In Rimworld, your task is survival. You start with 3 pawns who crash land on a planet on the Rim of civilization. With only the bare minimum to start with, you begin building, exploring, and researching to be able to finally build a ship and fly home. (Note in the new DLC, Royalty, there is a new endgame scenario. As I don’t have it, I won’t mention it further.)

My current colony, in all its splendor!




As you can see at the top, my original three pawns are now up to seven. One of the originals, Josh, was lost in a mad hare attack. Yes, you read that correctly. Two others also perished in that incident.
A closer look at the colony and some of its features:



By the numbers, #1 is a smoke leaf growing patch. Smoke leaf is a mild recreational narcotic. Using it gives a temporary mood buff, but there are some downsides – if a random caravan comes through and you send your best negotiator to trade with them whilst stoned, you will pay much higher prices.

#2 & #4 are cotton and devilstrand. Picking them creates a bolt of cloth which can be used to make clothing, etc.

#3 is a hops growing zone. You can make beer!

#5 & #6 are potatoes and corn, respectively.

#7 is my hospital

#8 was a communication room, but I threw a nutrient paste dispenser in there as well because it didn’t fit anywhere else.

#9 is a dining room/recreation hall. There is a video game, a TV, a chessboard, and a few pieces of art (ugly environment is a mood debuff) as well as a dinner table and chairs. “Ate without table” is another mood debuff. You can see a picnic table between room 11 and field 2. If a pawn gets hungry out at work and the dining table is too far away, they will eat where they are at and you will get the debuff.

#10 is a kitchen

#11 is a work room – from upper left to right is a distiller, a drug lab, and a fabrication bench. The drug lab can create medical or recreational drugs. The fabrication bench is a mid game production station that creates some of the better weaponry.

#12 is another production room – this one has a machining table, a smelter, and a biofuel refinery. The machining table builds weapons such as assault rifles, machine guns, etc. The smelter will allow you to smelt slag from spaceship parts into usable steel.

#13 is another production room – this one has a tailor bench and a stone cutting table. All the walls are granite, the blocks to build those walls came from this bench.

#14 has a research table and an artisan bench. The works of art around the base are sculpted here, and technology advances are researched here as well.

#15 are solar panels. Not the most efficient form of power, but they are a nice addition.

The lower part of the base:



#1 are all bedrooms. It is important for each pawn’s mental health to have a bedroom with a few creature comforts (ie a lamp for light, a dresser, and a piece of art). They are all carpeted, which explains the floor colors. Notice some are double beds – I had two married couples for awhile, alas poor Gerald’s wife perished in the infamous Mad Hare incident. For a while, Cottery had a lover who shared her room, but that poor unfortunate soul was kidnapped by raiders.
#2 is another research station – this is a high tech one for the later game technologies.

#3 is the prison. Captured pawns (from raids on my colony) will go here and receive medical treatment if needed. If they are useful, I will try to recruit them to my colony. If we have poor relations with their home colony, I may release them to increase our standing. Some Rimworld players like to commit war crimes with their captives. Organ harvesting is popular, as is amputation, use for medical training, and selling as slaves.

#4 is a storage room. Items will deteriorate if left outside, so they must be put in proper storage.

#5 is a freezer. Food, freshly killed animals certain drugs are kept in here to stay fresh. There is a butcher table in there as well so animals can be butchered for their meat.

#6 is the power center. There are chemfuel generators and batteries in there. The batteries are in case the chemfuel gens run out of fuel – they will keep things going long enough for pawns to have a chance to refuel the generators.

#7 is a barn. I tame a bunch of animals – boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel, alpacas give wool for clothing. I also have donkeys, horses, bears, rhinos, and a few other odds and ends. These animals have good value on the trade block, and I use them to acquire needed materials. The bears and rhinos have been trained to attack and will help with predators (both 2- and 4- legged!)

This shows the planning stage of the wall I’m building around my compound. I have to jog around the pond, as it won’t support he granite wall. The white piece of equipment on the right is the geothermal generator. It is placed over a steam vent and produces quite a nice bit of electricity. The planned structure above it is a killbox. Enemies trying to raid my compound will run in through the maze (in single file and get slowed down) and into an open area with absolutely no cover. My pawns will be behind constructed barricades, and along with gun turrets, will make short work of the raiders. I’m adding this in because I will soon start building the spaceship to take them home, and I am expecting raids while it powers up.



These are a couple of remote mining stations. I have deep drills placed on deposits I found with a ground scanner. I have batteries in the shacks powering them. The one on the left produces steel, the one on the right produces plasteel and is almost depleted. Depleted batteries will be uninstalled and reinstalled in the generator shed to recharge.



