I need help with going to the ship.

[banhammerer]

So I got the quest, "Ship to the Stars" and It is 60 days away (I have no animals rn) and I am debating weather I should go when I can. I just need to know what happens, is it worth it, and can I get it later? Please help me.

[whatamidoing]

What's with everyone asking about the ship lately?
Anyway, once you get there, there will be a ship, and you have to activate the reactor. It takes 15 days, during which you will frequently raided. Once that's done, you can load everyone you want into the cryptosleep caskets and launch the ship, which will give you a credits screen, and the option to keep playing with anyone left behind if you want. The quest never goes away, and you can build your own ship as well once you have enough research. Up to you if it's worth it. I've never bothered.

[banhammerer]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What's with everyone asking about the ship lately?
Anyway, once you get there, there will be a ship, and you have to activate the reactor. It takes 15 days, during which you will frequently raided. Once that's done, you can load everyone you want into the cryptosleep caskets and launch the ship, which will give you a credits screen, and the option to keep playing with anyone left behind if you want. The quest never goes away, and you can build your own ship as well once you have enough research. Up to you if it's worth it. I've never bothered.

Thanks for the info! I think everyone is asking because their new

[Steelfleece]

The ship will be there until you get to it. There's no hurry unless you want to get to the end quickly. If you do want to make the ship run, I'd put it off until you've made as many allies as possible and have a healthy supply of long-lasting food (pemmican/survival meals/etc), silver, and animals. Once you get there, build up fortifications and a temporary base before you think about activating the reactor. Make sure to keep values low if possible, may help to keep the raids smaller. With any luck, your allies will be sending help to assist in fighting off raids once they start arriving - they can make a significant difference. Don't worry about shoving everyone into the cryopods until the reactor's ready and the raids are over.

Oh, if you're really attached to any animals, you can have them anesthetized from their health->operations menu, and once they're downed they can be loaded into a pod too.

[Narrowmind]

He asked why everyone is asking because you can literally build your own ship, which is what most people do. Going on a forced march across the planet to another seems a lot more risky without a purpose, but if you're new, you definitely don't want to walk to the ship.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by banhammerer:

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What's with everyone asking about the ship lately?
Anyway, once you get there, there will be a ship, and you have to activate the reactor. It takes 15 days, during which you will frequently raided. Once that's done, you can load everyone you want into the cryptosleep caskets and launch the ship, which will give you a credits screen, and the option to keep playing with anyone left behind if you want. The quest never goes away, and you can build your own ship as well once you have enough research. Up to you if it's worth it. I've never bothered.

Thanks for the info! I think everyone is asking because their new

If you're new to the game, it's worth noting that the quest is entirely optional, and is intended for players who, after they feel satisfied with what they've accomplished in the game, want to end their game by making a last stand against waves of enemies and try to escape the titular rim world. Don't feel like you need to do it because it just popped up, you can do it in a year, five years, or as most RimWorld players do, never. :)

[Laurie]

Use a mod such as Pla Steel to get vehicles and drive there

[whatamidoing]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

He asked why everyone is asking because you can literally build your own ship, which is what most people do. Going on a forced march across the planet to another seems a lot more risky without a purpose, but if you're new, you definitely don't want to walk to the ship.

No, I'm just wondering why there's been at least three different threads about the quest ship recently when it's only come up extremely rarely before. Did someone make a video or something?

[Steelfleece]

Could be an influx of new players. Which could, in turn, be because of a video. I know Spiffing Brit mentioned the game recently, but just indirectly.

[IchigoMait]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What's with everyone asking about the ship lately?
Anyway, once you get there, there will be a ship, and you have to activate the reactor. It takes 15 days, during which you will frequently raided. Once that's done, you can load everyone you want into the cryptosleep caskets and launch the ship, which will give you a credits screen, and the option to keep playing with anyone left behind if you want. The quest never goes away, and you can build your own ship as well once you have enough research. Up to you if it's worth it. I've never bothered.

You can let the game run regardless if you have anybody or not, if you wait long enough you'll get a wanderer. There is no loss condition for losing or removing all pawns.

