Rimworld is Peak Colony Management
The last article I wrote took a lot out of me. A lot of research, with very little helpful knowledge extracted. This time I'd like to take it easy and talk about one of my favorite games, Rimworld.
I love Rimworld, it has to be the single best colony management game I've had the pleasure of playing. I was introduced to Rimworld after binging a ton of Prison Architect content on YouTube. To paint a picture: I was playing a ton of Prison Architect and really enjoyed fulfilling the needs of my prisoners, and planning my prison was particularly engaging. I used to design prisons in my notebook at school, and then build them once I got home just to see if they worked as-designed without hiccups. I can't remember which channel uploaded the first Rimworld video I saw, but I remember Rimworld attracted me because I saw that pawns’ health panels individually tracked every finger and toe, and every major internal organ. I was so impressed at that alone that I decided to give the game a shot, thinking it would be “sci-fi Prison Architect.”
How wrong I was.
The biggest difference between Prison Architect and Rimworld is that Rimworld has a grander sense of scale, and unique elements which Prison Architect is lacking. For instance, in Prison Architect the game will let you hire an accountant. This accountant is always going to be an accountant, and they will never get a promotion to, say, guard. In contrast, Rimworld just gives you pawns to do with as you see fit, allowing any pawn to do any job with minimal restrictions. Janitors in Prison Architect can be killed by prisoners but prisoners can’t be killed by janitors; in Rimworld your janitor-slave can start a social fight with a 9 year old vampire, who also happens to be the colony’s teacher, and spend a day in the hospital. The deepest storytelling I’ve seen come out of Prison Architect is something like: Violent Max-Sec prisoner works in a kitchen for 5 years and rehabilitates after getting an education in your prison. In Rimworld you can have the same story: Some raider gets captured, indoctrinated, rehabilitated, released. Except in Rimworld the rehabilitation is the beginning of someone’s story, not the conclusion. A prisoner can join your colony after your assigned warden chats with them enough and develops a rapport. Furthermore, in Prison Architect you aren’t usually going to be in a position where your prison is truly overrun since you can always hire more guards, take out more loans, or in extreme cases call a swat team and permit lethal force. You indeed can fail by way of bankruptcy, whereas in Rimworld failure is what happens when everyone dies. In Rimworld the closest thing to hiring a swat team would be the “Man in Black” who shows up when all of your pawns are incapacitated at once. The Man in Black will become a permanent colonist but you only get one, so if the same thing happens again you’re SOL. This isn't “Dog on P.A. Hour” so I'll just say P.A. is a lot of fun, and an excellent management game, but Rimworld held my attention by virtue of it’s depth of storytelling.
Rimworld’s storytelling has a leg-up on P.A. for one really important reason: Rimworld has a storyteller. In vanilla you have options of Cassandra Classic, Phoebe Chillax, and Randy Random. Storytellers will cause random events to happen, either good or bad, according to your colony’s health. Your colony’s health is measured by your total wealth, a number which is the sum of the unmodified market price all your food, pawns, weapons, buildings, etc. When a colonist gets the flu, their market value drops and the game thinks “oh! something bad happened.” When a colonist builds a masterwork sculpture the wealth goes up and the game thinks “oh! something good happened.” Now, these three storytellers are not equal and I’ll educate you how they each work. Cassandra Classic (C.C.) will give you more good events when your wealth is lowered, and more good events when your wealth is raised; C.C. will scale the size of the event according to your total wealth so new colonies with little money get pretty mild events in both directions, and big colonies will get bigger events in both directions. For an example, if you literally started playing 5 minutes ago you might get raided by one guy with a wooden club, or might get about 3 shirts worth of sheep’s wool falling from the sky. If you are on hour 300 of your colony you can get raided from multiple directions by people with explosives, or a thousand silver coins will fall from the sky instead. Phoebe Chillax (P.C.) will throw negative events at you as well, but they are much less frequent so that you can recover in-between. P.C. will also usually send you an extra colonist at the beginning of a colony or bless you with an early trade caravan so you can exchange silver (the universal currency) for food or animals or anything else they sell. Then there’s Randy Random, he’s a son of a bitch. His name is no misnomer, he is the only storyteller who has a random multiplier applied to negative events, which ranges from x0.5 to x1.5. That means a raid can be half-strength for your current wealth or %150 strength for your wealth. Randy is the only storyteller who can send consecutive raids as well, so you can get two x1.5 raids back-to-back or you can go months without even a x1.0 size raid appearing. Remember: you should always pick Randy Random as your storyteller so that you can always blame a failed colony on his antics instead of your own incompetence.
