RimWorld

[RampantDesires]

This came up in the SB this morning, and I've chatted to a few other people here on E about how much we love this game so having a thread to chat about the game, challenges, fun parts, mods and other stuff could be fun!

Topics that I'm personally interested in discussing.

Mods - good ones, bad ones, broken and 'cheating'
Starting Colonist Composition - Do you randomize or fish for a good group?
Picking Your Colony Location - What do you look for?  What screws you over every time.
Ice Sheet - Otherwise known as "so I hear you like cannibals"

[LuciferMorningstar]

Just the thread that I need and want I need to know what are the to get mods in the game, the dos and don ts with your first run in the game.

[RampantDesires]

I have personally played ... way too much RimWorld.  It was my obsession for several months and I still randomly break it out and put a colony together for fun.  As of writing this we're at 916 hours and it isn't really a game that you can let run in the background (some management games, like Banished and other colony builders, require a lot of time to pass to gather resources or what have you, but RimWorld is not like this it requires pretty constant supervision and reaction). It is important to note I guess that I've played over several updates so not ALL of this info might be currently relevant, I haven't played much in the last few months as have been busy with other things.  It should still be at least kind of helpful, but if something IS super outdated/no longer works please do tell me <3

Advice to Beginners
Phoebe is your friend. Just making a sustainable colony without the events and randomeness can be a challenge.  Don't feel like you have to up the difficulty immediately, giving yourself time to recover between events and rebuild can be super helpful on your first few colonies.

Pick a good starting location You're new?  Maybe start in the temperate zone that has a long or even year round growing season.  Again make sure you have the basics of the game down before making it more complicated for yourself.  Starving colonists are SUPER grumpy and it isn't fun to struggle with basic food production for long. Try to situate yourself near roads.  This makes traveling and caravan times SO MUCH FASTER, but that isn't super important.  When you're on your tile map and looking to start building, try to find a place that has some either existing dilapidated structures or like the curve of a mountain to build against or into, constructing free standing shelters in the beginning is kind of a waste of resources.

M-fing Rice Rice in fertile soil will feed you forever!  Fertile soil makes all your plants grow faster, but with rice it grows at 230%! It has a fairly long shelf life even without being refrigerated or frozen. I usually plant rice immediately and if there is a fair bit of fertile soil maybe dedicate a small amount to berries just because they can be eaten without being cooked, but you can always forage for berries in the early days.

GreenHouses At the end of the day though growing food outside can be unpredictable.  Blight, fires, you name in.  Growing food in your base or inside a shelter is much more reliable.  "But Rampant, there are hydroponic basins why not use those... " eh.  I don't like hydroponics and only use them when building on an ice sheet with few plantable squares.  Losing a whole crop to power outages makes me grumpy.  With a greenhouse set up (enclosed building with sun lamps) if you lose power you just lose grow time.  You can grow food all year round though you'll need heaters to keep things growing in the winter.  It is protected from everything except a power surge exploding inside the building, you can harvest and then leave it on the ground for awhile and even replant letting your colonists come through later to gather it when they aren't busy without losing durability.

Trade There is temptation to focus on gathering and stockpiling massive amounts of food and selling off some of this when you have too much.  Which is .. fine I guess?  But producing food doesn't make much money.  Even lavish meals don't go for all that much.  You'll need to train up some craftsmen and set up a trade beacon.  The king of money making are sculptures for me. Having a lot of art in your rooms, especially high quality art in the dining/social gathering room are great for keeping your people happier and improving room quality. All the other stuff you sell off for piles of silver. (Or you make sculptures OUT of silver and then it gets silly). Keep in mind that traders only have so much money on hand and you'll regularly drain them of all their available funds but usually there will be other random things for you to stockpile/use.

