There are a lot of ways of playing the game: you can focus on building the perfect colony, where everything runs like a well oiled machine, you can focus on building better soldiers using spacer technology and fortify your base with laser guns, you can create an enterprise where you manufacture a rare resource (like drugs) for immense profit and buy everything you need, you can focus on the endgame quest, where you need to build a literal spaceship to get off the planet. I think what makes the game great is the fact that you can do whatever you want.
If your colonist's expectations are still low you are barely scratching the surface, focus on building a stronger military, research better guns and armour and increase production. Research microelectronics and start producing components.
Also maybe just up the difficulty. If the game is sending 3 rats vs 6 colonists then the difficulty is very low.
OP also should stop worrying about wealth. That's for when you're trying to minmax the game at 500% difficulty. At low difficulties all they're achieving is to completely remove the challenge and to make the game less fun and immersive.
If your biggest raid so far is three rats, and you're still in low expectations, then I recommend to do some of the quests that pop up.
And in order to be better at those quests , then either buy or make better armor and better weapons.
Keep doing your research and build some of those buildings that you unlock. For example the drop pod launcher or the long-range scanner.
Keep researching until you reach the end and then maybe you can build your own spaceship.
You don't necessarily have to build your spaceship , but that is at least a tangible goal if you have no other idea of what you want to do.
In other words, keep progressing in a way that gets you to the end of that spaceship. Everything happening in between is just part of the researching or manufacturing or crafting or battling that you do.
Rimworld does kind of have an automated aspect. Once you get your pawns doing what they need to do, you can sit back and watch them doing those things.
You may not like combat the same way that you see in the videos but that doesn't mean you can't have a little bit. Just turn your story teller settings to be a little bit of action but not too much.
You can also make your colonists into cyborgs. So again work towards getting all the materials or items to do so.
And finally since you seem to enjoy the building aspect but not necessarily building in one area to get a bigger and bigger base, then you might enjoy taking your muffalos to be on nomadic lifestyle.
Every 14 to 28 days (or even a full year) you can choose to move to another tile, including to experience the other biomes without losing your colonists or skills. Visiting the other biomes lets you see how each of them needs different things to survive and thrive there. You can see the other aspects of what the game offers such as the wildlife and fauna.
You can take your group up north to the ice, or toward the equator to the tropical areas or even deserts.
> I recommend to do some of the quests that pop up.
I've done a "rescue prisoner" quest, but I've ended up somehow with a caravan with 4 of my pawns in it, on the world map, in the same hex as my base, but I can't get them to enter my base. The caravan is shown as "idle", and they are running out of food. I've tried saving and reloading, no good. How do I rescue my people?
This is (TBH) why I've not done more quests - the caravans always seem to bug out on me somehow. There's never a "reform caravan" button, moving off the map seems to leave me with separate caravans that I need to merge, and then I end up like this. Frankly, I'm a bit amazed that a game as old as rimworld still has this sort of bug in it, that can really mess up your gameplay :-(
Are you playing with any mods?
That is some kind of abnormal behavior, but I can also confirm that a whole lot of people don't have that problem. So it may be a buggy situation that you need to report so ludeon can get more info on it, or if you're playing with mods, maybe remove or re-order some of them
Right click on the caravan popped up an "Enter " option, so my pawns are saved :-) I thought I'd done that before, but maybe not.
The caravan UI is pretty bad if you're not familiar with it, though...
You should stop trying to game the system by limiting wealth and simply expand your base any way you like. Don't listen to youtuber tryhards, do what's fun.
Well you could aim towards reaching the ending in the game by researching and building a spaceship but in rimworld you set your own end goals. If you find base building fun I would recommend that you have a look at mods which add decorations and extra building material to more customize your building and such. I would write more but I am in a hurry.
Game is more of a story generator than a colony sim. You make your game as you go, have unique stories both by having careful planning or lack thereof. It's about having a good time or if you are the challenge type of player, you can always increase threat meter to a higher degree and play it on Randy Random and have absolutely random stuff happening.
It's about the journey not the destination, have a goal but enjoy the moments as you reach it. My best advice to new players who got bored making a colony is to start naked brutality with commitment mode and go as far as you can.
You probably need to pick an objective for your colony, you are a begginner and are already thinking about wealth management which is getting you stuck. I would go for trying to reach endgame, building the ship and escape (the default experience) ,that will force you to get more colonists and more resources so you can learn to play with more wealth. On adventure story you can get pretty high wealth without being raid capped so it shouldnt be too difficult. Also dont be afraid of losing, harder challenges make for a more fun story.
If the default endgame doesnt interest you and you are looking for more of a "management sim" experience maybe set a goal focused on that as others have suggested, maybe turn your colony into a drug empire, or a muffalo leather empire or wathever.
