Overview
This is a basic guide about the early game in rimworld (the guide is long, because the game is pretty complicated), hope this will help. My english is not good, please forgive me for my bad grammar.
Game settings and base position
The first things in the game you have to make a choice, is the narrator and the difficulty
Narrator:
– Cassandra Classic: The balanced narrator. She’s good for someone who’s learning for the game or veterans’re looking for great challenges. In medium/rough, Cassandra is not too hard, you can learn to play and have time to build. In savage and merciless, Cassandra is the hardest story teller.
– Phoebe Chillax: The slow narrator. She will give you good events constantly, and rarely attack you. Most people considerd Phoebe as boring. She’s the narrator for players who loves to build and expand. At higher difficulty, Phoebe can be very cruel with bad events. In savage and merciless, Phoebe is the 2nd hardest storyteller.
– Randy Random: The meme narrator. Everything with Randy is random. It can be a “game-ending” morning, or it can be a very boring year, no one can tell if it’s Randy. People says Randy is hard, it’s a meme and he’s not. Randy is the noob slayer since newbies have no idea what to do and how to deal with his events. On higher difficulty, Randy is the easiest for veteran players to deal with.
Difficulty:
Peaceful: illegal setting, don’t touch it. (all major threat events are disabled)
Builder: coward setting, or for minecraft players. (some major threats events are disabled)
Normal: the basic, for people who learns to play.
Rough: for normal players, most people enjoy rough difficulty.
Savage: for experienced players
Merciless: for 1000+hrs players.
All these settings can change mid-game. Cassandra Classic/Medium is the best choice for newbies to learn the game. The wallpaper is from The Royalty DLC of the game
Commitment mode is NOT recommend because the game can corrupt your save files when crashed, or adding mods, so having only 1 save means you may lose the colony entirely if the game crash.
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Now, you need to choose a seed for your world. Every seed will have all 12 biomes in the game, and eveyone will have the same world map if they’re playing on the same seed world, and the colony map will be the same if they’re playing on the same tile (only steam geysers and some other features are random). There are perfect seeds with perfect locations (you can find them on reddit thread /rimworldseed ) but that would be less fun to play.
All other settings, you can skip.
After choosing a world, you need a location. The most important of the location is its biome.
Easiest: Temperature forest, Arid shrubland
Easy: Tropical rainforest, Temperature swamp, Cold bog
Normal: Tropical swamp, Boreal forest
Hard: Desert, Tundra,
Very hard: Extrem desert, Ice sheet
Darksouls 2 with DLCs all bosses no hit run or beating Serral: Sea ice
The 2nd most important thing you need to check is the terrain
Flat land: Fast to build, plenty of space, very little resource to mine, hard to defend.
Small hills: Same with flat land, but have a little bit more of resources.
Large hills: Have a lot of resource to mine, some maps will have good choke points for defense
Mountainous: Have plenty of resource to mine, 1 edge of the map is blocked by the moutain. slow to build, easy to defend. (the most played terrain statistically)
The next thing you need to check, is the growth period, tiles with little growth periods are very hard for new players.
Growth period:
50 days + : easy
30-40 days: normal
10-20 days: hard
0: very hard
This is an example of a good start.
Other feature:
– Roads will increase speed of your caravan.
– Coastlines will block 1 edge of your map with beach and sea water.
– Caves will generate systems of tunnel inside the mountain area in your map with possibly giant insects.
– Rivers will generate a river run in the middle of your map and allow you to build watermill generators for power.
Settling near other neutral settlements will help you thoughout the game with trading and quests,
Pro tip: Marble and granite are the best stone types in the game, you can also check it if you want to optimize your base.
This is an example of a bad start, your base got isolated by mountains.
Choose your line-up
To build a good team, you should roll for the jack-of-all-trade colonist first, he will be the back bone of your colony in the long run. Then get 2 other colonists who can do what Jack can’t do or do badly at the start. A mixed gender line-up is always better (90% chance you will have a couple soon after landing).
Stats of your colonists are important, but passions (the flame symbols in front of the stats) are usually more important, a colonist with no passion will gain only 35% exp doing the task. But the minor passion colonist will gain 100%, and the burning passion will gain 150%. That means a level 2 grower with burning passion is better than the level 8 grower with no passion after 1 year in-game.
There’s 8 major works in-game, their important level are following this order:
Construction – Plantwork – Mining – Cooking – Crafting – Research – Animal – Art
Every colonists should be able to do at least 2 of those jobs (along side with hauling and cleaning).
