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What is RimWorld?

RimWorld is an indie space colony management game developed by Ludeon Studios, a Canadian studio founded by Tynan Sylvester. You guide a small group of survivors who crash-land on a procedurally generated planet, managing their needs, health, skills and relationships while building a colony that can survive raids, weather, disease and internal conflict. An AI storyteller drives events rather than a fixed campaign, so each playthrough produces a different mix of calm stretches and disasters.

The official community reference for it is RimWorld Wiki, which currently maintains 2,825 articles covering concepts, items, life systems and the DLC.

What you actually do in a session

• Build and sustain: place structures, power, production benches, food and temperature control so colonists stay fed, warm and sane.
• Manage people: track moods, needs, traits, health and social fights; a single bad mood can end in a breakdown or a colonist leaving.
• Handle threats: raids, mechanoids, disease and environmental events scale with your wealth and progress, so growth carries risk.
• Trade and travel: caravans, quests and factions connect your colony to the wider world.
• Shape the story: choose scenarios, storytellers and difficulty to make the game a relaxed builder or a grim survival test.

Expansions change the focus

The wiki groups official content into distinct expansions, each adding a different layer:

Who it suits

Players who enjoy systems-driven sandbox games, emergent storytelling and losing colonies to their own mistakes tend to get the most out of it. If you want a tightly scripted narrative or dislike micromanaging individual moods and inventories, the learning curve will feel steep.

A practical next step: read the wiki's Quickstart Guides and Basics pages before your first colony, then pick the base game with the default storyteller on a lower difficulty. Add expansions once you understand mood, wealth and raid scaling, since each one increases the number of systems you are juggling at once.

How do I start a new colony in RimWorld?

Start by choosing a scenario, an AI storyteller, and a difficulty, then let the game generate a world and map your starting colonists onto a tile. The in-game tutorial and the Learning Helper walk you through the first minutes, so you do not need to memorize anything before pressing start.

The setup order that matters

• Scenario: The default "Crashlanded" gives you three colonists and basic supplies, which is the most forgiving way to learn. Other scenarios change your starting people, technology and equipment, so treat them as difficulty modifiers.
• Storyteller: This controls the pace and type of events. Cassandra Classic tends toward steady escalation, Phoebe Chillax spaces events out, and Randy Random is deliberately unpredictable. Pick based on how much pressure you want, not on which is "best."
• Difficulty: Difficulty scales threats and rewards. Lower settings also soften some penalties, so it is reasonable to start low and raise it once you understand food, temperature and defense.
• World and tile: Generate the world, then inspect tiles for growing season, temperature, terrain and nearby factions. A temperate forest with year-round or long growing periods is easier than an extreme desert, tundra or swamp.
• Colonists: Check skills, passions, traits and health before you commit. Cooking, Construction, Growing, Medical, Mining and Intellectual cover most early needs; a colonist who cannot do several of these (from traits like Pyromaniac or a backstory restriction) creates avoidable problems.

Your first in-game hour

1. Pause immediately and read the Learning Helper prompts.
2. Set a stockpile and dumping stockpile so items stop littering the map.
3. Build a small room with a door, beds and a torch or lamp — shelter and light prevent mood and sleep problems.
4. Secure food: a small growing zone for a fast crop plus hunting or foraging. A freezer or at least a roofed, cooled storage room prevents spoilage.
5. Queue research toward what you actually lack, usually batteries, stonecutting or better food storage.
6. Plan defense early: a chokepoint or killbox near your base entrance, and give everyone a weapon before the first raid.

The RimWorld Wiki's RimWorld Wiki is the reference to keep open for specific numbers — it groups pages under Concepts, Items, Life and the DLC sections, and its Quickstart Guides and Colony Building pages are the closest thing to a structured beginner path. For a concrete decision rule: if a tile has a short growing season and you have no reliable indoor growing, either move on or plan hydroponics and heating before winter, because food collapse ends more colonies than raids do.

What are the differences between the DLCs like Royalty, Ideology, and Biotech?

The RimWorld Wiki treats the game's expansions as distinct systems layered onto the base colony sim, and the differences are best understood by what each one adds to your story rather than by size or price. Royalty leans toward a single powerful colonist and empire politics; Ideology leans toward colony-wide beliefs and rituals; Biotech leans toward genetics, children, and mechanoids. Each can be played separately, but they interoperate, so the practical question is which new decisions you want to manage every day.

Quick comparison

How they differ in play

Royalty is the most focused. It gives you a path for one or a few colonists to gain psychic powers and noble rank, which creates trade-offs: titles bring privileges but also expectations and restrictions. If you like quest-driven progression and a small number of exceptional characters, this is the most direct fit.

Ideology changes the whole colony's value system. You choose precepts that determine what is acceptable, from diet and apparel to slavery and ritual behavior. That makes it the strongest choice for players who care about narrative identity and want each colony to feel different. It also adds the most social and scheduling overhead.

Biotech is the broadest. It introduces reproduction and childhood, genes and xenotypes, and mechanitors with gestated mechs. This creates multi-generation colonies and new labor and combat options, but also new failure modes: children need care, genes need infrastructure, and mechs and pollution need management.

A practical way to choose

Start with the experience you want next. If you want a hero's journey with imperial quests, pick Royalty. If you want to define a culture and watch it shape daily life, pick Ideology. If you want families, gene-tailored colonists, and mech armies, pick Biotech. For a first expansion, many players find Ideology the most transformative because it changes routine decisions, while Biotech adds the most new systems to learn at once.

The RimWorld Wiki's DLC navigation is a good next stop: it links each expansion's concepts, items, and life systems, so you can read the specific mechanics before committing. See RimWorld Wiki for those pages.

How do I install and use mods in RimWorld?