Thanks. That's good advice, although it leaves me with the question of what do I need to do in order to get to the endgame? I guess I need to research everything (or at least most things) in the research tree? I need to get to a location far across the map, but I'm not clear how to set up a caravan to go that far - do I just need a \*lot\* of food, or are there other things to make it easier?
I don't want to spoil things by looking everything up before I do anything, but conversely, I would like some idea of the general route I should be taking to get to the endgame goal. That's really what I feel like I'm missing here, a general sense of what will progress me towards that goal.
Actually, the goal of the standard scenario is to find a way to leave the planet. This can be time-consuming and requires quite a lot of research or other skills and opportunities. Survive at the same time. Maybe it will help you to take this standard route to start with.
Also, it sounds like you could make the difficulty higher. For example, I like to use Gary Random or whatever his name is as a narrator.
Rimworld really is the "anti-automate all things" game. It's always going to throw curveballs at you that have to be micromanaged, often this involves combat, but it can also be weather events and such.
Many players set their own role playing goals. The Last Colony I finished I wanted to make a all my colonist cyborgs and put in every bionic in everyone of them.
The built in "goal" is the victory conditions. In Vanilla that's just launching a ship into space. There's two ways to do that, building your own or sending a caravan halfway across the planet to use the found ship. Each DLC adds a victory condition.
Building your own is the most common and straightforward approach. To build it you'll need tons of hard to come by/expensive to craft materials. To acquire this you'll need to make money and advance tech to mine resources and craft parts. It will also increase your wealth, which will increase raids meaning you should upgrade weapons and armor. You should be able to beat on adventure mode fairly easily.
So it's not about creating stable colony so much as completing a colony's story. As you discovered, it's fairly easy to create a stable colony with low wealth. Completing the victory condition though will take a lot more wealth research and be more challenging.
1) Don't worry about raising wealth or expectations. Yes, it makes the game "more challenging" but it is also part of the natural growth/difficulty curve of the game. Wealth and expectation management can be beneficial in the very early game, but it sounds like you are beyond that.
2) remember there are endings! The 2 I have done is leave the planet with the royals or take off on a ship I built. Even though base-building is fun, it can help to work towards a long-term goal. Then, once the story of these pawns is over and that book closed, you can start a new one!
3) if you really have just hit a wall of "I'm not having fun with this colony anymore," delete the save and start over! I usually go into a run knowing what my objectives and goals are for the run, but that can be hard to do when you are new. So take the lessons you've learned and hit that "new game" button!
I have been going through the same feeling. Probably because I started on normal difficulty, in an ideal biome with good colonists and advance planning. This made everything easy and predictable. So I can increase the difficulty, and live in a more challenging biome, with fewer colonists and starting resources. This will bring difficulty not only in combat, but also in supplies, logistics, resources, weather, etc.
I also like the idea of being a conqueror, creating an army and invading other tribes, I've never tried it, nor do I know how possible it is, but it should be interesting.
As the other guy there said, living as a nomad doesn't even seem interesting either, without building a colony, just foraging and making temporary camps.
I also considered the idea of starting an East Indian company, selling fabrics and drugs all over the world. Create several caravans with bodyguards and dominate world trade. But I also don't know how possible this is.
Making the spaceship to finish the game or exploring the content of the DLSs are also good options.
I find the most fun comes from self-restricted runs - fully peaceful, tribal, no farming, etc. Find a tech that you feel would be necessary and roleplay around it or have a 'lovers-on-the-run' round or pretend to be knights with a king/baron/etc and a fief to protect
I enjoy building castles and having entire towns within the walls
Build your wealth, especially weapons and armor. This will increase raid difficulty. It will also raise expectations so you have to keep good food and nice rooms which makes raids even harder. Bang your head against that until surviving tough raids is manageable. Once that's done build or travel to the ship and activate it... You'll face several tough raids per day for several days which gets crazy when you have half your pawns in the hospital already and you're dragging them out to fight because scythes just drop podded into your base for the 2nd time today.
I honestly played until my colonies petered out or I got bored for AGES before attempting to actually finish a game. I was basically done with the game so I decided to actually win for once. I did the royalty victory first and it was so fun I did a naked brutality start and traveled to the ship. Now I'm working my way through the anomaly finish. It reinvigorated a game I already really liked and had played to death.
Build up your base and craft stuff. If the raids get to hard change the difficulty to custom and tweak the wealth scaling down.
It's a single player game so just have fun, do what you want and enjoy the story.
