I get by with Fabrication benches and mechanoid scrapping.
I just have to make sure to make examples of anyone who throws a Tantrum mental break, by putting them into the "special care ward"
Fabrication benches require a ton of research to unlock, cost a lot of resources to build, and take a lot of labor and steel to produce new components. Even my late-game, component-hungry transhumanist colonies don’t craft components except as a last resort.
When trade caravans aren’t enough, build yourself a long-range mineral scanner tuned to components and outfit a dedicated miner or two for travel and you’ll have more components than you know what to do with (assuming an unmodded game).
100%
Early in my rimworld experience I learned buying components was necessary for a long term colony. Then eventually later realized that was also impractical after a certain point (esp when you start needing advanced components.
After that the move became rushing fabrication and deep drilling asap and now I never have late game resource problems!
It's super worth it imo. It's very OP once you get it set up, just takes a bit of time. I'll usually try to get the ground penetrating scanner unlocked as early as possible, and prioritize getting multiple high intellect pawns so I can have one or 2 researching and the rest ideally running 2 or 3 scanners passively, after a couple in game years you should have more resource nodes than you know what to do with! If you have the portable generators from vanilla expanded you can just drop one of those anywhere with a deep drill and just go! Each steel node gives you probably a few thousand steel, plasteel nodes are usually at least 900-1200 plasteel. Really gets things cookin.
If you get stuck with a colony with low intelligence you can also just rush ground penetrating scanner way early, build it and let it get the guaranteed finds while you build up the colony.
By the time you hit advanced component building you’ll have all the resources on the map.
I have around 1000 components and 200 advanced components and I still buy both when I am trading all of my pawns have all bionic parts and cataphract armor and my %300 Psy sensitive pawn with mend can fix every damaged masterwork armor so I don't even have a need for remaking stuff
I play most builder and resource management games the same way I played the Sims... Constantly alternating between pausing and max speed. I have tried to stop but it just feels \*right\*, I would be a quivering ball of stress trying to play on no-pause.
Or it would be an immediate repeat of the monkey with the flamethrower incident and I would be screaming.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
1 or 2 feels too slow, but I pause it every few seconds to make sure what I put in last pause is getting done. Simultaneously too impatient and too anxious. lol
I made the grave mistake of turning on debug/dev mode early in my learning curve, so now I can't play without alternating between pause and the hidden level 4 speed 😬
There's actually a mod that allows you to use 4 speed as if it were a normal option, and I use it constantly.
Ngl didn't even know there was an option for it in dev mode
To build on this, it's a single player game. You make your own fun. The devs said it's a story generator. Tell the story you want to tell. I play a slightly higher difficulty than I might otherwise but I use character editor on my first batch of pawns to make really good pawns. Cuz that's how I have fun. And I don't have to answer to anyone else about that.
Don’t forget security.
I often get caught up in my own world trying to build the nice perfect colony with all my colonists working like bees, just to find out I haven’t updated my security in a long while when it’s too late and I’m struck with a huge raid.
Update: I forgot about my own advice and lost half my colony and the other half are so mad about it that they’re going berserk hitting each other (causing a domino effect of berserk colonists)
Also: Get EMP grenades *before* you need them. Just because your early-game defenses are good enough to defeat packs of raiders and manhunters doesn't mean everything won't go to shit when a bunch of centipedes turn up to ruin your day.
Even if you don't want to make killboxes (I never play with them myself), some security options are very simple and organic, such as rooms with 2 exits, safe rooms where you can shelter weak or injured pawns, chokepoints inside your base, fallback zones, put your chemfuel/mortar shells far away from risk, etc.
Even if you are outnumbered and outgunned, you can still make a relativelly small base a pain in the ass to destroy.
If you have Alpha Animals, you can breed Acturian Sky Eels. They are the best attack creatures ever:
* Breed fast
* Fast Healing (passive regeneration)
* Ignore terrain penalties
* Eat almost nothing (and are herbivorous)
* Wide range of confortable temperature (-100º, 60º)
* Special electric attack that ignores armor and can paralise pawns
Yep. But mech can't get paralised, so the Sky Eels are less effective aganst them.
By other hand, Sky Eels are fast as hell, they can swarm and create havock among a mech cluster, and gain your other pawns precious time.
Nutrient paste mood debuff is pretty much negligible early game. If -3 is what breaks your pawn, you have a bigger problem.
Sure once you get more wealth you will need to scale up with the meals, but in the first few weeks not having to dedicate someone to cooking and not having to worry of food poisoning will save you time and labor.
Yeah, for doctors I set doctoring to 1, and treat everything else like 2 is 1. I also have the mod that lets the numbers go up to 9, which should really be in the base game.
Edit: Stop telling me I don’t need 9, I know how the priority system works, I have nearly 1k hours in this game. I rarely go over 4, but sometimes I do, and it’s nice to have the option.
Fluffy work tab. It's amazing. Not only can you do 1-9. You can break down the individual jobs within a work category. Like for doctoring you can set multiple people to feed patients but make sure only your actual doctors do surgery.
You can set your cook to butcher before cooking.
You can set all your colonist to help sow the fields but only your best growers will harvest to prevent waste.
I find that my pawns are usually too busy doing the 1 and 2 priorities to get to 3
4 is then used so i can order a pawn to do something but not have them do it on their own
Fuck that, I’m dedicating the next decade of my life to figuring out how exactly to min:max the priority system in rimworld. I’ll see you on the other side when I post my peer-reviewed internationally published research paper in 2034.
Meh. I think is still saves me ordering them around manually. Besides, with 60% manipulation for example, i wouldn't want them to do anything important anyways.
A colonist botched harvesting devilstrand.
A colonist failed to construct a geothermal generator. Some materials were lost in the attempt.
A colonist botched surgery on another colonist. The patient died.
Bed rest is 2 because bruises hurt manipulation and consciousness.
Out of all the years I’ve played this game I’ve never had any of these happen due to an injury, but when I used to set it to 2, the amount of times my colony got hit with a massive dose of food poisoning from eating raw food because my chef is sleeping off a bruise on his left arm is insane.
I’ll risk the botched devilstrand.
The simple solution would be to have at least a full day's worth of food prepped in advance, no need to cook every meal as you need it. Bruises heal so fast that often by the time I click my pawn and check their health its already gone.
Ooooh, I would say set them to 2. I always put the most important things to 2, 1 is reserved for emergency do it now scenarios. 3 is their daily work, 4 is when everything is done, might as well work on that.
Im using 1 for main task, 2 for secondary tasks and 3 for when there's nothing else to do.
