Rimworld

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This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

The universe maybe completely different from Dwarf Fortress, but the inhabitants are just as equally retarded.

Rimworld is what happens when Dwarf Fortress, Firefly, Dune, WH40k (think somewhere between Age of Terra and Dark Age of Technology), and several other space operas had an intense orgy and this is the result. She's prettier than her predecessor, but doesn't necessarily have the same depth...at least at first. Playable alphas were released sometime in 2013, and the game was released in full late 2018. Primarily designed by Tynan Sylvester (who wants you to buy his books). The main objective of the game is to manage a dwarven fortress space colony until one can escape the hellhole in a spaceship. Or they can choose to make their colony viable enough that it can participate in galactic society at large. Despite being a vidya gaem it is (somewhat) tolerated by /tg/ because of its gameplay similarity to Dwarf Fortress, though it is considerably simpler and easier (but then, what isn't).

The sci-fi setting allows for elements that dwarf fortress can't have (though the toady one can find a way to include most of them). Some of these elements include but are not limited to: forceful organ harvesting, cannibalism, human leather, catching carcinomas from toxic fallout, cargo pods dropping on your favorite thing, swarms of super beavers capable of leveling entire forests, exploding deer, exploding rats, people going on murder sprees simply because they have no bed(we got that in DF), and pirate-killing turkeys. And that is with just the vanilla game!

The game has become celebrated as insanely moddable, and there are literally thousands of mods offering everything from new weapons and furniture, UI improvements, new factions and storytellers, aesthetic improvements, and completely new mechanics such as space combat in spaceships. With a few free mods, it can be practically a different game. In

Apparently it was recently (2022) banned in Australia mostly because of its open display of drug use, especially normalised enjoyment of soft drugs for recreation, though this is actually optional in gameplay. This is a bit like banning Dwarf Fortress as offensive to people with dwarfism. Let's hope the Aussies don't realise D&D has potions. Nope! It's been unbanned but age rating moved up to 18+, better than nothing.

Overview

In the distant future, a space accident causes colonists to be stranded upon a rimworld, an inhabited but backward feral world at the rim of known space. The world is procedurally generated and differs each time you start a game. Tynan describes the game as an "interactive story generator", probably inspired by the many internet stories of Dwarf Fortress campaigns, allowing you to post your own colony's epic story of struggle, sacrifice and atrocity to your favourite board. As such, it's not "intended" to be played like a simple management game, though you can play it any way you like. The main mechanic is an "AI Storyteller", who semi-randomly spawns events. These provide most of the challenge of the game, although if you are feeling particularly confident you can always intentionally pick a difficult starting area such as extreme desert, disease-ridden swamp, bleak ice or tundra, and so on.

In Tynan's fluff, humanity is fuck-old: seriously, so much so that you literally dig up steel and electronic components like they're sedimentary rock. The objective is primarily to survive; if you manage that, then you can think about getting richer or even getting off the world. By default, you start with 3 colonists out of 8 potential choices, and tweak your chosen rimworld and landing site to your liking. Along with a pet and just enough resources to build some rudimentary shelter, your main objective is to build a spaceship and return to the stars, or you can just rough it in the wilderness and try to flourish. Later updates added some additional starting scenarios:

• A quintet of tribals who barely survive an attack from murderous machines (a couple of extra hands sure, but you'll be stuck with a research speed penalty for the rest of the run),
• A single colonist who leaves the comfort of high technology to strike it rich in the rim (only one guy, but at least you can build gun turrets right off the bat and start with a blaster rifle), or
• One unfortunate schmuck who's left for dead in his birthday suit and nothing else (unless you count the scraps of your drop pod "nothing else").

The colonists themselves can have useful, harmful, or utterly self-destructive traits and like real people usually mix the good with the bad. There are a set of skills that improve as they are used, though not all colonists start with them and some can never learn them because of backstory events. You can have a tough space marine who's a great shot but won't build anything, manic depressives and pyromaniacs, ugly or heavy breathers immediately disliked by everyone, misandrists and misogynists who keep starting fights, pawns unwilling to use weapons even when threatened with death, pawns that refuse to do dumb labour...it goes on and on. Some pawns can be worse than useless and can be actively harmful to the colony, so be careful who you pick and who you add to your colony along the way. Dead weight isn't so easy to get rid of, and neglecting, exiling, executing or just outright murdering your own pawns comes with a cost.

In addition you have a scenario editor that lets you tailor-make a scenario. One particular option is the presence of a Planet Killer, which blows up your planet after enough days have passed, making time of the essence. Or you could disable threats entirely, or make them much worse.

