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

I'm still at 60 hours officially and a few dozen more unofficially but I wouldn't trade it in for anything, even with the small design choices that drive me up the wall sometimes.

1500, more then the other games I have on steam combined...

I ummm... I think I can afford to get the expansions.

478.6 hours so far, and I've only seen the credits once. It's weird that I've played so much of a game that has long stretches of "waiting for something to happen," but even when there's nothing on the screen but a normal day of your colony humming along, it can be pretty satisfying.

Though I did have a sort of love-hate relationship going with it around hour 250, when I was fending off endgame raids that seemed unfair even with reductions to raid strength, and was spitting and swearing as my pawns shot each other and didn't react while their allies got ganged up on in melee. But eventually I had the realization that RimWorld is not a strategy game, but as it says a "story generator."

It's kind of like how Skyrim gives you lots of opportunities to swap "I once had a glitch thiiisss big" tales with your friends, except with RimWorld all those unforgettable moments are part of the actual gameplay and emergent storytelling.

Like, in my current colony, I've got 22 colonists, and four of them came from a "space battle" event (from "Vanilla Events Expanded"). For close to a day, my colony was on lockdown as random explosions scarred the desert from errant weapons fire, and chunks of spaceship and escape pods rained down everywhere. Most of those pods only deposited corpses, but some had badly wounded survivors, which led me to send my field medic racing across the map on her camel ("Giddy-Up!") to get them to the infirmary before they bled out or got hit by a warhead. One of the survivors was a cranky old lady with the unfortunate last name of Downs, and another was an android ("Android Tiers") named Nono. Both of them joined after being saved, and ended up becoming part of the research team, spending their days in the same big laboratory.

And they absolutely hate each other, Downs constantly insults Nono, who mostly responds with indifference since she's not advanced enough to feel real emotions. But occasionally Downs manages to trigger a social fight, resulting in... nothing, because Nono doesn't really get fights, and Downs is a certified coward ("Vanilla Traits Expanded") who runs to hide in the nearest corner whenever the fighting starts. So every other day, I get a notification that Downs and Nono are doing their strange little dance where the robot stares at the cringing old lady for a few minutes, then they both kind of awkwardly shuffle off and find something else to do.

Stuff like this makes the game arguably more memorable and entertaining than it would be if it were just another real-time base defense game. And I've got XCOM if I need my strategy fix, anyway.

...Though I will say, my colonists have worse accuracy than XCOM Rookies, sweet Christmas.

Personaly I have never actualy seen the ending, I prefer to just play the game as a sandbox rather then as an objective, I like making a little colony of Kurin that I have modified to have one tail and more vanilla graphics and just trying to survive out there on the rim.

I also tend to keep my colonies rather small, my biggest one being like 10, though sometimes I will start using lots of robots (The above post linked androids, though a modified version with much better performance) to fill out the ranks, but over all I like having a colony at the size that I can maintain a kind of personal connection to the individual colonists.

The space battle is probably one of my favorite events from that mod, it goes really well with save our ship 2 which like I still want to go hard in on some time, but every time I get ready to do so, I get bored and play other things for a while, then come back, and forget where I was so start over.

Like that getting bored part isn't really a flaw of the game either, if any thing I would consider it a plus that I so continually come back to the game after a period of break, its kind of just how my attention span works that eventually I move on to other things.

But rimworld is like the one game that I keep coming back too at the end of it all.

Also sorry for not linking my stuff as thoroughly as the above post, but like I am quite proficient at modding rimworld, so half the stuff is uh personal tuning so to speak.

Edited by Imca on Jul 6th 2021 at 3:41:05 AM

Just picked the game up and enjoying it so far. Amused by the fact my three settlers are a 32 year old woman, her 44 year old dad, and after being ordered to randomize by the tutorial, her 50 year old sister.

So far have a pretty solid colony going. Crops are far easier and more productive than Dwarf Fortress so far, struggling a little bit with the power grid. It'd be nice if they'd shut off lights and appliances when not in use, no idea how switches actually work. I do miss regular migrants though, I really need more people to haul shit and clean regularly.

