Overview
Your character roster can increase in many ways. Here is how to go about growing your colony. Updated for Rimworld Beta 18.
Colony members
Your character roster can increase in many ways:
- Recruiting captured prisoners: As mentioned, if you already performed the first steps, capturing alone does not mean that person will join you right away after he/she has healed. You will have to recruit that pawn. In order to accomplish that, you will need to send someone to talk to that person and convince him/her to join, it may take several attempts. It will be easier if the wanted pawn receives proper medical care, is fed, feels as comfortable and happy as possible, and you use your best wardens to recruit them.
- You can also try to take downed friendlies but this will cause the faction to turn hostile. If you care about relations it’s best that you rescue them instead, this gives a +15 relations boost for every rescued person.
- Slave purchase: Slaves are easier as you won`t need to recruit them, they will join you immediately after purchase from pirate merchants, which ain’t cheap… Their price depends on their skills and health.
- Wanderer joins: This one is the luckiest you can get. A stranger will just join without need of recruit or purchase.
- Chased refugee: A refugee being chased asks for asylum. Like the Wanderer Joins event, colonists joining this way immediately become available to the colony. However, very soon after the new colonist arrives, a raid will follow. You will have to fight off the incoming raid, possibly putting more colonists at risk, but at the same time gives the opportunity to capture more prisoners. You can see the kind of person they are (i.e. adult backstory, or child if under 20), and reject the offer if you know the colonist is not much use or you can’t risk a raid.
- Escape pod survivor: As mentioned, this one will mean that you have to rush someone for rescue. The main difference between crash-landed characters like yours and escape pod survivors is that you arrived intact, will in this case, the pawn will arrive unconscious and critically hurt. If you aren’t quick enough and their injuries aren’t severe, they might be able to recover and walk off the map.
Basically, the main difference between a raid capture and an escape pod survivor, is that the later one falls elsewhere while the raider comes towards you, “healthy” at first. Note that in this example, instead of building a whole new room, if you happen to have a mountain nearby, caving in saves work to do.
Careful when you assign a rusher to get the escape pod survivor as selecting “Rescue” has a chance that the survivor does not join, instead leaving the map once his injuries are healed. This is more likely to happen when you have more colonists. If they join, however, they do so immediately without needing to go through recruitment. If the pawn is not of your liking, just let go. But if you intend to keep them, then you must Capture, which means double the work for you to do that could have been simplified if Captured at first action.
Capturing also has the advantage of allowing wardens to practice social; if you don’t want them to recruit the survivor simply set Interaction to ‘Friendly chat’, and let them go when you are satisfied with the results.
Originally posted by glass zebra:You can also (try to) capture non-downed friendlies. Sometimes they resist, sometime they don’t but the rest is the same when capturing downed friendlies.
Additionaly: some patchnotes (a16 or a15) said that rescued escapodees will always join if they cant live outside (cold, toxic fallout etc.). Not sure if that is true at all (would be weired if it isn’t) but striping them after resuce helps. Plus: free non-deadman clothes (even from allies).
Mods
Mods used in this guide from RimWorld Workshop, mod 0.17:
* Essential to have imo
Notes
- glass zebra