– Construction is the most important stat througout the game. You need good builder earlier on to build decent beds. Better beds give more comfort to your colonists, and help them sleep quicker, help your colonists heal quicker, have higher chance of success with surgeries. You also need a decent builder for coolers, geothermal generators and hightech research benches. A builder is a must have in the starting squad, at least level 6 construction skill and minor passion (ideally, you need a level 7-8).
– Plantwork is the 2nd most important since you can only plant heal root to get herbal meds with a level 8 grower. The hop plants, psychoid leaves (to make beers and drugs) and trees also required level 5 and 6 growrers. A low level grower will get less income from crops too (harvest botched, lower amount of food per crop). You will need a good grower in the starting squad with at least 6 plantwork skill and passion.
– Mining is the most consistent job through out the whole game. You need a miner at the early game as much at the end game. Some veteran players considered mining as their requirements for most of their colonists. Better miner will mine a lot faster. A level 12 miner can mine faster than 3 level 5 miner. You don’t need a miner in your starting squad, but you gotta find a good one asap after landing if you don’t have one. .
– Cooking is the most underated job in the early game among the new players. The most dangerous thing in rimworld, in fact is food poisoning. Food poisoning will cripple your colonist a day, and will likely put them into a mental break because of pain/hungry. A good chef with a clean kitchen is a must have for any “safe build”. You need a chef in your starting squad with level 5 cooking and passion.
– Crafters are important in late game to make good weapons, armors and other stuffs. But in the early game, you don’t need a crafter (the only crafting work you need to do in the early game is stonecutting, and everyone can do it). You don’t need a crafter in your stating squad, but should get one before the middle of the 2nd year.
– Research is not that important in the early game, you need to stablize, then tech-up. Instead of having a dedicated researcher, you can make few research table and allow everyone to research (4th priority) in their free time and it won’t slow down your progress much overall. You should get a good researcher in the 2nd year.
– Animal is the mid-game stat. You don’t need animal early, so tamer is unnecessary (also good tamers/handlers are easy to find), you can find someone to take care of the pets later. You should have a tamer after stablizing your colony.
– Art is the last thing you need. Artworks are not critical in the early game, and having an artist in your squad would be a great waste. Arts take long time to make and artists usually have bad traits (pessimistic, chemical fascination, tortured artist,…), many of them are pacifist and incapable of violent. Since artworks take long time to make, passion is way more important than stat.
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– Fighting stats (shooting/melee) are important, but as long as your colonists are not pacifists, they can hold their ground in the early game easily. At least 2 of your colonists should be capable of fighting. If you rely on hunting as your main food sources in the early game, a good shooter with good animal stat is more important than a good grower.
– Medical is the main skill of your doctors. Better doctors will tend people better, faster, have higher chance to success on surgery, and if your doctor is really good (level 8 or better, you can let them self-tend without much risk). In the early game, you need at least 1 doctor in your starting squad with level 5 medical skill. Every colony need at least 2 doctors in the mid-game.
–Social effect your trading price and how fast you can recruit a prisoner. In the early game, you only need your colonists are capable of doing social.
An example of a very bad colonist, he can do almost nothing at all.
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The next thing you need to take a look at your colonists are their traits. There are many traits and you should try them all, but there are good and bad traits that you should know:
– Very bad: Pyromaniac (worst trait), Chemical fascination (2nd worst trait), Pessimestic, Slothful
– Very good: Fast learner (best trait), Super-immnune, Jogger, Quick sleeper
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With every year in-game passed, your colonist will get older and they have higher chance to get chronic problems (alzheimer’s, asthma, carcinoma,…). If your colonists are teenagers, they will have a penalty of their strength (they haul less per trip, they carry less on caravan, and they hit in melee not as hard), so your colonists should be in the age range of 19-55.
Health condition effects directly to your colonists, both mood and longevity.
A “not-worth” colonist: has good stats and traits but also got both frai torso and bad back.
– Never take these colonists: Alzheimer’s, dementia, drug addictions/withdrawals (the only acceptable one is ambrossia addiction), brain has mangled scars.
– These conditions are extremely bad, but if their stats are godlike, you may risk it: asthma, cataract eyes, eyes with mangled scars, frail torso, bad back, carcinoma, cirrhosis and heart artery blockage.
– These conditions are bad, but managable: painful scars, hearing loss, prothestic limbs, lose fingers/toes.
– These conditions are fine: itchy, aching scars, hearing loss (only effect social activities).
This is a good line-up (I got all of them with less than 10 random clicks each) with Nelly as a Jack-of-all-trade (builder, miner, chef, grower and also hunter), she will get bolt action rifle. Luca Jakobi is another grower/miner, with stats good enough to be a potential crafter/artist later on if I have enough people for other tasks. Since Luca is bad at shooting, he will get the knife and armors to protect him in combat. Ryan is the doctor, crafter and also, the researcher of the colony, in the early game, Ryan can also help with mining, and building basic walls, he will get the revolver. With this line-up, I will have a smooth early game.