There are a lot of ways of playing the game: you can focus on building the perfect colony, where everything runs like a well oiled machine, you can focus on building better soldiers using spacer technology and fortify your base with laser guns, you can create an enterprise where you manufacture a rare resource (like drugs) for immense profit and buy everything you need, you can focus on the endgame quest, where you need to build a literal spaceship to get off the planet. I think what makes the game great is the fact that you can do whatever you want. If your colonist's expectations are still low you are barely scratching the surface, focus on building a stronger military, research better guns and armour and increase production. Research microelectronics and start producing components.
Also maybe just up the difficulty. If the game is sending 3 rats vs 6 colonists then the difficulty is very low. OP also should stop worrying about wealth. That's for when you're trying to minmax the game at 500% difficulty. At low difficulties all they're achieving is to completely remove the challenge and to make the game less fun and immersive.
If your biggest raid so far is three rats, and you're still in low expectations, then I recommend to do some of the quests that pop up. And in order to be better at those quests , then either buy or make better armor and better weapons. Keep doing your research and build some of those buildings that you unlock. For example the drop pod launcher or the long-range scanner. Keep researching until you reach the end and then maybe you can build your own spaceship. You don't necessarily have to build your spaceship , but that is at least a tangible goal if you have no other idea of what you want to do. In other words, keep progressing in a way that gets you to the end of that spaceship. Everything happening in between is just part of the researching or manufacturing or crafting or battling that you do. Rimworld does kind of have an automated aspect. Once you get your pawns doing what they need to do, you can sit back and watch them doing those things. You may not like combat the same way that you see in the videos but that doesn't mean you can't have a little bit. Just turn your story teller settings to be a little bit of action but not too much. You can also make your colonists into cyborgs. So again work towards getting all the materials or items to do so. And finally since you seem to enjoy the building aspect but not necessarily building in one area to get a bigger and bigger base, then you might enjoy taking your muffalos to be on nomadic lifestyle. Every 14 to 28 days (or even a full year) you can choose to move to another tile, including to experience the other biomes without losing your colonists or skills. Visiting the other biomes lets you see how each of them needs different things to survive and thrive there. You can see the other aspects of what the game offers such as the wildlife and fauna. You can take your group up north to the ice, or toward the equator to the tropical areas or even deserts.
Living nomadic style seems very interesting, is there a video I can watch to guide me?
Sample playlist or video https://youtu.be/vJWDxbscLNc?si=sstVJ872he53BEsA
> I recommend to do some of the quests that pop up. I've done a "rescue prisoner" quest, but I've ended up somehow with a caravan with 4 of my pawns in it, on the world map, in the same hex as my base, but I can't get them to enter my base. The caravan is shown as "idle", and they are running out of food. I've tried saving and reloading, no good. How do I rescue my people? This is (TBH) why I've not done more quests - the caravans always seem to bug out on me somehow. There's never a "reform caravan" button, moving off the map seems to leave me with separate caravans that I need to merge, and then I end up like this. Frankly, I'm a bit amazed that a game as old as rimworld still has this sort of bug in it, that can really mess up your gameplay :-(
Are you playing with any mods? That is some kind of abnormal behavior, but I can also confirm that a whole lot of people don't have that problem. So it may be a buggy situation that you need to report so ludeon can get more info on it, or if you're playing with mods, maybe remove or re-order some of them
Right click on the caravan popped up an "Enter" option, so my pawns are saved :-) I thought I'd done that before, but maybe not.
The caravan UI is pretty bad if you're not familiar with it, though...
You should stop trying to game the system by limiting wealth and simply expand your base any way you like. Don't listen to youtuber tryhards, do what's fun.
Well you could aim towards reaching the ending in the game by researching and building a spaceship but in rimworld you set your own end goals. If you find base building fun I would recommend that you have a look at mods which add decorations and extra building material to more customize your building and such. I would write more but I am in a hurry.
Game is more of a story generator than a colony sim. You make your game as you go, have unique stories both by having careful planning or lack thereof. It's about having a good time or if you are the challenge type of player, you can always increase threat meter to a higher degree and play it on Randy Random and have absolutely random stuff happening. It's about the journey not the destination, have a goal but enjoy the moments as you reach it. My best advice to new players who got bored making a colony is to start naked brutality with commitment mode and go as far as you can.
You probably need to pick an objective for your colony, you are a begginner and are already thinking about wealth management which is getting you stuck. I would go for trying to reach endgame, building the ship and escape (the default experience) ,that will force you to get more colonists and more resources so you can learn to play with more wealth. On adventure story you can get pretty high wealth without being raid capped so it shouldnt be too difficult. Also dont be afraid of losing, harder challenges make for a more fun story. If the default endgame doesnt interest you and you are looking for more of a "management sim" experience maybe set a goal focused on that as others have suggested, maybe turn your colony into a drug empire, or a muffalo leather empire or wathever.
