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Add some mods in maybe ?
About difficulty, i dont think its an issue, fighting isnt what i enjoy most of the time.
Technically you're supposed to;
1) Make a spaceship to escape the rimworld.
2) Become high royalty to ascend to space and away from the rimworld life.
3) Archonexus quest to become a god ... but its really just create 3 wealthy colonies in succession to "win the game".
But most just;
4) Make up your own story.
If you allow mods into the game there's plenty of stuff you can do. Stuff like Vanilla Expanded Mechanoids makes it mandatory you actually deal with the mechanoids otherwise you're going to be overrun. Mods like SOS2 allow you to go into space and have space battles, adding a whole new segment to the game. Getting your first spaceship is no longer the end but the start of a completely new gameplay segment.
I do agree that the mid to late game can be a bit boring. I think its largely because there's relatively little to do in the mid to late game. you are well established in everything you need and the only thing that is challenging are the ever increasing raid sizes, which can be trivialized with proper mechanical exploits. For progression you get power armor and you get charge rifles and most likely turn your pawns into cyborgs depending on what appendages get blown off. After that there's not much to do because the game expects you to finish the spaceship and beat the game.
If you want to extend the gameplay, you have to expand the mod list or try alternative playstyles that focus more on roleplay.
What do you consider some common denominator for "Middle" and "End" gameplay?
Mid-Game can get reached pretty quickly. (That's generally at the point where the player would be exposed to most of a game's mechanics and is interacting with them, IMO.) For myself, my arbitrary points are based on Tech and that would be:
End-Game: Being able to research spaceship components.
Mid-Game: Somewhere around manufacturing Advanced Components, all starting clothing is completely worn out, research is around Assault Rifle, etc. (Gets a bit handwavey)
Most of my playthroughs stop at or before "End-Game." At that point, if I want to keep playing and don't have a long-term project in mind, I'll start a new playthrough. This is very common among Rimworld players, AFAIK.
Generally, if I want a sort of longer play experience, I focus on Hospitality Mod and just build bigger and better facilities for visitors until... I'm done. :) I no longer engage with vanilla "win conditions." I have nothing against it, I just find more play value in pursuing personal goals.
I don't own and DLC and have a very tiny list of mods I use, with Hospitality being the biggest. I also play on an older version due to personal preference. I also tinker a bit, try some new construction ideas, stack LEGOs... etc. I do try to keep morale high, so I use that as a weathergauge for what to do, next, pretty often.
Edit - On "Why you're bored" - You have been through the excitement of discovering new things and some ways to use them in-game. You may not see the game's Win Conditions/Victory as something worth pursuing.
You either go in for self-directed play and try something you've not tried before or you put a lot of importance on "survive as long as you can while pushing the limits" and see what happens.
The events in the game start to feel repetitive and predictable. If a colony starts to get too many colonists in it I stop caring about who people are or how good they are their jobs. Being too productive in your colony will only punish you if you aren't scaling most of the new wealth to defenses.
The game isn't dynamic enough on it's own and is missing something for the mid/end game experience. It just starts to feel very repetitive and lacks novelty the more you understand how the systems in the game work.
Raising the difficulty only makes the game less interesting because you have to play in a very specific way. Difficulty only makes games rigid and reduces everything to meta strategies and memorizing patterns.
It might be appealing if you aren't aware of meta strategies but what most people do is just copy what's all ready been discovered by others.
The trouble with games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, is the "endgame" is exactly what you make it to be. You have to decide what sort of end goal you want to set up, or what you want your colony to look like. Without an end goal you want to work towards, you will get bored after you become self sustaining.
Things like theming, story and all that sort of thing can help a colonies longevity. For example, one colony I made was with a custom werewolf style xenotype. My population would expand by capturing prisoners, forcing them to fight in a gladiator duel, and then turning the winner and recruiting them.
Or another colony that ran with the "high-tech medieval" theme, all my pawns used melee and heavy armour, but it was things like monoswords and power armour.
If you don't give yourself an idea to work with, you will just end up making yet another mix-maxed, hyper efficient killbox colony. You don't need to up the difficulty. Just change how you play a specific colony.
Build mostly in mountains? Try building a settlement like a city, with large concrete roads and specific buildings decorated for certain production machines.
Maybe pick a specific item and make it your colony's main export. Perhaps your initial settlers were a family of armour smiths, or brewers.
Give yourself a story to work with, and your colonies will last a lot longer. Because in the end that's what Rimworld is; a tool for telling stories.
It's not easy to do. And I find myself I can often get overwhelmed trying to decide what sort of story to set up. But once I find something that sticks, colonies can last a few in-game decades.
I personally find it easier to start with just a single pawn. That gives a lot more room for the environment to influence the story I'm tracking.
But much like playing DnD, it also helps to think of a compelling reason as to *why* your pawn(s) are here. Maybe they were an exile from another faction. Perhaps they experienced some horror at the hands of The Empire and are working to undermine their power. Or maybe they're just some guy that's hellbent on creating the perfect body for himself, and came to a Rimworld to avoid legal repercussions.
The actual gameplay of Rimworld is quite shallow, despite what some people will tell you. The meat comes from the story. But unlike linear games that give you the story, you have to play a part in telling it. You have to give meaning to where there is none mechanically. You have to create the significance behind a doctor botching a surgery on a guy he happens to hate. You have to decide if the Toxic Fallout that hasn't shifted in 3 months is significant enough to change the way your colony functions and views the world.
Sometimes a better colony is not a better experience, and it took a long time to learn that. ^_^
Your problem isn't unusual, especially for players with a lot of hours in the game. The advice above is good, but I want to approach the problem from a different direction: issues related to the genre mechanics.
