RimWorld Guide and Tips for Beginners

Welcome to RimWorld, a randomly generated planet on the fringes of space. Are you a lone survivor from an alien world? Perhaps a tribal villager that has lost all connection to your advanced ancestors, or something else entirely? Either way, it appears you’re here for a bit of a helping hand. If you’re looking to get started with RimWorld, we have a RimWorld guide designed for beginners, taking you through the basics of survival, base building and (re)taking your place in the stars.

At its core, RimWorld is a survival, strategy and role-playing game, with each save offering a completely different experience. There are many kinds of game modes known as Storytellers, each with a distinct personality to generate new gameplay events, along with a difficulty modifier and reload / Ironman options. Then there are the infinitely-generated maps to settle your colonies on. One of our tips for new and returning player is to play with Cassandra Classic, as she is the most balanced Storyteller available.

After selecting the save’s settings, you’ll begin randomly-generating your starting colonist(s). If you have the EDB Prepare Carefully mod, you can even adapt your RimWorld colonists with extreme precision. Spend some time getting the colonist(s) ready to a good fit before dropping into the actual meat and potatoes of RimWorld.

Whenever a new game is locked in, your generated colonist(s) will spawn or crash land (depending on the playthrough’s settings). Every save starts with some starting currency, wood, medicine and food so you don’t immediately die. The quantity of the starting resources depends on the default settings or custom starting inventories.

As for completing a save, it is a far-flung dream for many players. You can get a radio transmission at the start of a save, informing you of a ship that can take you off the planet. The challenge of moving a colony to the other end of the planet is rarely achieved. Instead, RimWorld players tend to make their own content and storylines. Our top RimWorld tip is to have fun with the game, mess around with mods and survive and experience an unfolding narrative that differs every time. To help you get there, here is our RimWorld guide to surviving your first day.

Day 1

When you get into the game, immediately pause it, using either the space bar or the pause button towards the bottom right corner of your screen. Find all the starting resources that spawned with you and press “F”, which ‘Allow’ them to be moved and used by your colonists.

After you have found all your items, you’ll need to prioritize your colonists for specific jobs. You can find this information by clicking on your colonists and selecting the ‘Bio’ menu. Click on every single one of your colonists and take note of their skills. If one of them is the best at Construction, have them prioritize building tasks, so on and so forth. You can enter the Prioritization menu by clicking on the Work tab in the bottom left of the screen, then the manual priorities tick box at the top of the new pane.

Next, you’ll need to get your colony self-sufficient as soon as possible. Use the wood you’ve been given to begin building some form of house, bedrooms or barracks. Accompany those new builds with a few sleeping spots, so your colonists have some form of protection from the elements.

While your builders are working away at the new shelter, you want to get your best ‘Plants’ colonist assigned to a farm. To build a farm, press the Architect tab in the bottom left and then the Zones button. A new menu will appear showing several zones; you want to select “Growing Zone” and click+drag your mouse over the area you want to turn into a farm. We recommend having a 10×10 Rice Paddy so you can guarantee lots of food in three days time. After the farmer has finished sowing the seeds, have them forage for berries around the map for additional meals. Once you have some basic food keeping the colony fed, you can sit pretty and wait for the Rice to grow, allowing you to create new fields for even higher yield.

These are the very basics you need to do on day one. Afterwards, it’s a matter of what you as a player want to make as your focus. The next part of the RimWorld guide for beginners will focus on the need-to-know information on other basic elements of RimWorld’s gameplay.

Skills and Tasks

Skills are the core measure of character efficiency in RimWorld. If a colonist has a poor rating in particular skills, they’ll do a poor job until they skill up. It isn’t too bad for most skills, such as Construction, Crafting, Art, etc, but for gathering skills like Harvesting or Mining, colonists will be slow or cannot do certain tasks properly. For example, a Chef with poor cooking skills has a higher chance to give their entire colony food poisoning. To avoid this and other pitfalls, start a colony with just a few colonists with a broad range of skills between them.