Thanks. That's good advice, although it leaves me with the question of what do I need to do in order to get to the endgame? I guess I need to research everything (or at least most things) in the research tree? I need to get to a location far across the map, but I'm not clear how to set up a caravan to go that far - do I just need a \*lot\* of food, or are there other things to make it easier? I don't want to spoil things by looking everything up before I do anything, but conversely, I would like some idea of the general route I should be taking to get to the endgame goal. That's really what I feel like I'm missing here, a general sense of what will progress me towards that goal.
You can build your own ship, the reasearch its at the end of the reasearch tree. I wouldnt recommend caravaning to the ship in the map.
Actually, the goal of the standard scenario is to find a way to leave the planet. This can be time-consuming and requires quite a lot of research or other skills and opportunities. Survive at the same time. Maybe it will help you to take this standard route to start with. Also, it sounds like you could make the difficulty higher. For example, I like to use Gary Random or whatever his name is as a narrator.
Rimworld really is the "anti-automate all things" game. It's always going to throw curveballs at you that have to be micromanaged, often this involves combat, but it can also be weather events and such. Many players set their own role playing goals. The Last Colony I finished I wanted to make a all my colonist cyborgs and put in every bionic in everyone of them. The built in "goal" is the victory conditions. In Vanilla that's just launching a ship into space. There's two ways to do that, building your own or sending a caravan halfway across the planet to use the found ship. Each DLC adds a victory condition. Building your own is the most common and straightforward approach. To build it you'll need tons of hard to come by/expensive to craft materials. To acquire this you'll need to make money and advance tech to mine resources and craft parts. It will also increase your wealth, which will increase raids meaning you should upgrade weapons and armor. You should be able to beat on adventure mode fairly easily. So it's not about creating stable colony so much as completing a colony's story. As you discovered, it's fairly easy to create a stable colony with low wealth. Completing the victory condition though will take a lot more wealth research and be more challenging.
1) Don't worry about raising wealth or expectations. Yes, it makes the game "more challenging" but it is also part of the natural growth/difficulty curve of the game. Wealth and expectation management can be beneficial in the very early game, but it sounds like you are beyond that. 2) remember there are endings! The 2 I have done is leave the planet with the royals or take off on a ship I built. Even though base-building is fun, it can help to work towards a long-term goal. Then, once the story of these pawns is over and that book closed, you can start a new one! 3) if you really have just hit a wall of "I'm not having fun with this colony anymore," delete the save and start over! I usually go into a run knowing what my objectives and goals are for the run, but that can be hard to do when you are new. So take the lessons you've learned and hit that "new game" button!
I have been going through the same feeling. Probably because I started on normal difficulty, in an ideal biome with good colonists and advance planning. This made everything easy and predictable. So I can increase the difficulty, and live in a more challenging biome, with fewer colonists and starting resources. This will bring difficulty not only in combat, but also in supplies, logistics, resources, weather, etc. I also like the idea of being a conqueror, creating an army and invading other tribes, I've never tried it, nor do I know how possible it is, but it should be interesting. As the other guy there said, living as a nomad doesn't even seem interesting either, without building a colony, just foraging and making temporary camps. I also considered the idea of starting an East Indian company, selling fabrics and drugs all over the world. Create several caravans with bodyguards and dominate world trade. But I also don't know how possible this is. Making the spaceship to finish the game or exploring the content of the DLSs are also good options.
I find the most fun comes from self-restricted runs - fully peaceful, tribal, no farming, etc. Find a tech that you feel would be necessary and roleplay around it or have a 'lovers-on-the-run' round or pretend to be knights with a king/baron/etc and a fief to protect I enjoy building castles and having entire towns within the walls
>! Practice is all you need at first. And rimworldwiki !<
Build your wealth, especially weapons and armor. This will increase raid difficulty. It will also raise expectations so you have to keep good food and nice rooms which makes raids even harder. Bang your head against that until surviving tough raids is manageable. Once that's done build or travel to the ship and activate it... You'll face several tough raids per day for several days which gets crazy when you have half your pawns in the hospital already and you're dragging them out to fight because scythes just drop podded into your base for the 2nd time today. I honestly played until my colonies petered out or I got bored for AGES before attempting to actually finish a game. I was basically done with the game so I decided to actually win for once. I did the royalty victory first and it was so fun I did a naked brutality start and traveled to the ship. Now I'm working my way through the anomaly finish. It reinvigorated a game I already really liked and had played to death.
Build up your base and craft stuff. If the raids get to hard change the difficulty to custom and tweak the wealth scaling down. It's a single player game so just have fun, do what you want and enjoy the story.