These days, many video games either tell you an extravagant story that you’ll play through once and then ditch, or they urge you to open your wallet and delve deep for cosmetics and battle passes on the free-to-play front, presumably forever. But if you venture over to the indie side of gaming, you’ll find genuine gems. One such is RimWorld. It’s a story-generator, according to its creator, Tynan Sylvester, in which the pawns you control and your choices create the ongoing tale. With the launch of the game’s latest expansion, Odyssey, introducing gravships, additional biomes, new animals, and more quests and rewards to uncover, it’s an excellent time to delve into RimWorld. I may be biased as I’ve spent nearly 700 hours with the game. But stick with me and you too might come to see what makes this game so special.
So what is RimWorld all about?
The colony sim genre went through something of a resurgence with the launch of RimWorld. Before that, it was relatively niche, but still popular in a cult following sort of way, thanks to Dwarf Fortress. It’s not about an overarching story; it’s about the tales you craft in the moment. In RimWorld, intelligent AI storytellers, like Randy Random, alter the experience based on how you’re faring in the moment. If you’re doing too well, with abundant food and resources, you might soon endure a horde of man-eating chinchillas ravaging your base and its crops. It’s all part of the experience.
This randomness is why most people who enjoy RimWorld really enjoy RimWorld. They don’t play for ten or twenty hours; they play for thousands of hours. They want to see what’s going to happen in the next episode of cannibal colony meets The Sims!
To give you an idea of what can happen in a colony, here’s an excerpt from a review I wrote on Steam about the game, which I think perfectly encapsulates the RimWorld experience:
“I started an ice sheet challenge with a single colonist. Thanks to the abundance of mods, my colonist soon discovered a talking tree in the wastes. His mind was forever altered. It wasn’t long before the kindly Lafayette was muttering to himself and chanting in odd tongues. He began to worship Cthulu in the mountains – alone and with supplies dwindling. It mattered not. The old god required sustenance of his own. Raiders came to pillage; none survived. They were placed upon the sacrifice table and offered to the tentacled one.”
New player tips to help you avoid a colony crisis
If you’re a new player who recently picked up RimWorld on sale, I’m sorry. No, not welcome or ‘nice to have you here’. Just, I’m sorry. You’re about to either lose many, many hours of your free time or rage so hard as your first colony crumbles into dust that you’ll never pick up the game again.
If you’re in the former camp, then here are a few tips to help you survive the onslaught of Randy Random and Cassandra Classic:
- Don’t hesitate to pause the game. While the default game speed isn’t overwhelmingly zippy, there’s a lot of map to explore, including under-mountain areas, colonists to manage, animals to hunt, and monsters to flee from. Your attention will be pulled in ten different directions simultaneously every few seconds, so pause to give yourself some breathing room.
- Defend your colony to the death. Upon crash-landing planetside, there are a few necessities to consider first: food, shelter, and safety. These three pillars are paramount to your colony’s success, but so many new players overlook safety. They think building in a mountain like a dwarf secures their existence. It doesn’t. You’ll want to consider traps, sandbags, etc.
- Build for efficiency, not aesthetics. Once you’re more experienced, then you’ll start designing bases that incorporate vibes or whatever Reddit says these days. For now, focus on efficiency. Wood burns, granite doesn’t. Your refrigerator and kitchen may remain in the same room to eliminate wasted time. Your Research Bench isn’t like other workbenches, in that it requires a sterile room to boost your colonists’ research rate, so separate it from the rest of the rabble.
I could go on endlessly, but these tips will start you off strong.
A look at RimWorld’s wild side: modding
RimWorld draws in tens of thousands of players daily and has an all-time peak player count of over 62,000. It’s safe to assume people love the game. And as it’s on PC, the modding community is obsessively active. Seriously, you can find total conversion mods that turn RimWorld into Warhammer 40,000 or The Witcher 3. Anything you need or want, the modding community delivers!
- Quality of Life mods, such as better storage solutions, greater pawn control, pawn editors, an improved camera, and the must-haves, like interaction bubbles that add flavor to your characters.
- Content mods, such as additional weapons, vehicles, animals, workbenches, hygiene, oil production industries, sushi cooking, fishing, mining, refrigerators, a Roomba, giant crops straight out of Stardew Valley, and of course, anime women.
- Total conversion mods, such as for Dune, The Witcher, Warhammer 40,000, Killzone, a medieval setting, a zombie apocalypse, and much more.
- Adult mods, such as…you know what, I checked out the offerings at Loverslab specifically for this bullet point, and I feel gross. There’s a lot, from furry content to animated erections for colonists.
What do people think about RimWorld?
Well, for starters, it’s one of the highest-rated titles on Steam. But if you need a professional’s opinion, Rock Paper Shotgun calls it a “wonderful fiasco. But it doesn’t take long to realise that this is something special.”
Would you prefer to hear from everyday people? Over on Steam, one user by the name of Detrail said: “This is quite simply, the best game ever made. Nothing will top it.”
Another by the name of Black Dog says, “2,000 hours in, I can say it’s okay.”
As someone with approximately 700 hours and counting, I can attest to its enrapturing qualities. No two games wind up the same, with some colonies crumbling into dust within a matter of days after planetfall, and others surviving through catastrophes big and small until your pawns feel almost godlike.
RimWorld is available now on Windows PCs, and its latest expansion, Odyssey, launched on July 11.
