How to learn the game

[KoterigeRyan]

Does anyone have any tips to better understand Rimworld? I completed the tutorial, but now I don't really know what to do, because they didn't explain everything. Thanks in advance!

[endymionologist]

If you understand that threat events like raids scale to both your population and your colony wealth, and you understand that losing with everyone killed horribly is still supposed to generate a fun story that you'll enjoy thinking back on in the future, then you already know how to play the game.
Build a compound, not a village; have one path into the compound fully open but with bits of wall and barricade for shooters to hide behind. Make your people well-armored, well-armed, technologically advanced, and happy; maybe make them happy first. Press buttons and see what they do. Build things and see what they do. Save, accept a quest, fail the quest, reload, lower the difficulty, accept the quest again; difficulty in this game often just means raids add more trash to clean up.
But if learning by failing isn't fun for you there are a decade of videos on youtube and threads on this forum for as long too. I hope others can better guess the kinds of details you're asking for.

[Chmerity]

This is very much one of those games where you learn from your mistakes, your failures.

You are essentially babysitting infants with suicidal tendencies and trying to get them to survive in a hostile world.

[Baouza]

Adam vs Everything videos, and Veequeu videos, keep the wealth low, focus on defenses and gear.

[schneck00788]

I modified the ki 0% danger lv

And build to learn which component does which,

But the event are Radom and only learn by appearing

[Wraith_Magus]

The tutorial has a fairly "learn by doing" approach. That said, it's mostly just there to get you started by having you do the absolute minimum, so as not to overwhelm new players.

Here's the Rimworld wiki[rimworldwiki.com]. It covers basically every part of the game that isn't mods in fairly high detail along with "analysis" sections. Don't feel like you need to binge the wiki before you play, but I like to have it up and alt-tab over to look up anything I don't remember. The wealth management[rimworldwiki.com] and defense tactics[rimworldwiki.com] pages are worth at least skimming early on, because these are the most important concepts for survival. Don't worry about the "late game" tactics for now.
The early and mid game stuff is important to understand, however. For example, you can manage dangerous animals early on by having a doorway blocking technique (with the animal in the door), have your melee wear the armor, and the ranged pawns shooting over their shoulder. Having walls with sandbags in the gaps allows you to position pawns behind the walls and they'll "lean over" to shoot past them and have more cover that way. Early on, wood spike traps will win many battles easily. If you simply take advantage of walls or pave certain tiles (enemies always prefer non-dirt tiles that are faster to walk across,) you can bait enemies into walking along a string of traps that make early fights easy.

Also, the easiest way to handle early-game threats is to have whoever "draws aggro" run away while everyone else shoots at the enemy. After firing, there's a several-second delay before the pawn can do anything else, so don't wait until the warg is breathing down your neck to run. Having doors or the like really help, and you can build spike traps behind the sandbag defenses to run past so the chasing animals/raiders will run into another spike trap after chasing you.

The wealth management part is important - the more wealth you have, the bigger the raids are. You should strive to have high amount of your wealth be directly relevant to your survival. Don't be afraid to sell most non-essential things for more armor or weapons early on.

Otherwise, while I try to think through what I want to do early on, for your first game, you should probably just make a defensible base, and remember that you should have no compunction about tearing down early structures to rebuild them later.

Try to have everyone capable of defending themselves - ideally, every colonist has a passion in either melee or shooting. Every pawn should contribute to defense. Don't bother trying to recruit pawns that aren't able to carry their weight. You don't need a 80-year-old dementia patient with a peg leg and the frail trait even if they have 16 grower. Each pawn in your colony increases the size of the raids, and a pawn that's useless in a fight is adding more raiders without being able to take any raiders down, themselves.

Corn is the best food crop in the long term unless you only have poor soil. If one crop gives you 10 food every 5 days and another crop gives 20 food every 10 days, the 20 food crop is the better one because it takes time from your pawn's schedule to replant that stuff. Your colonists' time is You want a little rice early on just to get you to your first corn harvest.

