RimWorld
It's not what it sounds like, I promise.
RimWorld
RimWorld is a sci-fi colony simulation game where you guide a group of colonists who have crash-landed on an alien planet. You make sure they survive by building a colony, providing food and handling challenges like raids, disease, and weather - all directed by an "AI storyteller" that plays you like a dungeon master.
RimWorld’s latest DLC ‘Odyssey’ was released on 11 July 2025, and that sounds like a good reason and an even better opportunity to update this review with more information and opinions about the different DLCs, and why Odyssey is the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of this game.
Introduction
My husband had been pleading with me to try RimWorld for years, but I could never get into it because the graphics didn't "click" for me.
I kept watching him play in awe, asking all kinds of questions and getting all kinds of answers. I was amazed by how crazy his stories ended up being, ranging from “aww, I tamed two wolves and now they have babies, look!” to “a guy lost a leg in a raid so I captured the raider, took off his leg, gave it to the raider, then kept him locked up in the basement next to a corpse in a cage to have my vampire feed on him periodically all while drugging him up so he is constantly terrified”. That is… well, yeah. Something.
I am in love with the endless possibilities this game has to offer. The fact that it was developed with modding in mind and the amount of extra workshop items that seamlessly integrate into the existing gameplay is truly amazing, and I can't believe it took me this long to discover that. It is truly one of those masterpieces, where you can tell the developer(s) very passionately put a piece of themselves into it - and I can only hope it wasn’t the “you can sew tentacles onto your prisoners” part.
Storyline
As far as a storyline goes… that’s all up to you.
The general premise of the game is: you’re in charge of a group of crashlanded colonists, and you not only want them to survive, you want them to thrive, researching and building the technology they need to get off this planet again. While doing so, they’ll receive quests (of the clear this outpost, steal these items, build this monument, take care of these refugees), be attacked by raiders, trade with other factions, get riddled with disease, make allies, be betrayed… Anything goes!
That’s the basic premise, though the start of your game may vary based on the scenario you choose. While a crashlanded group of colonists may start knowing how electricity works, a tribal colony does not. There’s a scenario where you start out with a lot of silver but no food. A one-man colony with three robots will play differently from a mad eldritch cultist starting with twelve children to indoctrinate. There are a variety of these scenarios readily available, you can find more challenges in the Steam Workshop, or you may just set up your own. Possibilities: endless.
The events that happen in your game (and how random, paced and difficult they are), are driven by the storyteller. There are several storytellers available in the base-game, the DLCs add some, and the Workshop has even more. These storytellers each have their own focus: while one may space the attacks out more so you can build a community, the other may barrage you with constant attacks to challenge you. While some may follow the general progression of your tech level, others may randomly drop a spaceship with machine turrets on your axe-wielding loinclothed tribals. Anything goes!
In the end, every game you play is a completely different experience, making it often feel more like a single-player ttrpg where your GM just really doesn’t like you.
Gameplay
RimWorld at its core is a colony management simulator, with the emphasis on adventurous storytelling.
As a player, you oversee your colony and its individual colonists, each with their own unique skills and needs, and manage them to contribute to the survival of the colony.
There is a heavy battle component to this game. Through raids coming into your territory or you traveling to dungeon-like structures, you’ll see your fair share of combat. Some pawns (what we call the colonists) may be specialised in melee or ranged, but to your average farmer armed with a club, bunkering up behind a thick wall and setting up turrets might be a better strategy.
Injured a raider but didn’t kill him? Great! That means you can capture him and do all kinds of things with him, like… graciously tend to his wounds and set him free for increased enemy faction goodwill. Or harvest all his organs, drain his blood to feed your vampires and feed him to your cannibals.
RimWorld currently has five DLCs available, each adding new content and features to the game, significantly changing the gameplay experience: Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly and now Odyssey.
Since I didn’t play RimWorld since the beginning, I jumped in the middle between Biotech and Anomaly.
