Rimworld Tips to Make Colony Building Easier

Rimworld is a city building, resource management game developed by Ludeon Studios. I reviewed it here and it has sucked huge wodges (technical term) of time out of my life since I found it. It’s a fairly complex game with random change playing a huge part in the gameplay and as you play you think I could have done that better or why did I start with that combination of characters. Well, I’m here to impart the benefit of my experience on to you, so you don’t have to make the same mistakes I have with these useful Rimworld Tips.

 Don’t be so Hard on Yourself

Out of all these Rimworld tips, the first and easiest way to make RimWorld easier for you is to of course, decrease the difficulty level. Ok, kinda obvious but a good point. If you’re struggling with the difficulty and the sheer brutal level of events, then don’t be a martyr. Don’t be afraid to try again on a different difficulty, ok you’ll lose the progress you’ve made but in those first few games while you’re learning you can begin again using what you’ve learned.

Get the Right Sort of People

When it comes to character selection there are a few things that you can do to make it easier for yourself within the game.

• Try not to have any colonists with things that they won’t do. It’s only going to cause you difficulties when you desperately need someone to do something. Deliberately adding issues is not going to make it easier.
• Try and keep clicking until you get a fair split of skills among all the colonists, specifically try to get at least one person who is either good or at worst just enthusiastic about the following Medicine, Research and Social. This will ensure that your colonists can be effectively healed, research new things and talk to traders and recruit new followers.
• Try to have them as young as possible; starting a colony with three people aged 60+ is only adding extra difficulties in regards to arthritis, hauling and plain old life expectancy.

Of all the RimWorld Tips this one is the hardest to achieve as you’re just clicking on a random button over and over until you get a result you want. A good outcome is possible for those with the patience.

Start in the Right Place

Where you crash is randomly determined but you can move people away. Sure if you move far away it can be a pain moving the crash resources but you only have to do this once.  In order to get your town in the best place look for the following and try to set up within a reasonable distance.

• Stone / Mountains – this are a good source of stone and metal, which you’ll need to move your base past the highly flammable wood.
• Soil and growing land – You’ll need somewhere to plant your crops and grow your food.
• Existing Buildings / Ruins – Good idea to use these, they are already there after all and most of them are stone.
• Indigenous lifeforms – Being near a herd of animals that can provide meat, leather and wool is not a bad idea either. Oh, and best not to start building too near a herd of boomrats.

Food for Thought… and Survival

Once your colonists have somewhere to rest their head, get your crops planted. You have some food packs already but they won’t last very long. I’d advise at least three different crops, two foods and one cotton. The cotton means you can make your own cloths with the tailoring bench, very handy for when Winter comes along. Have one food a quick-growing low yield food to fulfill the need now, and the other a longer term plant with a higher yield to cover you long-term.

“I’ve Got the Power!”

Unlike other games of this type, you can build technology straight away. In the crash there are enough components and steel for you to build your own power station. You don’t need much power, a solar panel and a wind turbine attached to two batteries should do you for now.

Make sure the batteries are housed in a building with a roof so they don’t short out when it rains. Cut down all the trees in front and behind of the wind turbine to increase its effectiveness. Most electrical items will connect automatically when within range of the power supply or cabling. If not you may have to build more, but they don’t cost much steel and you’ll need it for the next bit.

It’s Getting Cold Inside

Once you have a power supply you can look at creating a freezer room to allow you to keep all your food (prepared and raw) fresh and usable for months and not a few days. All you need to do is build a room, stone works better but wood is fine.

Attach a freezer unit to the wall with the red part outside and the blue part inside and then set the temperature using the dials at the bottom. -10 degrees is about right. Change the inside of this room to be a storeroom zone that accepts only food, and change any other storerooms to not accept food. Now all your hunted rat and squirrel will last for ages.

Kill Small, and Tame Big

If the idea of taming all the animals you come across to set your colonists up as a cross between Xavier’s School for the Gifted and Dr Doolittle seems appealing, try to stem those tendencies.  Smaller animals are generally not worth taming at this point, taming a rat at best ends up with a tame rat that eats food and can attack people but nowhere near as effectively as a chap with a club.

Smaller animals should just be hunted and with a butchery table turned into meat and leather.  Larger animals, I would generally just ignore until your colony is established, sure some provide wool and others are great for hauling stuff or defending your colony but until food, space and beds aren’t as hard to come by, I’d ignore them (or hunt them and hope they come back)

Wanna Get Big? Get Converting?

At some point you’re going to have to think about adding more people to your colony and for that generally you need prison beds of hospitals depending on your chosen route. So, make sure that you have two beds each with their own room; one stated as a hospital bed the other a prisoner bed. Make the prison room as attractive as you can. Add a nice bed, pot plants, good lighting and ensure that any prisoners you get are well looked after, healed and well fed.

At the earlier stages I would rescue people from other colonies rather than capture as you don’t want to be at war with them and the good will is always useful. Any raiders or pirates can be captured and put in your nice pretty prison. With a colonist with a high enough social skill you’re ranks will soon be swelling with pirate and raider converts.

So, these are my RimWorld Tips that I’ve picked up by playing and making mistakes in many different colonies. If you have any hints and tips for RimWatch don’t be shy, drop them in the comments.  I’m always looking for more ideas.