You want to get working on research early, and preferably have one person doing nothing but research once your base is initially settled. Dirty floors detract from research speed, so make sure you have a special room just for research and keep it clean. The same goes for your kitchen - dirty kitchens can cause food poisoning. Butcher tables are inherently dirty, so you need to move those to a separate "dirty room," usually near the barn.

Pawn time management is one of your key strategies to efficiency, so strive to make trips as short as possible for your pawns. Hallways are generally unnecessary - have a big rec room with enough wood statues to make it "impressive," and make it also be the dining room and possibly workshop, as well. Have personal bedrooms be small "spokes" off the "hub" of your central work/rec/dining rooms. Making your base "dense" makes it faster for your pawns to get where they're going. Remember that you can put shelves set to hold materials for that bench (I.E. wool and leather for a tailor bench) directly next to the chair for that bench to cut down travel times.

It's hard to have enough steel and components in the early game, so trade for them. Wooden statues are really valuable, but so are tamed animals. Sell your tamed animals once you have a breeding pair early on. You can also mitigate the dangers of boomrats by taming them and selling them to a town. It's their problem now!

Be cautious of fire - use concrete liberally (it says it's unattractive, but a -1 really doesn't matter) to have a cheap source of fire-proofing. Fires only spread two tiles. Enemies can start fires, so you want your walls to be replaced with stone as fast as possible because steel walls are not fireproof for some reason... Thunderstorms are common and ridiculously likely to start fires on any map with significant vegetation. Concreate "fire breaks" spaced away from your base will stop uncontrolled fires from reaching your base, which is often going to be wood early on.

Get electricity generators going when you can (wood-burning is fine enough early game) and make a freezer to preserve your food. This guide shows you the mechanics of freezers.

I recommend sticking to Cassandra Classic until you really get used to the game. Phoebe is a newbie filter option where she'll send raids the same size as Cassandra, but because she waits longer to do so, many new players presume the next raid will be like the last one, but they've built up a ton of wealth and suddenly spawn a raid 3 times the size of the last one and are caught totally unprepared. Randy, meanwhile, can give unfair challenges early on that might give you a distorted idea of how the game works. Cassandra gives you a clearer idea of the difficulty curve, so stick to her for your first game.

[Veylox]

Frankly you should look up a couple of beginner guides on youtube, this is a complex enough game that you can't just go in and discover by yourself, there's some menu logic to understand first.

Aim to learn how to build a basic base, (living room, beds, early power generation, freezer, and basic zones like stockpiles and sowing zones)

Once you're comfortable with that (having all the essentials for your starting colonists to be able to live a few weeks on their own), maybe a basic guide on how combat works so that you can draft them properly and know that melee pawns should be up front and ranged pawn never reached by the enemy, and then you're basically set

It sounds like a lot but a really basic video usually covers most of that, and once you have the basis for survival and the basis for combat you can discover the rest on your own, research new technology at your own pace and discover what it does whenever you unlock it.

[MadArtillery]

Beginner guides, Adam vs everything for anything more advanced generally. Or just, bumbling around failing a bit. Reading and hovering over things is very important. Hover over that recreation bar and go to the bottom left and click the room details mode on. Try to make those stats better, keep recreation variety up as it changes with expectations which are tied to wealth. More you own the better lives colonists expect and the more people want to murder you for it. Difficulty is based on what is on your map, even corpses or flooring counts towards it.

[Red Bat]

Strange as it sounds I actually think the tutorial tooltips do an amazing job explaining the game, including explaining things that are underexplained in the wiki or on these discussion forums. They even do a good job of explaining DLC features. A lot is also conveyed ingame through item and pawn descriptions as well, even getting encyclopedic at times such as explaining everything that influences particular stats.

