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.
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 kind 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.
With the Ideology DLC, your colonists become religious, following either an ideology you manage yourself or one of the dozens already in the world, adding more challenges and conflicts to an already very charged political environment. Capturing enemies and converting them to your ideology - with or without violence - is a sound strategy to strengthen your position in the world.
You can choose to pursue becoming allies with The Empire, or become a rebel fighting against them, in the Royalty DLC. This DLC adds all kinds of fancy stuff for fancy (wannabe) royals. Audacity is added through the “expectations” mechanic, adding yet another challenge for you to balance.
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.
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!
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 will list some of my favourite mods below, in no particular order - feel free to leave your mod suggestions in the comment section, too! I’m always on the lookout for more until I break the game beyond repair.
Vanilla Expanded
This isn’t a mod, it’s an entire collection of mods. Vanilla Expanded flawlessly ties into the rest of the game, it becomes hard to tell what was vanilla and what isn’t. There is a whole collection of VE mods adding wonderful content to the game, I’d just suggest getting all of them, really.Achtung!
I can’t play without this mod anymore. It tweaks the way you can control your pawns, giving them orders in group, control how you position them in combat, which tasks they have to prioritise, queue tasks or continously work on connecting areas, even adding a Rescue work type that made my life so much easier.Barely Better Spots
This mod allows you to hide most of the “spots” in the game (i.e. a very thick and visible square on the floor where you research, butcher, craft etc. before you unlock/build the actual workbenches) to increase immersion. Includes support for several mods, too.Too Many Areas, Allow Animal Areas and Area Unlocker
Too Many Areas fixes the area layout so that there aren’t 67897868785 different buttons all packed together, and replaces it with a handy drop-down list.
Allow Animal Areas allows you to assign animals to areas instead of pens, making your colony planning much less tedious and more effective.
And Area Unlocker removes the arbitrary maximum amount of areas you can have.
These three mods together unlock all the potential areas have to offer!Research Reinvented and Stepping Stones
Not only does Research Reinvented add a lot of immersion to the game, taking your researches away from behind his desk and allowing them to study things in the world, reverse-engineering existing structures and brainstorming with others, alongside the Stepping Stones companion mod, it also overhauls the tech tree to a more logical, intuitive progression.Simple Sidearms
This mods adds the functionality of having two weapons on you: one main weapon, and one sidearm. This works very well as a way to have a ranged weapon as default and then a smaller, lighter melee weapon for when the gap gets closed and you need to switch to close combat, with an easy interface that allows you to switch between the two.Hospitality
I cannot express how much I love this mod. It allows you to host, entertain, sell to and even recruit visitors. You assign them beds, decorate their rooms - very much a little hotel simulator mini-game, if you will. It adds so much life to my towns!Museums
Tying into what I love about Hospitality, the Museums mod adds a museum your colonists and visitors can visit, allowing you to display the collection of loot you worked so hard for.Pick Up and Haul
In Vanilla, pawns will haul one stack at a time, even if their inventory is empty and they’re carring twenty-seven backpacks they might as well fill up. This mod makes them gather stuff in their inventory and then deliver it to the respective stockpiles in sequence, making themless dumbmore efficient.Blueprints
Save your buildings as a blueprint and easily roll out copies of them, a dream for people who make all their workshops and houses the same size!Dress Patients
Ever noticed how you can strip a patient / prisoner, making them drop everything they’re holding and wearing, but then they sort of… remain naked until they themselves decide to put their clothes back on? With this mod, you can dress them yourself, in the clothes you choose. I know the name says ‘patients’ but it works on prisoners and dead bodies as well.We Are United
I’ve always felt really bad whenever I got the notification that one of the visitors is on of my pawn’s mother / sister / greatgreatgranddaughter, without the option to invite them to join the colony, so you‘d to arrest them and break their will like they were some common criminal. This mod adds a “Ask to Unite” option (which can still fail), allowing you to invite family members, or pretty much just anyone you have a positive relationship with, to join your colony.Camera+
Simply adds more zoom to your game, perfect for screenshots.Defensive Positions
This mod allows you to set a “go to this location when I call you to arms” strategy, meaning your pawns will be ready for a raid in 0.2 seconds.Dynamic Trade Interface
Adds a trading interface (that honestly should have been vanilla) which allows you to trade from and to visitors, shows your two separate inventories instead of one combined list, generally more intuitive.Ritual Chair
I know, I know - I’m not too good to sit on a pew or a kneeling sheet… but sofas are just more comfortable, so I know I personally would follow the ideology that offers me comfortable seating in cburch. Wouldn’t you?Mass Graves
When playing RimWorld, a lot of raiders come to your doorstep - and hopefully, that means there will be a lot of dead bodies on said doorstep a moment later. Before you reach the cremation tech, they are impossible to dispose of, and they get a little smelly. Therefore: mass graves.Custom Actions
This one is a game-changer. With this mod, you can set up a sytstem of filters, triggers and actions, allowing you to automate things you’d otherwise have to keep an eye on yourself. E.g. “any time a crop in my growing zones becomes harvestable, automatically select it, set it to harvest” or “any time we sink below 9 bags of hemogen, all able-bodies adults should report to the med bay to donate some”. This has given me a lot more time to just enjoy watching instead of losing myself in micromanagement.Questing Meme
I’ve only discovered this mod recently and accidentally, while looking for something lese, but holy shii- I never realised how much I needed this. Completing quests becomes part of your ideology, effectively rewarding you for exploring ruins, helping refugees, building monuments etc. on a more ideological level as well.Colony Groups
Another one that I can’t believe isn’t vanilla: grouping your colonists. Set up groups for builders, miners, farmers, and collectively select and address them in one click. Twelve refugees joined your colony and your colonist bar is a little crowded? Separate them into a group and hide the group. Super handy, especially for bigger colonies.
Additionally, I sometimes like to just… not play a tech/scifi RimWorld and play it like a medieval RPG instead, with magic and dragons.
Sounds neat? Then these mods are what you’re looking for:
Medieval Overhaul
Probably the biggest overhaul mod on the RimWorld workshop, Medieval Overhaul completely changes the way your game looks, feels and acts. Not only does it remove the higher tier techs, limiting you to a tribal and medieval experience only, it also completely changes the way items look, are named, or are obtained, making RimWorld a completely different game. If you have DLC, mind that there are DLC-specific addons, too.Dragons Descent
Adds dragons to RimWorld, including an altar to perform dragon rituals, draconic drugs, and all kinds of exclusive items for both dragon worhsippers and hunters. But not an ideology component, for which you’ll need…Draconic Style
- this mod, which adds floors, statues, memes, basically an entire unique draconic style to your ideology.DragonBond
This adds the Velonir, a noble race very much inspired by the Targaryens from A Song of Ice and Fire, who in RimWorld possess the unique ability to bond with dragons, giving them unique buffs depending on which type of dragon they bonded with. This mod includes two factions, a set of armor, face paints and tattoos, a custom scenario, inheritable genes, a pyre funeral ritual, and probably some other cool stuff I’m forgetting.Dragon Genetics
This adds the Dragons Descent genetics into the Vanilla Genetics Expanded genepool, allowing them to manifest as dragon hybrids.RimFantasy
This adds magical weapons, furniture, defences, all while working well with Medieval Overhaul.
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 Twitter!