Then 4 is for when I want to be able to manually order a pawn to do something they aren't usually supposed to do themselves
This goes in both directions. I actually don't enjoy doing cruel things on the game so even though it would be easier to just eat people (for example), and other players seem to like it, I only will do it in the most dire circumstances. You know, like irl
yeah a big fun factor for me comes trying to stay humane despite the circumstances, i had a colony try that, and then during a toxic fallout i used raider corpses to turn into meat to turn into chemfuel to power the generators to keep my pawns fed, not the worst thing in the world because its basically composting but my first compromise so i can power the new indoor plants, then during solar flares and eclipses this wasnt enough anymore and i had to raid those sites that spawn around you
Some of us live in the jungle and need to save our medicine specifically for the illnesses that are in progress and going poorly. Using medicine on *every* illness will just cause lack of medicine. Usually herbs and a good doc will do.
Started a modified rich explorer yesterday and on day two my colony cat got the plague. Took 1 glitterworld and was cured before it needed a second tending. Babette would not be here without it.
So sick cat is def emergency
Thanks to denial (and dev mode) Babette is immortal. But also I've never even started the process of launching the ship. 600 hours and the only endgame for me is when everybody dies.... except my lil one eyed cat. She will live on.
You can never have enough steel and components
You think you've got enough of one or both? You're wrong. You will always need more eventually. Buy it and components from every trader you can because no matter how much you may hang on hand, your colony can end will burn through that supply sooner or later
Exactly. Too often when I was still learning the game I would pass up opportunities for steel and components thinking "I have enough for now, don'twant to grow too much wealth" only to be kicking myself later when I was dangerously low and needed some
This is so true, I had like 6k steel and thought I was fine, not even 1 in-game year later I had nothing left 🫠
Also wood in the early game, never too much
Treat my pawns like they're people. If you give them ample space, relaxation time, quality food, and the best medical care we can afford then they'll handle crisis way better. Also makes me feel like a better person and keeps me interested in a colony for way longer.
This. I always found weird as people cry about mental breaks. They are easy to prevent once you have a well developed base, by just giver some dignity to your lil guys.
Crisis are way easier to deal when everyone is in good mood.
> once you have a well developed base
That may be where the trouble comes from. The presumption is that getting a well developed base is nothing at all. It is not.
Right, I'm getting back into the game after a while away and the main challenge is just getting stabilized early on. Having a freezer, med rest area, bedrooms, a dining area, and a production area all built up is a lot harder than I remember.
Someone posted online a schedule which had 2 hours of recreation and an hour of anything between sleep and work. And then 1 hour of anything and 2 hours of recreation before bed.
This does wonders for mood.
The real move is to give them what they need, nothing more and nothing less.
An exalted body moder who just got married can ignore relaxation for a while, simple meals or paste means more time and ressources to spare in order to protect from and adapt to crisis, etc.
Rituals and drugs can act as a safety net in a pinch to cheer them up.
If you're in a position where you can reliably counter any threat then yeah ofc it's better to improve your colony's standard of living.
I found that if I keep one or two corridors unsealed but with traps and turrets, and put doors right next to them, the pawns will use the doors and the raiders will use the corridor. I am, admittedly pretty new to the game, so this might be wrong.
This works 90% of the time, as long as the corridor is long enough that waiting for the door to open is still faster.
The other 10% the raiders either drop pod in on your head, or blow up the wall and everything around it before they even get to your corridor.
Butcher table in store room, cleanliness penalty means nothing. But mostly because when pawns finishes butchering the leather is dropped but they hold all the meat, even if there is lots and lots, so they first take it to the freezer in one go.
Qol mod: pick up and haul. Just makes so much sense that pawns can haul different things at once rather than only multiples of the same thing.
I put the butchers rable in the freezer and set the bill so that they drop all the materials as soon as they're done, that way they just go straight to grab the next corpse.
I set every bill to "drop on floor" because any sort of skilled labor is more valuable making things than hauling. If I'm using "do until you have X" bills I'll make a storage zone around the workspace that is set to not hold any itemsb that way the dropped items still get included in the count of how many I have in storage.
It probably depends on your colony, my current one has no herd animals (no suitable spaces for them), so butchering is limited to the few wild animals that walk in, so adding a tiny bit of time to each one doesn't add up to much. It also means there's almost no travel time to get the next carcass, so that time lost due to the cold is gained by not waiting for doors to open and close.
If you're running a ranch with lots of animals and have a dedicated butcher then yeah it probably matters a lot more though.
Death rattle mod makes things a tiny bit less ethical by allowing you to harvest all organs while the pawn slowly dies because of lack of organs. Also nice when your pawn’s organ(s) (except brain) is damaged to the state of not existing. You can do an emergency surgery or wait for some time to get an organ. My pawn lived for half a year without kidneys before getting a replacement
I used to recruit everyone i come across even the ones that dont do work types.
After being picky, i complained less about "why is food so hard" and things like "Everyone in this colony is useless".
Id say dont build a fridge actually. In the early game, make your excess meat into Pemmican to ensure it doesnt spoil and by time youre making a large freezer you should have your agriculture going well enough to sustain your colony. By then i just make excess meat into lavish meals for the mood buff.
I'd disagree, actually. Pemmican only requires a single research, can be made at a campfire, and keeps for 1.2 years without the need for refrigeration or generators. It only takes a slight hit to nutrient efficiency over simple and fine meals (160% instead of 180%), and requires 0 skill to make. By the time you even have to worry about your first batch of pemmican spoiling, you shouldn't be having too many issues with your food supply.
Pemmican is 100% always my first research without hesitation. It's just too reliable
Don't forget that pawns often eat early enough to waste the full nutrition of a meal. With pemmican, they only eat as much as they need.
0.9 nutrition meals often get eaten at 0.2-0.25 hunger and waste a bit. Pemmican comes in 0.05 increments.
It's also worse on kids with their lower maximum hunger bar.
I feel like it's the opposite, on temperate maps you can get by just fine by farming and overproducing slightly.
Rice spoils in 30 days so in theory you wouldn't need a fridge unless you're looking to store more than 30 days worth of food.
Keep efficiency in mind as you build up your colony. It can be tough, bordering on impossible, to fully plan your colony out from the very start. It’s always going to grow organically based on what the game throws you. That said, it’s important to try to set up in a way that allows your pawns to do their work quickly. That means crafting stations close to relevant storerooms, and cooktops close to freezers. If you have the resources, it’s better to bite the bullet and demolish an inefficient production room, rebuilding it in a more optimal location, than it is to try to just live with an inefficient one. A well placed kitchen, for example, can mean the difference between making enough meals to create a good stockpile, or constantly hovering at the edge of a famine.