Landing!
You need a plan for the first few days after landing, the standard “build order”:
The early game of rimworld is the 15 days after you landed on the world. You wanna get as many people as possible (but they’re not too terrible or you gonna have to banish them later), ideally, you will have 5 people and around 500 food instorage after the early game.
Day1: equip items, make a storage room, a barrack with 3 beds, horseshoe pin, haul everything inside. Your colonists are mostly likely have cryosleep sickness, so they will vomit a lot, and whatever you do, they will wandering around for few hours in the 1st day.wd
Day2: make a farm, in a 30 days growth period map, you will need around 10 tiles of food farm for every colonist (normal soil, work with corn, rice and potatoes). Rich soil is better for corn, and stony soil is better for potatoes. Rice is the worst yield crop, but fast. You can plant corn right at the start if you actively hunting and gathering wild berries in your map. Build a table, few chairs, chess table.
Day3: finish planting your farm if you didn’t finish it, research table, stonecutting table, butcher table
Day4: start chopping down trees, clear your surroundings, make a kitchen and a freezer. A cooler works for every 50 tiles room (7×7 or 5×10), you only need to micro management a bit in heat wave days. You will also need woodfire generator.
Day5-6: make a dining room and a rec room, make a few barricades and spike traps, keep kitchen, dining room and rec room clean by daily clean-up (you can click on your colonists, then right click on the dirt to make them clean it manually every day before bed). If you have free time, hunt small animals or harvesting wild berries.
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After day 5, you should start using manual work priorities. Firefight, patient and doctoring (for doctor) always at 1 priority, their main job should also be 1 priority (grow, plant cut, construct, mining, research), if you have a hunter, hunting and handle should be 1 priority. Other things they can do should be 2 priority, haul and clean at 3. If you have a prisoner, you need someone with 1 or 2 priority in warden.
You should have long-term defense plan, looking for choke points to setup your defenses would be a great idea. You can also build a killbox, but a good bunker by walls and barricades with spike traps laying around should be fine for now.
The red areas are good choke points in this map.
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Day7: if you planted rice, this is your harvesting season (rice needs 5.5 days to grow). If you chose potatoes or corn, harvest berries on the map, make more farms for heal root (5×5 is fine), cotton (7×7 or 5×10 are fine) cut down more trees.
Day8: start building bedrooms (6×4 or 5×5 are the perfect sizes), putting more furnitures,…
Day9-10-11: make a small hospital, hunting for extra meat and furs, tailor bench, keep researching,…
Day12: this should be your harvesting season if you planted potatoes (potatoes need 11 days to grow, corn is 21), after you got your crops, make fine meals to replace simple meals. Every simple meal takes 10 units of ingredient (any type) and fine meals also take 10 (5 meat, 5 vegetables). Hunt more if you don’t have enough meat.
Day13-14: you should have enough stoneblocks to replace every wooden wall with stone wall for better protection. You can replace the wooden floor with stoneblock floors too (wooden floors are flamble), if you’re living in a mountain, smooth the floor and wall to make the room looks prettier.
Day15: your cotton plants are ready, get some cloth. It’s time to make other recreation types, make some more clothes for your colonists by fur/cloth, armchairs,…
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After day15, you’re in the mid-game. At this point, your colony is stable. Good luck!
Unlike SC2, Rimworld is all about RNG, so the build order only helps you to understand how to make a basic base. Everything can change on the way (bad raids, food poisonings, misplays, harmful weather…) so if you’re doing the works of day 10 at day 15, it’s fine, just follow the order, you will slowly but surely finish it.
What is this game about again?
The end game goal of rimworld, is leaving the planet. There are 2 ways to do it: build a spaceship, or find one.
But it’s not about the destination it’s about the journey. The brightest part of Rimworld, is the story it brings to you. You will see your colonists suffer, you will see losses, sacrifices, cowardice, bravery, desperation, hope, and everytime you think you know the game, you will find out something new.
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Lowko, I want to thank you, for all of your great works on youtube and twitch. I’m a big fan of you for years, and you helped me a lot, even in real life. You’re also the one who brings me to Rimworld (even when you haven’t played it yet). Back in October, 2019, you shared the list of games you want to give a try, and Rimworld is one of it. I picked Rimworld up after that and it became one of my favourite game of all time. Rimworld is really good for quarantine time like this.
Once again, I want to say thanks. You’re my favorite youtuber and streamer. 😀