When did the game "click" for you?

[Mr. Gilly]

I recently purchased and decided to make the game as easy as possible so I could learn the game mechanics. As expected, I found this incredibly boring, not because of the game itself, but by the lack of anything happening. I soon was informed that some of Rimworlds best game elements shine when you (the player) give in and let the randomness take over.

My next run is a solo naked colony (of one). The game describes this as unfair. I'm like "Well, what do I have to lose?" For the first two days, my naked dude makes use of a partially constructed building while eating berries. He chops trees with his hands and often completely fails at building. Somehow, a bed, a campfire, and the remaining walls are built. But without any tools or clothes, I expect the worst. But then....

A trader comes through. I can't afford anything so I take her prisoner, steal all her weapons, money, and clothes. Half way across the map, as I'm harvesting berries, a wild rodent goes crazy, smashes into my "home", and murders my defenseless prisoner. Blood is everywhere. It's great.

At that moment, I was like, "I get it. This is why people like it."

[pauloandrade224]

Also it has one of the best healthy systems ive ever seen plus building from nothing (well almost nothing )is satisfiying af.

My most memorable memory was of my base with the crashlanded mod crashlanding a bunch of extremely explosive aand flammable ... Well explosives . And 70% of my base was made of wood...

AND IT LANDED IN MY ARMORY.

AND I HAD COMBAT REALISM MOD INSTALLED....


I had 13 peps and a dog i believe and only half of them survived the Apocalypse and the Infections that came from the injuries.

The dog died... Poor machete. The purple hair guy lived tho so thats a plus.

And from that moment on i rush the stoneworker's table every time if possible....

10 out of 10 would get bombed again...

[GeneralVeers]

Originally posted by Mr. Gilly:

At that moment, I was like, "I get it. This is why people like it."

There are MANY reasons people like this game. You found ONE.

There are many more. I'm sure you'll bump into some of them later on..........

(my personal favorite so far was when my colony was attacked by a manhunter turtle)

[Black Goat]

Not sure I'm really there yet, maybe soon...

[pheanox]

Was it your post I saw deleted a day or two ago talking about being bored? If so, glad you got the spark. For me it's always been the potential for story generation. You have to roll with the punches and for me it's making up the story in between what's going on that really does it for me.

[Cute Totori]

I finally decided to test my skill with this game after 600+ hours and put it on Cassandra Losing is Fun difficulty tribal with commitment mode. I lasted 5 game-years, only lost 1 colonist and ended with 9 colonists in total.

I lost cuz despite having marine armor and assault rifles and some decent brawlers, she dropped 9 centipedes on me with infernal lances. Everyone kept getting lit on fire and would run to the river that's far away and ignore directives to put the damn fires out on each other.

The fun of the game comes from the randomness and dramas, but there are some events that will literally end your run, period and leave you little hope to succeed if you play on higher difficulties.

I might use developer mode to spawn centipede events and play around with kill zones and turrets and stuff to figure out how to deal with them, but IMO, with how long they take to kill, they shouldn't be armed with charge lances and fire inferno lances while simultaneously spawning in swarms of 9+ lol.

HOWEVER, all other raids including sieges and other mechanoid events, drop pod raids, infestations etc went quite well for me. I know a LOT of advanced tricks. For example using winter temperature as a freezer for storing food that won't go bad, using some drugs to stop breakdowns, setting them to use them in moderation that won't lead to addiction. Also amputating limbs off of colonists before an infection kills them (You can do that too).

Overall it's amazing fun to ramp up the difficulty and challenge to maximum. If you use a mod to disable mechanoids completely I find the game is a lot fun for me personally, but lately I've turned them back on to try to tackle it. I think centipedes need to lose their ability to have weapons if they're going to take that long to kill.

[Gamefever]

I dont know,

My first run I couldnt figure out why one of my colonists wouldnt get out of bed and Humps had to go over to her an feed her everyday.
So I checked on the internet an it turned out that there is a health tab and she had her back broken by that last animal attack.

As luck would have it a quest reward came in for a bionic spine reward....Well I thought hey lets go get that...Bring it back and fix her up real good and I figure she has a lot of seasons left in her.

Unfortunately thats when I learned about traits....She was a Body Purist and had a complete mental break down over it, went beserk and killed poor Humps the young man that cared for her for weeks until he found a way to get her to walk again.

[Astasia]

I was told something similar when I first looked into the game long ago, so I didn't buy it. I don't enjoy chaos or losing, or the concept of playing something just to watch a sad story unfold. This is what a lot of people will tell you RimWorld is, essentially a roguelike story generator where you play until disaster happens over and over. So I watched other people play it on youtube, series after series, multiple youtubers, seeing how they approached the game, learning the mechanics, wondering if it could be tamed. After some time of doing that, possibly hundreds of hours in total, is when it "clicked" for me. I had learned enough to know how to control my own stories in the game, and I bought the game and have done so ever since, 1500+ hours later and never feeling like things were out of my control. A proper exciting colony management game with reasonable threat and predictable enough mechanics to master, and endless replayability through mods.

[Green_Twenty]

I tried it a while ago and thought, "Way too complicated, I'm out."