Another important aspect to note is Passion. You can easily see how passionate a colonist is about a particular skill via the number of flames assigned to it. One flame against a skill means that the colonist gets a 100% boost to experience, while two flames grant a 150% exp buff. It is one way to indicate what job you want a colonist to do on the rim. Lastly, don’t rely on one colonist to do one job. RimWorld is a brutal game, and death is always around the corner. If your only good cook dies, and the next best has a Cooking skill of 2, then it means you might be dealing with a nasty case of colony-wide food poisoning until they improve.

Health and Moods

Health and Mood are two very important micromanagement aspects in RimWorld. Health relates to how healthy and how close to death a colonist is, although be aware that individual organs and limbs have their own HP. It is very possible to have a character become mute, losing all their social skills, or lose an arm and become unable to perform tasks. Paying attention to health and sickness while adapting to humanitarian crises is an essential aspect of RimWorld.

Likewise, Mood is a feature that you should view as colonists’ mental health. Eating well, being comfortable, being sleep-deprived, witnessing a loved one die, divorce, and many other occurrences will affect Moods. Eventually, you may temporarily lose control of colonists to enraged or sad mood events. Such events can result in mental breakdowns, sad wonders, digging up dead bodies, arson sprees, social tensions, and fighting between fellow colonists, among other things. In some situations, these could spell disaster, such as your doctor going on a sad wonder as the colony is swept away with the plague. Yes, this did happen to me once.

Medicine

Naturally, this leads us onto medicine in RimWorld. You’ll need to keep a supply of medicine in your base at all times for even the slightest scratch or bruise They can become infected, knocking your character unconscious until they receive the right treatment, or worse, die. Thankfully, you can easily farm Herbal Medicine from Growing Zones, or buy sophisticated medicine from traders. Alternatively, you can produce more advanced medication, prosthetics, or transplants with better technology or mods (more on mods later). Keeping your colonists alive, treated, and fully functioning is the key to success.

Research

Research is one of the main progression paths in RimWorld. You’ll need to research different technologies to achieve various goals. Depending on the start of your save, you’ll either have Modern, Medieval or Tribal technology. Eventually, all saves progress towards more futuristic tech. The trick to managing technology in RimWorld is to plan ahead. Getting access to electricity and batteries as soon as possible for a Tribal or a Medieval colony could make or break a save in winter. If you experience frequent hostile raids, you may want to focus more on defence, weapons, and armor technologies.

Zones

So far, our RimWorld guide has only briefly touched upon the use of Zones in RimWorld. While farming zones are very important, there are other activities that require zones. One example is the Dumping Stockpile and Stockpile zones. Dumping Stockpiles need to be your outdoor dumping grounds for rotting corpses from hostiles (bury your fallen colonists for memorial events), chunks of rock and more. Note that stockpiles are highly customizable. You should have one stockpile dedicated to food and perishables, ideally in a freezer. Other stockpiles can feature a clothing room, armory, or medical room. It all depends on your base size and organizational skills.

The other important zone you’ll want to learn are Allowed Zones. These zones establish an area of the map specific groups can move through. While not exactly useful in a RimWorld guide for beginners, this technique kicks in when you have to deal with extreme heat, freezing conditions, nuclear radiation and other disasters.

The more beginner-friendly use for Zones is to keep your tamed animals from walking around the colony’s wilderness areas, where they’ll inevitably get eaten by a Lynx or something silly like that. If your luck is anything like mine, your pet will get eaten, and the pet’s master will get upset and start sad wandering, only to get eaten by the same Lynx. To set an animal enclosure, all you need to do is select the Animals tab, Manage Areas, New Area and make one. With the new area created, select your colony’s animals via the Animal menu (not to be confused with Wildlife) and place them in the new group. Now go back to Architect >  Zones > Allowed Areas, click on the new area, and draw it around the desired location to isolate certain characters or animals.

Animals and Wildlife

Animals and Wildlife are an important part of RimWorld. From being humble pets to valuable members of society, Animals are a fun feature worth mentioning in our RimWorld guide for beginners.

Each save’s starting options offers a number of different pets. One save may only offer one pet, while another offers three. Depending on the animal, you can train them to haul (aka carrying materials) from point A to B. Moreover, they can guard your colonists, or be used for hunting or fighting off enemy raiders.