[LuciferMorningstar]

I have personally played ... way too much RimWorld.  It was my obsession for several months and I still randomly break it out and put a colony together for fun.  As of writing this we're at 916 hours and it isn't really a game that you can let run in the background (some management games, like Banished and other colony builders, require a lot of time to pass to gather resources or what have you, but RimWorld is not like this it requires pretty constant supervision and reaction). It is important to note I guess that I've played over several updates so not ALL of this info might be currently relevant, I haven't played much in the last few months as have been busy with other things.  It should still be at least kind of helpful, but if something IS super outdated/no longer works please do tell me <3

Advice to Beginners
Phoebe is your friend. Just making a sustainable colony without the events and randomeness can be a challenge.  Don't feel like you have to up the difficulty immediately, giving yourself time to recover between events and rebuild can be super helpful on your first few colonies.

Pick a good starting location You're new?  Maybe start in the temperate zone that has a long or even year round growing season.  Again make sure you have the basics of the game down before making it more complicated for yourself.  Starving colonists are SUPER grumpy and it isn't fun to struggle with basic food production for long. Try to situate yourself near roads.  This makes traveling and caravan times SO MUCH FASTER, but that isn't super important.  When you're on your tile map and looking to start building, try to find a place that has some either existing dilapidated structures or like the curve of a mountain to build against or into, constructing free standing shelters in the beginning is kind of a waste of resources.

M-fing Rice Rice in fertile soil will feed you forever!  Fertile soil makes all your plants grow faster, but with rice it grows at 230%! It has a fairly long shelf life even without being refrigerated or frozen. I usually plant rice immediately and if there is a fair bit of fertile soil maybe dedicate a small amount to berries just because they can be eaten without being cooked, but you can always forage for berries in the early days.

GreenHouses At the end of the day though growing food outside can be unpredictable.  Blight, fires, you name in.  Growing food in your base or inside a shelter is much more reliable.  "But Rampant, there are hydroponic basins why not use those... " eh.  I don't like hydroponics and only use them when building on an ice sheet with few plantable squares.  Losing a whole crop to power outages makes me grumpy.  With a greenhouse set up (enclosed building with sun lamps) if you lose power you just lose grow time.  You can grow food all year round though you'll need heaters to keep things growing in the winter.  It is protected from everything except a power surge exploding inside the building, you can harvest and then leave it on the ground for awhile and even replant letting your colonists come through later to gather it when they aren't busy without losing durability.

Trade There is temptation to focus on gathering and stockpiling massive amounts of food and selling off some of this when you have too much.  Which is .. fine I guess?  But producing food doesn't make much money.  Even lavish meals don't go for all that much.  You'll need to train up some craftsmen and set up a trade beacon.  The king of money making are sculptures for me. Having a lot of art in your rooms, especially high quality art in the dining/social gathering room are great for keeping your people happier and improving room quality. All the other stuff you sell off for piles of silver. (Or you make sculptures OUT of silver and then it gets silly). Keep in mind that traders only have so much money on hand and you'll regularly drain them of all their available funds but usually there will be other random things for you to stockpile/use.

Interesting read and I think you have some great tips and ones that could help quite a lot, some that I never really took into consideration as like you mentioned it is a game that needs a lot of attention.

[RampantDesires]

Mods

Some people hate mods.  "It's cheating"  "It isn't even the same game" ect and so forth.  I get the argument but ... they fix SO MANY of the annoying problems with gameplay. 

- The most useful and controversial mod out there is probably EdB Prepare Carefully "Customize your RimWorld colonists, choose your gear and prepare carefully for your crash landing! Use the optional point limits to try to create a balanced start or keep points disabled to build the starting group that you always wanted to try. Save your setup as a preset so that you can start your game the same way later."

Yep.  Just what it sounds like. It lets you completely customize your characters before starting.  You can have a perfectly balanced team, this person is a great crafter, this one's my cook, this guy's got combat and social skills.  They can all be in their 20's and healthy.  Even better you pick their backgrounds and temperments.  Look at that they're all cheerful and will get along. 

It has a point buy system (which is itself is optional, but whenever I use this mod I always make sure to limit myself with a balanced point buy :P).

- My favorite mod is called I Can Fix It! which makes it so walls and buildings are auto repaired.  It is kind of useful, BUT the mod description is what makes it the best.

