Ideology Reference: Specialist Roles

A brief overview of the new specialist roles in the ideology DLC. Includes disabled work types, work types NOT disabled, abilities, and which memes unlock which roles.

Intro

A quick reference for the different specialist roles. Don't be surprised if this guide goes out of date due to balance patches, bug fixes, and the discoveyr of new strategies and/or exploits.

Most of this guide is based off of tooltips and theorycrafting. Take everything with a grain(silo) of salt.

Feel free to copy and reuse anything and everything in this guide for any use. Credit appreciated but not necessary.



The Leader and Moral Guide roles are NOT covered here. Discussing them requires going over Ideologies, Rituals, and other subjects that are beyond the scope of this guide.

Specialists: Skill Table

The "X" indicates jobs that are NOT allowed. Ability names have been shortened and summarized for ease of reading. Click on the image to enlarge it.

The Leader and Moral Guide roles are not included in the above table as they are allowed to do all work types and have no bonuses outside their special abilities.

Specialists: How to Get Them

All ideologies can have one Leader and one Moral Guide role. An Ideology can only have up to two Specialist Skill roles, which adds up to a maximum of 4 roles total. Unlike the Leader and Moral Guide, you can have as many Specialists as you want.

Specialist Roles are chosen at the start of the game. You can change which pawn has which role, but you can't change which roles are available without reforming a fluid ideology, recruiting pawns with a different ideology, or editing an ideology with dev mode.

Which kinds of skill specialists are available to you depends on which memes you select. Since your ideology can only choose TWO types of skill specialists, I recommend to have at least two memes that add different specialists.

<Specialist Skill>
<Meme> (<Meme Points>)

Animals

Animal Personhood (3)
Rancher (3)

Mining

Darkness (3)
Tunneler (3)

Medical

Blindsight (3)
Flesh Purity (2)

Plants

Tree Connection (3)
High Life (2)
Nature Primacy (2)

Production

Human Primacy (2)

Research

Transhumanist (2)

Shooting and Melee

Raider (2)
Supremacist (1)

No Specialists Unlocked

Pain is Virtue (3)
Nudism (3)
Cannibal (3)
Proselytizer (2)
Female/Male Supremacy (2)
Loyalist (1)
Guilty (1)
Individualist (1)
Collectivist (1)

Specialists: Tips and Tricks

You can assign specialist roles using a ritual, and unassign them instantly at a mood penalty. Note that arresting a pawn for any reason (such as to stop a mental break) will also unassign that role.

Ability cooldowns of leaders and moral guides are tied to the role. You can't eliminate or bypass the cooldown by reassigning or unassigning these roles. Specialist cooldowns are tied to specific pawns, so if you have more than 3 of the same kind of specialist you can theoretically keep their abilities active 24/7.

Required clothing is optional, and not recommended. You want to transition to power armor eventually, which would make any pawn that 'recquires cape' or 'recquires hat' mad at you.

To edit your ideology after the game has started (which I highly recommend for Role Playing purposes alone), you can either start the game with a Fluid ideology or use Dev Mode. If you don't want to start with a Fluid ideology (or made a mistake with Fluid), you can enable Dev Mode using the checkmark in the settings tab in the bottom right of the screen, select the ideology tab on the bottom of the screen, then select the Edit Ideology checkmark at the top right.

Don't forget to disable dev mode afterwards to avoid making mistakes (and to get rid of the Dev Mode UI).

Every time you edit your memes, the rest of your ideology (including specialists) is randomized. Finish editing your memes before you do anything else to avoid wasting time.

While editing your Ideology (in dev mode or when making a new colony) you can right click on a role to remove it. This lets you add different roles (provided your memes have unlocked them).

ALL ROLES ARE USEFUL. Some roles are more useful than others, but none of them are bad. Once your colony has enough pawns/the right kind of pawns, you will want all of your roles to be assigned. Choose whichever memes you want FIRST, then decide how to make the best of whichever roles are unlocked by those memes.

ROLES AREN'T EVERYTHING. Some memes add excellent roles but are terrible for your playstyle, and vice versa. For example, the Animal Personhood and Rancher add the amazing Animal Specialist role but have the nasty drawback of greatly limiting what your colonists can eat.

Shooting

Shooting

The aim bonus is of questionable value in the late game, when bionics and skills hit the upper limits of accuracy. The real benefit is reducing the warmup time of weapons. A shooting specialist has half the aim time, and a trigger happy shooting specialist has no aim time at all. Even better, the marksman command removes almost half of the windup time from all of your pawns in range.

This can lead to ridiculous situations such as instantly shooting Doomsdays with no aim time at all. Note that you still have to deal with weapon shooting times (which is quite long for burst weapons) and weapon cooldown times.

Melee

Most players like to avoid melee, but when melee is unavoidable or desired, this is very strong. Melee combat is extremely dangerous in Rimworld, even with the best armor, skills, and equipment, and outright suicidal if you aren't equipped.

When possible, shooting is almost always preferred. Even in situations that call for melee blockers you will usually have more shooters than melee units.

Less useful in the early game, more useful as better armor, melee weapons, and hospitals become available. Extremely useful on pawns with the right traits, especially Tough, Nimble, Brawler, and Masochist.

