific, featuring a plethora of slavery, organ harvesting, cataclysms, and sexual abuse. The cake has to be taken by 'Urbworld sex slave', genetically engineered to be inhumanly attractive and too weak to offer any resistance.
- A subtle source of nightmare fuel is the fact that nobody, not even the god-like arcotech AI personas, has ever figured out how to travel faster than light. Casual Interstellar Travel is non-existent; anyone departing a planet for a rimworld has no hope of returning home and getting even the faintest idea of the extent of human civilization is impossible. When your colonists look through their telescopes, you can't help but wonder how they feel knowing that humanity inhabits those far-off stars, forever out of their reach.
- Yes! You've finally built a ship and traveled offworld! Surely your colonists will seek out a newer, better world than the one they settled, right? Well, here's the thing: their fate is left entirely to your imagination. And the ending blurb says that your colonists may end up on a paradise world or they may end up stranded on a distant moon, frozen in stasis for the next couple-thousand years. It could be either one or something worse.
- At the very least, you can take pets along if you anaesthetize them first.
- With the addition of the Ideology DLC, players can create any religion they want especially with the Vanilla Expanded Ideology and Memes mod. While peaceful communes of nature lovers and societies of AI worshipping body modders can be created, nothing is stopping the players from creating cannibalistic cults of human-sacrificing raiders and brutal dictatorships of No Woman's Lands and Lady Lands built on the backs of slaves of the maligned gender. Some religions can even be created as corruptions of real-world religions. Given the isolation of the worlds in the setting due to the inability of humanity to travel faster than light, any encounter with a colony could potentially be a brutal shock for the unprepared visitor.
- One of the roles packaged with Ideology is the Leader. Representing your faction in diplomacy, the leader comes with a variety of abilities emphasizing their duties in the colony, including the ability to accuse any colonist of wrongdoing, regardless of whether they're actually guilty of anything. If successful, the accused can be imprisoned, banished, and even executed without much fuss from the other colonists. This ability's success chance is dependent on the leader's Social stat, meaning that a charismatic leader can hold Kangaroo Courts willy-nilly just to get rid of nuisances. Worse, one of the memes even allow your colonists to take satisfaction in the execution of the guilty, making this a viable stop-gap measure of keeping your colony happy. Even worse, there is actually a meme that requires you to do this from time to time to keep your colony happy without the leader needing to do anything except carry out the grisly duty. Depending on the player, it can be easy to prove Rousseau right or wrong.
- The system for converting pawns to your Ideology has shades of this. The way to do this is to reduce their certainty in their initial low enough that they will be converted should the attempt to do so bring it down to 0%. Their certainty gain rate will slow down or even reverse if they're very unhappy. Therefore, the player has every incentive to lock up the soon-to-be-converted in conditions of absolute squalor in order to hasten the process.
- Ideology introduces base game support of slavery, where captured pawns can be forced to do menial labor for the colony albeit at reduced speed. To keep them in line, you can use a variety of methods ranging from putting bondages and collars on them to constructing special buildings such as terror sculptures and even heads impaled on spikes and bodies put in gibbet cages! Sure, you can treat your slaves like pampered servants, but nothing's stopping you from subjecting them to fates worse than death...
- Ideology adds resource gathering camps on the world map that can appear at any time, stay for at least 30 days, and contain not only relevant resources but buildings that can be disassembled for resources. Though they can belong to one of the major factions of the world and are guarded by some of their members, most of the time these camps belong to factions too unimportant for any diplomatic relations to be affected by should something happens to them. For a player in dire need of certain resources and potential slaves/sacrifices out of the defenders, the temptation can become too great to ignore...
- Biotech now allows you to create transhuman colonists with special abilities. One of which is the ability to drink blood.
- And what is the best way to deal with their thirst for blood? Capture prisoners, put them in People Farms, and designate them for bloodfeeding or automatic blood extraction. Their thoughts make it clear that they hate being used as cattle, but your only other option is to feed on fellow colonists, crippling them with blood loss.
- Biotech's introduction of reproduction and children allows a lot of Child Abuse Tropes to apply.
- For instance, you can engage in forced reproduction (which teeters rather close to rape), leading players to use their prisoners as baby factories, with the children being used for subcore ripscanners (which kill the pawn put into it) for making high-tier mechanoids, or in organ harvesting to make a profit.
- If you enable the option, enemy children can participate in raids. As they're not exempt from instantly dying when downed, you will inevitably have to deal with your colonists suffering mood penalties and being hated by others.
- Gene modification adds a new level of Nightmare Fuel. Nothing's stopping you from bioengineering your colonists into superhumans while your slaves only get traits that would make them even more useful as slaves but poorer at successfully revolting against the cruel caste system you forced on them. Suddenly, dying from raids and diseases seem like a mercy...
- Biotech adds the ability to make your own Mechanoids. In order to make them, you need subcores to act as computer processors. The lowest tier can be made easily with steel and components. The Standard tier needs a humanoid brain to be scanned, which leaves the subject sickened but alive. The highest tier uses a device called the Ripscanner, which kills the victim by frying their brain. This also implies that powerful, higher-end Mechanoids you fight were all created through the death of a living person.
- Speaking of mechanoids, the Apocriton leader mech deserves special mention. Its description explicitly mentions that it's one of the few mechs capable of higher thought. Despite this, it still unleashes utter carnage, using similar Mind Rape techniques as the psychic ships/drones as well as a poison-tipped needle gun. In other words, the Apocritons are one of the few A.I.s in fiction whose actions against humanity are guided by pure malice.
- This doesn't even come close to the existential horror this procedure can create. What if the ripscanned individuals are still conscious, but cannot do anything as they serve those who forced them into their unfeeling, mechanical bodies? What if even copying their minds without killing them merely condemned their copied consciousness to the same fate? Perhaps the mechanoids invading your colony were once people who were driven mad by their wretched existence and decided to take their anger out on everyone else.
- Hey, so remember the archotech A.I.s? The unfathomably powerful machine intelligences which are the closest thing to gods in the setting, able to create technology so advanced and incomprehensible it might as well be magic? The things that, when activated on a planet, inevitably take control of it and transform both the planet and its occupants into something unrecognizable for reasons no human can truly understand? Well guess what! Anomaly introduces one that's insane! And your colony has pissed it off!
- Of particular note is that Anomaly is being marketed as a horror-focused DLC, its scope going beyond that of the threats in both the base game and in the other three expansions. There have only been a handful of dangers that have approached the supernatural, such as sanguophages, all of those only being a taste of the true nightmares that Archotechs can being forth. As bad as life is on the Rim, it's about to get much worse.