Copied from their page

"Sparkles?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Remind me why we're locked in a closet."

"There's wargs outside, boss. They'd probably eat us."

"Wargs."

"Yep."

"Why are there wargs outside?"

"There was a gap in the wall, so they just, y'know, came right in."

"They just came right in?"

"Sure thing, boss. Just walked through the wall."

"How did they walk through the wall?"

"Well, there was a hole in the wall."

"And why was there a hole in the wall?"

"That was the raiders, boss. Blew it up with grenades."

"The raiders. Got it."

"Sure thing. Can't stand those raiders."

"Sparkles?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Did I, or did I not, tell you to repair the wall?"

"Sure did! Patched it all up in a few hours, just like you asked."

"Then *why was there a hole in the wall*?"

"Well, they destroyed that part of the wall, boss."

"And so you didn't repair it?"

"Can't repair it, boss. It's destroyed. Not there anymore."

"Could you . . . build a new wall, maybe? In the same spot as the old one?"

"Oh, yeah. Could've done that, I suppose."

"Why didn't you?"

"Didn't tell me to build a new wall, boss. Just repair the old wall."

"Right. Got it."

"Y'know . . . boss . . ."

". . . Yes?"

"Just occurred to me. Maybe I should have built a new wall?"

". . ."

"You know. Where the old one was."

". . ."

"And then the wargs wouldn't have gotten in."

". . ."

"And eaten our dogs."

". . ."

"And trapped us in this closet."

". . ."

"Maybe that would have been a good idea, boss?"

". . . Yes, Sparkles. That would have been a good idea."

"Great, boss! I'll do that next time."

"Wonderful. You do that."

"Glad I could help!"

"Sparkles?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"How are you with melee weapons?"

"Terrible, boss!"

"Perfect. Here, take this spear."

----

Destroyed buildings will now leave behind a construction ghost, meaning that your builders will automatically rebuild things once they get a chance. Also, due to how bright construction plans are, it'll be a lot easier to see what's been destroyed.

Friends don't let friends get eaten by wargs.

- I like having more medical options.  Prosthetics and what not, there are a ton of mods that involve these things, it is just personal preferance, but I like being able to baby and fix my colonists.

- Some kind of refrigeration mod is always good.  Being able to plop a fridge in your dining room/rec room so that people can wake up and immediately go eat at a table without having to go to the kitchen is a major time saver.  It sounds stupid, but, yeah, so useful.

- The Star Wars mods make it ... a whole new game and are a lot of fun, but I don't recommend it until you've kind of mastered the base game and are looking for something new and fun.

- Ditto for the Starship Trooper's mod.  Fuck Arachnids.  Like, a lot.

[RampantDesires]

Just personal preferences

I like mountain bases.  I play mostly on mountain maps where I can dig into the side and block out rooms.  Infestations are a BITCH.  God those bugs hurt, especially early on, but for me the pros outweigh the cons.  Even once my base is set up I'll mine out extra rooms and passages so that bugs will spawn away from my actual people and I can put up roadblocks between them and deal with them at my leisure.  Since I make most of my silver from art pieces having the stone is nice.  I make everything out of stone actually, it is readily available and super durable/fire resistant.

Animals aren't efficient, it has been proven over and over again, but I LIKE them.  It makes game play more interesting.  I usually tame boars, they can be trained to haul.  This rocks my world.  They're also decent in combat and if they die they are way easier to replace than colonists.  Dogs are also great for this, but you can't find them in the wild :-) Wolves are hard to train/tame but are a fun challenge. Muffalos are good for milk/sheering for wool and I almost always get them or llamas. The wool I turn into clothes for colonists or for resale, it trains up your crafters and makes a decent amount of money.

Most often I just plant a giant field of hay once a season and then haul it into a giant indoor barn area where all my non trained to haul animals sit. 

Things it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn

1) Clean hospital rooms.  So important.  At first I was like "you have a hospital bed and a doctor why aren't you getting better"  When people are sick I make sure to assign someone to clean the room first, or even daily and this greatly improves things.