One of my strongest examples of the depth of storytelling Rimworld offers is from my first colony, because it was a dumpster fire. Our food was spoiling because I didn't understand how refrigeration worked, my pawns were dying because I didn't force them to rest when they had infections, and I didn't think to give guns to the people who knew how to use them. Despite the troubles we faced, I had captured one of the raiders who attacked in the last raid. I didn't really have the capability to build a jail cell, so I dug a hole in the side of a mountain and shoved the prisoner in there. I was so excited when I saw that I had the option to “Perform Surgery: Harvest Kidney” that without thinking twice I ordered my medic to rip it out for fun. The prisoner survived, but the procedure failed. I did some investigating and it turns out that doctors do better work when they can see. The cave had no lights so I built a campfire.
Did you know campfires get hot? Because the prisoner found out pretty quickly when they had severe heat stroke. I hastily ordered someone to prop open the cell door to vent the heat out and attempt to save his life. Success! He recovered from heat stroke and announced their improved health by escaping through the door I propped open. Whoops! This was not an issue, by this point I had given our melee specialist a cool club I looted off an attacker (probably one of the prisoner’s friends) and we subdued the prisoner successfully. Except the prisoner got an infection from a still-healing leg wound from the failed surgery. On a hunch I thought “can I amputate his leg?” Sure enough, we could amputate his leg. I scheduled the operation and installed a torch in the jail cell. Torches provide light but less heat than a campfire, so hopefully no heatstroke this time around.
This time the surgery was a success. We successfully removed his kidney! Wait huh? Apparently I forgot that I originally queued for both kidneys to be removed, and then added an amputation surgery. “Not to worry.” I said to myself, we can still remove his leg. Then the unthinkable happened: my doctor had a mental break and started beating the shit out of our prisoner. Who, by the way, is still recovering from anesthesia and suffering an infection in the leg. The poor guy gets beaten to within an inch of his life by the time I send a pawn to attack our doctor to stop his assault spree. The doctor is knocked unconscious and is brought to his room to recover. The prisoner needs to be brought to bed as well, and of course as we are tucking him in to his sleeping spot on the floor, the pawn carrying him has a mental break and proceeds to beat the shit out of the prisoner.
The final straw was: Ate without table.
Rimworld can create the funniest and most unhinged stories, this is true for new players and experienced players alike. Another favorite story of mine from only a year or two ago exemplifies the more dramatic and engaging stories Rimworld can offer, a story of humble beginnings, loss, self-actualization, and identity. It’s also extremely silly as long as you consider tragedy as hilarious as I do.
I was running a colony a few years ago after the release of Biotech, Rimworld’s 3rd DLC, where I was enjoying a much different experience than our first story. There was ample food, we had a couple vat-grown disposable Gary's to fight for us, our King was a psychic powerhouse and life was good. Then Watts fell out of the sky, crashing into a temperate forest in the winter in a transport pod. Watts was a 78 year old woman with lung cancer, whole-body paralysis, injuries from landing, and a bad back. I imagine if I could hear her voice she would sound like everyone’s favorite chain-smoking aunt. During the crash she sustained injuries to her legs that never fully healed, leaving her with painful scars. One of the Garys braved the frigid winter environment and dragged her back to our hospital, but not before she had moderate frostbite.
