RimWorld the sci-fi colony sim Catch-All

Hmm, hope we don't / can't hurt them little ones.

Biotech is out!

Now to see which mods haven't been updated yet

About half my 70 mods were already updated this morning. It was a great move to have an early access branch for modders to jump in and test/tweak. I havent put any time in yet but thought I'd run a vampire first, maybe bend him towards the mech...thing skillset.

My last play emulated Dr Soong alone working on androids. I think it was the Robots++ mod that did the heavy lifting there. It was interesting having the solo human craft more and more bots who could do all the busy work while he pretty much just researched and researched all day, all meals crafted by the Cooking Skill 12 bot who did nothing but keep the freezer stocked while loads and loads of turrets defended the place.

Once the bots could make more bots, we were off to the races. I think I had 20 running around. Great mod. Ill be curious how the new mech stuff works.

omni wrote:

Biotech is out!

Now to see which mods haven't been updated yet :)

I started a colony last night without all the usual mods I play with and, holy moly, going back to only vanilla takes a while to get used to again!

Hello fellow GWJer Rimworlders. I can't believe I waited this long to try this out. Biotech timing was impeccable too. What an amazing game.

First time playing Biotech, or first time playing Rimworld?

omni wrote:

First time playing Biotech, or first time playing Rimworld?

Both

I'll jump on this point to say that I bounced off of Rimworld a couple of years back but want to give it another try. Last time I felt like I didn't quite get anywhere after several hours of playing: still just trying to figure out how to keep my folks fed and not bleeding to death. Any advice on what version I should start with? Vanilla? Biotech? Any particular mods?

If you've got the expansions, play with them on. For the most part they just add more to do and see without changing the core challenge of the game or adding too much to the complexity. The one thing I'd say is to pick a static Ideology from the list at the start when prompted. This simplifies starting so you dont have to make an annoying number of decisions before you ever give the game (another) try.

As for mods, what I did is start without any and add as I went when I thought about things that would be nice to have. Odds are good there's a mod for that. Now I have a ton of Quality of Life mods, that I wouldnt play without, but I built it organically so I have a game that's tuned to me. I never had a problem adding a QoL mod mid-game. I wouldn't add most content mods without starting a new save though.

Like, I remember thinking "it would be nice if there was a notification when someone gained a level." There's a mod for that.
or
"Im annoyed I can't zoom in or out more." There's a mod for that

Also you can change difficulty at any time. I'd start low and move it higher. I tend to pick the Chillax storyteller, because Cassandra is designed to kill you eventually and Randy Random is... random. It'll accidentally kill you by throwing too much at you before you're ready. "Cassy kills you on purpose. Randy kills you by accident" as the saying goes.

easy sunday wrote:

I'll jump on this point to say that I bounced off of Rimworld a couple of years back but want to give it another try. Last time I felt like I didn't quite get anywhere after several hours of playing: still just trying to figure out how to keep my folks fed and not bleeding to death. Any advice on what version I should start with? Vanilla? Biotech? Any particular mods?

I watched this YT series of 3 videos that really got me going

easy sunday wrote:

I'll jump on this point to say that I bounced off of Rimworld a couple of years back but want to give it another try. Last time I felt like I didn't quite get anywhere after several hours of playing: still just trying to figure out how to keep my folks fed and not bleeding to death. Any advice on what version I should start with? Vanilla? Biotech? Any particular mods?

I have an embarrassing number of hours in this dang game.

The one thing to keep in mind is that the game is pitched as a "story generator" vs a base building game because most of the gameplay lessons are taught by your favorite pawn or everyone in your colony dying horribly, whether that's because you didn't farm or hunt enough for the winter months or a bout of toxic fallout or you let your colony wealth skyrocket without also beefing up your defenses and you got smacked with a huge raid.

Take the pawn deaths and colony wipes as opportunities to learn for your next colony or turn the difficulty down and save scum. It doesn't matter. It's a single player game.