After that you choose between 3 AI Storytellers and their level of sadism difficulty, ranging from showering your colony with gifts and significantly reducing the likelihood of colony assaults to kicking you till you're down, kicking you while you're down, and kicking you all the way down. Your choices are;

1. Cassandra Classic: the vanilla storyteller. A gradual ramp-up of threat level based on the difficulty, and your wealth (or just time, depending on settings). Great for beginners, but after a while of play the repeating pattern of raid-recover-raid-recover will soon become predictable and tiresome.
2. Phoebe Chillax: the tsundere storyteller. Peaceful periods for colony-building broken up by threats, she can hit just as hard as Cass given the right difficulty so make sure you've fortified your positions. While this might sound great for campers, it also can lull you into a false sense of security and rob you of the weapons raiders tend to drop regularly when playing with another storyteller - meaning that when that big raid does come you're caught with few defences and simple pistols and rifles because you spent all your time and effort building a nice new rec room.
3. Randy Random: the random storyteller. Sneers at concepts such as "logical progression" and "fair play" and sets off whatever event he fucking wants. One moment, you receive a surprise cargo drop of bearskin trousers, the next moment he sics a herd of manhunting elephants onto your colony. All this at any point in your playthrough, be it potentially at the start of the game or when you're well stocked on textiles and food. Will most likely be your primary storyteller once you've gotten the hang of the game.

The real fun in Rimworld comes when multiple events kick off at once making you really struggle to keep your colony together, which is why when the training wheels come off most people prefer Randy. He isn't totally random and still spaces out the worst events and still scales them (a little) to your progress, but he's still a close as *FUN as you can get. But be warned, the other two will scale up their attacks the better you are doing at the game, i.e., the bigger and richer your colony, making you hanker for good old Randy again. (Luckily storyteller can be changed mid-game.)

The storyteller decides when events will be triggered, what they are, and how big. A sudden epidemic of flu, a heatwave, a raid; for the most part events can't be avoided and you can reduce the chance of some events to zero, but doing so just increases the chance of other events happening. Basically when storyteller decides it's time to fuck you up, you get fucked up. Depending on setting, either passage of time or colony wealth increases the size and difficulty of raids; in the latter case, the savvy player will make sure the colony is well defended before putting down fancy carpets and making gold sculptures.

Gameplay

Just like the ASCII dorfs of Armok, Rimworld has you commanding your colonists (referred to internally as "pawns", which also applies to animals) for day to day activities. Harvesting food, research, production, you name it, and they're even vulnerable to mental breakdowns if they get too stressed out. Colonists also have traits and backstories that determine their specializations and attitude towards others, and coupled with the random generation this can result in some interesting scenarios. Your head chef's ex-boyfriend is the leader of that Outlander Union you are at war with? That refugee you just took in is actually the younger sibling of your middle-aged tailor? Crap like that. They can even tame and befriend animals either as livestock, beasts of burden, guard animals, and pets. (They used do all the hauling in a colony, but recent updates have changed this and most now cannot haul goods, and those that can have a propensity of shitting all over your nice clean floors.)

While not batshit insane like Armok's inhabitants in that they'll (mostly) act in their own interests as long as not stressed out, your colonists still aren't particularly smart and if you're not careful they'll do shit like let injured people bleed to death while playing chess, walk straight into a crossfire to pick up dropped corn, and sleep soundly while a fire burns down most of your colony. Keeping them happy keeps them from going full-on dwarf fortress bonkers, which you can do by keeping them fed and well rested, giving them free time, prettifying their surroundings, nice bedrooms, good meals, controlled temperatures, and the like. Oh, and not traumatising them by exposing them to rotting corpses or forcing them to eat without tables.

Once your planet has loaded up, you basically direct your colonists in gathering supplies, researching, and just generally surviving, via the basics: finding food (and avoiding food poisoning), building shelter, avoiding predatory or rabid animals, fighting disease, defending against forest fires, and trying not to die of hypothermia or heat exhaustion. There are more extreme events such as toxic fallout and volcanic winters, but they trigger more rarely.

