''Rimworld'': A Sci-Fi Colony Building and Managent Game

A game that shares familiar traits with games like Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, and Banished. It is a Sci-Fi Colony building and management game where players guide a colony to survival and the games optional end goal.

The games story is that humanity has spread out across the stars using Generation Ships that contain the colonists in Cryo-stasis pods. Since the distance between the stars so great there is minimal contact between distant star systems. This can leave colony worlds completely out of touch of all but the most advanced ships. This has left the galaxy populated by a wildly different colonial settlements. They range from failed civilizations that suffered set backs such as self devastation through war or natural disaster to glittering hyper advanced societies with technological prowess well beyond most other civilizations around them. Mixed into this are killer Robots, alien creatures, and even malevolent psychic forces lurking among the stars.

The standard scenario for the game is that three colonists wake up from Cryo-Sleep to find their colony ship falling apart around them. They barely have time to make it to the escape pods and reach the planet with bits of the ship landing around them and some supplies. The player has to guide these colonists through the challenges of setting up a survivable colony location on the world and possibly pursue an end game scenario.

The player chooses one of three scenarios which include a "Rich Explorer" and "Lost Tribe" which each have their own unique parameters and intro story. The game allows the player to create their own custom scenarios and share them with the steam community.The player also has to choose from one of three storyteller AI's that dictate how the players encounter challenges and a difficulty setting that determines how hard they can possibly be. The colonists are randomly generated with random physical and mental traits, back grounds, perks and flaws, and their own skills. Finally the player picks a location from a randomly generated world to start their new colony.

The player has to not only build shelter, arrange for food, medical, and protection for the characters they will have to address other needs to keep colonists happy. The colonists will have unique encounters and relationships outside of the players control which can lead to a variety of situations both good and bad. The characters are quite capable of suffering a variety of mental break downs which can be interesting. To add to it there is almost always one hostile group that will raid the players base. It is possible to have bows, spears, and knives and be raided by thugs with rifles and armor.

Players have to plant crops, hunt, mine for resources, and even trade to acquire things they can't make themselves or acquire the materials they need to do so. Workshops and research benches permit characters to learn new tech and equipment to help further them along to their goals. As the players advance up the tech tree they gain a variety of abilities including the ability to install cybernetics and build advanced equipment. They will need it as the variety of alien critters and other threats can create a serious challenge for players.

The game may be found on Steam and features a steam workshop with lots of mods that can further expand gameplay potential by adding a wide variety of features.

Here is a lets play demonstrating many of the features.

edited 24th Aug '16 4:08:58 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I have this game. It's awesome. I highly recommend the embrasures mod on the Workshop. It adds walls you can see and shoot through so you don't have to leave open spaces in your settlement for dealing with enemies.

The moding options for this game are great. There are several weapon, equipment, farming, and even hair mods. I am tempted to try the medieval mods.

I am honestly suprised it took this long for a thread to get made about it.

I backed the thing on kickstarter, and its one of the few projects that has NOT disapointed me.

For me it is kind of like a Bethesda game. I beat it once normally and now I have it loaded to the gills with mods.

I never didn't use mods, but I am kinda sad that the best mod made for it never got updated past alpha seven.

And the second best mod wont be updating past alpha 14. :/

Which one? Some folks have integrated and updated some of the mods into newer material.

Tech Tree Minami and EDB Prepare Carefully respectivly.

The last one was updated for this version, but wont be updated further.

More is the pity as EDB is pretty handy.

Anybody else get a problem where colonists stop doing much work after a while? My current settlement just ran into it. There's plenty of work and ingredients and people designated to do it, but it doesn't get done.

That occasionally happens with one or two, but I've never seen it with all of them. It usually means that you're missing something. Maybe they don't have the equipment to perform their tasks, or their mental health needs have gone wonky (but not enough to trigger "poor mood" alarms). Try messing with their tasks. Unassign everything and then reassign.

Pretty sure it's mood, because I'm starting to get poor mood messages.