Also probably start your colony on a temperate forest map hex instead of a tropical swamp, desert, or ice sheet. Trying to keep your first couple of colonies alive is much easier when you have 45 or 60 days of crop growing per quadrum vs 15 or none and your colonists won't die from hypothermia or heat stroke.

The base gameplay is to tech and gear up while keeping your pawns alive and happy enough that they're not constantly mentally breaking. For me anyway, the fun comes from figuring out what and the heck you're going to do when the inevitable tragedy or challenge strikes. Your favorite pawn will probably die. The one you didn't like or ignored will save the colony during a raid. Sometimes that bonded pet has to become dinner (and maybe a nice shirt).

The DLCs add new functionality/capabilities that, for the most part, are layers of complexity on top of the core gameplay. If you have them, play with them.

If you don't then the core game is just fine especially since there's literally a mod for anything your heart desires. You want to turn it into a D&D session with elves and magic? There's a mod for that. You want to continue the game after you launch the spaceship? There's a mod for that. There's literally an insane amount of added content, items, etc. and QOL tweaks with the mods on the Steam Workshop.

For QOL stuff, I'd recommend a couple to get you started:

-- Fluffy's Workshop Medical Tab: adds a new tab so you can keep track of the health of all your pawns at a glance, including how their medical condition is impacting their stats and lets you see why your pawn with 14 crafting is constantly f*cking up things because you forgot they're missing an arm and two fingers on their remaining hand.

-- Jaxe's Workshop Interaction Bubbles: Rimworld has a log of what the pawns say to each other when they interact. The mod just turns that into speech bubbles that you can read in real time so it makes your pawns more realer.

-- Camera+: let's you zoom in real close on the action.

-- krafs's Workshop Level Up: adds a tone and a quick message whenever a pawn's skill levels up.

-- CrashM's Workshop CM Color Coded Mood Bar: adds colored bars behind the icons of your colonists that shows their moods. It's a handy way to see who's happy and who's about to break. It also includes visual clues for when a pawn is wounded and bleeding as well as gives you a visual indication of how infections or sicknesses are progressing. Very helpful.

-- Razor 2.3's Workshop Auto Cut Blight: very simple, but so helpful. It just auto designates blighted crops to be cut so you don't have to individually click.

-- Jaxe's Workshop Rim Hud: UI mod that lets you customize the info cards for pawns and creatures.

-- dracoix's Workshop Door Mats: another simple one that just helps cut down on the filth pawns can drag into building from the outside.

-- tikubonn's Workshop DontBlockDoor: crazy simple mod that makes sure pawns don't block the door open with items when the room is designated as a storage area.

I can't recommend any of the Vanilla Expanded mods enough. That mod team is incredible and adds a lot of content that just expands the Rimworld 'verse with new biomes, animals, crops, etc.

Thanks for all the helpful tips. I've copied OG_slinger's opus and the links to those YouTube videos into a Word file. Now I just need to get cracking.

Medical tab is one I hadnt heard of. That's a great one. I had a guy with 2 missing legs and an arm and I had no idea because I don't obsessively check after every battle. Time to get making some bionic legs!

I had heard that Auto Cut Blight was integrated into vanilla, but I havent disabled my mod to find out.

Pick Up and Haul is a nice one. People will tend to grab stuff up to their inventory capacity when hauling, so if there's a scattered bunch of stuff it will get hauled a lot faster.

Replace Stuff lets you build on top of other things, which makes it a lot easier to redesign. This also lets you replace some workbenches with the Electric version and maintain the list of bills. Doesnt work with the Forge for some reason.

There's a sort of content mod that I really like: Research Reinvented. Instead of just standing at a research bench forever, you can equip your scientists with various research kits. Now they'll go out in the field and study things in the world that have a relation to what you're researching. You get small research bumps for these, which can make some later techs faster. You can build prototype versions of the things you're unlocking after some amount of core research process, which have grossly reduced durability and quality but give a HUGE bump in the research progress. This also gives you an incentive to take things you might ignore in a raid, like lamps if you don't have Electricity yet.