Finally, you see my graveyard. Leaving dead bodies lying around gives pawns a serious mood debuff and is plain unsightly. So they must be buried. Pawns will occasionally visit the graves as a joy activity as well, so they should be placed nearby. My downed colonists are buried there, as well as a number of less than successful raiders.

I completed that game - built the ship, staved off a number of attacks over the 15 days it took the power generator to spool up, and launched my colonists homeward.

I decided to start a new game, so I'll write it up as I go.
You start by picking your scenario - I'm going with "Crashlanded."



Then your "storyteller" - the AI that controls random events for your colony. You can change any aspect of this at any time during the game. There are also mods (Rimworld is HEAVILY moddable) which create new storytellers.
I'm picking Phoebe, which will be a new one for me. I've been sticking with Cassandra. Phoebe is a little more intense but at greater intervals between events. Supposedly.



Once your world is generated, you choose your landing spot (or pick random). I'm still new to the game, so I'm picking a temperate forest to keep things a little easier.



Finally, you pick 3 out of a given 8 colonists. They each have different stats in terms of abilities/tasks they can accomplish as well as quirks - both positive and negative.







There is a mod called "Prepare Carefully" which lets you tweak any of the colonists as you would like. I didn't use it for any stats on the colonists I wound up choosing, but I did alter their appearances.

Here's a look at your arrival:



First order of business is to "unforbid" all the items on the map you want or need that are currently forbidden. Colonists cannot pickup or haul anything marked forbidden, so you have to enable them all. I'm not sure of the reasoning behind it, but it does give you the option to keep or ignore items, so maybe that's the point.

Setting up each colonists work priorities is another task prior to unpausing. Highest priority is 1, lowest is 9 (via mod, 4 without). They will do any 1 priority tasks available first (from left to right on the list) then 2, 3 etc. You want your most skilled pawn set at higher priority for most tasks, esp things like "Doctor." Low skilled doctors can botch things up and kill people. Cooking is another example - a low skilled cook can give food poisoning. Low skilled construction workers can botch a job and cost you the material for the build.



Also visible in that picture is the construction I have planned. The map I landed on had some ruins I was able to claim - they will form part of my colony buildings.
Items will deteriorate if they are kept outside, so I have to build a room and create a storage zone in it for items to be kept out of the elements. That is the building in the upper part of the picture.
The one in the lower will be a barracks for now. Eventually I will build separate bedrooms for each pawn and repurpose that room.

Pawns have needs and their mental well being needs to be taken into account (the reason for the private bedrooms). Pawns may go into a mild break (ie sadly wandering around the compound, or following another pawn and hurling insults) if they get pushed too hard. A major break might entail them having a tantrum and smashing things in their rooms, or breaking items in storage, or even attacking other colonists. Besides the obvious downsides, while they are in that state, you cannot control them, so if you get raided or need to draft them for some reason you cannot.



Lastly, here is a look at the stats for my pawns. None are perfect, there are some annoying quirks (not hauling is one that really annoys), but they had good stats and hopefully will work out well. The flames next to certain stats indicate a passion for that work. Pawns with passion will improve that stat faster as they do it. For that reason, it makes sense to have a lower skilled but passionate pawn handle a job you have a better option for in the short term.

Good posts JC. When I saw the OP I will admit I wasn't pulled in. The game is not a looker. But as you are showing, it seems like it's the sort of game that can really get its hooks in. I was just randomly looking at reviews for Star Wars Squadrons and noticed a link to this article and read it, having heard first of this game from your posts.

https://www.wired.com/story/rimworl...11-8bc3-4bfb-80f0-c15104a8f89a_text2vec1

It's a short piece about a player who has dropped 700 hours in to Rim World. Not every game has the ability to pull you in like that. So I can believe this game has that certain je ne sais quoi that makes it worth playing. Thanks for the heads up. Personally I'm on hold for Cyberpunk and not taking any new patients right now lol. Especially one that could prove addictive and compelling. I've got my plate cleared for Cyberpunk, although I bought a new sniper game yesterday to fill in the three weeks until it's released.

Good article, I think I ran across that one not too long ago too. I can vouch for much of it, inlcuding capturing a raider and harvesting organs (in one particular case, both lungs) to transplant into one of my colonists who was having health issues. And yes, losing one hurts, esp when he's your best doctor or craftsman (Jess and Todd from my last game), or the spouse of another pawn who then winds up with a -20 mood buff because of the loss of their loved one and is constantly on the brink of a mental break. And you are quite about the game not being the prettiest, but it has wonderfully deep and engrossing game play. Steer clear if you have anything better to do!