Of course, you aren't left alone to deal with these threats in peace, being that you're not the only humans or indeed non-humans on this planet:

• Pirates: (nearly) permanently hostile assholes. Will generally raid your base for shits and giggles, and come in Outlander and Tribe flavors. The more advanced kind can land by drop pods, sometimes set up sieges and mortar your colony from a distance, or just blow their way in through your walls with grenades and rocket launchers. But mostly they just wander dumbly into your killbox and traps, which is just as well as some of these bastards can have as much armour and firepower as you do (though they lack the most advanced guns). They tend to be jacked up on drugs, much like IRL pirates.
• Outlander Unions: Remnants of whatever used to be the dominant ruling power, now fragmented and trying to survive much like you. Will generally use contemporary technology like firearm usage or, if you've really cheesed them off, artillery bombardment and drop pod launches. More or less pirates who aren't quite as piratey and a little less well armed. Some are also set to be hostile... uh, like pirates, but you can befriend them given some effort.
• Tribes: Humans who decided to take a step back in technology for whatever reason. Weak equipment (unless you're dealing with spearthrowers or longbowmen, who can easily take off a limb or vital organ with a well-placed shot unless you're armored up) but make up for it via sheer numbers and propensity of working out ways of getting into/tunnelling into your settlement avoiding your carefully prepared traps and killboxes, and once inside being able to easily overwhelm your colonists with lots of stabby. Some tribes are friendly, but you won't be trading widescreen TVs with them. Now also come in cannibal and nudist flavours. And nudist cannibals.
• Mechanoids: those above-mentioned killing machines, who cannot be bargained with nor reasoned with, and are heavily armoured with serious firepower. Incredibly potent within their chosen combat role, but near-helpless outside of it, and they will fuck up your shit. The DLCs buff them so that every visit is an even greater opportunity for mass colonist limb loss and death.
• Insectoids: A faction known as 'Sorne Geneline', you can't trade with them and they tend to turn up under mountains or deep drill sites, bursting out of the ground to overwhelm you as a tidal wave of crawling, biting, scratching death. (Did you ever think that maybe a deep mountain base would be the safest place in an unsafe world? Think again!).
• The Empire: A crumbled, degenerate feudal empire, long past their prime but still powerful. Introduced in the Royalty DLC, they start off neutral and won't even trade with you unless you have gained feudal ranks with them. Have psycasts and the most advanced technology, so not generally a good idea to piss them off, although they can provide a great source of high tech weapons and armour if you do and know how to handle them correctly. However befriending them also makes for some serious benefits.

Most of these factions can be friend or foe depending on how you interact with them, and when starting a game you are guaranteed to get a visit from a neutral group. Pirates, savage tribes and rough outlanders start hostile and will generally regress back to hostility in time even if you befriend them. If you make a faction friendly enough, you can ask for trade caravans or even military support during a raid. When raids do come, it's with the purpose of burning your fields, breaking your equipment, killing or kidnapping your pawns, stealing your stuff, and generally undoing many hours of careful real world management. Insectoids and mechanoids are always hostile, and their sole intent is to kill, destroy, and cause you to ragequit.

Combat looks simple in play but extremely complex under the hood. Your pawns have anatomy: it's perfectly possible for a humble arrow to penetrate your best pawn's brain because the suit of high tech armour they were wearing didn't cover the face. Heart, liver and brain instakills can happen regardless of how well armoured, and loss of toes and fingers is distressingly common in minor fights. And what other game can you have a character's nose shot off, then be dumped by their lover because she now finds them repulsive? (Though having your ears shot off makes you deaf.) Melee combat is particularly powerful, since you can't fire any gun in close combat and a short spear stab does as much damage as a charge rifle shot. Personal shields also exist to help their bearers get into melee without being Last Samurai'd. Blunt weapons mostly ignore armour, so it's quite possible your terminator-like heavily armed troopers are knocked unconscious by men armed only with clubs and ill-fitting tribal thongs.

Things like blood loss, organ damage, paralysis, ageing dementia and Alzheimer's, and blinding are all handled (with variable levels of realism). Age is not just a number in Rimworld, and young pawns are often more valuable, if less skilled, than older ones. Losing a kidney may not have much effect until it comes to recovering from the plague. Sometimes you may be left with difficult choices, such as euthanising your colony's best crafter because they got brain damaged or their spine or pelvis shattered. It's about the story, remember!

Enemy pawns are treated no differently by the game. A glance into any given Rimworld community will discuss frequently about the war crimes they perform on every playthrough, and with good reason. You can capture any person from any faction (either visitors or raiders) and they're completely at your mercy. Working them to death into labor camps is scratching the surface. Using them as guinea pigs for your fledgling surgeons to practice on is a common activity, as is harvesting their organs. Hell, a common tactic for pirate prisoners is to replace a hand or foot with a cheap prosthetic and let them go: in the event they come back, their movement is impaired and they're even more of a burden during an attack. And player can get real creative on how their living quarters are, such as filling their prison cells with a hundred cats and oceans of beer, so they're constantly vomited on by inebriated felines, and the overall mess made of vomit, blood, and generic "dirt" will drive them insane several times over. Keep that door locked.

