So...How the Hell do I play Rimworld?

[Saucemain]

So, Ive played this game for a good minute and I cant seem to understand how people can enjoy this. I know rimworld is similar to games such as dwarf fortress where its mostly in the story and not about dominating or wining but, I havent been about to see anything interesting happen. Ive already had two collies die due to some creature attack were everyone just bleed out but beside from that nothing else seems to happen expect the random trader coming bye.

Ive added mods to try improve the ui and the vanilla expanded mod to give me more options but i still struggle to get a stable amount of food or have to just watch as pawn bleeds out then we have the medicine bu my other pawns would rather pick berries than say the dying person.

Any mods or tips to help improve my experince?

[whatamidoing]

Bloat expanded is just going to confuse you if you can't play the game normally without it. If you're not getting enough food, make your growing area larger. If your growing area isn't being worked, make sure your farmer(s) aren't busy and make more people work if you need to. If your pawns aren't getting treated, make sure you have a doctor and rescue downed pawns. Maybe put the difficulty down, maybe even to peaceful, until you can at least get a self-sustaining colony.

[grapplehoeker]

Tips:
1. Avoid mods and play vanilla until you've got the game firmly under your belt.
2. Learn to manage your Work priorities... eg. your Medic should have Doctor as priority 1 before all else. Then they'll be less likely to go foraging when somebody is in need of first aid.
No mod is going to help you if you cannot prioritise correctly ;)
3. Failing can be entertaining and enjoyable...
4. Learn from your mistakes ;)
There's a lot to learn and a good minute isn't near enough. Expect many hours worth of failures before you git gud ;)

[Vermillion Cardinal]

I'd say stick to Peaceful difficulty on a temperate forest tile first so you can learn survival basics before tackling bigger subjects like raids. As the others have said, avoid most mods (especially those that add new stuff and mechanics) until you're certain of your basics.

While setting your job priorities is a thing, remember that you can order your pawns to do stuff directly; don't watch people ignore stuff that needs doing when you can assume direct control and order it done right now. Just make sure they can do the job via the Work tab first.

In terms of food, favor rich soil if possible, plant rice first so you can have a basic supply set up, and expand growing areas as needed (the latter will be based on experience as you play, though I'm sure there's some spreadsheets online somewhere if you really need the fine details). Try not to plant them too far away to save on travel time. Have your people hunt animals if really desperate, but check their Animal Revenge chance first; it's much safer to prey on those that won't suddenly charge back at you.

Have walls and pens to protect your people, crops, and pets. Use zones, caravan hitching spots, and pens to move animals to safety from wild predators.

[malefiiicent]

I was in your shoes like 3 weeks ago. I almost refunded this game because it seemed way too confusing, and now I have 145 hours in game lol. My biggest advice for learning how to play is to find a streamer or youtuber who plays vanilla rimworld and watch their playthroughs. Even just search youtube for Rimworld tips for beginners. Seriously - this alone helped me sooooo much. Then after you get the basics down you can start adding mods :-)

[BurlsoL]

1. Avoid mods at the start. While there are some decent quality of life mods out there that can make things easier, this can make you learn bad behaviors that can cause issues down the road. Increased stack size mods, for example seem benign and helpful, but they make it easier for you to stockpile more than you can reasonably use, and grossly inflate your colony wealth. Colony wealth is a mechanic that is used as a factor to determine how severe raids and disasters can be, so having too much can make things much worse for you.

2. Start on peaceful with a smaller map. Yes, it might be a little boring, but you're playing with the goal of just surviving a few seasons without your colonists starving to death while doing some building and research. It's about learning some basic mechanics before you have the game trying to murder you regularly. If you think you can learn things quick, pick a colony location where you have 60 days growing season instead of year-round. This will give you some challenge as you deal with changing seasons. Make a manual save at the start of each season so that if it goes bad, you have a place to restore from and learn from your mistakes.

3. Then move one step higher in difficulty and do the same thing over with a new colony. You'll have raids and animal attacks to contend with. Play it out as far as you can, working towards building a space ship. Make saves at the start of every season. Don't be afraid to look up mechanics you might have trouble with.

Common downfalls include; shooting at things that will attack you when you only have 1 colonist nearby, doing anything with drugs, having a pyromanic anywhere near a wooden structure, not having some medicine before you need it, keeping too many prisoners, keeping too many animals, trying to make single pawns do too many different things.

4. Then have fun, add a few basic mods, try new things, make mistakes, fail horribly, do better next time.

[Cannenses]

Originally posted by Saucemain:

... struggle to get a stable amount of food or have to just watch as pawn bleeds out then we have the medicine bu my other pawns would rather pick berries than say the dying person.

Any mods or tips to help improve my experince?

Rimworld is unique in how much control it grants you with running a colony. Hence the saying: "Easy to learn, hard to master".