Then I recently watched CohhCarnage play it on his back catalogue on YouTube. He was so chilled and just accepted the events as they came. He got invested in the story of his colony, even when it burned to the ground (multiple times). But it always felt like he had a plan to make it better.

Then I realised I had been approaching it all wrong - it isn't about victory, it's about the events that happen on the way and how you react to them! And this game does a great job with the emergent storytelling. It also gave me the courage to play on a harder difficulty which of course makes things more dramatic.

[_SoMe]

i am still pretty busy with my first cassandra map :) trying to see how far i can take it in terms of running smoothly. having about 60 tamed animals and 13 pawns now, everything still runs completly smooth after 159 days - still motivated to go much higher on those numbers

although i havent done much of research due to bad micro management and a mess of a basecamp

i guess once i reach the endgame and get into all the research i probably will start over with a more difficult challenge.

i might even flip the switch in the end, just to let some chaos spread around before everything goes down

like building that huge sand castle close to the edge of an ocean :)

and this game totally clicked after i captured a raider and making her a colonist, only to realise that my soldier had destroyed her left lung. Her nickname now is "Breathless" and she got two labradors called Left Lung and Right Lung :D It was my first recruit attempt and she is still a reliable member of my colony :)

[Sebslocker]

Ride enters the map gets hit with meteorite killing some and inapacitating one. Some of the rocks are morphite so pawn lays there getting increasingly irradiated morphing uncontrollably eventually turning into full on beaver. My pawn goes to mine that unstable material and gets pig snout. In the background brachiosaurus witnessed it all with visible confusion. One day I will tame that beast and ride it into a battle.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Astasia:

I was told something similar when I first looked into the game long ago, so I didn't buy it. I don't enjoy chaos or losing, or the concept of playing something just to watch a sad story unfold. This is what a lot of people will tell you RimWorld is, essentially a roguelike story generator where you play until disaster happens over and over. So I watched other people play it on youtube, series after series, multiple youtubers, seeing how they approached the game, learning the mechanics, wondering if it could be tamed. After some time of doing that, possibly hundreds of hours in total, is when it "clicked" for me. I had learned enough to know how to control my own stories in the game, and I bought the game and have done so ever since, 1500+ hours later and never feeling like things were out of my control. A proper exciting colony management game with reasonable threat and predictable enough mechanics to master, and endless replayability through mods.

^--- Exactly this.

This is exactly what I did. I watched "Let's Plays" from a lot of different YT'ers. Hours and hours and hours... By the time I finally bought the game in EA, I already knew most of the mechanics and their various functions and quirks.

That did not, however, stop a rabid squirrel from causing a cataclysmic chain-reaction of unfortunate events...

That's when everything "clicked."

The key to "Winning Teh Gaem" in Rimworld is adequate preparation and planning for Events that have not yet happened.

[Rizen]

I always look at this game as a indie development cash grab but then i saw it grow into something more established as i evaded it for few years then started watching others on youtube enjoy it watching the meta and builds on how to play and win or survive. I have taken break from three weeks of playing myself because of rng that can decimate your colony. Then i looked at the mods and seen how op and harder this game can become and how there weird meta of researching to get stabilization.

It clicked when it sorta felt like i was playing rome tottal war and ck3 but sorta different more intricate and diverse. If devs do read this id like more quests and royalty quest and stuff added to the game at some point I feel like they can do lot more with this game even after first update in several months/year. I find it relaxing and enjoyable.

[Hoki]

for me it clicked twice. i spent about 8-9 months as part of jjayjims community watching him play RW and when it hit version 1.0 i finally decided to give it a go. i played it for about 40 hours vanilla and then lost interest in it. following that i kinda forced myself to keep playing it that way for about 20 more hours until i then decided to abandon any kind of attempt to finish the game before giving mods a go. for me vanilla always lacked in options available.

and here we are now with me having over 2000 hours and to this day not finished a single run. modded was what made it click for me for good. it offered me everything i needed to create a customized experience that i can enjoy. up to about 1200 hours i just threw together mods and somehow made them work together (to be honest those packs were messy and obviously very unbalanced) but ever since then the game became a true story generator and presented me with an enourmous puzzle segment i can enjoy in the form of balancing modpacks.

vanilla by itself is a great (though not perfect game) that features a very big frame for stories. modded simply added details for those stories that finally made me enjoy them.

[pauloandrade224]

Im sad that no one experienced the Joy that is 70% of your base burning down due to crashlanded and Combat realism Literally crashing an Ammo and explosive's cache into ur armory filled with said explosives and ammo wiping out half of ur colonists and all of ur animals...

Yet.

[Aurian]

I had my big AHA moment when I used the alternate crashlanding scenario where dead and half dead people and ship parts keep randomly crashing down for a while, and the whole map turns into a fiery inferno where you're scrambling to save either some much needed resources or some colonists from the fire...

As it turns out, in my scenario a ship reactor dropped right in the middle of the map and I had to drag all people and resources I managed to save down to the very southwest, because the dropped ship reactor was irradiating 80% of the map. Couldn't deconstruct the damn thing because the radiation would have killed anyone who got too close for too long. The radiation killed nearly all animals on the map, too. Fortunately, a random trader who eventually stopped by had an android (not affected by radiation) slave with high construction skill for sale...

Edit to add - for those interested: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=730384702