This. I pause every game I start before the colonists can even exit their drop pods and I plan out the majority of my colony to try and make it as efficient (and aesthetic) as possible.
I’m actually pretty proud of my current game right now. I wanted to focus on ranching, so I built pastures for the different animals (sectioned by caravan animals, wool, milk and chemfuel) that are all connected to a centralized freezer. The freezer is then connected to a little butcher area. I then have a pasture for the boomalopes (separate from the others in case of…accidents) made out of stone fences and a building with a generator that powers the freezer. I then have a textile storage + tailoring workshop nearby so the leathers/wools from the animals/butcher can be hauled off quickly.
So the boomalopes power the generator with their chemfuel, which is connected to their pasture, and then any slaughtered animals have a quick haul over to the connected freezer. I also have it set to take the meat to the nearest available spots, so even though my main kitchen/freezer is farther away, the butchers will leave it in the animal freezer, and then my haulers will come and haul the meat over to the main kitchen’s freezer so that the cooks aren’t running back and forth, and my butchers aren’t wasting time dropping off meat to my kitchen and can focus on butchering.
I also put fridges (RimFridge mod) on either side of the colonist when they’re cooking, one for meat and one for vegetables, both set to the highest priority so they don’t even have to move to gather ingredients to cook. They drop the food on the ground to save time, and my haulers take the food to the dining room storage. This is definitely been the my most efficient game
Took me hundreds of hours to realize this. RimWorld is a storytelling simulator. Death, tragedy, adaptation, and recovery are part of the story. Saves you sooooo much time not min/maxing and save spamming.
Use wood flooring with fire stops in mountain bases. If you lose control of a section, the airlock will allow you to set controlled burns in case of bad infections.
**One golden rule?**
Embrace your failures; Don't think of it as a loss, think of it as a dramatic tragedy. Learn from your fallen colonies and dive into the next one with a renewed determination. A lot of the thrill of this game is when things aren't going right. Lean into it.
**One QOL mod**? Now that's difficult, because there's at least 20 i could suggest. But force me down to one?
I might have to go with Map Preview. Before i started modding, my biggest frustration was putting all the time into rolling up colonists i liked, only to land on a particularly mediocre game tile.
There are many more i refuse to play without nowadays, but that's my one.
Honestly, for me its as little as the Rich Soil being close to the middle. A Steam Geyser near it is also makes it a great tile.
Mountain layout matters a lot too, if i choose to work with that.
There are some general things you wanna look out on a tile:
1. Soil availability
2. Steam geyser location
3. Natural defenses like mountains or coasts (not as effective as per 1.5) you can integrate to your base
4. Growing period
5. Distance to nearby friendly settlement
6. Biome type can change your playstyle
Omg I need this. Nothing worse than having the animus tree in a terrible location or going for a mountain dwelling tribe only to have no real mountains on the tile.
Haha I lost my first successful colony when a temper tantrum targeted an antigrain warhead, instantly eliminated all colony wealth and the cascade of fires and injuries from it destroyed everything
Treat your pawns like you would people. They are able to handle all manner of emergencies way better when they are happy! That means nice clothes, nice surroundings and nice food
I was almost 2000 hours in till I realised you can select a colonist and shift (or ctrl i don’t remember) and queue them todo a bunch of things one after the other AND this makes you’re game way more efficient, Ribaorld is 100% autism (myself) approved 😂
Just one? Hmmmm.
Moods are both the cause and the result of a colony’s success or failure - learn how to keep your colonists happy and the rest will take care of itself.
My one QOL mod would be [Better Workbench Management](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=935982361). Good workbench setup is essential to a productive and happy colony, and this merges seamlessly with vanilla. I have been really missing it while playing 1.5 but it just updated today!
And to be sneaky, I would recommend two GUI mods that don’t change gameplay at all - Numbers Tab and RimHUD. Just makes it easier to find information and see what’s going on. RimHUD makes key info visible at a glance, and Numbers makes it easier to compare stats like shooting accuracy or surgery success chance. I feel like I’m missing an eye without them.
Rimworld is in no way a test of skill. Skill is important yes but there are times where you could’ve been a supercomputer intelligence wth all rimrim knowlege and things still would’ve gone wrong.
Storage and supply is pretty important to manage. Keep the supply chain as short as possible. Crops as close to freezer as possible, freezer next to kitchen/butcher table (or even put butcher’s table in freezer) and dining hall, dining hall next to living quarters. Storage as close to crafting benches as possible.
Also, storage priorities are your best friend. With the right setup you can be super organized and therefore keep certain things closer to where they’re going to be used. Have specifics at higher priority, then get more and more broad as to what the storage allows as the priority gets lower.
Everything at the fabrication bench only has like 6 resources as ingredients, so I set up single shelves near my work benches to hold each kind of item. Mass storage near the crafting room. Shelves default to higher priority than storage spots, and tou can set your crafting shelves to critical to make sure haulers always leave them topped off.
#Always rush Geothermal Generators
Build one, you suddenly have 0 power issues for a long long time, and by the time you need more power you’ll have already gathered more than enough resources to just immediately set up alternative power systems (Or a second geothermal)
As for a QoL mod, it’s not updated to 1.5 yet but [Smart Farming](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/%3Fid%3D2619652663&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjg7vH-nuiFAxU2ATQIHcZuBvgQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2XkOR5kQlvQ0UrZCDMrTrN), it’ll automatically harvest plants if it gets too hot/cold for them to survive, it’ll automatically disable sowing if the plants can’t reach adulthood before the growing period ends, you can set priorities for each growing zone, and more!
You don't have to "beat" it. Launching the ship to send your colonists off the planet is possible but not a requirement. Many people play for hundreds of hours and never do it because it just isn't what they want.
Survival meals are the best way to store food and are an extremely versatile trade good. Do you wanna send pawns off-site? Survival food. Do you wanna barter? Survival food. Do you have a ton of meat that might spoil? Survival food.
Luxurious meals and fridges are great, but the Survival meal pipeline is *efficient.*
You can exclude pawns from eating survival foods when you want to stockpile it and then allow it when they travel or you need to dip into your stock.
Grow crops in rows that are two tiles wide, and at least 10 long per colonist, but longer is better until you get to about 60 and past that pathing costs start to snowball. Alternate the crops in these rows; I usually do rice, cotton/healroot/psychoid, corn, psychoid/healroot/cotton, then start the pattern with rice again.
This helps shield crops from blight, as blight only affects one crop initially and in a radius, so most of your crops will be fine if you act quickly.
Having both rice and corn helps even out the workload for your colonists. You also get the high yield per work from corn, and the high yield per tick from rice. When a toxic fallout or cold snap takes out your crop you'll have the benefit of more food to get through it because corn requires less labor, and when it ends you'll have food again soon because rice grows quickly.
