Looking for a complete Anomaly overview

[kaczorski]

As the title says, before I buy this DLC I'd like to know about everything it has to offer. What's the deal with the cube and how much more stuff there is beyond what was described in dev diaries? So far it seems like its basically loads of new raid strategies limited to specific creatures. If you want to share spoilers don't hesitate!

(Sort of strange that this is first RW DLC that can be spoiled)

[Kittenpox]

I haven't played enough to answer this directly, though I would start here myself: https://www.rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Anomaly_(DLC)

Edit: I hadn't checked the page (trying to avoid spoilers myself), but apparently it has some work required - but later on this may be useful for people, once the wiki is fleshed out a bit more. :-)

[IchigoMait]

You wont get more than this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1c1k7d5/rimworld_anomaly_expansion_available_now/
aka same as this
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/294100/view/4160834030793878434

1.5 update changelog
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSgQmFRFk0FATWTjyZkKRq4oa58sQps4D0kE_uoyKR1y3ZXJT1nIMZSsno7T8cfG-Y6B8lVL3QFnbwQ/pub

[HunterSilver]

Anomaly throws entities at you to help you, hinder you, or destroy you. Entities refers to any anomalous event, whether it's openly hostile or something else entirely.
8 Basic entities: with some coming in harder variants such as the fleshbeasts.
17 Advanced entities: these are where the game expects you to seriously fight back or die. Many have multiple outcomes, such as keeping the entity and maintaining it to utilize its benefit, or destroying it.
2 Ultimate entities: these are difficult to spawn and are a game ending threat if you take them lightly.

Anomaly is all about you identifying, researching, and neutralizing threats while adding what you can to your arsenal. Sometimes that means harvesting the meat and skin of imprisoned anomalies for electricity, bioferrite, and twisted flesh. Other times that means fashioning a creature's spine into a bionic for your colonists to use. And yet other times that means keeping an obelisk suppressed so that you can use it to safely duplicate or mutate colonists as you please.

Most entities engage you at your base, but some such as fleshbeasts can require you to travel the world map to hunt them down.

The cube is just another entity. You get paid to get a golden cube off of another settlement's hands. If you do, it begins to make your colonists obsessed with it, causing them to go into mental breaks where they create effigies of the cube everywhere. Their work speed decreases and they sleep less and less. You can't take the cube off the map or destroy it through normal means. Colonists who are away from it for too long fall into a coma for 2 seasons. With sufficient research you can destroy the cube, but doing so will cause all obsessed colonists to either immediately leave your colony or go into a berserk rage. It's not a unique event and you can have multiple cubes sent to your colony over time.

[dande48]

There's a lot in anomaly that is purposefully kept hidden until you uncover it. I feel like revealing it would spoil a lot of the fun.

But to sum up, in the most generic terms:
- A monolith will fall from space, prompting you to study it.
- Studying the monolith will attract SCP-like entities and events
- Capturing and studying these entities will unlock tech and cause more powerful entities to spawn.
- The new tech will allow to commit greater crimes-against-humanity.

It will present you with some very unique, dangerous situations unlike anything you've seen elsewhere in Rimworld. You won't be able to just "brute force" your way through them.

[Raelic]

I can't give you complete, but...

So far the loop goes...

The Square appears, you study it on cooldown with a new research tab.

New Monsters appear, mine seems to be bugged because I never get attacked by anything but monsters now.You kill them or capture them. There's a bestiary type thing as well that fills in as you discover monsters. The monsters are unique and have new mechanics. For example, there's one that is invisible and there's one that will kite out melee attackers.

Capturing them lets you harvest from them, use them as a power source, or study them on cooldown. Each monster has it's own power and your containment area, based mostly on material and research, has to exceed the power or they will break free.

A new obelisk appears and you can do similar to the square, but it also has a rising meter that you have to suppress. There's a tiny option to auto do it every time it reaches 40%.

I did also get attacked by acolytes and was told they could ritual my colonist to teleport capture. I didn't let them do it.

I see on the research bar that I may be able to do it as well.

There's also books, not sure if that's new or not, but they are there. One book did all my microanalyzer research eventually by reading it.

And that's as far as I've gotten so far.

[kaczorski]

Thank you for all the answers! Had no idea wiki got updated so soon :D Keep the good stuff coming!

[Yoh1612]

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1c1ojav/spoilers_inside_infographs_on_tons_of_anomaly/

[Veylox]

There's a lot the preview didn't disclose, but it's all in the same vein ; Anomaly is basically one giant quest where you study the different SCP that appear around your colony up until you reach the ending. You're not locked into finishing the quest, you can ignore it and play like previous DLCs, where you let events come to you randomly and just deal with them, but you also have the option to actively trigger the events to complete your codex.

You actually have a codex that tracks what anomalies you have encountered and which ones are left. Most anomalies, especially in the higher tiers, function like quests rather than just normal raids. They throw a problem at you and you have to solve it in a way that's unique to that one anomaly, and while direct combat is often involved, it isn't enough. It's pretty much the anti killbox playthrough ; most anomalies you'll have to deal with don't nicely walk in a straight line through your tunnel, they all have some type of twist or ability to them that will force you to adapt in different ways.

Which means that this dlc is probably on the harder side compared to the others, I do believe veterans of the game would struggle less with it, some of its events assume you know how to properly zone your colonists for example, which wasn't really a thing up until now.


That's for the event side of things. Now studying anomalies will give you a couple currencies (and research points) that you can use to unlock and build new techs, usually tech directly related to the anomalies themselves. You've seen an enemy that could make itself invisible ? Better assume you're gonna be able to do the same at some point. The DLC comes with an entire tech tree that, not unlike the base tech tree or the whole genetic system, has a lot of stuff, some of it you'll never use, some of it potentially gamebreaking depending on how to use it. Some of its techs, when used properly, can genuinely annihilate raids better than a killbox could. Parts of that tech tree expands on the ritual system introduced with ideology, parts of it expands on stuff closer to biotech or royalty like implants etc.

So yeah, Anomaly is basically split between being an event-heavy DLC, and an alternative tech research DLC, while having a questline that is much more involved than previous questlines or unique endings.

[kaczorski]

Originally posted by Yoh1612:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1c1ojav/spoilers_inside_infographs_on_tons_of_anomaly/

Thank you, that's perfect.

[kaczorski]

@HunterSilver, dande48, Raelic, Veylox
Thank you guys, now I've got the full picture. Lots of this stuff sounds very interesting, especially variety of enemies and new raid strategies but horror theme doesn't mesh with me. I'll wait&see what modders do with Anomaly and maybe get it then :)