I never start intending to develop a big colony, but the game just keeps sending refugees or escape pod survivors my way until I've got twenty or more pawns on the map. And it takes a really bad colonist for me to consider exiling them, I'm a softy I suppose. My completed playthrough had a whopping 31 colonists alive at the end (and one "in memory of" guy I didn't remember losing).

Cryostasis, eh? I've got a 20-something grandma in my current colony.

And on the topic of family colonies, my first successful playthrough started with a mom, her second husband, and her teenage daughter by her first husband. Which led to a couple of awkward days of them sharing a little wooden house and the daughter occasionally hitting on her stepdad. But once I captured and recruited the first raider to visit, the daughter decided to shack up with a former criminal even older than her stepdad. Success?

I don't think I've ever built a power switch, I just use water mills and geothermal generators to guarantee a steady output instead of bothering with solar, wind and batteries. I guess you're supposed to have one by your workshop so you can reroute power from workstations to a turret array, but with the constant threat of drop pods, I prefer to leave everything on.

If you need more colonists, try getting a nice base that's perfectly-sized for your current number of colonists, with just enough food stored to get you through the winter. That's usually the point the game throws a half-dozen starving refugees at you.

I never quite understood the habit of Let's Players to never take flawed colonists. I mean, they're already playing on the highest difficulty level as it is so they clearly don't mind the challenge, plus more manpower is always useful to have.

If you're doing something like a sea ice tribal start challenge run, though, you have to be a lot more discerning, to make sure potential recruits understand the... pragmatic dietary needs of an arctic lifestyle.

In other news, my current colony has finished its spaceship, but I haven't activated the reactor to trigger the endgame yet, so I can see how we do against a three-star quest threat: housing a baroness for a week while two double-strength tribal raids come after her. I wasn't expecting both double-strength raids to hit simultaneously.

Buuut a mech cluster happened to land in the corner of the map a day or two before the mega-raid, so after drafting everyone and manning the embrasures (ED Embrasures) at the end of the maze to my killboxes, I fired an artillery shell (VFE: Security) at the sleeping defoliator mech base and woke them up, so suddenly one mass of 70 tribals was facing pikemen and cenitpedes. Another mass got carpet-bombed (SRTS Expanded) with incendiaries... did I mention this colony's in extreme desert with a single river through the middle of the map? Anyway, that was a second mass dealt with. And the tribals that weren't on fire or fighting with the mechs didn't have much fun crawling through a tunnel filled with cavalry traps (Fortifications - Neolithic), and gave up before making the final turn into turret range.

So my colonists got to stand around for a few hours on a hot desert night, listening to screams and sounds of carnage rising from beyond the walls, only for the alarm to be canceled so they could hurriedly grab a meal before crawling into bed. There were some casualties, though, two farmers who got caught harvesting tea from plots along the riverbank and took some hits from longbows on their way back inside the walls. One actually got downed, and I tried to get a colonist out to rescue her during a lull in the fighting, except the idiot decided to ignore the autodoors he just exited through in favor of running past several archers to slowly pass through a series of stone doors. A very stupid way to lose an eye, but luckily I had a bionic replacement in storage.

And now I have to clean up approximately a hundred corpses, a lot of them jammed up in the "maze of spikes" that has a habit of injuring my workers while they perform maintenance. Sigh.

Well, if I'm disposing of shitty colonists, it's going to be pacifists. I'm getting eaten alive by bandits because they're too cowardly to defend our shit. "Luckily" our last hunter was kidnapped near the end of winter with some meat in the fridge, so we won't starve because the people who can fight have been abducted.

Except for Hopey. I'll be keeping Hope "Hopey" Ashmore, the child-star turned taxonomist who refuses to haul, clean, or fight, and is a drug-abusing, ugly sociopath. She's just magical.

For the record, I have no trouble with things that are challenging per se. I only have problem with things whose sole intention is "haha, fuck you".

Suicidal Pacifism and flat-out letting other people die without complaint is in the latter category for me. And no, I don't care what other game inspired them, it's still a massively assholish thing to put into the game.

Edited by amitakartok on Jul 12th 2021 at 11:16:19 AM

Ship launched (party favor SFX). I think I got raided about seven or eight times over the reactor charging sequence, and most of them were mechtoids. I was arguably cheating for disabling sappers (Disable Sappers) and forcing attackers to crawl through the Maze of Spikes to reach my killbox, but given centipedes'... everything, I don't feel too guilty. So many defenders running around on fire, so many destroyed fortifications, so many full infirmaries.