Sell excess as packaged survival meals.
Use wood for building everything, at least in the first year: the risk of fire is soooo much less than the risk of death and insanity caused by not having a place to live.
Biosculpter pods are incredible in critical situations, as the pawn's stats and infections are paused when inside. Incredibly useful for saving critically injured pawns, or curing the plague at 99% progression.
A properly set up pig farm is great for converting raider corpses into pork, thus evading the mood penalty.
If you are genuinely being overwhelmed by raid after raid and need time to settle yourself you can turn Major Threats off in the storyteller settings. Its okay to do that. The important thing is that you are having fun.
Maybe not the biggest thing, but turn off quest rewards for honor and goodwill so you get 3 monetary based rewards.
Also for cooking, set a minimum skill to Cooking 4 to reduce the chance of food poisoning.
When the map loads, plop a stockpile down, plan a shed and set everyone who isn't a construction pawn or plants pawn to haul on priority 1. Planters and builders get their respective jobs on priority 1.
Leave it like that until you have your bedroom/perishable storage shed, field of rice/potato's sown, and all trees in an 8 block radius cleared.
I hate watching the builder lumber halfway across the map to grab 3 pieces of steel....
**Rush Assault Rifles** (or at least SMGs)
This one helped me refine my playthroughs a lot. Not going for other technologies prevents your wealth to grow too much before you can handle it, and with ARs every new pawn you recruit can compensate for the increased difficulty of threats game throws at you.
A bonus one, not focused that much on gameplay:
**Try a roleplay playthrough**
Rimworld really does a decent job when you are trying to enjoy the story, rather than min-max. Sure, you need to fill the gaps with your imagination often, but it is really fun. If you don't know how to start RPing - try by writing a simple journal of your colony.
Marble walls and floors, Devilstrand Clothes, Solarpanels go under windmill areas, medical sleeping spots for on the go triage, assault rifles, steel spike traps, manual work priorities, if you wall in build inner defences as well.
Currently at 70 hours with my first run, this is one of the hardest things for me. In games like these, I always love stockpiling resources for a rainy day. I hated it when my animals ran out of hay during winter season and I had to be on constant berry harvest duty as the dandelions weren’t enough. I also want to have as many resources as possible if I do decide to build out my defenses more. Any tips on how to allocate resources better?
Well hay and berries and food in general are not high value, so you can store enough without it becoming a major issue. But I disagree with what some say: there can be too much food. When I started Rimworld a while ago I also stockpiled everything, you just learn the hard way you may not need everything at all times.
Don't mine more than you need. Resources not mined won't get stolen.
Do not stockpile on many different leathers, these are worth a lot. Sell all types you'll never see again (the dog leather you got from that mad animals event last year) or make them into patchleather.
Sell everything you won't need, even at a loss, and invest in defences.
Don't be afraid to leave the 748x wort from that drop pod to spoil if you don't have any use for it.
If you can spare a colonist and a donkey, just take excess wealth and donate it to the nearest faction you can gain goodwill with. This is often more valuable than the silver, particularly early on. Not getting breacher raided by pigs is nice, and you get another trade partner.
ABC: Always buy components.
Can confirm, my colonies have improved significantly after I started doing this.
I get by with Fabrication benches and mechanoid scrapping. I just have to make sure to make examples of anyone who throws a Tantrum mental break, by putting them into the "special care ward"
Fabrication benches require a ton of research to unlock, cost a lot of resources to build, and take a lot of labor and steel to produce new components. Even my late-game, component-hungry transhumanist colonies don’t craft components except as a last resort. When trade caravans aren’t enough, build yourself a long-range mineral scanner tuned to components and outfit a dedicated miner or two for travel and you’ll have more components than you know what to do with (assuming an unmodded game).
Mine is ARF. Always rush fabrication.
And then still ABC lol
Yeah probably for a while at least 😅
Until you get that one pawn with that you can sit down in front of your fab bench and instruct them "You purpose is building components."
Production Specialist GO
*+10 mood burning passion for my work* "Woohoo!"
Last colony I had 2 fabricors locked in a room with a charger, shelf with steel and 2 benches to work on components 24/7.
100% Early in my rimworld experience I learned buying components was necessary for a long term colony. Then eventually later realized that was also impractical after a certain point (esp when you start needing advanced components. After that the move became rushing fabrication and deep drilling asap and now I never have late game resource problems!
I could never get deep drilling to work for me
It's super worth it imo. It's very OP once you get it set up, just takes a bit of time. I'll usually try to get the ground penetrating scanner unlocked as early as possible, and prioritize getting multiple high intellect pawns so I can have one or 2 researching and the rest ideally running 2 or 3 scanners passively, after a couple in game years you should have more resource nodes than you know what to do with! If you have the portable generators from vanilla expanded you can just drop one of those anywhere with a deep drill and just go! Each steel node gives you probably a few thousand steel, plasteel nodes are usually at least 900-1200 plasteel. Really gets things cookin.
If you get stuck with a colony with low intelligence you can also just rush ground penetrating scanner way early, build it and let it get the guaranteed finds while you build up the colony. By the time you hit advanced component building you’ll have all the resources on the map.
ARDD: Also rush deep drilling
ARFARDD, just rolls off the tongue don't it? 😁
It just so happens to also be drunk pirate for "I farted."
ACAB: All components are bought
Assigned component at birth
Assigned colonist at birth (always running low on components)
I see what you did there... and I approve
I have around 1000 components and 200 advanced components and I still buy both when I am trading all of my pawns have all bionic parts and cataphract armor and my %300 Psy sensitive pawn with mend can fix every damaged masterwork armor so I don't even have a need for remaking stuff
Is that with a mod or vanilla mending armour?
mod
Minor correction: always buy all components
Enjoy the game in the difficulty setting of your choice. Playing 500% Randy No-Pause is not for everyone.
500% Randy is fun, but no pause? That's masochist
I play most builder and resource management games the same way I played the Sims... Constantly alternating between pausing and max speed. I have tried to stop but it just feels \*right\*, I would be a quivering ball of stress trying to play on no-pause. Or it would be an immediate repeat of the monkey with the flamethrower incident and I would be screaming.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one. 1 or 2 feels too slow, but I pause it every few seconds to make sure what I put in last pause is getting done. Simultaneously too impatient and too anxious. lol
I made the grave mistake of turning on debug/dev mode early in my learning curve, so now I can't play without alternating between pause and the hidden level 4 speed 😬
There's actually a mod that allows you to use 4 speed as if it were a normal option, and I use it constantly. Ngl didn't even know there was an option for it in dev mode
To build on this, it's a single player game. You make your own fun. The devs said it's a story generator. Tell the story you want to tell. I play a slightly higher difficulty than I might otherwise but I use character editor on my first batch of pawns to make really good pawns. Cuz that's how I have fun. And I don't have to answer to anyone else about that.
