Rimworld Is like Prison Architect In Space (More Death Though)

Rimworld is a newly released game on steam that has blown up into the top sellers in a matter of days and at the time of writing this it has just under 10,000 concurrent players which is very good for a newly released Indie game.

Rimworld is a sci-fi colony simulator where you manage a bunch of rag tagged people who survived a spaceship explosion and you crash onto an unknown planet, you have a few resources to start you off and you have to build up a new colony for the survivors. You can choose a scenario to start with which alter your start such as 3 people with medium resources, 1 person high resources or 5 people with low resources, Rimworld also allows you to get scenarios off the workshop as well as create your own.

After you choose your starting survivors you can pick where they land, Desert, Tundra, Arctic, forest, jungle and so on, this is a vital for surviving as starting in the ice or desert is more difficult than the nice plains. Climate is a big part of this game, you have to manage temperatures and make sure the colony is warm, or cool enough for your people. As well as temperature you have to manage food, medication and happiness of the survivors. The medical system is very well done and the best I’ve seen ever. For example one of my guys got his leg badly burned by a molotov which cause an infection. An extreme infection, if untreated, will kill them. So, as an honorable human, I got him on anesthetic and amputated his leg. This came with consequence, he could no longer move out of bed so you can install a prosthetic, these range from wooden peg legs to biotic legs. These will affect their movement as well.

Not only will you have to make sure everyone is happy and healthy, there are also raids. Pirates can raid and they will usually prepare then attack at their full force, starting off they will wield metal and even stone weapons such as pikes and clubs  but after a few hours of surviving they will hit you with their grenades, guns and even mortar strikes which will devastate your base if not taken out quickly, you can build mortars as well as well as turrets to combat these raiders, traps can be used but the AI are very smart when it comes to avoiding them, that would’ve been the difficulty though.

There are 3 AI story tellers which is how the difficulty works in this. You have classic Cassandra which is the traditional way, Phoebe friendly is a more relaxed way of playing if you want to build a giant colony before getting raided but be warned, when Phoebe sends you a raid they hit hard. There are big amounts of down time between the events though. And last but not least there’s Randy Random which is unpredictable random events, may they be good or bad. In my opinion this is the way to play Rimworld. There are also difficulty levels which change the level of raids and other events, I recommend playing rough which is the 3rd of 5 difficulty options.

There is so much potential for Rimworld and with it only being alpha I can’t wait to see what else it has in store for Beta release let alone further then that.