Speaking of Legs. Im having some really bad luck with them. Had a 'Zzzt' in my warehouse that set off an explosion, probably some shells I looted, while I was loading a shuttle, took out at least 3 legs and I already have a backlog of people needing them. I can't build them fast enough and it's costing me dearly on the Advanced Components, which I can't build yet. Had to dump a LOT of wealth. Now to take a full year making them all (so slow!)

polypusher wrote:

I had heard that Auto Cut Blight was integrated into vanilla, but I havent disabled my mod to find out.

It sort of is. It automatically designates the first diseased crops for cutting, but that's it. But as the blight spreads, it doesn't designated the newly infected plants as needed to be cut.

Additionally, Auto Cut Blight does something in the background to override your current work priority settings and make cutting those plants the absolute priority for your workers which means the blight rarely has time to spread.

polypusher wrote:

Speaking of Legs. Im having some really bad luck with them. Had a 'Zzzt' in my warehouse that set off an explosion, probably some shells I looted, while I was loading a shuttle, took out at least 3 legs and I already have a backlog of people needing them. I can't build them fast enough and it's costing me dearly on the Advanced Components, which I can't build yet. Had to dump a LOT of wealth. Now to take a full year making them all (so slow!)

A peg leg will get those pawns to 80% of their movement speed (if they're only missing one leg) and a prosthetic leg will get you to over 90%, but only at the cost of a little steel and a few normal components.

easy sunday wrote:

Thanks for all the helpful tips. I've copied OG_slinger's opus and the links to those YouTube videos into a Word file. Now I just need to get cracking.

If you get stumped with anything, I'd also recommend stopping by r/RimWorld. It's a very friendly subreddit and even has a weekly tutorial thread where you can get answers to whatever question you might have.

Can someone sell me on this?

Do you like the Colony builder genre? Where you don't directly control the people, and you don't just plop down buildings that magically appear - instead you give orders and task priorities and your colonists will carry out the tasks (resources required)?

If so, this is, imo, the best in the genre. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but far more accessible (again, imo, even including the new Steam version of DF).

I have over a thousand hours in this game on and before Steam. It is very, very high up in my list of 'favourite games of all time'. It's a story generator, along with being a game. You'll get attached to individual colonists, and weep when they take a stray bullet to a vital organ, or succumb to malaria, or a bear attack.

You can play it on bone-crushingly hard difficulty and watch as your colonists suffer tragedy after disaster after tragedy. Or you can whack it on easy mode and build a perfect little town with no violence at all in the game. There are DLCs that all add something, but are far from critical. Difficult to master all aspects, but zero shame in starting on the lower difficulties, and gradually increasing as you get to grips with different mechanics. You can also alter the difficult mid-game, so it's not like you have to start over each time. Be a peaceful trade village, or swap things around and build a band of mercenaries to go and wipe out other factions from the world entirely.

There are over 17,000 mods available via Steam workshop to allow you to tweak or overhaul almost every aspect of the game, if you find something that annoys you, or that you want more of. Want to turn the game into a Wild West simulator where you have to manufacture every single bullet you fire? You can do that. Or how about a Lord of the Rings-esque Fantasy world with Elves and Goblins? Go for it. Star Wars? yep. On and on.

I have never 'completed' it, not once, with any of the game end options - it's not why I play the game.

Is it for everyone? Probably not. I've bought 5 or 6 copies for friends with a roughly 50/50 rate of 'this is the best game ever, thanks for getting me it!' and 'I dont get it, nothing seems to happen'. Sadly I don't think the 2 hour 'refund time' that Steam gives you would be long enough to know for sure.

So, make of that what you will...