Animals

Extremely valuable to certain colonies. Doubling taming chance means you can safely tame even the most dangerous animals with enough skill, doubling training chance means wasting half as much time and food to make animals useful, and a 1/5th revenge chance makes it much safer to attempt risky tames in the early game.

Will not prevent predators from hunting your tamer for food. In emergencies, you can use "Animal Calm" as a get-out-of-death free card.

Note that even the most dangerous animals are safe to breed, slaughter, train, and manage once they are initially tamed. A single tamer that collects an initial pair of bears can be of immense value to any colony.

Mining

Valuable to certain types of colonies, at certain stages of the game. Useful early game if you want to carve a home in a mountain, nice mid game if you like sending out mining caravans, and very nice late game when the speed of your mining drills is the limit on how fast you can expand.

Tunnelers rely heavily on mining, as they get a mood debuff when eating surface plants and a mood buff from eating mushrooms farmed underground. Being able to set up a new farming area quickly is very useful for getting past the early game.

Medical

Variable usefulness. The only job restriction is violence (including hunting and defending the colony). This is compensation for medical not being a skill you can use full time. Immunity Drive is invaluable for not only surviving infections and disease, but reducing the downtime. The tend speed combined with tend quality dramatically reduces the odds of death, even when tending injuries without medicine out in the field.

The only catch is the surgery success chance, which has a hard cap. There will ALWAYS be a 2% chance of failure, which will ALWAYS have a chance of death on major surgeries. Sufficiently advanced colonies will see little benefit from this role.

Plants

Somewhat valuable to some colonies, extremely valuable to others. At a bare minimum, +70% work speed and +30% yield mean you can feed many more mouths with a fraction of the farmers. Access to food, medicine, cloth, and drugs is valuable to all colonies at all stages of the game.

Some of the memes that add Plant Specialists also add Dryad Trees as an optional reward for rituals (among other Dryad related benefits). Depending on how much use you get out of dryads, you might consider this role even more valuable. As I haven't seen anyone test or use Dryads extensively yet, I can't say much here.

What I can say is that Dryads probably don't add as much wealth as a pawn does, while doing at least as much work as a pawn while ALSO being extremely disposable. Low wealth/low tech colonies might get more use out of these - but again, this is speculation on my part.

Production

The most powerful specialist in the entire game, hands down. Let's break this down, shall we?

Construction Speed +50%

Useful, but you could also just assign more pawns to construction. Niche utility if you want to repair a door faster than a centipede can bash it down.

General Labor Speed +20

What does General Labor impact? Well, it applies to Art, Crafting, Smithing, Tailoring, as well as misc unskilled work like stonecutting, cremation, and chemfuel refining. That is a very impressive array of tasks.

Quality Level +1

Every time this pawn would craft an Excellent item, it is now Masterwork. If it would be Masterwork, it is now Legendary. A single dedicated Production Specialist can churn out either Legendary furniture or Legendary equipment for the entire colony, with no need for micromanaging inspirations.

In terms of generating equipment, wealth for trading, and improving living conditions, no role is anywhere close to this powerful. Even in a lategame colony with 100+ pawns, having even a single Production Specialist is a gamechanger.

The production command is also useful in a pinch, as it makes building emergency fortifications a much faster process.

Research

At face value, this is one of the least useful roles. On the one hand, nearly doubling the research speed of your best researcher lets you skip much of the early game. On the other hand, the rate limiting step in your colony growth is usually manpower and supplies - not research.

With enough manpower you can easily double or triple your research speed without relying on this role. (Of course, this is easier said than done due to wealth scaling.)

The bonus to Hack Speed is interesting. If I understand correctly, this makes raiding certain ruins and points of interest much easier, by nearly halving the amount of time you need to endure raids while you hack objectives. I don't know enough about ruins to speculate on how useful this may or may not be.

Despite being suboptimal in the late game, tech rushing playstyles benefit greatly from this role. Transhumanists suffer severe penalties for lacking bionic limbs, and great bonuses for having bionics, so being able to rush past the early game is extremely valuable. If you have a Fluid ideology, you can always remove this role once all of the important research is finished.

[sarteck]

"Melee combat is extremely dangerous in Rimworld, even with the best armor, skills, and equipment, and outright suicidal if you aren't equipped."

If you have the best armor, skills and equipment.... aren't you equipped?

[RedPine]

Minor update to guide. Noted that you can have multiple specialist, shooting specialists are kinda OP, and a few other tweaks. I won't comment on melee specialists until I've tested it myself - it might have been patched, after all.

[Roasty Toasty]

In my experience, the melee specialist is the worst. The specialist ability makes them go berserk for 3 hours, essentially forcing you to send them out solo.

Having to keep them alone in combat is incredibly risky, even if they have great armor. Even worse, they are still berserk when they get downed. If you happen to patch them up to the point they can walk again before the berserk wears off they will try to murder your doctors.


The shooting combat specialist is fantastic by comparison. Stack his role ability with your leader's combat command and even unskilled shooters with miniguns will have trouble missing.

[LeifFantasyMage]

melee is beserk trance

[qualified turtle ship]

The skill table is seriously useful :)
You should consider posting it to the wiki

[RedPine]

I don't know. All I know is that at high skill, they pump out masterworks and legendaries with no need for inspirations in the first place.

[MildlyHighDutchGuy]

Does the quality bonus of production specialist stack with the bonus from creativity inspiration, meaning that you will get +3 to quality?