My doctor was quite skilled, and we had excessive amounts of Glitterworld Medicine, so I decided to get to work curing Watts’ various conditions. We conducted a risky surgery to repair the paralysis and it succeeded! I waited for the anesthetic to wear off… and waited… and waited… but Watts never got out of bed. Watts was awake and able to talk to people but was just kinda lying around looking pathetic. I checked the health panel and found out that between a bad back, frail body, and scarred legs, she was far from fully recovered. She was still stuck in bed despite the fact that none of her conditions should stop her moving. In so many other games your HP is untied to your other skills, operating at peak performance while teetering on the edge of oblivion. In Rimworld HP isn’t even really a thing, instead measuring Consciousness, Pain, Movement, Manipulation, Sight, and Hearing separately. I figured since the different conditions caused the pain stat to be so high, that was the culprit keeping her infirm. I started administering smoke leaf joints daily to treat the pain, but they reduced her consciousness to the point where she still couldn't walk anyway. I was ready to chop her up and eat her at this point, but I persisted. I figured there was fruit yet to be born and held out a little longer.
It was around this same time I finished researching the Biosculpting technology, which is a tech that allows you to regrow limbs and cure complex conditions like cancer or cataracts. I shoved her in for a 20-day cycle and it said it would cure her leg scars, bad back, and frail body. Awesome! 20 days later she pops out of the pod and… she still has a bad back and a frail body. Her legs are cured, so she can technically walk now, but apparently when a Rimworld pawn reaches a certain age they simply always have the Bad Back and Frail conditions. I was willing to look past those two conditions since she could walk now, but whenever she smoked a joint or drank a beer she would immediately collapse and I would get a “Colonist needs rescue” notification. It was really funny at first, then extremely annoying. Only one thing left to do: stick her in the pod for about 2 dozen age reversal cycles until she's the young young age of… 55. At that age I just had to put her in the pod once a year to maintain a mature but healthy body, 100% movement speed and 100% consciousness. She became our mascot and our janitor, a true symbol of what it means to be my colonist.
Though healed in body, the spirit was yearning for something greater. You see, in Rimworld's 2nd DLC Ideology, you can design an Ideoligion (a portmanteau of Ideology and Religion). Among other things, my ideoligion at this time was Transhumanist. That is to say the faithful believed their bodies were weak and they wanted modifications such as bionic limbs or peg legs. Whatever you have lying around really.
I had a pretty adept craftsman in my colony so I set out to craft a pair of bionic arms for Watts. I haven't mentioned this yet but colonists in Rimworld can have a passion for a given job; jobs like plant cutting and cooking. You see, Watts had a strong passion for melee combat. Imagine how I felt when I first met this sweet, old, crippled woman, who couldn't walk and who was so vulnerable, and I saw that she thirsted for blood splatter across her wrinkly face. I made her the bionic arms she wanted, but I didn't stop there. I had received a special kind of prosthetic called an Archotech Leg, archotech prosthetics are even better than bionic limbs and can make a reasonably strong pawn into a true beast. Suddenly Watts is my #1 Frontliner, since unlike my other pawns she would never get a broken arm and she could run faster than a horse. She was equipped with Cataphract armor and helmet as well, making her a kind of Master Chief figure on the Rim. We continued to modify her with a Nuclear Stomach to minimize the need to eat, two Archotech Eyes to enhance sight, a Love Enhancer (prosthetic vagina/penis), Bionic Heart, Coagulating Factor, and basically anything else I could fit in her anatomy. Watts would routinely sprint from my colony to neighboring rivals and single-handedly cull the raider population, then bring back the food and wealth. Eventually I trained Watts to shoot effectively as well, so they had the option of ranged or melee combat whatever they so chose. I started making her fight bears 1-on-1 just to see what would happen, and she usually triumphed. The nice thing about bionic limbs is that they can repair themselves, so as long as she didn't bleed to death she could get up and resume fighting if need be.
