Rim World

In this case I took refuge in the enemy building, which was full of sleeping spots. In general you can slap down a sleeping spot anywhere and use it, though doing so outside on the dirt no doubt gives a strong chance of infection.

On past caravans and jumps I brought a bunch of bedrolls with me. But every time I do I forget to uninstall them before I take off and they get left behind.

So when you do a battle like this, you for the most part completely control your pawns, right?

Yes, in detail. There’s a lot of double tapping the spacebar to let just a half second go by. Especially if the battle gets spread out and I’m likely to miss something if I let time go too long. I had a lot of episodes in earlier games where I’d think I’d be doing great in a battle and then I’d notice one of my guys getting slaughtered just off screen of what i was currently micromanaging.

This is why I cannot play, as I always want to micro the whole thing as much as possible and I really get deep in the weeds.

I could never adapt to the McMaster Style of RimWorld-Fu.

Few more mods to recommend that I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned here:

This one was a big one for me, as I almost never come across a trader who sells bionic parts, and when I do I rarely have the funds to justify purchasing at the time, and even when I do, rarely is the part I want/need available.

Starting with basic prostheses like a peg leg or a hook hand, you can research everything you can think about: Simple prostheses like the vanilla ones and some new, bionic body parts and even advanced bionics. But to get advanced bionics you have to do plenty of research and they’re also pretty expensive to craft. If you tend to losing your organs, this mod helps, too! You can research and craft surrogate and synthetic organs, so you never have to miss your kidney again! The mod is pretty big, there’s enough work to do, so even in endgame there’s something new to research, to craft and to buy available.

  • Additional Joy Objects: Board games, arcades, paintings, bookcases, medicine, and more

  • Misc. Training: Objects that help with training (Shooting Target, Martial Arts Dummy, Archery Target)

Once I have good production for trade up and running I use the comm panel to request an exotic goods trader every chance I get. Usually along with a bulk goods trader from another faction since the exotic goods trader doesn’t but a wide range of things. I sell the large wooden sculptures that are in constant production to the exotic goods trader and buy whatever is interesting that I can afford. To the bulk good trader I sell excess food and clothing.

My usual plan to getting enough cash for all this revolves around producing and selling two things. Art and devilstrand clothing. I try to start with someone who at least has a passion for art and as soon as I can they are set to constantly create large wood sculptures for decorating the base and for sale. I get to producing clothing as soon as I can as well from hunted animals or tamed muffalo and alpaca. At some point I find the largest patch of rich soil near the base and plant the entire thing with devilstrand. Around when that’s half grown I start another. It’s a long term strategy but at some point I have enough devilstrand to support a couple of tailors endlessly kicking out shirts, pants and dusters.

I also made use of a lot of small caravans early on to start trade going. Once I had some tame muffalos I sent the occasional caravan of one good trader leading a couple of muffalo loaded down with berries to a settlement a day a way. I was fortunate to never have one of these small, stealthy caravans get attacked.

All this said, I should mention I’m not exactly playing on the hardest settings. I’m using the Cassandra storyteller set to “some challenge”. I carefully picked my starting point to be in lights hills in a higher altitude area near the equator so there would be a year round growing season but the summer heat wouldn’t be terrible. I also picked a spot close to two other settlements for trading. I don’t use prepare carefully, but I do spend 20 minutes banging on the random button until I get a starting three with a decent mix of skills, passions, and most importantly no traits that will obviously doom everyone later on. I’m not using any major mods. I have: Medical Tab, Conduit deconstruct, Relations Tab, [KV] Trading Spot, [KV] Rim Fridge, [KV] Refugee Status, and “Where’s the gravel?”.

I have no trouble letting my guys run around and do their own thing in peacetime. As long as I don’t give them too many tasks to do at once, I can trust them to figure out how to get them done. But in combat, I constantly pause and make sure I’ve got everyone standing on exactly the right tile.

Does that make more money for the same amount of work as selling stone statues?

I haven’t completely mastered the comms console yet. Do you just plop down an orbital trade beacon near a bunch of stuff and voila, it’s all for sale? I have a few in place, but what with traders not necessarily being interested in certain items, it hasn’t yet become clear to me if I’m doing it right. Also, once I place a beacon down it seems that colonists start dropping off random stuff in that area (not stuff I’d specified in the zone, before placing the beacon).

I haven’t done any math on that. Stone statues just take so long to create. I figure more quantity over time, more rolls of the dice to get high quality.

Also to agree that the only super micro times are serious combats. The normal run of the colony is mainly done through work priorities, adjusting things like allow sowing on growing zones, stockpile priorities, etc. rather than direct micromanagement. When I really want something hauled now, or want to make sure my best constructor builds a piece of furniture I do some individual prioritization. Other than that the only super pause micro times are raids.

That’s one of the things that’s so addicting about the game. Sometimes you are just watching your people run around according to plan doing their peacetime activities to benefit the colony and planning what to build or produce next. Then there are periods of intense tactical terror.

The comms console has two purposes, it can be used to contact other factions and to contact trade ships passing by the planet.

For trade ships anything you want to sell to them needs to be near a trade beacon. I usually set up a large outdoor, roofed area as a stockpile for things I plan to sell like clothes and art below a certain quality or agricultural products that overflow my refrigerated storage.