Here is my latest progress, not too much farther along because we're in a bit of a bad stretch here. Features to point out include the freezer - the double walled structure in the upper left. The double walls insulate better as does the granite they are build out of There is a generator shed next to it to keep the freezer running. Food placed in there will last indefinitely. Apparently freezer burn is a not a thing on the Rim! To the right of the freezer is the non-food storage area. Wooden walls were placed in conjunction with the ruins that were there to complete the structure.

Below these are one larger building, which is the barracks I mentioned in an earlier post, again built using the ruins of another era. To the right is my bedroom area. I was building three, one for each pawn, when two decided to move in together. So now you see the double bed in the upper one for Ris and XiaoLiang, while Xandy has the lower most. I plan on moving the last bed into the lower right hand corner of the old barracks and walling it off to create a prison cell. The unused bedroom will be used for a yet-to-be-recruited pawn.

This game may not last as long as I might hope, if you look in the right hand column, among the messages there is a reminder that I am currently in a heatwave. You also might see a "Heatstroke" notification. I am not quite ready for that event, as I haven't completed the AC for the bedrooms. Right now, the only cool room is the freezer. I can't keep the pawns in there, though I can send them in for a bit to cool down. It remains to be seen if I can juggle that long enough to wait out the event. At 0500, the temp is 112F. The previous day it got to 135, I can easily lose at least one of my carefully chosen colonists, which would severely throw a monkey wrench into my survival plans.

Get in the freezer! You've five minutes. Next!

That's what I forgot to do - update this thread!!

So when last we left our intrepid colonists, the three were in the midst of a stifling heat wave. They survived,barely, by me cycling them through the freezer (so you weren't too far off DB!) and switching their sleep/work schedules so they'd be active during the night when it was cooler. I also had them prioritize getting the AC up and running. The heatwave did cost me our pet rhino, which broke Xandy's heart as she had bonded with it. Much of the wildlife also perished in the wave.

Ris and Xiaoliang wound up getting married too! They had a pleasant little ceremony in the common room, which now houses an artisan table, a stone cutting bench, a research table, and a tailoring station for making clothes. The dinner table is there as well, and there is a "marriage spot" (yes, you can configure that) in there as well as a party spot (also configurable.) All the colonists have their own room, and I have built a hospital and a kitchen off the freezer. I've also expanded the dry storage and am in the process of adding a jail cell for "guests" who drop in.

I've added a new member to our happy little clan too. Tank was escaping from slavers and asked for assistance, in return for which he would join the colony. I took him in but had to fight off is would be captors. Five more bodies in the graveyard now!

I've begun taming animals again, as I found it quite profitable in my previous run through. I have a number of muffalo, and I'll sell off a few and keep the rest for their fur. I can sell the fur and make clothing out of it as well. I want to tame some boomalopes, because I can milk them for fuel for the chemfuel generators (much more efficient than the wood burning generators I have now). Unfortunately, they don't seem too common here. Of course walking gas cans may not be indigenous to an area that gets heatwaves like I had earlier. I may be out of luck for boomalopes.

Here's the latest pic, showing my new additions.

Whew! Things move pretty quickly on the Rim!
Let's start off with the raid - three banditos decided to attack, and in the process I wound up having Ris kidnapped. There is a chance I would have been able to rescue her later on, but that will not come to pass.
I received word of a refugee in need of assistance who would be willing to join us if we helped him, so I sent Xiaoliang and Xandy after him, leaving Tank to mind the store.
Xiaoliang and Xandy do in fact successfully rescue Smith, but then their caravan is hijacked on the way home, and all Xiaoliang is badly injured. The travelers set up a temporary camp, and Xandy tended to him until he was well enough to travel. The injured Smith also recovers a bit more as well. After a short delay, the caravan got back on the trail home.
Unfortunately, they were only a few hours away from home and they got jumped again - this time by manhunting cats. Xandy was the only one capable of defending the group, and she was outnumbered 3-1. Still she managed to drive them off, but was herself badly injured.
It turns out Smith cannot do any kind of medical work, so I had no choice but to send Tank out after the caravan. Unfortunately, before Tank could reach them both Xandy and Xiaoliang succumbed to their injuries. Then of course, Tanks caravan gets jumped as well. Guess what happened? If you said "He died," go to the head of the class!
So with only Smith remaining, I've decided to stick a fork in this particular run.