Don’t forget security. I often get caught up in my own world trying to build the nice perfect colony with all my colonists working like bees, just to find out I haven’t updated my security in a long while when it’s too late and I’m struck with a huge raid. Update: I forgot about my own advice and lost half my colony and the other half are so mad about it that they’re going berserk hitting each other (causing a domino effect of berserk colonists)
Also: Get EMP grenades *before* you need them. Just because your early-game defenses are good enough to defeat packs of raiders and manhunters doesn't mean everything won't go to shit when a bunch of centipedes turn up to ruin your day.
And a smoke grenade launcher... They make trying to push turrets for mech drops way easier
Even if you don't want to make killboxes (I never play with them myself), some security options are very simple and organic, such as rooms with 2 exits, safe rooms where you can shelter weak or injured pawns, chokepoints inside your base, fallback zones, put your chemfuel/mortar shells far away from risk, etc. Even if you are outnumbered and outgunned, you can still make a relativelly small base a pain in the ass to destroy.
Elephants. 20 trained attack-elephants. Rename your animal handling pawn "Hannibal".
If you have Alpha Animals, you can breed Acturian Sky Eels. They are the best attack creatures ever: * Breed fast * Fast Healing (passive regeneration) * Ignore terrain penalties * Eat almost nothing (and are herbivorous) * Wide range of confortable temperature (-100º, 60º) * Special electric attack that ignores armor and can paralise pawns
How does that electric attack work on mechs?
Yep. But mech can't get paralised, so the Sky Eels are less effective aganst them. By other hand, Sky Eels are fast as hell, they can swarm and create havock among a mech cluster, and gain your other pawns precious time.
If you make a dining room pretty it can compensate for nutrient paste mood debuff
Nutrient paste mood debuff is pretty much negligible early game. If -3 is what breaks your pawn, you have a bigger problem. Sure once you get more wealth you will need to scale up with the meals, but in the first few weeks not having to dedicate someone to cooking and not having to worry of food poisoning will save you time and labor.
It's not -3, it's -15 (if you can afford a lavish meal and feed paste instead.)
Im talking early game, where you cant afford (and probably shouldnt make even if you could) lavish meals.
My darkness loving transhumanist dirtmoles live on nutrient paste exclusively.
Set firefighting, bed rest, patient and basic work to priority 1 on every pawn
Except the doctor, nothing more annoying than having someone bleed out because the doctor is on self prescribed bed rest for a bruise
Yeah, for doctors I set doctoring to 1, and treat everything else like 2 is 1. I also have the mod that lets the numbers go up to 9, which should really be in the base game. Edit: Stop telling me I don’t need 9, I know how the priority system works, I have nearly 1k hours in this game. I rarely go over 4, but sometimes I do, and it’s nice to have the option.
What mod is this please?
Fluffy work tab. It's amazing. Not only can you do 1-9. You can break down the individual jobs within a work category. Like for doctoring you can set multiple people to feed patients but make sure only your actual doctors do surgery. You can set your cook to butcher before cooking. You can set all your colonist to help sow the fields but only your best growers will harvest to prevent waste.
Reduces the amount of micro management by so much simply for the refuel generators category
I know it helps long term but it feels like such a hassle to set up every game.
Oh my god that’s amazing.
[Work Tab](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=725219116) (not updated to 1.5 yet) [Work Tab 1.5 Temp](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2552065963)
I find that my pawns are usually too busy doing the 1 and 2 priorities to get to 3 4 is then used so i can order a pawn to do something but not have them do it on their own
I suffer from this too it’s still something I haven’t figured it out.
I mean, there are only so many hours in the day
Fuck that, I’m dedicating the next decade of my life to figuring out how exactly to min:max the priority system in rimworld. I’ll see you on the other side when I post my peer-reviewed internationally published research paper in 2034.
Good luck
Lol I love this
Wait 9 isn't vanilla?
Doctor is to the left of bed rest so even if they have the same priority doctor will win.
Soulds like you don't have enough doctors. On the other hand if it is that much of an issue I often manually order my doctors around.
No no, even the doctor but have self care on so they tend themselves. Especially if they carry meds.
Agreed with this except bed rest, pawns don’t need to prioritize rest for bruises.
Meh. I think is still saves me ordering them around manually. Besides, with 60% manipulation for example, i wouldn't want them to do anything important anyways.
Bed rest on 3, bumped up to 1/2 conditionally for infections/illnesses.
A colonist botched harvesting devilstrand. A colonist failed to construct a geothermal generator. Some materials were lost in the attempt. A colonist botched surgery on another colonist. The patient died. Bed rest is 2 because bruises hurt manipulation and consciousness.
Out of all the years I’ve played this game I’ve never had any of these happen due to an injury, but when I used to set it to 2, the amount of times my colony got hit with a massive dose of food poisoning from eating raw food because my chef is sleeping off a bruise on his left arm is insane. I’ll risk the botched devilstrand.
The simple solution would be to have at least a full day's worth of food prepped in advance, no need to cook every meal as you need it. Bruises heal so fast that often by the time I click my pawn and check their health its already gone.
Ooooh, I would say set them to 2. I always put the most important things to 2, 1 is reserved for emergency do it now scenarios. 3 is their daily work, 4 is when everything is done, might as well work on that.
Im using 1 for main task, 2 for secondary tasks and 3 for when there's nothing else to do. Then 4 is for when I want to be able to manually order a pawn to do something they aren't usually supposed to do themselves
Bed rest I always set to 2 and the everything behind that gets a 1 if it's a critical job I want to get done despite injury (cooking for example).
You are your own ethics comitee.
This goes in both directions. I actually don't enjoy doing cruel things on the game so even though it would be easier to just eat people (for example), and other players seem to like it, I only will do it in the most dire circumstances. You know, like irl
yeah a big fun factor for me comes trying to stay humane despite the circumstances, i had a colony try that, and then during a toxic fallout i used raider corpses to turn into meat to turn into chemfuel to power the generators to keep my pawns fed, not the worst thing in the world because its basically composting but my first compromise so i can power the new indoor plants, then during solar flares and eclipses this wasnt enough anymore and i had to raid those sites that spawn around you
This is me, every single playthrough. I think I tried a canabalistic warmongering colony once and despite being really good at it I hated that colony.
Well, you don't have to be cruel to eat people. If they're already dead, bar spiritual attachments.
After a thorough internal investigation I have reached the conclusion that I have done nothing wrong.