DLC: Royalty
Royalty introduces The Empire, a faction with a royalty rank system, new weapons and armor, psycasters and bionics.
You can join The Empire, sign up for their honour system and rise in the ranks by showing your loyalty to the imperial lords through various quest lines. Start as a lowly freeholder and end up an imperial Archon. Each individual pawn can earn honour, so every one of your colonists could technically rise up through the ranks, and unlock their full psycaster abilities.
Having these titles comes with various perks, like being able to summon workers or ordering a drop of resources whenever you need them. But the most impressive one: as soon as you unlock your first rank, you get bestowed the ability to become a Psycaster. And that is the closest to magic vanilla RimWorld gets!
There are various classes of Psycaster that each come with their own specific ability trees, but essentially they all share the same concept: psychic powers, for which you have to recharge your psyfocus to use. The stronger the abilities, the higher the cost to the caster. Some of these skills might effectively change the course of an entire battle, but leave you in a coma for a couple of days. High price, high reward, just the way we like it.
If that sounds tedious to you, you can also choose to betray The Empire, by taking in a Deserter that conveniently knows the location of two psylink neuroformers, which you can just jab into your own eye to form the psycast connection. The imperial Bestowers make a big ceremonial production of it, but how hard can it really be? Stab. There. Brain updated with psychic powers.
Sadly, in vanilla RimWorld, I feel like they haven’t done enough with the not-imperials. The Deserters could have been a whole lot more interesting, a faction on its own just like The Empire. Luckily, though, the modding community has our back. Vanilla Factions Expanded - Deserters adds exactly that: a full-fledged faction that gives you quests working against The Empire, introducing a whole new “visibility” system to keep track of. It’s a lot of fun, though I haven’t delved into it too deeply yet so can’t say much about the contents of the quests yet. From what I did see, they were quite interesting yet challenging, with well-balanced rewards.
DLC: Ideology
This DLC introduces a religious system. You can choose one of the premade ideologies, including the real-life big religions, or create your own custom ideologies for your colony, impacting and even dictating pawn behaviour and social interactions. Ideologies have relics, which in turn add several quests to find them and obtain them, so you can proudly display them in your ritual rooms, and which believers from other factions can come visit!
There are a lot of different memes (no, not the funny internet image kind, but the basic elements that make up beliefs, shared between believers) to choose from, each impacting different precepts, unlocking different buildings or roles. Does your colony like cannibalism or not? Do you feel good about violence? Are you vegetarians? All of this can be included in an ideology.
This game allows you to go as crazy as you want to, without too much judgement. Want to play the goody-two-shoes knight who takes in all the stray refugees no matter how often they betray him? Who heals all wounded animals, tries to capture enemies instead of killing them, then returns them to freedom with tended wounds and upgraded limbs? That’s fine. Buuuuut if you ever wanted to become the leader of an Eldritch cult where you violently convert everyone through torture, harvesting their organs to upgrade the cult leader’s body and keep him alive forever, sacrificing arms in favour of tentacles and eating the flesh of your enemies upon victory- that’s fine, too. It’s really, like, ugh, whatever.
This DLC introduces slavery. Or rather, expands on it. Playing without this DLC, you can still capture surviving enemies and sell them into slavery, but owning your own slaves and having them do labour for your colony is not a thing without this DLC. I have to admit my experience with slaves is limited, I tend to play the good guys, but the vanilla system itself is interesting enough. You have to keep your slaves happy (but not too happy, they are slaves after all), put the fear of whatever you believe in into them through skulls on spikes, corpses in cages, painful collars - I realise typing this all out makes it sound very sadistic, which I guess I’ll have to admit it is.
As always, the modding community steps up. The Vanilla Expanded team adds various ‘Vanilla Ideology Expanded’ mods that add a lot to the Ideology DLC. More icons, more memes, more relics, and an entire structure built around the Anima Trees from the Royalty DLC with fancy dryads and whatnot.