Mid/end-game boredom isn't a RW problem, it's an inherent problem in simulation/4x games. The issue is that the mechanics that make the game compelling in the early game create problems for the player in the late game. There are three different mechanics in play:
1. Decision-making (Engaging decisions become boring)
The problem is that decisions that are exciting in the early game become tedious in the late game. Examples:
Early game raids can be deadly and decisions can be life-or-death, but in the late game your first thought might be "how am I gonna clean up the mess?"
Resource management creates important decisions in the early game (do I use my last medicine to tend this flu, or take a chance on healroot?). In the late game these decisions mostly disappear.
You invest in your first pawns and their traits and behavior impact the story significantly. Your decisions about them are meaningful. But it's hard to even remember or care who that 14th pawn is, what their job is, or whether they're sleeping in the right bed. When your OG pawn loses a limb in the third raid it improves the story by impacting your decisions. You might not even notice that #14 lost a limb.
2. Difficulty-scaling (more X ≠ more fun)
The second problem is that it’s really hard to for developers make difficulty scale to accommodate the mid-late game expansion without increasing the amount (whatever that is, like raiders in RW or units in Civ). This is because it's difficult to make threats evolve for each stage of the game. This is even more difficult in a game like Rimworld that has an huge range of play styles. For example, changing raider behavior instead of the number of raiders (or raid points, actually) not only requires balancing that behavior but also making sure the player has the tools to deal with it. If the player has learned that breach raids do X in the mid-game and established a strat for that, making breachers do Y in the late game requires additional development and may be confusing for the player.
Imagine, for example, that late-game doomsdayers didn't waste their shots or path into mazes and instead were heavily-armored pawns that used their rockets to full advantage. Exciting, yes, but hard to code, difficult for players to build their strats around, and likely to end a lot of runs.
Especially if you have the DLC RW has lots of different raid types, just not enough to keep it fresh for those of us with hundreds (or thousands) of hours in the game. Up to the late game raid types are varied, but once you hit the late game they just get bigger and bigger. Personally I feel like all the new raid types may have exacerbated the problem: up to the mid game anything can happen (yttakin sieges! pigs with grenades! ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!), but that same mid-game dynamism can make the late game seem more boring in comparison (oh, pigs with grenades again...).
Again, this isn't a RW problem specifically, it's a problem with the genre.
3. Micro doesn't scale (micro early = exciting! Micro late = tedious)
Like in real life, 4x-ing inevitably result in having too much stuff of one kind or another, and stuff = micro. I've played every version of Civilization, and late-game micro is still a game-ender, even after 31 years of iteration. The problem is it’s hard to systematize decisions in ways that players enjoy. Two ways to reduce micro are to 1) take decision-making away from the player (eg automating city management in Civ), or 2) create elegant control systems that allow the player to take a hands-off approach (Rimworld).
The problem with #2 is that it's impossible to force players to use the micro-reducing systems like jobs, schedule, zones, bills, etc. optimally. Hardcore min-maxy streamers, like Adam vs. Everything and Mortal Smurph provide really good examples of this, but their playstyle (no story), and level (pro) isn't the norm.
OK, so what does this mean?
General advice:
1. Try to use the systems in place to optimize your colony. I don't mean "make it perfectly efficient," I mean make the tools work for you. This is hard for me, because I tend towards perfectionist play (wanting to micro tailoring bills to choose the best textiles, for example), but especially by mid-game I want all of the in-game tools set up well.
2. Figure out how much BS you're willing to tolerate. Sometimes you can get into the zen of the micro, or you're invested in a goal so much that you don't notice. Sometimes you just have to say "this is no fun, this run is done." I have at least a half-dozen colonies like this: they reached peak fun before the end-game so I just stopped. Remember that this is genre problem, not a problem with RW or your run.
3. Be an observer. Some of my favorite runs are ones where I just let things happen and enjoyed the way everything went to hell. These runs tend to end around mid-game, for obvious reasons, and when they lasted to the late game, the sheer chaos was enough to keep me interested.
Finally, this is my process for setting up runs:
1. Design challenging runs
Plan runs that are difficult due to self-imposed constraints and the storyteller settings. Basically, lay down a set of rules that force you to play sub-optimally while dialing up the difficulty to a level that makes mistakes deadly. In my case I almost always play as good-guys (no attacking neutrals, harvesting organs, etc.) This inevitably forces me to make suboptimal choices, and those remain interesting even in the late game. Lots of people do this with mods, but biomes, ideologies, and xenotypes usually keep me satisfied (although that said, my next run is full-on VFE).
2. No reloads
The threat of losing pawns and having your base get wrecked keeps things exciting.
3. No killboxes
Once you've perfected killboxing it's time to move on. I can remember the exact moment I realized manipulating raid pathing was sucking the excitement out of the game. Raids are a big part of the game, so I think about how to make them fun, not just easy.
4. Ship launch
I seem to be in the minority on this, but I usually do a ship launch, often under some limitation that makes me less prepared than I'd like to be. The raids can get monotonous, but having to design an effective colony keeps me focused. I like to do the journey to the downed ship and give myself just a season or two to prepare. Planning the trip and having to build a new base is a solid challenge that prevents you from turtling in a high-functioning colony.
Something I learned from watching streamers like Xwynns, Pete Complete, Mr. Streamer, and Hazzors is that you have to tell yourself the story. What I mean is that their runs are fun because they are forced to tell a story out loud. When you're just playing by yourself, it's easy to let the story slip away and just push pixels around. Sometimes I imagine I'm recording the run, and this pushes the story to the forefront.