[whatamidoing]

Originally posted by IchigoMait:

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

What's with everyone asking about the ship lately?
Anyway, once you get there, there will be a ship, and you have to activate the reactor. It takes 15 days, during which you will frequently raided. Once that's done, you can load everyone you want into the cryptosleep caskets and launch the ship, which will give you a credits screen, and the option to keep playing with anyone left behind if you want. The quest never goes away, and you can build your own ship as well once you have enough research. Up to you if it's worth it. I've never bothered.

You can let the game run regardless if you have anybody or not, if you wait long enough you'll get a wanderer. There is no loss condition for losing or removing all pawns.

Yes, the only strict game-overs are the archonexus ending and the planetkiller scenario option.

[IronyIsGod]

The planetkiller scenario option?

[whatamidoing]

Originally posted by IronyIsGod:

The planetkiller scenario option?

Yeah, if you make a custom scenario there's the option to add an inbound planetkiller weapon that functions as a timer to get off the planet, with a strict game over once whatever timer you set has passed.
https://rimworldwiki.com/images/b/b7/Game_over_planetkiller.png

[IronyIsGod]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

Originally posted by IronyIsGod:

The planetkiller scenario option?

Yeah, if you make a custom scenario there's the option to add an inbound planetkiller weapon that functions as a timer to get off the planet, with a strict game over once whatever timer you set has passed.
https://rimworldwiki.com/images/b/b7/Game_over_planetkiller.png

I never noticed this. Thanks for explaining.

[Narrowmind]

Yeah, me either. I thought it was a mod only.

[ichifish]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

He asked why everyone is asking because you can literally build your own ship, which is what most people do. Going on a forced march across the planet to another seems a lot more risky without a purpose, but if you're new, you definitely don't want to walk to the ship.

What's funny to me is that so many players seem to think it's particularly hard or uninteresting. I did the journey immediately after my first successful ship launch, which was probably my 3rd or 4th colony attempt. This was 1.0 when caravanning was... unpredictable. Since then at least a 1/3 of my runs have had a significant amount of nomadic activity (sidenote: try choosing "random location" on start, then journeying to your permanent colony site).

I highly recommend everyone try the journey to the ship, even if you're just sending a handful of dupes on a lark.

As for difficulty, that's determined by your difficulty settings, which you can dial up or down on the fly.

Planning and undertaking a long journey is fun and full of interesting challenges. It is "a thing to do in a game." You can take the careful route, try to plan everything out, and do the trip in one long push or wing it and just try to survive as nomads, settling a bunch of tiles on the way, staying for a quadrum or two, then moving on.

Ambushes are exciting, occasionally deadly, occasionally lucrative challenges.

On your first attempt you might realize you made some miscalculations and have to make a temporary home by settling a fresh tile or taking over an enemy settlement. This is lots of fun because designing a temporary home is a different kind of challenge.

Entering the ship tile and seeing the map you'll have to defend for the first time is exciting. Building a base around the ship with experienced pawns is lots of fun because you can realize your intentions much faster compared to growing a colony over several years.

Originally posted by banhammerer:

So I got the quest, "Ship to the Stars" and It is 60 days away (I have no animals rn) and I am debating weather I should go when I can. I just need to know what happens, is it worth it, and can I get it later? Please help me.

As for what happens, when you get to the ship tile it's a regular map of whatever biome, usually rather inhospitable, as it's far north or south. In the center of the map there will be an entire ship with 18 cryptosleep caskets, ready to launch. At that point the game continues exactly the same way as it does on a regular start or if you settle a second colony (look in the options menu for the "number of colonies" setting if you want to settle more than one tile, btw). The only difference is that your wealth will be relatively high, as the ship is very valuable, so raids will be a bit tougher. From this point you can take as long as you want (or your settings allow, if you've enabled the Planetkiller scenario) to build a base and prepare defenses for the ship launch. You'll get all of the same events as usual and you'll retain the same relationships with the other factions. When you fire up the reactor core you'll get the same kinds/amount of raids as you'd get if you built the ship yourself.

There was a thread a couple of days ago in which I wrote some perhaps overly-specific advice. You can check that if you want to plan carefully, but tbh, I say just go for it.