DLC: Biotech
The Biotech DLC feels the most “this should have been vanilla so I’m glad they added it” DLC of them all. It focuses on genetics, mechanitors and pollution.
It introduces natural reproduction, which I think should have been vanilla in the first place. Pawns that sleep together getting pregnant, having babies, raising those children in your colony - all of that is a lot of fun!
Genetics become a thing: each pawn can pass theirs on to their offspring, meaning that races will mingle and crazy xenotype creations can come out!
In combination with the above two DLCs, this means that you could either have a pureblood elitist racist nation, or one that welcomes diversity and even encourages it through pawn growing in vats and genetic manipulation.
Take it a step further and we’re talking about splicing humanoid pawns with animals. Again, in combination with Ideology, your colony can have opinions on that. Do they welcome the manbears and catwomans of this world? Or do they believe Boompeople and Baseliners don’t mix? So many roleplaying and gameplay opportunities unlock with this DLC.
Your pawn can become a Mechanitor, meaning you can control friendly versions of the hostile Mechanoids yourself. This is one of my favourite parts in the entire game! Having cute little robots zoom around your base, hauling stuff, cleaning floors and growing fields. If not adorable, you can ‘t argue that it’s super cool!
And as usual, the modding community adds a TON of races, each with their own genetic markup and genes they can pass on (or not) to the next generation of pawns. Some mods add more machines, more genetic materials to play around with, and there is so much of it I haven’t even explored all of it.
DLC: Anomaly
The Anomaly DLC is, to me, the odd one out. It introduces horror elements, supernatural threats, tons of new monstrosities - all very dark and edgy, and all adding a lot of eldritch energy to your game.
I say it’s the odd one out, not because it isn’t a good DLC, but because unlike the other DLCs, which all seamlessly tie into the base game and each other, Anomaly feels like separate game mode. While joining or deserting The Empire or building a religion works for most playthroughs, Anomaly takes a very specific, deliberate focus into the macabre that I don’t feel works well alongside the rest of the game. It has to be its own… cult.
An Anomaly playthrough is something to commit to, I don’t feel it works well if it just happens naturally like the rest of the DLCs. I therefore think that this is the most “end game” DLC of the set, one you should get last, when you’ve experienced the rest of the game and its DLCs, know the game very well and know what you’re doing.
Though there is a certain appeal in just dropping a monolith on a tribal colony and see what happens.
DLC: Odyssey
And then there’s Odyssey. Freshly added earlier this month, and I think this might be the best thing to happen to RimWorld so far!
Odyssey expands the game by introducing new biomes, landmarks, animals, all aimed at motivating you to explore rather than settle down in one spot.
How does it take care of the mobility, you ask? By adding gravships.
And I can’t express in human words how happy gravships make me!
They are essentially a portable base that you can either research yourself the regular way, or start with the gravship scenario that, well, starts with you on a gravship, being chased by mechanoids. This adds a definite urgency to your nomadic lifestyle, as you won’t be able to stay in one place for long before they come in and you have to run again.
This has been SO much fun! Building has become an entirely new experience. With immobile settlements, you’d go big: big bedrooms, big kitchens, big throne rooms, big storage rooms, big, bigger, biggest - you don’t have that luxury on a gravship. Your building surface is limited, and you’ll have to fit everything you need into it. That means barracks stuffed with beds side to side, your kitchen being inside your freezer because there just isn’t the space to put it outside, eating at your desk and not hoarding too many resources. It adds a lot of challenge to suddenly build very compactly, while still trying to optimise the space and balance out the (de)buffs while you’re at it.
Your gravship can go into orbit. In fact, that’s where you start if you play the gravship scenario. There are, of course, some challenged linked to that. You’ll need vacsuits to survive in space, and/or build a pressure and oxygen system onto your ship to take animals up there, for example.