It really doesn't help a full-tribal neolithic start if the other civilizations on the planet can come in packing firearms and grenades.

Holy crap the MOD story teller AI really hates my guts. First it is several back to back raids in a season, then I get super beavers in the middle of a toxic fallout, with a raid on top of that. After the fallout clears and I clean up I get a giant pack of killer boom rats and have to use the manned turrets while the automated turrets do their best to blast them around us. I really need to just install more sand bagged and embrasure cased turrets.

They would certain help for when I get yet another space ship crashing nearby I have had two psy ships and one toxic ship crash. Thankfully I got a ton of much needed steel and plasteel from that mess.

One of the raids almost went very badly for me. Because I have mods installed enemies do things like attack me with RPO-Z-Shmel incendiary rocket launcher that smacks the tar out of one of my colonists. I am starting to think I need to install fire foam near my perimitter.

edited 24th Aug '16 4:48:43 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Yeah, mood was totally the issue on that one. I restarted with no issues. Well, not that issue. I keep doing Mountainous sites for the free walls, but I'm having to learn to start small. I keep finding these big courtyards surrounded by small branch ones and my eyes grow bigger than my stomach, trying to fortify the big courtyard instead of claiming a few branches for the early times.

Journey: I choose a lot of the same terrain though more for the increased likelihood of finding compacted steel and machine parts. That and I use a tone of carved stone in my settlements. Plus the mods that allow you to make sand and gravel from stone eat up a lot of stone chunks. Leaving a choke point with a surprise in it is always good entertainment.

My latest location is almost perfect. I can build my walls straight and create interlocking fields of fire along the wall sections I am going to put in. The access points are highly restricted. One section will have automatic turrets and the other two manned turrets. I just need to build funneling obstacle walls to for the enemy to move around into the kill zones. Unless they want to shell my settlement again it should work pretty well.

I personaly play costal myself, but thats just because it makes the most sense thematicly to me.

I would play coastal if we could fish and make better use of water personally.

I think water should be a survival element myself.

I mean food is, but in reality it is not as important as water.

edited 25th Aug '16 4:28:48 PM by Imca

Only if they make a reasonably easy way to get it. Food you have crops, hunting, and enemies dropping pemmican, rations, and cooked meals.

I wouldn't mind digging wells or setting up mechanic powered devices or a combination of those things. There is one mod that lets you create mud bricks with straw, dirt, and water. You can bottle the water and your colonists will drink it for some benefit just like the mod that adds booze and other drinks.

edited 25th Aug '16 6:09:03 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Ground water wells, collecting it from it on the map.

Cistrens for the rain.

De-salinizers for the ocean.

There are lots of ways to get water, and.... this is actualy a mod I have considered making since version 6, I just dont like working on games in development because then I have to rebuild every version. :/

edited 25th Aug '16 6:06:44 PM by Imca

Immy: Ninja. I just edited my post but you and I are thinking alike in this regard.

I am tempted to poke at modding this myself just to see what I can get away with.

I just like being able to fortify my position with the starting wood, finish it in the morning, and spend the rest of the first day setting up farms with half my people and getting started on the bedrooms with the other half.

I usually nail down homes and cut wood on day one then start farms, initial storage and fortification on day two. Different approaches and all that.

So far I've generally appropriated ruins for initial housing and storage, then worked on farms and defense on day one. Now I'm thinking hole up in a small canyon I can defend with bows from behind embrasures, smoothen out the walls before building what little bedroom space I need for a few nights, and get the farms started. Usually six six by six plots with a variety of potatoes, strawberries, rice, corn, cotton for clothing, and possibly healroot if I have a farmer skilled enough to grow it. And maybe a twenty by twenty plot for hay for animals.

I always start Neolithic, so refrigeration takes a while.

ETA: By the way, how does one upgrade tech level?

edited 25th Aug '16 7:02:23 PM by Journeyman

I wish I knew how to upgrade tech level. I have forgotten how to order surgeries as it is.