2) Have you cook drop meals on the floor instead of taking them to the nearest stockpile then gather them all up at the end or let someone designated to hauling take care of it.  This goes for crafters making like stone blocks as well.  Having a skilled person walking back and forth is the biggest waste of time. 

3) You can move full batteries ... Legit just pick them up and move them. I was making GIANT lines of power cables to do things like drill or run a single light and what have you for the longest time, you can just bring a full battery over to your drill and have it run it by itself. *head desks* I hate that it took me that long to work that out.



I could ramble about this forever but I think I'm going to cut myself off here :P

[Lyron]

Phoebe is your friend. Just making a sustainable colony without the events and randomeness can be a challenge.  Don't feel like you have to up the difficulty immediately, giving yourself time to recover between events and rebuild can be super helpful on your first few colonies.

^ This. Srsly. I made the mistake of not doing that for my first playthrough and didn't touch the game for some months after. XD There's definitely a learning curve that Phoebe helps promote. I picked up the game again a couple weeks back with this little change, and it helped immensely. I have a pretty sustainable colony now that used to have seven colonists...until I got attacked by predators three times in a row. XD Lost two, and the third one hasn't taken his last beating yet, fortunately. XD But the walls went up shortly after that. >.> (Only for two wargs to slip in during the construction...)

GreenHouses At the end of the day though growing food outside can be unpredictable.  Blight, fires, you name in.  Growing food in your base or inside a shelter is much more reliable.  "But Rampant, there are hydroponic basins why not use those... " eh.  I don't like hydroponics and only use them when building on an ice sheet with few plantable squares.  Losing a whole crop to power outages makes me grumpy.  With a greenhouse set up (enclosed building with sun lamps) if you lose power you just lose grow time.  You can grow food all year round though you'll need heaters to keep things growing in the winter.  It is protected from everything except a power surge exploding inside the building, you can harvest and then leave it on the ground for awhile and even replant letting your colonists come through later to gather it when they aren't busy without losing durability.

...I didn't think of greenhouses. I have hydroponics set up with a geothermal generator, but yes, those don't feel as efficient. Gonna have to consider some remodeling or wait until my next colony. :D I made the mistake one winter of overestimating my food supply, when there wasn't any indoor gardening. It was rough living until the rice could finally grow. And, at least with the rice, you can apparently harvest even if the plant isn't fully grown. I usually keep forgetting about that, but it's probably better than letting the plant die off.

Have your cook drop meals on the floor instead of taking them to the nearest stockpile then gather them all up at the end or let someone designated to hauling take care of it.  This goes for crafters making like stone blocks as well.  Having a skilled person walking back and forth is the biggest waste of time.

...Didn't know this could be done either. XD I took to moving the stockpiles closer to the workstations to save on time, though, especially since some of my colonists are so slow. Might have to give this a try.

One thing I learned the hard way, and am embarrassed to admit, is that there is a limit to how far roofs can be constructed from a wall. ::) I assumed a roof had been built entirely over a stockpile, since RimWorld did indeed have it marked as a roofed area, and probably lost a few med kits. Thankfully, the man-hunter bunnies and squirrels didn't have me depleting those resources.

[Missy]

I've been trying to remember what this was called. I've seen lets plays of it, but have never played it myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw8WaBYyW24&list=PLTlpO3Ief-8HSxzMe8pUR9KNMoRD3YbGa

[Sain]

I remember playing this a few times. It is a nifty little game. Back then it was possible to set up hydrophonics just barely in time so as to not die of starvation or resort to cannibalism in those ice sheet areas. It of course depended entirely on how lucky you were to get some metal deposits also so that you could build those hydrophonics in the first place. If you pick completely clean ice sheet that's of course going to be a bit more difficult.