This DLC also introduces landmarks. Those are special structures which randomly spawn all over the world map. Some may be very useful, like an abandoned colony you can comfortably stay at for a few days, or a stockpile of chemfuel you were just running out of. Others might be more challenging, like an entire cave full of bugs to clear out or an ancient stockpile to hack your way through. Some maps have a more natural landmark, like hot springs or poison geysers, and all of them can co-occur, making for interesting maps to explore while you stay ahead of the mechs and make your way to the gravcore and gravlite panel stockpiles.
Fishing was finally added as a vanilla component. That’s a feature a big chunk of the community has been asking for for a while, but if I’m honest, I’d have to admit that it’s a bit underwhelming. Vanilla Fishing Expanded already had a perfectly good system in place that, objectively, works better than the official one. Fishing zones and a separate fishing job are a must, which of course have been added by mods - but still, they shouldn’t have to be, they should have been vanilla and part of this mod.
And not that anyone expected it not to happen, but this new DLC has of course inspired the modding community to add a lot of things, ranging from utility UI things to smaller appliances, more storage options, different types of vac suits, loft beds - basically everything in favour of saving space on your space ship. There’s some irony in that.
Atmosphere
RimWorld is… special.
I couldn’t get into the game for the longest time, specifically because I couldn’t “parse” the graphics. They were simplistic, didn’t match, the layers didn’t always make sense, it was throwing me off, very weird.
And then one day, I got over that. I can’t explain how or what gave me the final push over the edge, but once I started playing, I was instantly addicted and now I adore the way the game looks! It’s iconic, it’s simple yet effective, and it allows for modders to tie into the existing graphics style flawlessly.
Depending on in which biome you decide to set up your colony, the atmosphere will feel vastly different. Different trees and plants, different weather, different temperature, different seasons… Depending on which type of rock is present on your map, your buildings will vary in look. Depending on which ideology you follow, certain pieces of furniture and decoration will look different.
Introducing mods, the way your game looks can be changed indefinitely. Some mods go as far as overhauling the whole game to a medieval atmosphere, while others invest in making the game even more futuristic and tech-y. Whatever you’re in the mood for.
All of this makes the ‘look and feel’ of RimWorld vary a lot, in a very good way!
Tutorial
The tutorial is limited, but gets you through the basics nicely.
Most of the game is pretty self-explanatory. Following the research steps and looking through what you unlocked gets you there most of the way. Though I have to admit, even after playing for a thousand hours, I’m still discovering new things that I didn’t know about, so I don’t think you can ever learn everything about this game, which only adds more to the fun of discovering it!
Modding
Ah, my favourite segment of this review: the mods!
Only I’ve already said so much about it above, there isn’t much to add.
The RimWorld modding community genuinely deserves a statue. When I say ‘whatever you want to do, there’s a mod for that’ - I mean that quite literally. Whenever you’re playing and think, “hmm, I wish xyz would be different”, somebody probably already thought about it and made the mod.
I could list my favourite mods below and write a review long enough to print out and wallpaper a mid-sized medieval castle with, or I could just link you to my Steam profile, where you can find my mod collections. These are collections of mods that I played with for specific scenarios and different versions of the game. There should be a list of the 1.6 mods I play with soon.
And last but not least, I’d like to plug my own mods. I haven’t delved too deeply into modding as I usually do, out of fear of ruining the game for myself as I usually do. But there are a few things I added, go check them out!
TL;DR
RimWorld is a colony sim where you manage survival on an alien planet, balancing resource gathering, building, and defending your colony, all while dealing with random events thrown in by a game master that hates you. Lots of unpredictable drama and beautiful moments alike. My initial hesitation over the graphics faded once I saw the depth and chaotic creativity it offers, whether you’re running a peaceful village or an eldritch cult. The game's storyline is whatever you make it, and every choice can lead to absurd or intense outcomes. Modding adds endless possibilities, making each playthrough a new adventure. Absolutely 100% recommend this game!
Questions or comments? Let me know on Steam or on Discord!