So I bought this game and am trying to start the tutorial. It generates the world and says select a starting site. If I select the site that the arrow is pointing to, or any other site, and click next nothing happens. I even tried the select a random site for me and nothing happens. I've went back and regenerated the world and the same thing. Not a great first impression.

What am I missing?

Edit: I figured it out. Your not supposed to click on a building which is what the arrow was pointing directly at. Also, the select random site appears to be broken. Tutorial not so much.

What is this thing?

On sale for a week on Steam, nearly 5 years old, and I've never heard of it.

Saw some of y'all recommended it on Steam. 98% positive reviews. Sheesh.

And 30% off is the deepest discount ever? It's at that again on Fanatical for a day.

Maybe I should look at those beginner guides on the last page. Just wondering how this is so well received and I missed it mostly.

Stele wrote:

What is this thing?

Good game. Simplified Dwarf Fortress. IIRC, developed by an asshole, though it’s possible I’m confusing this with one of the other popular indies with an asshole in charge.

This summarises the controversy. I don't know if those things in the games moved on from there in the last 7 years (or if Tynan has evolved his opinions).

I have a mod that replaces the binary "gay" trait with a 6-point Kinsey scale thing which seems to work in a nicer way.

My sense is that Tynan is more clueless than malicious in his insensitivity, but I might be wrong.

There's a certain amount of art imitating life here. Tynan never added code to make heterosexual men respect a lesbian's declared preference. So, you know, accurate sim.

Stele wrote:

What is this thing?

Imagine if Kenshi was entirely focused on the base building part, and didn't hate you so much.

I fell back in...and I fell back in deep.

I'm still fumbling my way through, but after running through some tutorials again I picked up some missing information and am now 10 hours into my most successful colony. More experienced players may be able to tell I'm in a bit of a death spiral, but it's all a learning experience and I'm having an absolute blast!

My favourite moment was a fancy noble asking to visit "to experience the culture of other colonies"; he contracted malaria on his first day. Once he started to feel better, he insulted my cook, got into a fist fight, and ended up back in hospital.

IMAGE(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2001337339612511010/6BF9A06187A501D4462AD1E220D3850FDD7709EE/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)

It looks like I already own the Royalty DLC but I haven't touched any of that stuff. It's a bit overwhelming when I'm only barely surviving.

But the idea of genetics and funky ideology rules are pretty interesting to me, would it be a bad idea to pick up one of those while I still feel a bit clumsy and confused? I was leaning towards Biotech Thoughts?

I find Biotech has more content that I actually enjoy than Ideology. The different variants are interesting, and children are a good addition to the game. I think if you like really themed runs (e.g. I'm going to be a matriarchal slaving vegetarian colony) then Ideology has a bit more for you.

IMO Biotech doesn't really add complexity as such, whereas ideology is more busywork, so I'd agree with you that Biotech is a bit of a better fit for you if want to get one and you're feeling a bit overwhelmed already.

Biotech has been super cool so far! The additions are a lot more immediately noticeable and easier to access than Royalty. Even just having the various Xenotypes available for character creation has spiced up the gameplay a lot. I also had some fun trying to raise a child that ran into my colony because he made a robot angry

I somehow sunk close to 30 hours into this game over the last 4 days since I've been off work/study sick, and despite that, I still feel like I've only just scratched the surface

Edit: I have made a discovery! While waiting far too long for a slave trader to arrive (they never did), my crappy prisoner was eating up too many resources. Oh a whim, I tried harvesting his left lung, and to my surprise, the wandering visitors were happy to buy human body parts! And it's really good money! Now I try to keep as many raiders alive so I can chop them up for easy cash

Ah, the true end goal of Rimworld..

All paths lead to crimes against humanity.

My last colony had vampires so I removed the arms and legs of prisoners which made it very easy to harvest blood from them, so I'm very guilty too. But they were the baddies, you see.

Damn I should have bought this game on Steam sale last week...