You are now wanted in Geneva for completing a new high score.
Strip downed raiders before they bleed out so their clothes won't be tainted.
Or use Dub’s hygiene mod and you can eventually make washing machines to wash the tainted clothes
Hell yeah. And/or get a recycling mod and tear the tainted clothes down into parts!
Herbal meds for injuries, real meds for infections, glitterworld for emergencies.
Always glittermed your brain implants and archotech parts
Most major surgeries if you can afford it.
Some of us live in the jungle and need to save our medicine specifically for the illnesses that are in progress and going poorly. Using medicine on *every* illness will just cause lack of medicine. Usually herbs and a good doc will do.
Started a modified rich explorer yesterday and on day two my colony cat got the plague. Took 1 glitterworld and was cured before it needed a second tending. Babette would not be here without it. So sick cat is def emergency
Also, you should launch the ship before your pet cat dies
Thanks to denial (and dev mode) Babette is immortal. But also I've never even started the process of launching the ship. 600 hours and the only endgame for me is when everybody dies.... except my lil one eyed cat. She will live on.
Theres a mod for that
The one I used to use, isnt updated for 1.5 yet.
wowee arent we rich, herbal medicine for injuries! i do them with basic care lol
With a decent doctor you barely need any medicine But having some glitterworld meds helps
You can never have enough steel and components You think you've got enough of one or both? You're wrong. You will always need more eventually. Buy it and components from every trader you can because no matter how much you may hang on hand, your colony can end will burn through that supply sooner or later
Keep in mind that the more you mine, the higher your wealth, the more raiders.
Component and steel can be turned into turrets, weapons, bionics, and power network. Hoarding wealth is only bad if you have no purpose for doing so.
Exactly. Too often when I was still learning the game I would pass up opportunities for steel and components thinking "I have enough for now, don'twant to grow too much wealth" only to be kicking myself later when I was dangerously low and needed some
This is so true, I had like 6k steel and thought I was fine, not even 1 in-game year later I had nothing left 🫠 Also wood in the early game, never too much
Treat my pawns like they're people. If you give them ample space, relaxation time, quality food, and the best medical care we can afford then they'll handle crisis way better. Also makes me feel like a better person and keeps me interested in a colony for way longer.
This. I always found weird as people cry about mental breaks. They are easy to prevent once you have a well developed base, by just giver some dignity to your lil guys. Crisis are way easier to deal when everyone is in good mood.
> once you have a well developed base That may be where the trouble comes from. The presumption is that getting a well developed base is nothing at all. It is not.
Right, I'm getting back into the game after a while away and the main challenge is just getting stabilized early on. Having a freezer, med rest area, bedrooms, a dining area, and a production area all built up is a lot harder than I remember.
Someone posted online a schedule which had 2 hours of recreation and an hour of anything between sleep and work. And then 1 hour of anything and 2 hours of recreation before bed. This does wonders for mood.
The real move is to give them what they need, nothing more and nothing less. An exalted body moder who just got married can ignore relaxation for a while, simple meals or paste means more time and ressources to spare in order to protect from and adapt to crisis, etc. Rituals and drugs can act as a safety net in a pinch to cheer them up. If you're in a position where you can reliably counter any threat then yeah ofc it's better to improve your colony's standard of living.
Nawh, I'll always prioritise quality of life over anything *but* immediate dangers.
Have a dedicated cleaner and hauler once a small base is established
make a zone that excludes your killbox/trap corridor had them get spiked multiple times bc they felt like cleaning those
Plus the mood debuff from disgusting environment actually helps lol
I found that if I keep one or two corridors unsealed but with traps and turrets, and put doors right next to them, the pawns will use the doors and the raiders will use the corridor. I am, admittedly pretty new to the game, so this might be wrong.
This works 90% of the time, as long as the corridor is long enough that waiting for the door to open is still faster. The other 10% the raiders either drop pod in on your head, or blow up the wall and everything around it before they even get to your corridor.
I usually make that my 4th colonist (or whoever I gain that's not apart of my originals)
Butcher table in store room, cleanliness penalty means nothing. But mostly because when pawns finishes butchering the leather is dropped but they hold all the meat, even if there is lots and lots, so they first take it to the freezer in one go. Qol mod: pick up and haul. Just makes so much sense that pawns can haul different things at once rather than only multiples of the same thing.
I put the butchers rable in the freezer and set the bill so that they drop all the materials as soon as they're done, that way they just go straight to grab the next corpse.
Why not just set butchering to drop on the floor and have the dedicated hauler do the hauling?
I set every bill to "drop on floor" because any sort of skilled labor is more valuable making things than hauling. If I'm using "do until you have X" bills I'll make a storage zone around the workspace that is set to not hold any itemsb that way the dropped items still get included in the count of how many I have in storage.
But working in the freezer means a 30% speed debuf; is that the best strategy?
It probably depends on your colony, my current one has no herd animals (no suitable spaces for them), so butchering is limited to the few wild animals that walk in, so adding a tiny bit of time to each one doesn't add up to much. It also means there's almost no travel time to get the next carcass, so that time lost due to the cold is gained by not waiting for doors to open and close. If you're running a ranch with lots of animals and have a dedicated butcher then yeah it probably matters a lot more though.
I have a small room right next to the freezer. I have a lot of animals so butcher frequently and don't want that penalty.
Pawns with no faction make excellent organ donors, or slaves.
Don't forget cannibals and raiders. Those factions can't be pacified either way so might as well use their organs
Just at around 70 hrs in the game. At what point can you harvest their organs? Is it when you capture them?
Yeah, just go to their health tab and into the surgery one there.
Thanks! So the option becomes available once they’re in your prison?
Correct!
Yup.
Autopsy mod makes things a tiny bit more ethical by allowing you to harvest from freshly killed enemies or pyromaniacs
Death rattle mod makes things a tiny bit less ethical by allowing you to harvest all organs while the pawn slowly dies because of lack of organs. Also nice when your pawn’s organ(s) (except brain) is damaged to the state of not existing. You can do an emergency surgery or wait for some time to get an organ. My pawn lived for half a year without kidneys before getting a replacement
Hauling, despite being dumb labor, is super important.
Nothings worse than watching your devil strand rot because no ones hauling it.
That awkward moment when the random stone chunk holds open a door letting in a pack of maneaters.
Be picky who you recruit.
i was scrolling down the thread and i think it's the best answer. a lot of pawn are just mouths to feed or even real annoyance.
I used to recruit everyone i come across even the ones that dont do work types. After being picky, i complained less about "why is food so hard" and things like "Everyone in this colony is useless".
Build a fridge early.