Once you have your food supply locked down, you can use leftover food to begin taming animals. All you need is an appropriate food source for the animal, along with a colonist with a modest level of the Animal skill. Taming animals is a roll of the dice, based on the Animal skill of the colonist responsible for taming and a critter’s resistance level. If your colonist gets lucky with taming, the animal will join the colony. Some animals like Elephants and Muffallo are great caravan animals, as they can carry plenty of weight and travel long distances. On the other hand, Bears, Wolves and Lynx make for interesting security solutions.

Base building is one of the most important features to get right in RimWorld. The RimWorld Guide for beginners will teach you all you need about the basics of building a base.

Rooms

Like every base or town, you need to allocate space for your colonists to sleep in. Providing each colonist with an uncramped personal Bedroom fitted with high-quality decorations and furniture is a huge boost to their comfort needs. You’ll also need a dedicated Kitchen, alongside a Dining Room for your colonists to eat and socialize in. The greatest sin for your colonists’ mood is eating without a table. Build a Dining Room as soon as you can. You’ll also need a freezer, ideally near the Kitchen, along with a main Warehouse for all your storage needs. Remember to keep these rooms clean, furnished and well lit to increase productivity and cleanliness. You can always force a colonist to clean by selecting one who is not incapable of manual labor and right-click dirty spaces to force clean. Alternatively, you can have a less skilled colonist work on cleaning and hauling more than other jobs.

After you unlock electricity and batteries, you’ll need to build a dedicated battery room. One tip we can give you is to build this room entirely out of stone. Batteries are prone to blowing up at any given moment, which causes a fire. These fires will then spread to the rest of your batteries through organic surfaces. You don’t want your entire battery house getting eradicated in one go, do you?

When your base gets more established, you’ll eventually want to start thinking about dedicated Research rooms, such as a Hospital, Prison, Workshop, and Recreation rooms or other buildings. This is because structures dedicated to specific tasks generally offer much better performance levels than basic buildings. Having a spacious Workshop filled with different benches, tools, and other attractive furnishings grants more productivity. The same goes for Research Rooms, with bonuses to Research speed. As for Recreation Rooms, they offer more fun and thus boost your colonists’ mood. Hospitals, on the other hand, become much cleaner, improving the quality of the patient’s recovery. Nicely kept Prisons also make it more likely for a prisoner to join you as they were treated better, but it is only a slight modifier. As you can see, proper room management is key to victory.

Freezer

Building a Freezer is a necessary feature of RimWorld. You’ll need to dedicate a room to freeze your food and other perishables, especially if you plan on surviving the winter. All you need to do is to either chill a room with a passive cooler, extending the life of perishables if you don’t have air conditioning already researched. If you do, install a cooler in the freezer room and set its temperature to below zero to get it to freeze. If you have a big freezer, you may need a second cooler to be able to freeze the whole room.

RimWorld Killbox

A RimWorld killbox is one of the most important base defence strategies to master. Most of the early game raids follow a path of least resistance to the heart of a base. All that means is the enemy AI will not knock down walls or doors when trying to find a way into your base. You can trick the AI into following a more convenient route to your base, one filled with traps and labyrinth-inspired walkways. The cleanest way to the base can become a tunnel of death, with your colonists shooting at zig-zagging enemy raiders, or they get whacked by traps set along the paths.

This defence method is very effective for the most part. However, it isn’t the only defensive tactic you’ll need to employ when building your base. If you build inside mountains, there are cave monsters that can spawn inside your base. Some of the raiders can now dig under your base as of Ideology’s release, and sometimes enemy raiders will build a siege camp and mortar bomb you. Eventually, you’ll need to anticipate different defensive tactics to stay alive, but that will come with more experience.

 

Mods are one of RimWorld’s best features. There are countless Mods available on the Steam Workshop and from other modding communities. If you want to know more about many flavourful or must-have RimWorld mods, we have assembled a vast list to peak your curiosity. Throughout this RimWorld guide for beginners, we have referenced some of the more useful mods for specific aspects of RimWorld. Make sure you check them out!

This concludes our RimWorld guide for beginners. Do you feel we missed something you really need to know more about? Let us know in the comments below!