Alongside the story of Watts there was also our royal leader Greyhound. Greyhound in the beginning was an expert carpenter and sharpshooter, and they were the obvious pick when the Empire offered to induct one of our colonists into their royal hierarchy. You see the Royalty DLC for Rimworld introduced this empire as well as psychic powers. You do favors for the Empire and you get some cool space wizard abilities, sometimes you can raise a wall of stone or maybe blind everyone in a radius. The point is that Greyhound was very helpful to the Empire, and this help was very well rewarded. He could nauseate or confuse groups of enemies, could teleport himself across the world map, and could melt people's brains with neural heat. Greyhound was one of the first responders when we were invaded by a powerful mechanoid cluster, mechanoids being Von Neumann style evil robots. Greyhound charged in with his loyal subjects and although the group was successful, Greyhound’s head was shot off when a stray sniper round hit him from behind. I didn’t get to see Greyhound die myself, but what I did see was that nearly every one of my colonists had a frowny face emoticon pop up simultaneously, so apparently Greyhound was quite the charismatic leader. This all took place while Watts was still paralyzed, so this was by many measures the lowest point of the playthrough. We froze Greyhound's body in the hope that we might find a cure for decapitation.
In the following in-game year my colonists: Tried to butcher Greyhound for meat, Unburied Greyhound for morbid observation, Unburied Greyhound to use his coffin for a random raider, and left Greyhound outside in the rain for days at a time. I was certain that his body would be in awful condition, but by pure luck he was usually only unburied when it was frozen outside, so he never spoiled. Roughly around the same time Watts was receiving her first upgrades we had a caravan from the Empire visit, they were looking to trade. I was extremely giddy when I saw it: Resurrector Mech Serum. They had two in stock so I bought both. I did a test run by reviving another dead colonist, and once I figured out how to use this serum I scheduled the resurrection of Greyhound. Greyhound was neither in mint condition or rotten, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Poor guy came back from hell and he was brain damaged. His royal title was passed on to another colonist when he died, so he wasn't even royalty anymore. He kept his psychic powers though, thankfully.
All was not lost though, and I put Greyhound in for a bioregeneration cycle which was able to cure his brain damage and a few scars from past battles. He was back, and he was among his people once again. Without the burden of authority he became our shooting expert, modified with two Archotech Eyes, it helped that he was basically a Jedi too. Around this time I determined to actually beat Rimworld for the first time, trepidatious as I am, even I could see that I was over prepared. I endeavored for the most difficult ending: The Archonexus.
In Rimworld your goal is to leave the planet, and you have a few options. You can march across the planet to a crashed spaceship, you can build a spaceship, you can get a ticket for the royal spaceship, or you can go to the Archonexus. Now, the Archonexus isn't a ship. You don't really understand what it actually is, but you get an offer from a third party to trade for a map to the Archonexus. What do you give away? Your colony and most of your pawns. And you have to do that 3 times. Basically once your colony has $250k in wealth, you can sell the colony and keep a few colonists in exchange for the first of three maps that lead you to the Archonexus.
Once you sell your colony you will start over on a new part of the world on a map with a weird ancient high-tech structure that radiates painful psionic waves to all your colonists. You have to decode the structure, whatever that means, and then build another $250k colony. You sell that one and do the same thing twice again. Finally you're on a map with a REALLY BIG ancient structure, except this time you aren't selling your colony. Instead, once you finish decoding the structure, you ascend to a higher plane of reality and the credits roll. That means that somewhere Watts and Greyhound are ballin’ around in a new life as higher-dimensional beings.
There simply isn't another game that creates such intertwined and complex stories. Rimworld is firmly grounded in the human experience- hunger, violence, and tribalism are core themes behind anything happening on the Rim, and driving factors in our own lives. Likewise the moments of relief after raids, or feelings of triumph when you can build sustainable bases, give us something to work toward amidst the anguish and frustration. Rimworld also has it’s own unique science-fantasy themes with medieval psychic space royalty, vampires, werewolves, evil robots, and magic trees. I love Rimworld!
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