For talking to other factions, you can send them money to improve relations and if your relations are good enough you can send money to have them send you a caravan. The cost is based on relations, so first have your colonist with the best social skills send them bribes until a caravan costs only 700 to send. The silver you send has to be near a trade beacon, but the trade is via caravan that they send to you. You can summon one from each faction once every 3 or four days.

Regular factions have better stuff and more cash than primitive factions. So initially I summon bulk good traders from the industrialized factions to build cash reserves by selling food and clothes. Once I have enough to afford a bionic limb or neurotrainer I start requesting exotic goods traders.

I’ll also use the primitive factions for bulk traders once I’m always requesting exotic goods from the other factions. It costs 700 to have a caravan sent, and they carry around a grand. So the overall profits aren’t huge for each caravan summoned, but I have a steady supply of steel from them and some profit to slowly make up for what I spend on with the exotic goods traders.

So I manually renamed one character to “Gramma” because she was much older that the rest of my pawns and I couldn’t keep her straight.

A year or later, another guy crash lands and his name is “Grandpa”. Is this game trolling me?! Heh heh…

Uh oh. You are getting emotionally invested in your characters. in this game, that rarely ends well…

important tip I just discovered: Placing IED’s next to poison or psychic ships seems to be a no-no now. Just had one explode after it was created and open the ship up. I guess that was considered too cheesy.

Man, getting all sorts of errors now all of a sudden. Which version is considered to be most compatible with a variety of mods? Been switching between alpha 17a, alpha 17b and unstable beta.

Sorted it by removing all mods. closing, waiting, reloading and gradually adding the mods back. Also, thanks for the comms console and trade beacon advice, Thrag!

So it turns out that six guys in power armor out walking their pet muffalo will attract some attention. Perhaps due to overconfidence after having defeated the pirate outpost so easily, the team stumbles into an ambush.

Eleven of them, decently armed. A definite threat.

Since the backup plan was loaded up but not used for the assault on the pirate encampment, the decision is made to drop it in now.

I’ve chosen the north end of the long lake to drop in the defenses. The team takes up position near the planned landing site.

The package arrives.

The team quickly runs to set up the defenses as the enemy draws near. One of my guys is carrying a battery we brought back from the pirate base so he deploys it while the rest of the crew starts unpacking the turrets and battery from the drop.

The guns are up in the nick of time. The battle begins. Powell moves off to the left flank, making sure to stay out the way of my own guns. Everyone else positions behind the guns in the hope the enemy will target the turrets first.

Hopey takes one to the shoulder from a machine pistol, as Powell descends on the shooter. Fortunately, her shoulder is made of metal so it’s a minor injury.

The guns and my charge rifles have taken down the enemy’s left. Powell now has their right tied up. Hopey moves back to find better cover, and my right moves up on the west side of the lake.

Powell’s mace mops up the enemy’s left as the rest target the enemy’s center. While the sentry guns keep them pinned down in a group, taking cover behind a pile of boulders, my shooters have spread out to their flanks. The snipers, off screen in these shots, are still a threat as my guys advance out from their cover. Though rather than try to address them directly I figure the best course of action is to make them turn tail and flee after witnessing the violent ends their friends are surely soon to meet.

Another pirate goes down, and their resolve breaks.

One of their number looks like they might make a good night janitor for the base so Powell moves in to try and capture them.

Sadly, Alexandra does not live to see the sculptural masterpieces that adorn what I like to think is one of the nicest prisons in the galactic rim.

The team takes refuge in a nearby ruin to finally get some sleep. Aside from the small bit of lead in Hopey’s bionic shoulder Powell received some cracks and bruises

Come morning we’ll see if we can tame a few of the local muffalo to help carry back the guns before dropping in whatever additional pack animals are needed. It still a few days until we’re back to base, and the half dozen additional animals I’m going to need to carry back all the equipment isn’t going to make us any stealthier. Even though we got through this one with just some scrapes it was a reminder to be on our guard. Despite the loss of their outpost the pirates are obviously still active in the area and another attack on the caravan or a raid on our undermanned base remain real possibilities.

I almost forgot to point out how my muffalo blissfully slept through the entire thing.

Cool engagement, certainly was handy you over prepared for the siege and had that stuff staged to send in.

So tell me, if you wanted to could you of elected to disengage by heading off that map sector away from them?

RimWorld hits 1 Million sales. Nice! Totally deserves it.

https://ludeon.com/blog/2018/01/one-million-copies-sold/

RimWorld has now sold over a million copies. Platinum status!

This is a remarkably unexpected moment for me. The original Kickstarter only sought 1,000 sales, and that seemed like a lot. This is… crazy.

Many thanks to all the players for buying the game, to Piotr Walczak, Ben Rog-Wilhelm and all others who worked on it, to modders for making a huge variety of mods that are intricate, scary, useful, and amusing. Also to everyone who ever made a video about RimWorld, or streamed it, or just told a friend about it. And to those making comics and art interpretations, to those moderating forums and chat channels, and everyone else bringing life into the community. I can’t thank you enough.

Here’s hoping RimWorld and its community keep going strong for a long time to come.

Awesome fun story posts!