Mods in RimWorld are installed either from the game's built-in Steam Workshop browser or by placing mod folders into the local Mods directory, then enabling them in the in-game mod list. The RimWorld Wiki documents the mod system and links to modding tutorials, but the practical steps below are general advice for how the game handles mods.

Installing from Steam Workshop

If you own the Steam version, subscribing to a mod on the Workshop downloads and installs it automatically. Launch the game, open Options → Mods, and the subscribed mod appears in the list. Check the box to enable it, then restart when prompted.

Installing manually

For mods downloaded outside Steam (or for the DRM-free build), place the unzipped mod folder into the game's Mods folder. On Windows this is typically under the RimWorld install directory; on macOS and Linux it sits in the user data folder. The folder you drop in must contain the mod's About folder with its About.xml — if you have to dig through two or three nested folders to find it, you have unzipped it one level too deep.

Enabling and ordering

The mod list is where most problems are solved:

• Enable each mod with its checkbox.
• Order matters. Core sits at the top and cannot be moved. Official DLC (Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, Odyssey) should load before most mods that depend on them. Mods that patch or extend another mod generally need to load after the mod they patch.
• Restart the game after changing the list; many mods only take effect on a fresh load.

A practical example

Suppose you install a small quality-of-life mod and a larger overhaul that both change the work tab. If the overhaul loads first, the small mod's change may be overwritten. Move the small mod below the overhaul in the list and restart. If the conflict persists, check the mod's own description for a required load order — authors usually state it.

Trade-offs and cautions

• Save compatibility: adding mods mid-save often works, but removing mods from an active save frequently causes errors or corruption. Test on a new colony first.
• Performance: large mod lists, especially those adding many pawns, items or world objects, increase load times and can slow late-game colonies.
• Version drift: a mod built for an older game version may break after an update. Check the mod's page for its supported version before enabling.

Next step

If something misbehaves, disable half your mods, restart, and re-enable in batches to isolate the culprit. For background on how the game's systems and DLC interact — useful when judging whether a mod will conflict — see the RimWorld Wiki.

What are the best strategies for managing colonists' mood and needs?

The short answer: treat mood as a system of buffers, not a single number. Keep needs satisfied enough that mood never sits near the mental-break threshold, and keep a few emergency levers ready for when it does.

Start with the biggest, cheapest levers

• Food variety and quality. Colonists grow unhappy when they eat the same thing repeatedly. Rotating meals, and upgrading to better-quality meals when your cook is skilled, is usually the highest-return mood fix per unit of work.
• Comfortable, well-placed beds and rooms. Sleep quality and room impressiveness feed directly into mood. A clean, decorated bedroom and a decent dining/recreation room do more than scattered small bonuses.
• Beauty where colonists actually spend time. Art, flooring and clean surroundings count most in bedrooms, dining areas and workshops. A beautiful room nobody enters is wasted work.

Match recreation to your population

Different colonists want different recreation types, and boredom is a common hidden mood drain. Provide a few different recreation buildings rather than many of one kind, and check individual mood breakdowns to see which need is actually unmet. If you want the full list of recreation types and their interactions, the RimWorld Wiki keeps them organized under Life and Building.

Decide your strategy by colony stage

Practical decision criteria

• If one colonist is chronically unhappy, read their mood breakdown before building anything. The cause is usually specific (ugly environment, hunger, pain, a trait) rather than general.
• If the whole colony is unhappy, it is usually environmental: bad food, cramped or dirty rooms, or too little recreation.
• If you only have time for one fix, improve food quality and variety first; it is cheap, repeatable and affects everyone.

For the exact numbers, traits and item effects behind these choices, the RimWorld Wiki's Concepts and Life sections are the place to check before you commit resources.

How does the combat system work in RimWorld?

The combat system in RimWorld is a real-time-with-pause tactical layer on top of a colony sim: you don't issue attack orders in the usual RTS sense so much as position colonists, choose targets, and let line-of-sight, cover and skill checks decide outcomes. The wiki's own outline splits this into Cover, Drafting, Offense, Structures and Tactics, which is a good map of what actually matters at the table.

The core loop

• Drafting turns a colonist into a directly controllable unit. Undrafted colonists fight poorly or flee; drafted ones hold position, aim and fire on your command.
• Cover is the central defensive mechanic. Walls, sandbags, chunks and even corners block or reduce incoming shots, and a defender behind cover is dramatically harder to hit than one standing in the open.
• Accuracy comes from the shooter's skill and weapon, modified by distance and the target's cover, so a high-skill colonist with a long-range weapon and clear sightlines is worth several panicked ones.
• Melee closes distance fast and ignores cover, which is why a single melee attacker in your backline can disrupt a firing line.

Practical consequences

The interesting part is that combat is entangled with everything else. Injuries create permanent scars and missing body parts, so a won fight can still cost you a colonist's productivity for years. Structures matter because killboxes, chokepoints and doors convert a fair fight into a lopsided one. Tactics matter because the AI storyteller scales raids to your wealth and population, so hoarding silver or recruiting aggressively raises the size of what arrives at your door.

A concrete example: three colonists with bolt-action rifles behind a wall corner can hold off a much larger tribal raid by focusing fire one target at a time, retreating through a door when flanked, and letting the wounded crawl to a medical bed. The same three colonists standing in an open field will usually lose.

Where to start

Read the wiki's Cover and Tactics pages before Offense; beginners lose colonies to bad positioning far more often than to weak weapons. If you want a decision criterion: build for chokepoints and cover first, then invest in weapons and armor, because terrain multiplies whatever gear you already have.

The wiki is community-maintained and covers the base game plus the Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly and Odyssey expansions, so check the version banner on a page before trusting a specific number. For the game itself, see RimWorld; for the wiki, RimWorld Wiki.