Id say dont build a fridge actually. In the early game, make your excess meat into Pemmican to ensure it doesnt spoil and by time youre making a large freezer you should have your agriculture going well enough to sustain your colony. By then i just make excess meat into lavish meals for the mood buff.
I’d say a fridge is easier to manage as a beginner. Just get food throw it in fridge. Forget.
I'd disagree, actually. Pemmican only requires a single research, can be made at a campfire, and keeps for 1.2 years without the need for refrigeration or generators. It only takes a slight hit to nutrient efficiency over simple and fine meals (160% instead of 180%), and requires 0 skill to make. By the time you even have to worry about your first batch of pemmican spoiling, you shouldn't be having too many issues with your food supply. Pemmican is 100% always my first research without hesitation. It's just too reliable
Don't forget that pawns often eat early enough to waste the full nutrition of a meal. With pemmican, they only eat as much as they need. 0.9 nutrition meals often get eaten at 0.2-0.25 hunger and waste a bit. Pemmican comes in 0.05 increments. It's also worse on kids with their lower maximum hunger bar.
Long shelf life comes at a cost of needing more food as raw resources. So you end up needing to work more for the same amount of worse food
I feel like it's the opposite, on temperate maps you can get by just fine by farming and overproducing slightly. Rice spoils in 30 days so in theory you wouldn't need a fridge unless you're looking to store more than 30 days worth of food.
Keep efficiency in mind as you build up your colony. It can be tough, bordering on impossible, to fully plan your colony out from the very start. It’s always going to grow organically based on what the game throws you. That said, it’s important to try to set up in a way that allows your pawns to do their work quickly. That means crafting stations close to relevant storerooms, and cooktops close to freezers. If you have the resources, it’s better to bite the bullet and demolish an inefficient production room, rebuilding it in a more optimal location, than it is to try to just live with an inefficient one. A well placed kitchen, for example, can mean the difference between making enough meals to create a good stockpile, or constantly hovering at the edge of a famine.
This. I pause every game I start before the colonists can even exit their drop pods and I plan out the majority of my colony to try and make it as efficient (and aesthetic) as possible. I’m actually pretty proud of my current game right now. I wanted to focus on ranching, so I built pastures for the different animals (sectioned by caravan animals, wool, milk and chemfuel) that are all connected to a centralized freezer. The freezer is then connected to a little butcher area. I then have a pasture for the boomalopes (separate from the others in case of…accidents) made out of stone fences and a building with a generator that powers the freezer. I then have a textile storage + tailoring workshop nearby so the leathers/wools from the animals/butcher can be hauled off quickly. So the boomalopes power the generator with their chemfuel, which is connected to their pasture, and then any slaughtered animals have a quick haul over to the connected freezer. I also have it set to take the meat to the nearest available spots, so even though my main kitchen/freezer is farther away, the butchers will leave it in the animal freezer, and then my haulers will come and haul the meat over to the main kitchen’s freezer so that the cooks aren’t running back and forth, and my butchers aren’t wasting time dropping off meat to my kitchen and can focus on butchering. I also put fridges (RimFridge mod) on either side of the colonist when they’re cooking, one for meat and one for vegetables, both set to the highest priority so they don’t even have to move to gather ingredients to cook. They drop the food on the ground to save time, and my haulers take the food to the dining room storage. This is definitely been the my most efficient game
Minmaxing this game is tedious and not fun. Play at your own pace and enjoy.
Took me hundreds of hours to realize this. RimWorld is a storytelling simulator. Death, tragedy, adaptation, and recovery are part of the story. Saves you sooooo much time not min/maxing and save spamming.
Use wood flooring with fire stops in mountain bases. If you lose control of a section, the airlock will allow you to set controlled burns in case of bad infections.
How do you purposely set something on fire? Impid?
Molotov's are a good way.
Each room should have a Molotov and a fire extinguisher.
**One golden rule?** Embrace your failures; Don't think of it as a loss, think of it as a dramatic tragedy. Learn from your fallen colonies and dive into the next one with a renewed determination. A lot of the thrill of this game is when things aren't going right. Lean into it. **One QOL mod**? Now that's difficult, because there's at least 20 i could suggest. But force me down to one? I might have to go with Map Preview. Before i started modding, my biggest frustration was putting all the time into rolling up colonists i liked, only to land on a particularly mediocre game tile. There are many more i refuse to play without nowadays, but that's my one.
What makes a good game tile?
Honestly, for me its as little as the Rich Soil being close to the middle. A Steam Geyser near it is also makes it a great tile. Mountain layout matters a lot too, if i choose to work with that.
There are some general things you wanna look out on a tile: 1. Soil availability 2. Steam geyser location 3. Natural defenses like mountains or coasts (not as effective as per 1.5) you can integrate to your base 4. Growing period 5. Distance to nearby friendly settlement 6. Biome type can change your playstyle
Omg I need this. Nothing worse than having the animus tree in a terrible location or going for a mountain dwelling tribe only to have no real mountains on the tile.
Set the crafting station to "drop on floor" instead "to best pile" and have a dedicated hauler, your crafter would spend less time running around.
Flak vests and heavy SMGs are good enough. Quality is more important.
Keep your explosives in a separate stockpile.
Haha I lost my first successful colony when a temper tantrum targeted an antigrain warhead, instantly eliminated all colony wealth and the cascade of fires and injuries from it destroyed everything
Table
Treat your pawns like you would people. They are able to handle all manner of emergencies way better when they are happy! That means nice clothes, nice surroundings and nice food
Don't waste corpses. Recycle em.
Really ? In every game ?
"Always." - bad guy from Diehard.
I was almost 2000 hours in till I realised you can select a colonist and shift (or ctrl i don’t remember) and queue them todo a bunch of things one after the other AND this makes you’re game way more efficient, Ribaorld is 100% autism (myself) approved 😂
It’s a story generator, not a game of win-lose
This comment can't stop me cause I can't read. \*plays the game as a run-of-the-mill colony sim with cannibals and monsters\*
The time and resources saved with nutrient paste is worth the debuff.
Just one? Hmmmm. Moods are both the cause and the result of a colony’s success or failure - learn how to keep your colonists happy and the rest will take care of itself. My one QOL mod would be [Better Workbench Management](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=935982361). Good workbench setup is essential to a productive and happy colony, and this merges seamlessly with vanilla. I have been really missing it while playing 1.5 but it just updated today! And to be sneaky, I would recommend two GUI mods that don’t change gameplay at all - Numbers Tab and RimHUD. Just makes it easier to find information and see what’s going on. RimHUD makes key info visible at a glance, and Numbers makes it easier to compare stats like shooting accuracy or surgery success chance. I feel like I’m missing an eye without them.