Highlights include the time the mechs' drop pods landed literally on my doorstep, and were it not for being forewarned by my sensors (Preemptive Strike) I would have had a surprise mech-ing at two in the morning. As it was, one quest-given janissary was instantly slain by a Scyther, but that was the only fatality. Speaking of that quest, I "cunningly" accepted an imperial quest to call in a dormant mech hive, solely for four extra expendable soldiers. And then when some hostile androids arrived to assault, I woke up that mech hive with some carpet bombing to watch some hot robot-on-killbot action. Turns out 70 androids armed mainly with clubs and knives can tear apart a quartet of centipedes, but can then be mopped up by a solid charge-weapon gunline.

The final raid was an anticlimax, two masses of tribals that didn't do too well in the wooden spike maze, especially when I had someone with a flamethrower come out a side door to set the entrance on fire behind them. And then came the heartbreak of learning that you can't take pet cats with you on the spaceship, even if you build extra cryptocaskets for them. The colony of Kohi belongs to you now, Gumbo and Fancy. Reign over the camels with wisdom and strength.

Final thoughts on an extreme desert colony: it's not too hard with the right mods and map. I went with a river for early watermills, had Terraform Rimworld to convert sand to soil for non-hydroponic farming, Raise the Roof for air-conditioned greenhouses, Vanilla Fishing Extended for reliable protein, and VFE: Power for Helixian gas coolers to keep my base livable even during solar flares (though it took a lot of coolers in the dining room to keep the temperature comfortable during the height of summer). The heat had my colonists sleeping during the day at the start, but once everyone had their dusters and cowboy hats, things quickly felt normal. And I was disappointed how little the extreme temperature affected raiders, even the friggin' vikings (VFE: Vikings) that traveled hundreds of miles to try to steal the stele outside my walls.

On the plus side, the year-round growing temperature negated the usual "did we hoard enough crops to get through the winter?" stress, and the abundance of sand made dry thunderstorms a non-issue. And I don't think anyone caught a disease that wasn't an infected wound. Oh, and it was hilarious to see insectoid hives dying during a summer heat wave, leading the bugs to abruptly pack up and leave for lack of food.

My next "extreme" colony site will probably be a jungle, since the sea ice sheet is formulaic and boring. But my next game is going to be in a temperate zone while I get used to the Ideology content.

"Green hell" my ass. After the extreme desert, the jungle's a paradise. Plentiful wood, tons of animals to hunt, abundant soil, and sometimes the temperature at night gets down enough for colonists to complain about the cold.

So far, I'm pretty pleased with the Ideology content. I'm playing a benign, individualist colony instead of something too game-changing, but it was fun to get notified of an upcoming festival and have to hastily prepare a little shrine and effigy. And then learn that the actual festival was a dance party with a disco ball and pounding music that I should have held in my rec room.

It's also made the game more challenging due to how those ideologies get along, or more frequently don't. My colony abruptly doubled in size when a starship's cryptosleep section crashed onto the map, and while four of the survivors shared my ideology and instantly became fully-productive members of the colony, the fifth guy was a transhumanist with a long list of things he hates about being here: he's bigoted so he hates being led by a different ideology, he hated having his symbol housed in the same room as mine, he wants implants and a sleep accelerator and bionic limbs and so on. And every time another pawn idly tries to convert him (not to be confused with the "priest" position's conversion action) he gets in a social fight and sends them to the hospital. So I, who usually have at least twenty colonists by the endgame, am now weighing the pros and cons of kicking him out and bringing my colony size down to nine.

Ideology also makes the Hospitality mod more difficult, depending on the other ideoligions. Some intensely-bigoted tribal nudist cannibals came to visit, and had so many negative modifiers toward my colonists that even my most talented socialites kept offending them during interactions. The string of failures was such that my hospitality score was -3 despite my fancy dining room and rec room.

Oh, and having fenced-in pastures instead of a dedicated animal zone is nice and immersive. I especially appreciate how the game keeps track of the nutritional output of the pen vs. what the critters are consuming. With a year-round growing season, I don't even have to bother with hay!

