So, when I pick a character or team, I like to make sure it has high shooting (I play rich explorer a lot, so it’s just one char) and can farm. They don’t have to be good at farming, but it helps. You need an 8 to grow Healroot and a 5 for strawberries (they grow fast and don’t have to be cooked). It also helps to have a decent construction and mining, just because of how long it takes to do anything with those skills when they’re low. Finally, I never start with anyone that can’t firefight and is a pyro during mental breaks - you’ll just end up losing your entire base at least once if you have a pyro.
The second you land, pause the game and scroll out. There’s probably a goodly amount of partially destroyed buildings. Claim those and build the missing walls/door and put a bed in them. I like to haul all my crap under a roof ASAP because stuff deteriorates if its uncovered. I’ve lost a lot of medicine and components that way. Once that’s done, you’ll need to go ahead and plant. I used to do small fields of 5x5, but I do 8x8+ nowadays. Your party eats a LOT of food - something like 20-30 worth of food a day.
Next, I deal with power. This is where construction comes in. You have to have a construction over 4 or 5 to build decent power production. Recently I’ve been using wind turbines because it takes less construction skill than solar, but both aren’t super taxing. I usually build 2 and then a small outbuilding to hold a couple of batteries.
Once that’s built and charging, I build a small room. 6x6 or something, and place an AC in it and drop the temp to around 20F to create a freezer for any medicine, meat or unprocessed animals.
The reason I mentioned it is that I’ve had 2 of the new effects. One of them, a dude went nuts and decided to live in the wild with the squirrels or something. You can tame them to get them back, but I didn’t have taming. So there’s this guy who wanders around my camp eating my stuff. That was irritating.
The real bad one was Catatonic. There was nothing wrong with this char, it just wouldn’t move. Whole camp get slaughtered while she sat there. Then she woke up and starved to death. It’s pretty brutal.
I mean, I do play on really high levels with permadeath, so anything that goes a little off the rails will kill you hehe.
Thanks for the tips, Jason! So one survivor must be rough… I’m still doing the 3 crashlanders for now and seems like it takes forever to get stuff done. I can’t imagine having only a single person doing all of the work!
It can be for sure, but the game usually tries to send people to you. If, however, it doesn’t random a new person soon after landing (which does happen more than I’d think) it can get REALLY bad.
Ok, well that actually sounds like fun, getting new people showing up. It’s one of the things I enjoy about the 3 survivors is all the variable personalities.
There’s a guy (Yeti or YetiPlays or something) on YT that plays with 1 character and no starting supplies. Fairly impressive, when it goes well, but it can go sour quickly, like you said!
I don’t even think I’m that good at this game and I’ve got a 9 person colony that’s cranking out and selling drugs like crazy. We’ve got air conditioning, lots of sleeping space, a 250 beauty sculpture in the dining hall and a huge stockpile of supplies. Even had a secondary mining camp for a little while until I stripped it of all the components that were there. Haven’t had a single death yet. Close, but not yet. I think McMaster sucks at this game. :P
Wiggins was sick of life on his fancy home planet and so decided to strike out into the galaxy on his own for some adventure. He’s now running a 9 man colony, has his own home complete with laboratory and fancy gold royal bed.
There are turrets but only a few for backup. They’re not very reliable on their own for defense. Easily killed, accuracy isn’t super great and you can’t tell them what to target. Typically I will get a mix of long range guns / short range guns / melee guys behind cover near where the enemy will breach the walls and then we tear them apart as they come across the no man’s land I’ve created between the wall and my sandbags. Once some raiders dropped inside my walls but we just took cover behind buildings and surrounded them :)
And yes, I also saw Jason’s run in with the terriers. Shameful!
I don’t think I’ve ever played another game where there are so many different strategies you can use that are actually viable. Whenever I see how other people play, they always do in some way I would have never thought of.
I love my people so much that I don’t want to risk them in combat if I can help it. I rely on turrets and mortars as much as possible. But seeing how you run your colony, I think I’ve made a big mistake in putting the turrets outside the wall. Maybe this time I’ll put the turrets inside to hit the raiders after they breach the wall, and then I’ll have sandbags behind the turrets so my people can support them from long range.
Yeah… easy… My current run is Tribal start on Cassandra Rough in the new Swamp biome. I lost three colonists already and the first year hasn’t even finished yet. The first died of infection after someone botched treating it. Later, that someone got shot in the head during a Federation raid leaving him permanently catatonic. I’m still debating if I should euthanize. The third casualty was my only skilled doctor who contracted the plague. As she was already 78 years old, combined with only herbal meds and no decent medical care she was a goner as well.
Literally in this case as I send her to fight pirates as to die in a blaze of glory. Instead she got kidnapped and died as a pirate prisoner somewhere off screen, leaving me without even a body to bury.
But I got a xenophobic reptilian alien in return who used to be a bodybuilder. She beat the crap out of one of my old colonists when he went on a mental break and killed his own dog. The list of negative joy modifiers for that one is longer than my arm. If that keeps up I might lose a fourth this year leaving only one colonist alive from my starting lineup.
Playing Rimworld is a choice between dying quickly and dying slowly.
Not that I have ever come even close to getting that far but isn’t the end game when you actually get to the space ship across the world or build one or… something?