The wiki also explains more optimal strategies, but I think Rimworld is one of those games that are probably a bit more fun to figure out on your own to some extent. Failing a little bit from time to time enhances the overall experience slightly. If you play perfectly optimally, you'll have a very boring experience.

[Astasia]

Many years ago I watched some lets plays on youtube just to understand the concept of the game when I was thinking about buying it. I think largely though, much of what RimWorld is, is being surprised by the game and learning from it, every run, for thousands of hours. Learning from your mistakes is a pretty big part of the game experience, I'm not going to say "losing is fun," even though that is a tag line for the game, but being blindsided and having to recover from something can be pretty fun. If you have specific questions about any mechanic, it should be covered by the wiki linked above, but for the most part being "unclear" and leaving things open for you to explore is likely very deliberate. I haven't done the tutorial, it didn't exist when I started playing, but I still probably wouldn't even recommend it vs going in blind, as long as you have a basic understanding of the genre.

The only things I think you really need to know to get going, are drafting for combat, stockpiles/shelves for storing items, creating bills on worktables to have colonists make things, and filters on both for controlling what/where. I think you can fumble through pretty much everything else.

A lot of what there is to learn about the game will take some of the magic away, and can result in some pretty abnormal and unintended play as you try to preemptively try to prepare for something that isn't an issue. A lot of people "learned" wealth mechanics too early and unnaturally for example, which has led to some pretty bizarre beliefs and habits about it and some people doing extremely unnecessary and tedious things.

[𝙁𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙣]

-Play the tutorial, pay full attention to it till the end. Seems you've done that so
-Just enjoy, explore and RP, experiment around till you get a save going
-Read up on stuff u dont fully understand from the help menu top right, it's not THAT much text.
-imo everything else should be taught from experience but thats just me

[di eshor ribly]

3000 hour player here. Beyond the initial youtube video I saw that introduced me to the game and got me to buy it I didn't watch another video or tutorial until I was ~1000 hours deep.

There's a lot of fun in the early discovery struggles. Your 'failures' are an intended part of the game that you should treat as both a learning experience and your very own personal meme generator. We all have those moments where a single pawn decided to destroy everything we've built in that colony.

Learn from the mistakes you make, and laugh at the absurd situations your pawns get into, like kicking a nuclear warhead because their wife is cheating on them, their air conditioner is broken, and they got a little wet in the rain outside.

[apud.harald]

Set the game on the easiest mode possible, sandbox for a bitm, work out the problems you encounter. When you can do that in your sleep, increase the difficulty, bit by bit.
Thus, you learn to find your own solutions oprganically.

That surely beats the crap out of being nervously indictrinated over the risks of increasing or decreasing this or that by overdescriptive warnings about the perils of increasing your wealth - OMG - by 1000 silver.

Learn to do things your own way, do not worry about solutions you did not dream up yourself. This way, you will feel confident about what you do, and not obsess over ''did I do that just like she told us in the video?''. Your successes will be your own, and errors are solely due to Cassandra and Randy beings bellends. Learn from yourself, not from others.

Don't worry, be happy. That is how you learn.

[Dyspeptic Icarus]

Originally posted by KoterigeRyan:

Does anyone have any tips to better understand Rimworld? I completed the tutorial, but now I don't really know what to do, because they didn't explain everything. Thanks in advance!

In the future, if you do make villages, don't have everything in one set of walls. Section off homes, versus production. Section off Animals from the rest.

Lets you fall back when they burn some homes and you can put up a defensive in another section of the village.

Try not to mix homes with production, and storage. Some times raiders may steal some juicy ♥♥♥♥ if it's closer than other pawns and run.

Having Storage on the outskirts have precious goods. While the inner has the expensive stuff that is more useful like drugs, components, etc.

[Wraith_Magus]

Well, I suppose I should ask, "How do you learn other games?"

I personally hate video tutorials, so pointing me to video tutorials isn't helping me, and I find wikis much more useful information. It depends on how your style of learning works.

[KoterigeRyan]

Thanks for the tips everyone!