Weird, because my pen is 90% hay growing zone and it can't feed my animals. Despite showing that my production out-weights my consumption, I've lost several to starvation. Now I have a storeroom dedicated to hay and kibble inside.

Ideology can make things somewhat infuriating. I have a tendency to shoot things like xenophobic psycho cannibals on principle. My filthy cave-dwelling made people will happily hide under their mountains, in the jungle all night long. That and an actual turret kill zone keeps them happy.

Sidenote, I've realized more reasons why I don't use mods:

Its always depressing when mods don't get updated anymore since creator moved on and so new versions can't use them anymore, so by never using them I never get used to them x'D

But yeah, while I haven't tried them out, I am actually pretty interested in mods that make rimworld less hard scifi

Heads up, folks! New DLC coming up and it's a HUGE one!

• Pawns can now get pregnant and have children who need to be raised and educated. You get to choose their passions and the better educated they are, the more passions they can pick from.
• If you don't want to wait for the kids to grow up the normal way, you can growth-accelerate or even just flat-out vat-grow them.
• Pawns can now have non-standard genetics. What this means is that factions of Beastmaster Furries, pig people and fire-breathing imps are now a thing. You can also extract/buy/find gene samples to augment your own colonists with.
• You can now build your own mechanoids, both combat and labor models, but you need to fit one of your colonists with a brain implant to psionically control them.
• More mechanoid types are getting added. Flamethrowers in particular were mentioned.
• To balance out the usefulness of having Mecha-Mooks at your beck and call, mechanoids now apparently produce toxic waste pollution which will poison the environment and sicken colonists. You can freeze it to store it safely, send it to other factions (who will not be happy about it), later on you can also dispose of it via disintegration, but there are also means to mitigate the effects, such as gene mods for increased resistance.

They're also about to release version 1.4, which will add dyeable floors/walls/carpets, a new crop to harvest dye from, gas from rotting corpses that sickens pawns who breathe it in, mod manager UI overhaul...

Oy, I still have mods in Rimpy that aren't updated for the current version.

Also not looking forward to a new batch of warcrimes, like... well, they wouldn't be full-sized hats, would they? More like fezzes? Skullcaps? At any rate, ShitRimworldSays is getting even more disturbing and the expansion isn't even out yet.

Edited by Tacitus on Oct 7th 2022 at 4:26:56 AM

It's been a year and a half since the last update.

Besides lots of mods still work even of the mod loader says it's for an old version.

For what it's worth, I've seen at least one Youtuber ponder about waiting with getting the DLC until it's possible to turn children off because the rimworld is too violent for them as it is.

Edited by amitakartok on Oct 8th 2022 at 3:32:19 PM

I checked out rimworld reddit and it has at least temporarely become step more wholesome because of people awwing at children or wanting to protect them unknown

But yeah having had lot of fun with dlc and I like new lore added

One interesting thing is that midtier and hightier mechanoid cores apparently require brainscans, with hightier "without huge facility" requiring ripscan which destroys the brain in process.

Surprised at this take of the concept of harvesting brains for robots :'D

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 31st 2022 at 12:15:34 PM

I'm honestly kinda wondering what is real statistics with this game. Like with Stellaris apparently vast majority of silent players are xenophiles, so are vast majority of rimworld players the ones not doing warcrime bingo?

Its really tiring to attempt to read what this community is writing online x'D

Edited by SpookyMask on Nov 3rd 2022 at 9:23:02 PM

The whole warcrime bingo is just a meme from a vocal minority, I think.

I have absolutely never done any of that BS in any of my colonies, ever. Though to be fair, I also don't play like how these folks insist the game should be played, like rejecting colonists with imperfect traits.

My experiance hanging out on discords is that every one I hang out with that plays it honestly treats it more like sims but occasionally a shootout breaks out then they do warcrime bingo.

So much look at my cute little pawn and her cute little house.

People will meme about the warcrimes, but dont actualy do them

Edited by Imca on Nov 3rd 2022 at 6:00:13 AM

Oh, they do the warcrimes all the time. It's a frighteningly good way to get some wealth and gear.

I almost never leave injured enemies alive unless I am looking to improve relations to temporarily halt raids. Beyond that though I am not that vicious.