[RampantDesires]

I remember playing this a few times. It is a nifty little game. Back then it was possible to set up hydrophonics just barely in time so as to not die of starvation or resort to cannibalism in those ice sheet areas. It of course depended entirely on how lucky you were to get some metal deposits also so that you could build those hydrophonics in the first place. If you pick completely clean ice sheet that's of course going to be a bit more difficult.

Ice sheets are definitely the biggest challenge in the main game.  I cannot do them with a random group, they have to mostly be cannibals and game play is much slower.  I couldn't afford to feed anyone above my starting three for like the first three years (it is super depressing slaughtering your starting pet day one, but it needs to be done because there's just no way to justify keeping them around).  Even on ice sheets I try to find sections of gravel where I can grow things not in hydroponics.  This even lets you grow trees at some point and be subject to the whim of random traders.  You never think about how much you USE wood until there is none to be had.

I tried to get around using cannibals by putting human meat in the nutrient dispensers, but people hate eating that stuff too and morale was pretty consistently low.  People going berserk and killing one another, lighting your storeroom on fire, just running out into the icy dark.  So depressing.  The only real upside is that once you DO start making food you can store it forever without having to worry about proper refrigeration :P



Ooo, speaking of refrigeration.  This was often one of my bigger problems in my early games.  Keeping things frozen so they don't spoil, working on like stockpile rotation so that things that aren't refrigerated (like giant rooms of hay or even piles of herbal medicine) don't rot.  It is kind of a pain in the ass, and I always add in some buffer room in my planting for mismanagement on my part, but setting your stockpile priorities and having lots of smaller stockpiles instead of giant ones can be super useful.

I still end up having giant freezers stuffed full of food however. 
Tips for refrigeration
- You lose a lot of heat/cold through your walls.  Always have a double layer of walls (not like rough stone, but walls that you make out of stone blocks) around the entirety of your freezer.  Like I said I personally like to build inside mountains and this helps keep the overall temperature cooler and more stable.
- Always.  ALWAYS have airlock rooms outside to stop heat transfer.  This works for keeping your freezers cold, but also your base warm in the winter.  A small room or corridor that allows one door to close behind you before you open the next door into your main room. 
- Never rely on just one or two AC units.  You can stagger their temperature level so that some only kick on during the dreaded heatwave (I usually have one at -8, -7, -6, -5 and then an two extra that are flipped off for emergencies, like I said I like GIANT freezers) this takes a minimal amount of power to keep them there and means you don't have to be knocking out portions of wall and putting your food at risk during the actual event.  I am weird and I leave my extra ones off and then manually toggle them on when I need them, but you CAN totally automate it.
- I usually have a small outer room that holds meals and three stacks of vegetables and three stacks of meat near the stove.  Then there is a deeper like, deep freeze behind it that isn't opened as much.  If you lose power during a heatwave this helps you minimize your losses since you can forbid access to your larger room and in theory keep it cold longer while still feeding your colonists from the outer room.  So it goes Deep Freeze ---> Smaller refrigeration/cooking storage ---> airlock ---> rest of base :P
- Having lots of different kinds of meat can be a pain in the butt, half stacks of random things kill my need for organization so I will routinely rotate out the type of meat that is allowed in my critical meat store next to the stove making them completely use one or two types of meat completely then rotating to something I have in storage.
- Speaking of storing meat.  It is more efficient to store like muffalo corpses in your deep freeze than to slaughter them first.  They take up less space although it is hard to at a glance gauge you food store. This is really only a problem in the first few years, or if you get some of those ridiculous man eating herds of them and have like 50 of them to deal with at a time.  In some cases I've built a seperate like, emergency freezer that gets manually turned on to store the bodies until I can get around to/need to put them in the actual food rotation.  Again if I had known that I could just move batteries over to power these temp structures it would have been way easier, but lessons learned :P
- I'm not sure if you still can, but you USED to be able to cheese the system but cooling a very small room with a single AC and then venting that cold air into a larger room.  The way vents work (or used to wrong if they fixed it) is kind of broken.  This felt a bit too much like cheating to me so I never used it. But if you're in the jungle and refrigeration is a major issue it could work for you.