The headline statement would be, as you're aware, this is a "colony sim". In practical terms, you are trying to optimise all inputs to output (activity of colony). Simplistically, if you're running a team IRL, you're looking at -- in priority -- people, process, (finally) technology.

In Rimworld terms, it would be
a) Food -- people require energy to function
b) Mood -- pawns not working as intended disrupts process
c) Gear -- technology to help defend, attack and colony function generally.

Given that 'food' is an issue, you're better off focusing on how to procure food efficiently. Then learn to allocate work manually. Don't rush research because wealth (from higher tech) triggers 'incidents' which your colony might not withstand.

My only tip for absolute beginners (as I once was) is: Save/Fail again/Reload ... until you're comfortable with all incidents the game will throw at you.

[JAJAJAJAJAAJAJ]

As barebones as it is, try playing the tutorial. It teaches you how to set up a functioning colony, and introduces raids.

[primeinsurrection]

Download Ideology, pay for it or you will feel like all the time you played was wasted.
Make your colonists role play the ideology so they stay happy. Each ideology is alot of work and a huge shift in how you play.

My fun option:
Play custom. Put research on 1%. Then put adaptation on 1%. Then put colonist and enemy kills on 50%.

[Ducks on Fire]

Originally posted by primeinsurrection:

Download Ideology, pay for it or you will feel like all the time you played was wasted.
Make your colonists role play the ideology so they stay happy. Each ideology is alot of work and a huge shift in how you play.

My fun option:
Play custom. Put research on 1%. Then put adaptation on 1%. Then put colonist and enemy kills on 50%.

I don't think OP should buy any DLC at this point. Their issue seems to be they don't even understand the basics of the game.

The best thing to do is to just play and try and keep your colony alive for as long as you can while learning the game. Don't use mods yet. As you learn to play you''ll also start getting ideas for how you want to play and what goals you want to accomplish in game. Then you can start adding mods and buying DLC to fit with what you want from the game. I'd also recommend watching some playthroughs, preferably unmodded if you find them. Chances are you'll see some of the basics of the game being played out to get an idea of what you should try to do at the start. Plus you might get inspired to pursue a similar goal to the player your're watching or something.

Personally I like the process of laying out my colony and building it up. I like trying to get a nice looking town with buildings and stone walkways and stuff. I come up with different layouts for hospitals, town center type buildings, armories, all that good stuff. But at the same time I want to feel like I'm surviving so I play things out regardless of what happens. If I spent 20 hours on a colony but a bad raid and an unfortunate fire leads to everyone starving to death then so be it.

[The Amateur Player]

Being a Dwarf Fortress player myself that was converted to Rim World, DO NOT compare it to it. RimWorld is nothing like DF, so if your expecting very deep interaction like DF you will be disappointed. Play entirely without MODs or DLC and take your time. I am also about 2 games into Rimworld still learning as well. But i have years of experience in DF. Once DF comes out in Steam then that will be wonderful.

[kevinshow]

My tips: do as others are saying to learn the game. While you're learning the game, if you're OK with making multiple save files, then do that, and you can redo some points of your game if you want to.

For example, save before a battle, save every day for a backup of what you did that day, and then tomorrow play another session. Save a rolling set of 2-3 files whenever you want to (besides the game's auto-save of 5 backup files).

The reason is so that you can learn, make mistakes, and redo the thing again if you want to see what other results could happen.

Of course, some people don't want to do that and that's fine. But if you do, then that's a suggestion I think will benefit you as you are learning the game.

[Haunt Fox]

Sometimes you have to Draft people to make them do certain things, like make arrests.

Pawns won't rescue anyone if there isn't a (medical?) bed that's inside and under a roof and not sweltering/freezing. Goes for downed animals, too (give your critters sleeping spaces/boxes.)

Instead of just playing "peaceful", you can choose "custom" (on the storyteller/difficulty page at startup) difficulty. Turn down the threat scaling (there are three scales you need to watch, the first one, and the last two on the right) to 1% - you can stlil learn to deal with raids, but they'll be one dude with a knife.

The thing I missed when I first started mucking about was how everything has bills.

Oh, also, you might not know that under the "work" tab, you can set that crap manually - set priorities so that they don't all run around higgeldy-piggeldy without making sense. This is one of those games that takes more than a casual minute or two to get the idea of.

Also watch the upper left screen for notifications that come and go much too fast, sometimes.

[LookToWindward]

Stockpiles with carefully set filters on what they will accept together with the right bills to keep a supply going but not overfill the stockpiles is the way to a good functioning base.....

[psychotron666420]

Tweak the settings in the gitgud.ini file.

[ambi]

if you're running out of food, make your growing fields larger and store your crops and meals in a freezer. go hunting if it's an emergency. and try to build in a warm climate with year-round growing seasons so your crops will grow 24/7 (semi-arid and tropical are good choices).