RimWorld turns disaster and loss into a chaotic but hilarious party

The once peaceful colony of happy spaces has gone completely berserk. People are fighting in the dining hall, prisoners are trying to break out of a small structure I’ve called the Friendship Room, and a bunch of robots just broke through the residential quarters. This is all a testament to my arrogance and hubris, and only the strong will survive.

I’ve been coping with the chaos of the real world by sinking a ton of time into RimWorldThe story generator and colony simulator game ‘Colony Simulator Game. It is very chaotic. While you could run the entire show with other simulators, it is not possible to do so in. RimWorldRandom events and quests balance out the building of bases. You might be able to save someone from raiders, and they’ll join your group — or a nuclear winter will set in, or a malevolent AI will make everyone angry and paranoid using psychic rays. Mondays, am I right? Three people in a colony can rapidly grow to a dozen, with each pawn performing their task.

For starters, RimWorldI was given a number of random pawns with different strengths and weaknesses. Trovatelli (a research genius who was raised in an affluent world) made up my motley group of survivors. Sally, an angry spaceship tactician, was with her, as well as Maverick, an ex-office drone.

Image: Ludeon Studios

The pawns must survive so I built them a base. The pawns grew their own food, medicine and had their horses tamed. They also built their very own bedrooms. It’s possible to play RimWorldIt’s exactly like Stardew ValleyAn Animal Crossing is a game where players are focused on building happy communities.

Or, if you’re like me, you can go into the difficulty settings and choose a narrative difficulty curve that throws challenges at you for dramatic impact. There are many things that could go wrong.

Items WereEverything was going smoothly. My economy was thriving and my trade caravans were booming. I also had access to more advanced technology. I had automated my pawns’ daily actions, freeing me up to dream bigger. Trovatelli, at this point, was the engine driving our colony’s research forward, bringing us from a rustic agricultural community into a sci-fi base with spaceship engines and plasma weaponry. Sally, now sheriff was Maverick’s wife and Trovatelli had been in love and tended to her every need. Their group was joined by raiders, who were rehabilitated at the Friendship Room.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, but little did I know that the seeds of my colony’s disaster were already being sown by my own lack of planning.

I didn’t know my pawns would have so much agency. They’re fleshed out with childhood backgrounds, adult lives, and their own personal biological or personality quirks. Sometimes, this is fun — a tortured artist might throw a fit, then get a huge boost to the next item they make because they got to be angsty for a bit. Other times, it’s a little more dangerous. If you have a pawn who absolutely loves drugs, and you have drugs in the colony, that pawn — in this case, Maverick’s mother, who I rescued from a crashed escape pod — WillYou should take these drugs. Needless to say, her antics caused stress on Trovatelli’s marriage, which was less than ideal when I needed her to build spaceship parts and research cutting-edge technology.

Image: Ludeon Studios

These problems are difficult to solve. RimWorld is eager to offer you a whole host of solutions, only some of which are “moral” or “nice.” At first, the player has options to grow crops or build a new room. As I built new facilities, trained my pawns and researched new technologies, new options opened up to me.

That was how I found out a dark truth: Every Pawn is a Poet. Technically full of valuable cargo… their organs. An attack by raiders could cause a favourite pawn to lose a kidney. When Rebecca Barajas, my colony’s number one artist and moneymaker, lost a kidney, I realized she was only one kidney away from death. Terrifying! Terrifying! If you’re feeling technical, it can also be called a mortuary.

My crops were producing fewer potato plants and rice and more of the devil’s lettuce and cocaine. I felt pretty good about this decision — neighboring villages and towns BelovedYou can buy cocaine. But I didn’t realize that a good chunk of my colony’s military, in between raids and fighting off robot invasions, was getting absolutely blasted on yayo. It was even worse that they became dependent on it.

Now, this might have been sustainable if I could keep producing cocaine — in RimWorld’s version of reality, at least — but on this hostile alien planet, a blight over my psychoid crops killed them all. That’s when things got It is reallyBad, I had one of the most horrible outcomes possible for my condition. RimWorldGame: A cascade of mental breakdowns.

Each pawn is subject to stress. If they’re well fed, comfortable, and surrounded by friends, they’re more than happy to work away and be productive members of society. But if they’re hungry or sad, they’ll need alone time. You can push your pawns too far and they will run for cover in the room, or smash up an item in anger.

These mood modifiers get more powerful for more extreme circumstances — for instance, withdrawing from cocaine, or finding out someone in the colony was “organ-murdered,” which is a specific category of murder that RimWorld tracks. So, it was a straight shot to hell for one unfortunate prisoner who died from a lung infection.

Everyone’s mood tanked. One pawn tried to start a party in the dining hall to lift everyone’s spirits. For a time, it worked… until one of the artists, upset about the whole organ-murder thing, dragged the corpse into the middle of the dance floor. This caused several more breaks. Among them, the prisoner broke out from the Friendship Room, beating their guards to death.

It’s a whole Something, and it’s going to take a few days of work for me to repair all of this damage. Still, when things get hectic, it’s nice to disappear into a dense, narrative-heavy game. Yes, I might be dealing with a band of organ-murdering monsters — but they’re My organ-murdering monsters.