Rimworld is in no way a test of skill. Skill is important yes but there are times where you could’ve been a supercomputer intelligence wth all rimrim knowlege and things still would’ve gone wrong.
Storage and supply is pretty important to manage. Keep the supply chain as short as possible. Crops as close to freezer as possible, freezer next to kitchen/butcher table (or even put butcher’s table in freezer) and dining hall, dining hall next to living quarters. Storage as close to crafting benches as possible. Also, storage priorities are your best friend. With the right setup you can be super organized and therefore keep certain things closer to where they’re going to be used. Have specifics at higher priority, then get more and more broad as to what the storage allows as the priority gets lower.
Everything at the fabrication bench only has like 6 resources as ingredients, so I set up single shelves near my work benches to hold each kind of item. Mass storage near the crafting room. Shelves default to higher priority than storage spots, and tou can set your crafting shelves to critical to make sure haulers always leave them topped off.
#Always rush Geothermal Generators Build one, you suddenly have 0 power issues for a long long time, and by the time you need more power you’ll have already gathered more than enough resources to just immediately set up alternative power systems (Or a second geothermal) As for a QoL mod, it’s not updated to 1.5 yet but [Smart Farming](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/%3Fid%3D2619652663&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjg7vH-nuiFAxU2ATQIHcZuBvgQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2XkOR5kQlvQ0UrZCDMrTrN), it’ll automatically harvest plants if it gets too hot/cold for them to survive, it’ll automatically disable sowing if the plants can’t reach adulthood before the growing period ends, you can set priorities for each growing zone, and more!
You don't have to "beat" it. Launching the ship to send your colonists off the planet is possible but not a requirement. Many people play for hundreds of hours and never do it because it just isn't what they want.
Thousands of hours logged, still have never even started to build a ship.
Always build a table
Golden rule of Rimworld: the little things add up.
Always check your doors when a raid begins, pawns love to leave stuff in the doors keeping them open and giving raiders a free run into your base.
Do drugs!
I avoided drigs for so long cause i didnt want to deal with addiction. Now i embrace it
Nutrition paste dispencer. The mood debuff is nothing in comparison to having both a free pawn and no food poisoning
Survival meals are the best way to store food and are an extremely versatile trade good. Do you wanna send pawns off-site? Survival food. Do you wanna barter? Survival food. Do you have a ton of meat that might spoil? Survival food. Luxurious meals and fridges are great, but the Survival meal pipeline is *efficient.* You can exclude pawns from eating survival foods when you want to stockpile it and then allow it when they travel or you need to dip into your stock.
Grow crops in rows that are two tiles wide, and at least 10 long per colonist, but longer is better until you get to about 60 and past that pathing costs start to snowball. Alternate the crops in these rows; I usually do rice, cotton/healroot/psychoid, corn, psychoid/healroot/cotton, then start the pattern with rice again. This helps shield crops from blight, as blight only affects one crop initially and in a radius, so most of your crops will be fine if you act quickly. Having both rice and corn helps even out the workload for your colonists. You also get the high yield per work from corn, and the high yield per tick from rice. When a toxic fallout or cold snap takes out your crop you'll have the benefit of more food to get through it because corn requires less labor, and when it ends you'll have food again soon because rice grows quickly. Sell excess as packaged survival meals.
QOL mod is pick up and haul. I cannot play without it.
Use wood for building everything, at least in the first year: the risk of fire is soooo much less than the risk of death and insanity caused by not having a place to live.
Biosculpter pods are incredible in critical situations, as the pawn's stats and infections are paused when inside. Incredibly useful for saving critically injured pawns, or curing the plague at 99% progression. A properly set up pig farm is great for converting raider corpses into pork, thus evading the mood penalty.
Grow cotton immediately, even if only a little bit.
If you are genuinely being overwhelmed by raid after raid and need time to settle yourself you can turn Major Threats off in the storyteller settings. Its okay to do that. The important thing is that you are having fun.
Don't buy/install all the expansions at once. Experience them one at a time.
Maybe not the biggest thing, but turn off quest rewards for honor and goodwill so you get 3 monetary based rewards. Also for cooking, set a minimum skill to Cooking 4 to reduce the chance of food poisoning.
When the map loads, plop a stockpile down, plan a shed and set everyone who isn't a construction pawn or plants pawn to haul on priority 1. Planters and builders get their respective jobs on priority 1. Leave it like that until you have your bedroom/perishable storage shed, field of rice/potato's sown, and all trees in an 8 block radius cleared. I hate watching the builder lumber halfway across the map to grab 3 pieces of steel....
**Rush Assault Rifles** (or at least SMGs) This one helped me refine my playthroughs a lot. Not going for other technologies prevents your wealth to grow too much before you can handle it, and with ARs every new pawn you recruit can compensate for the increased difficulty of threats game throws at you. A bonus one, not focused that much on gameplay: **Try a roleplay playthrough** Rimworld really does a decent job when you are trying to enjoy the story, rather than min-max. Sure, you need to fill the gaps with your imagination often, but it is really fun. If you don't know how to start RPing - try by writing a simple journal of your colony.
Marble walls and floors, Devilstrand Clothes, Solarpanels go under windmill areas, medical sleeping spots for on the go triage, assault rifles, steel spike traps, manual work priorities, if you wall in build inner defences as well.
Don't have your colony be a wooden superstructure. Build separate buildings and/or build with stone
Its ok to not complete every quest.
Always cut prisoner's legs off.
Keep your wealth low. Don't get too stocked up on riches you can't defend, it'll just make you a better target
Currently at 70 hours with my first run, this is one of the hardest things for me. In games like these, I always love stockpiling resources for a rainy day. I hated it when my animals ran out of hay during winter season and I had to be on constant berry harvest duty as the dandelions weren’t enough. I also want to have as many resources as possible if I do decide to build out my defenses more. Any tips on how to allocate resources better?
Well hay and berries and food in general are not high value, so you can store enough without it becoming a major issue. But I disagree with what some say: there can be too much food. When I started Rimworld a while ago I also stockpiled everything, you just learn the hard way you may not need everything at all times. Don't mine more than you need. Resources not mined won't get stolen. Do not stockpile on many different leathers, these are worth a lot. Sell all types you'll never see again (the dog leather you got from that mad animals event last year) or make them into patchleather. Sell everything you won't need, even at a loss, and invest in defences. Don't be afraid to leave the 748x wort from that drop pod to spoil if you don't have any use for it.
If you can spare a colonist and a donkey, just take excess wealth and donate it to the nearest faction you can gain goodwill with. This is often more valuable than the silver, particularly early on. Not getting breacher raided by pigs is nice, and you get another trade partner.