Rimworld is a strategy survival game centered around building up a colony of random individuals on a remote planet on the edge of civilized space. It’s a strategy game, although a very different sort of strategy than what’s used in say online casino games but still a form of strategy nonetheless.
The standard game involves three people who have crashed onto the planet after a ship malfunction and have to come to grips with surviving on this new strange and very dangerous planet.
This involves managing everything from farming plants, hunting animals, and cooking food. Tasks that take up most of the game at the beginning (since food is mildly important to survival.). Then comes things like planning out the settlement you want to build.
- People want to have their own rooms, and they want them to look at least passable decent too. This means setting up rooms with beds, some nice flooring if you really care, and maybe some flowers to really go all out. Just copying the same room over and over might lead to problems because there might be people who want to have the best room around them or even just have a really nice room because they are greedy.
- People need to eat (a lot) so a kitchen is usually necessary. This also connects to other systems you will have to design. Things like your stove need either to be powered by wood fuel or electricity. One of these involves having to chop a lot of trees and the other involves having to design an electrical system and a method to generate it.
- People need a place to eat so a cafeteria or dining room is also a good idea. These should also generally be nice places because people tend to relax or socialize here. People like doing that in a nicer location. Comfy seats can’t hurt either.
- Then you need somewhere to store the food you have hopefully been collecting. This means a refrigerator. This also means you need an electrical system! That’s a whole other can of worms.
Do you understand now how this game can very easily draw you in for hours on end? Just setting up the basics are tasks that all connect to each other and trying to design the best designs and systems for all these things can entertain someone for quite a while.
All of this is without even getting into the in depth systems of backstories and personalities for each person you have to take care of, the hostile natives on the planet who very much want to take what is yours, and the systems of trading, diplomacy, disease and so much more.
Needless to say, there’s a lot to this game.
But after its update into a fully released game a few years back the development on Rimworld hasn’t stopped.
A new large update gets released every few months or at least every year. Along with those large updates also come DLC or downloadable content.
Extra expansions to the game that you can pay for. These add on entirely new systems and things to do that are entirely optional but enhance the game in every way.
The newest released one is called Ideology and it’s a big one.
What is the main theme of Ideology?
Rimworld’s Ideology DLC’s main idea is adding exactly what the name implies. It gives your colony of people an ideology or religion to follow.
Depending on how strong of an ideology or religion you choose for them to follow this greatly changes how the entire game can work.
While in normal Rimworld the general things you need to keep someone alive and happy are pretty much the same across every person this changes massively with Ideology installed.
When people have their own ideology they have certain things they start to like and certain things they really don’t like.
You can get relatively simple ones like people who are vegetarians and will refuse to eat any meat, the opposite with people that will only eat meat and won’t touch a vegetable, people who shun killing and want you to choose the peaceful option, people who dislike technology and wish for things to stay modest and simple.
Stuff like that changes things up a little bit but for the most part, the game goes the same way.
But you can have ideologies that are much, much larger than those.
People who despise the sun, light, and everything to do with it. They need to be under a roof and in the dark to ever be happy. They require monthly sacrifices to their god or they will go crazy. They believe that anyone who isn’t them deserves to be enslaved or killed and if you treat anyone differently than that they will go crazy.
You get the idea.
The possibilities just overflow.
Trees, rituals, and robot overlords
Along with the main gameplay features talked about in the above section, there are also a lot of new content features that are added in the newest DLC.
These include a new magical tree called the Gauranlen tree. These are a nifty way the creators of the game have gotten around wood being a resource that you need while also having people that refuse to kill trees.
The trees themselves while looking pretty and being magical don’t do much. But each Gauranlen tree has a little creature that lives in it called a Dryad.
Dryads can get special abilities depending on what you train them to do.
These include useful features like:
- Carrying. The Dryads get the brilliant ability to carry things. They can be a useful helping hand by carrying things where they need to go, freeing up some people from having to do some chores.
- Clawers do what the name implies mostly. They claw things. They are a great help in a fight, because who wants to fight pretty much a tree with claws.
- Barkskins are like Clawers in that they are just meant to help you fight but instead of dealing damage, they take it. They can soak up a large number of hits meaning they can take the pain while your other people deal it out.
- Woodmaker. This is where the real charm of Dryads and Gauranlen trees comes into play. If you are playing people with an ideology or religion that despises chopping or killing trees in any way but still wants wood you need to get it from somewhere. These types of Dryads and Gauranlens slowly produce wood that falls off of them making them a completely ethical method of collecting wood for whatever you need it for.
- Medicinemakers are in the same idea vein as Woodmakers. Herbal medicine is a medicine that you harvest from plants. This can be a better than nothing type of medicine or it can be used to produce better medicines later in the game. But if like the tree people you are playing people who despise the idea of harvesting or cutting plants you need some way of getting it. These Dryads and trees are exactly what you need.
- Berrymakers are pretty much the same except they are a great source of vegetable or fruit food without needing to damage any nature or plants in the process.
- Gaumakers are how you turn a single tree into many trees. Instead of wood, medicine, or berries, these trees produce sprouts to make more trees out of. Very handy.
As you can tell there are a lot of new features and things to do in the new DLC. If you’re interested in any of it you should really check it out.
If you didn’t even know the game existed and seem intrigued, you should look into it. It’ll certainly be worth your time.
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