Those updates include adding a spherical globe that, I suppose, is slightly more realistic (you still have to settle on one landing area). Probably the most significant part of the update is the ability to form caravans. You can designate a group of survivors, supply them, and then designate a destination. This feature alone makes the world seem much larger than the small square your colony occupies.
For this go round I decided that I would play what I consider to be the most difficult of the pre-made scenarios. I picked the option to start with a group of five survivors at the tribal level (on challenging difficulty with Cassandra Classic as the storyteller). It's nice to have a few extra people in your camp to start with, but having your tech level be at the neolithic level is a little brutal. The amount of time to research anything takes significantly longer. This is especially true when you get to the higher tiers of research. Gathering food and keeping it fresh is also more complicated as the lack of refrigeration makes stockpiling much more difficult. Producing tons and tons of pemmican takes up a large amount of space and requires gathering both meat and plant matter.
Once I had the food situation somewhat under control a new set of problems arose--every single attacking faction outclassed the technology of my group. My ragtag group of survivors wielded spears, knives, bows, and one pila. Here's where I admit to the decision to allow some light to heavy save scumming. Yes, I saved! And I loaded! And sometimes I reloaded! There...that is out in the open. It felt somewhat justified since I picked a more difficult scenario.
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| Lots of happy couples in this playthrough. Do it for the mood boosts. |
Managing to survive a few random attacks (and a few reloads.....) my colony finally seemed to be thriving. I noticed a few major differences from the permadeath parade. Firstly, I seemed to get a large amount of cargo pods. It felt like every few days yielded some new swag from the heavens. Secondly, permadeath seems to really try to kill you. I had some really difficult random events--one that included radioactive fallout that slowly poisoned and killed everything on the map and another where a volcano erupted and the amount of sunlight that reached the planet was significantly reduced. I didn't encounter anything that crazy this time. Oddly enough I also had a very high number of colonist marriages (and, as a first, one divorce). Marriages are the best for many reasons--each marriage is a happy occasion that involves a party and a long lasting mood boost. Married colonists enjoy a more positive mood and can receive a boost when there's "lovin'" involved. The high rate of coupling might have also been caused by the fact that my colony became quite large with eleven colonists. I usually like to keep it around 6-8, but learned quickly that now, if you rescue someone from a downed escape pod they will automatically join your group.
Eventually I made it to the point where I could begin researching and building the coveted ship. This was made even more difficult by the fact that I had picked a map that had a very limited number of components but fortunately had a large amount of steel. My villagers mined a veritable boatload of steel and then crafted it into components (aided by a few crashed cargo pods with components inside). Research takes so long at the neolithic level that I had time to completely mine the entire map and begin the laborious process of gearing up my colonists by building weapons and armor. There was still a copious amount of downtime....so much so that I actually thought about scrapping the whole thing. This was further complicated by the fact that I didn't realize that you now need uranium to build ship cryptosleep capsules and the reactor. Uranium is exceedingly scarce and I completely forgot that it could be mined with deep drilling. Once I had Googled the lack of uranium and had the epiphany that I could deep mine it.....sheesh, did I feel dumb.
The colony of Crashville managed to escape from one of the most painful scenarios that I have played. My next goal is to conquer permadeath. It's going to happen.....hopefully. I thoroughly enjoy RimWorld but there are still a number of small things that irritate me (remember that it is early access). My biggest irritation comes from the inability to assign colonists to stack items--stockpiles are frequently overflowing due to the fact that items often get strewn about at random in small stacks. I really wish they would assign a task for organizing or some sort of organizational personality trait or skill.
I attempted to form a caravan but quickly discovered that the nearest colony was twelve days away. The amount of food to supply a three person caravan (sure, I could make a smaller one, but what if they got attacked?) for twelve days is absolutely insane. Starvation seemed to be in the cards for these poor souls so I cancelled the caravan. There needs to be an easier way to choose routes and specify the amount of food that a specific route would take.
Oddly enough, if you are completely mining out a mass of rock you can suffer from "roof collapses" that can crush your colonists to death. I don't know if I'm missing something obvious, but this seems a little nuts since there really isn't a way to destroy the "roof" on rocks. It would be nice if this was remedied.
I plan on returning to RimWorld and dooming another group of unfortunate colonists in the dance of permadeath doom.
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