What is your aim in Rimworld?

[Aedes]

Hello everybody. I still didn't get my copy because I'm still unsure if the game will be right for me. I used to play Dwarf Fortress a bit from time to time. I found the game to be generally fun, but what killed my interest in it is inevitable fps death and bugs. Due to fps problems, I would rarely or even never build interesting structures. Other bad thing was countless hours spent searching for stuff and trying to make my dwarfs equip certain items and making crossbowmen shoot arrows instead of going melee, and then trying to make them pick up ammo....

So how is Rimworld in comparison to that? Are there things to do? How do you spend 1000 hours in the game? Please help me understand. I'm very worried I might become bored.
Thank you.

[Nightmyre]

RimWorld is the kind of game where, after you've played it, you'll constantly be asking yourself when playing other games, "why couldn't they just do it like RimWorld did?"

It's probably the game with the fewest "problems" I've ever played.

There's a reason why it's probably the highest rated game of all time on Steam (if you aggregate total ratings and not just look at positive reviews).

[Aedes]

Thank you for your reply. I was thinking about that, what makes it so good. I guess I just need someone to "convince me" it is really what people say it is. I guess I will give it a go.

[Ben]

Usually to take over the world. Build up a touch-able society via superior tech, numbers and training. Then I get bored and start making arenas for the captured prisoners to fight in, you know...when on break from the mines and such work.

[Nightmyre]

It's no one thing that makes the game so good. It's just that everything is done so damn well.

The closest analogy I could give you would be comparing StarCraft to every other RTS. There's a reason why it was probably the most played RTS of all time - because it just did everything right. There wasn't one specific thing that made it great - it was just so polished.

[Bozobub]

There are three kinds of goals in RimWorld:

1. Long-term goal: Build or travel to a spaceship and escape the rimworld you currently occupy. This is *completely* optional, mind you.
   
2. Short-term goals: Basically, all the immediate needs and desires of your colony, such as providing/maintaining food, shelter, weapons/defense, and etc.
   
3. "Meta" goals: The goals YOU choose arbitrarily. Essentially, "role playing".

If you prefer "hard" goals, simply try to "win" all the time. Many, if not most players, however, prefer #3, above, and just play as they like =). Either approach is both perfectly valid and doable, as you desire.

[Aedes]

Thank you all for replies.

[Nyah]

Get it you won't regret it.
It's a masterpiece.

[Tri-Enclave President CEO]

To create a prison breeding farm and mass sell prisoners or use them for fuel in bioreactors.
Either that or make a cheese farm.

[Marik]

Dwarf fortress is a vastly superior product, but requires a lot of time to master. Rimworld sort of stands on its own two feet when modded, and is way more accessible. But you absolutely need to mod it. The base game is terrible.

The most fun I've personally had in Rimworld was after I accumulated dozens of cattle over time and just went caravanning. No building or researching. Just going out into the world and experiencing the sweet and sickly gambler's fever of pillaging other people's settlements and taking their stuff for your own, and seeing what you got. It feels great to be building a fort while attacking someone's base, accumulating weapons and finding out a way to succeed against the odds.

[The Knowledge Seeker]

Well, this is a story survival against raids and weather. You can make it as easy or as hard as you like ( only vanilla ) and you can change at any time. Each time you start a new game, it isn't the same. Why would you start a new game? Cause you died? Now, you learned that lesson and want to try it again. You will die again... crap! Not this time... hmm, wonder if there is a mod for that? Before you know it, you blink and it is 500+ hours later. Watch some Youtube lets plays and then decide.

[CANADIAN TAPEZOID]

this game has no problems at all and ive only seen 1 bug and thats because i had to many mods this game runs so smooth i swear

[Bozobub]

"No problems at all" is WAY overstating it, and frankly it's untrue. Don't get me wrong, the game is largely bug-free, a lot of fun, and even runs reasonably well on wooden PCs, but NO complex software has zero problems =o! Especially since "problems" are often more subjective than objective; witness those who believe lack of official multiplayer support is a "problem", for a perfect example.

Currently mods, themselves, have HUGE problems for some people (although generally only for those who use a very large number of them). I'm confident a fix is otw very soon but overpromising/false PR isn't really a benefit to RimWorld/the devs/the community in the end ^^'.

[climbingeastofwinter]

Dwarf Fortress has ( / is trying for) a fairly unparalleled level of rpg/simulation depth, as far as games go. The interface is functional and the game is pretty complicated and it's still so early (hah) in it's development that it's hard to tell if things are working as intended, or bugged at times, or if certain features are just lacking. Still, what's there is amazing.

Rimworld does not come close to Dwarf Fortress in many regards mechanically, but it does a decent job of balancing some sandbox/colony building on a single layer 2D map, with some light social interactions and storytelling devices. Rimworld is much easier to get into than Dwarf Fortress, is similar in many regards in that you loosely (depending on how well you macromanage vs micromanage) direct your handful of people to gather / build their way to self-sufficiency, and feels like a more elegant solution in many ways, so long as you don't mind what feels like a much lower level of detail across the board.

It's fun, I have more hours in Dwarf Fortress than Rimworld and I'm never giving up DF, but I purchased Rimworld and I'm happy with it. Also, I haven't noticed any serious FPS problems in Rimworld - Dwarf Fortress does tend to grind to a halt eventually on any system as far as I'm aware.

[Bozobub]

If you scrupulously avoid pets (especially the catsplosion[dwarffortresswiki.org]) and the gold economy, you can actually keep DF running pretty well with some improbably large colonies. But you also have to always keep optimizing your colony, to do so; you have to do the same in RW but it's far less tedious.