And now you can justify your evil deeds with religion!

Unlike it's inspiration, collapse of your colony is not inevitable. To complete the game your pawns must escape the planet. You can do this by constructing a spacecraft, finding an AI willing to get you off-world, sucking up to an Empire for taking you, or transcending to the Machine God (I shit you not). These are not the easiest things to do, and will almost always include great challenges and difficult battles.

Controversies

Yup, a game like this isn't immune to skub. For a while it was banned in Australia, and could not bought there legally any more "due to depictions of matters of sex(btw only Rimjobworld mod has sex), drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults." That's just how fucking good it is. Fortunately for us, the developers were able to negotiate with Australia and bring it back for sale.

The most likely reason was the use of in-game drugs, which are pretty well modeled all things considered. In retrospect it's hard to see what the fuck the problem was: they do provide temporary bonuses but saddle your colonists with health and other issues (like tolerance and addiction) down the line. Use of hard and combat drugs can (and almost always will) make life nasty brutish and short. Even "Smokeleaf", the game's hybrid analogue to marijuana and tobacco, can potentially result in asthma or even lung cancer if smoked too often, and stoned pawns having piss-poor productivity, using too much food, fainting in really inopportune moments such as in a freezer or near a fire or during a raid, and even in rare cases starve to death immediately. TLDR; If the game sees you using drugs to try to get around a shitty life for your colonists, it will punish you for it. Even if you're using drugs for noble reasons (namely boosting your best surgeon's dexterity to increase the odds of pulling off a difficult surgery), you have to weigh the risk of complications down the line, especially if the colonist in question is quite old.

Unfortunately, from Australia's perspective, the "temporary bonuses" bit caused them to jump the gun and kick the game out. This was not the first time Australia has complained over drug use in games, as Fallout 3 also came under fire in Oz for depicting Morphine usage, and was only granted access when the offending drug was relabeled Med-X prior to release, a name that stuck in later releases.

And not the first time Rimworld has had controversy. Following its first surge in popularity, certain “sites and blogs” found aspects of it problematic (by which we mean they tried to advance their politics and own popularity by criticising The Popular Thing). Thankfully, it completely failed to generate a moral panic or its typical counter-backlash. Nobody gave a shit.

But the actual reason is interesting. To explain a bit: Rimworld has a romance/relationships mechanism, its rewards being mood bonuses that can help a colonist through hard times without cracking. Tynan added gay, bisexual and asexual traits to the mix, more to drive story development than to be politically correct. Of course, this is never enough for some people, but not having more fringe human sexualities wasn’t what people objected to, for once.

Instead it may be unintentional Darwinism. Colonies in Rimworld grow mainly by one mechanism: kidnapping people and brainwashing convincing them in prison to join your colony. Mostly this is enemy pawns injured and captured during raids, resulting in a quick check of the injured pawn’s profile and if they aren’t worth keeping, then swipe left leave them to bleed out or cut their throats there and then. After all, taking too many prisoners or slaves at once (even if you have space) increases the odds of jailbreaks, and last thing you need is to be tied down with new colonists who are mental break bait for hard-pressed colonies for whom weakness can mean death. In a way this uncompromising harshness models well the struggle to survive on an unforgiving world. Or dating on Tinder.

Anyway, the gay trait was usually considered one of the weaker ones, not because of moral objections, but because a gay pawn may unsuccessfully try to woo straight members of his/her own sex and repeatedly fail, getting growing mood penalties and spreading them to the awkwardly embarrassed woo-ees. (This behaviour was toned down in later builds.) Even that aside, the thought was, if you don’t have another gay colonist for them to pair up with for nice lovin’ bonuses, they probably aren’t worth keeping, as it may be a while before you find another decent “recruit” who happens also to have the gay/bisexual trait.

It’s not just the poor gays who get this treatment, of course. Anyone too old, ugly, unhealthy, or with undesirable traits but no essential skills to balance them usually unceremoniously gets the chop. You can choose the difficult but moral option when playing it yourself, but the game’s mechanics - i.e. it being a unforgiving battle for survival - are against you if you do. Tynan probably didn’t mean the game to end up promoting ableism, homophobia or ageism. You can imagine how he wanted it to play out: lonely gay pawn, after days spent wet in dark and cold finally leaves colony to seek romance elsewhere after being mauled by a chinchilla. That’s a story. This isn’t how we play games though. Maybe there is an inner fascist in all of us.

Even though the clickbait inquisition quickly abated, it had an effect on Tynan. With ideoligion, while introducing polygynous marriages/relationships, sex only within the bonds of marriage (M’Lady) and standards of dress for each gender, he chose to stay well away from banning or penalising gay marriages or sex under any ideoligion even though this is pretty much a big thing in real-world religions. It probably wasn't worth giving political militants ammunition given that most players wouldn't develop stories from it anyway: it must be said that the other time apart from lovin' bonuses most players much care about the gender of pawns is when a psychic drone tuned to that gender is trying to drive them murderously insane.

TLDR; a game is a fucking game, not a serious attempt to model human socio-sexual norms. If you don’t like a mechanism, mod it out or don’t play the game. But be sure that if you’re being real-life offended or allowing yourself to be mentally moulded by a game where the sex animation is literally floating cartoon lovehearts and you can make someone your lover by impressing them about knowledge of kumquats, then you may just have bigger issues.

The DLCs

Currently there are two DLCs for Rimworld, offering a bit more for those with only a few thousand hours of play (which for Rimworld isn't much). They can also completely alter the gameplay.

• Royalty: Introduces the Empire, feudal ranks and psycasts (pretty much spells by another name). The Empire have access to technology so advanced that you can't research it until you buy its techprints, with some impossible to research at all. Being feudal, they won't trade with you unless you gain your pawns feudal titles by giving the Empire gold, slaves and prisoners as tribute, or completing quests for them. As they go up the ranks your pawns gain more psycast levels and powers and can call in favours such as silver drops and drone strikes; you can even ask them to take you off the planet by topping the ranks and completing a quest. If this all sounds too good to be true, it is: high ranked colonists will become increasingly self-entitled, high maintenance assholes, demanding fancy clothes and thrones and having mental breaks if denied. Making an enemy of the Empire to swipe their tech instead is viable but not the brightest of ideas; aside from psycasts they also have high end tech such as zeus hammers, monomolecular swords, self-aware "persona" weapons, cataphract armour and lots of cybernetic implants, including one that dissolves all their equipment when they die. They can fuck you up. If you really hate, you can ally with them. Place the throne room between Mechanoids and your colony. Using the noble douchebags as cannon fodder.

One common complaint of Royalty is that it buffs the mechanoids ludicrously, as having the most powerful melee units, limb-lopping railguns and walking tanks clearly wasn't enough. They're now also given mortars, low shields to totally block incoming fire, high shields to block your own mortars, and fortified cluster bases with three types of turrets. The only saving grace is that such clusters often have unstable power cells that can cause chain explosions and wipe out whole groups of them.

• Ideoligion: Introduces religion and ideology to the world of Rimworld. Ever wonder why tribals hurl themselves at your miniguns every few weeks with hundreds of casualties but never seem to get the message? Religion is why! Ideoligions (a mix between religion and ideals) dictate how a faction should act, including your own, whether that be cannibalism, nudism, raiding, slavery, living totally in the dark like molemen, enjoying drugs and casual sex, practicing ritual scarification and so on. Includes religious relics and events of many kinds, from Christmas trees to human sacrifice, ritual blinding to gladiator fights. It is possible to act outside your ideoligion, but with penalties, so if your dominant ideoligion says you shouldn't cut down trees, butcher animals or wear clothes, you're going to have a tough time. Also, you may find it difficult to keep multi-faith colonies happy, especially if its ideoligions are polar opposites: just like real life.

Many reviews have complained that ideoligions nail you into a role and it's difficult to change. This is true and adds to the game's challenge, but the ideoligion itself is definable from the start and can be reformed as you go along. If you want a vanilla experience you still can have that, or you can go full nihilist and have an ideoligion where literally any evil shit you can think of is ok or encouraged. A bigger issue with the DLC is that it buffs the fucking mechanoids yet again, giving them a termite unit with thump cannon that knocks down the thickest of walls like they weren't there. It also gives tribals and pirates breach axes, as if their previous ways of breaking through walls weren't enough. Git gud.

Remember, Tynan wants you to generate a story, and your precious, perfect colony being massacred is a great story...

Ok neat. . .why is here?

It's connection to TG is mostly in it's connection to our beloved Dwarf Fortress but it does have one other function the game has that gives it enough of a niche that we can have a wiki page for it: God Mode.

If you turn on dev tools, you can activate god mode letting you place every item in the game, even from mods, free at no cost, instantly in anyway you want. With this mode enabled Rimworld makes a surprisingly decent map making tool for table top games. F11 to get rid of the UI, screen shot, print or Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V into you virtual table top of choice. Easy simple, and get a good game as well out of it.