Previously: Games Played – 2018

RimWorld Anecdotes

Raiders tunneling into Ancient Danger. Again, the screenshot looks dumb and meaningless. Just trust me when I say this was a super dramatic, white knuckle, holy crap moment.

People on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about RimWorld by now, but blog readers can enjoy these quips for the first time! Unless you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve probably seen them before. But now you can read more about what I meant with the power of more words!

That was my first game, a standard scenario on normal difficulty. A dozen cats just joined my colony out of the blue. It was adorable. They ate a lot of food. They meowed a lot. I mean constantly. It got kind of annoying actually. Four of them got pregnant, each of which had two kittens. I sold off most of the male cats after that. The kittens mewled and made little kitten sounds, which was adorable, and also kind of annoying after a while. Some of them were killed by monstrous raiders who went out of their way to target them.
This was one of my early attempts at what I call "RimWorld Roulette," where I choose a random starting scenario and a random starting map location and see what happens. I uploaded a few of the shorter, more disastrous efforts on my YouTube channel. This was my first jungle map, which I thought would be hard, but turned out to be easy mode, because you can grow crops year-round. The colony was so successful it was kind of boring, so I tried to hunt an elephant. The elephant charged. My hunter was gored in seconds, and since she was way on the other side of the map, I couldn't rescue her in time.
Ah yes, the memorable demise of the Bringa Tribe. A tribe of five that started on an arid scrubland map, the first time I'd played a tribe, and my first scrubland map. There are very few trees on a scrubland map, and not much food, and not much to hunt, but thankfully a year-round growing cycle. There was a marriage, then the guy cheated on his wife, and married the mistress. They broke down constantly. They were attacked mercilessly the whole time. The Bringa Tribe clawed and fought and survived through 25 half-hour videos, only to succumb to a heat wave which happened to hit at the exact time they were low on food and wood, and then a group of maddened iguanas finished them off as many of them were collapsed and slow from heat stroke. Things happened at the end there that we should never speak of.
This was what I called the Crypto Forest colony, another random scenario that happened to start in a mountainous scrubland with no resources. One of the three colonists was abducted by pirates almost immediately. I put the remaining two in a caravan and moved to a nearby temperate forest location just to give them a chance to survive. Then another colonist was carried off by pirates, leaving only one guy who had no fighting ability. He went beserk, and then the maddened yorkshire terrier arrived and mauled him because I couldn't order him to go inside. Then the Man in Black arrived and killed the terrier, and rescued the colonist at the last minute.
In the end, all of the original colonists of Crypto Forest died except one: A plucky little husky named Gambler. He was caught outside when a bunch of raiders shot him up pretty bad, but he was rushed to safety and saved in the nick of time. I left those guys with a very stable colony on its way to prosperity.
Started with one colonist. There were no trees at all on that map, no berries or fruit, and only a handful of iguanas to hunt. One starting condition had a constant toxic fallout that slowly killed anyone who wasn't under a roof. And I couldn't build anything. And had no food … except the two pets I started with. I tried to mine into a wall. I accidentally tunneled into the Ancient Danger, which is an enclosed room on every map containing advanced ancient mechanoids. I got the warning message but it was pretty clear I wasn't going to survive very long anyway so I just let the mechanoids out to put that poor colonist out of her misery.
That was my first exposure to an incendiary launcher, with a colony I dubbed the Chocoholics, because the two colonists started with 300 chocolate bars. At first, I thought it was a flame thrower. It's not a flame thrower. It's a rocket launcher that sets huge swaths of the ground and any people it happens to hit on fire. The filename of that video I recorded is called "brutal raid, fire, death and resurrection." I thought it was going to be the last one, because I thought my whole complex was going to burn down, but it started raining just before the fire reached the building. One of my colonists was shot dead with a head shot that destroyed her brain. I happened to have a "resurrecter mech syrum" that I got from a previous excursion and was able to use it to bring her back to life. Other than a couple of minor crises like that, the Chocoholics are a pretty chill, successful colony that I still go back to from time to time.
This was the Gold Helmet Brigade, six strong. They started on a mountainous map with like 50 gold helmets and not much else. I learned from this colony that starting with six people is not necessarily an advantage, because that's a lot of people to feed right away. They were constantly breaking down. Besides that, just as we were starting to get a super strong defensive base mined out of the mountains, I was attacked by 21 raiders with short bows and pilas. I had managed to make two short bows by then for the only two colonists who had shooting skill. I can only assume it was some sort of bug in the AI. They swarmed over us with predictable results. Fortunately, they decided to take the gold helmets (which were, in fact, quite valuable) and leave instead of slaughtering us to the last man. The slaughter came a little while later, in the next raid. Those guys set up mortars and bombed the Gold Helmet Brigade back to the stone age.
That's the Rocky Rangers colony. It was a disaster, and I got that AI bug again that sent way harder attacks than we could handle. It's a 5-part series on YouTube if you like watching train wrecks.
That was the Chocoholics again. Many of the ostriches died on the spike traps I had setup, but they pecked the holy hell out of a bunch of colonists who couldn't run fast enough and put them in the hospital for quite a while. Ostriches are \*fast\*. They almost made it all the way inside the front door and left blood everywhere.
This was another new colony I called the Empire Escapees, who I imagined had escaped one Empire and decided to build a New Empire. I was trying to make a military superpower. It didn't work out very well in the end as we will soon see. Other than the original three, I couldn't get anyone into this colony who was actually good at fighting. And one of the original three was shot in the head, causing brain damage that rendered her nearly useless for the rest of the game. The one new colonist who was actually good at combat went on a psychite binge, developed an addiction, then went completely berserk in the ensuing withdrawal. He left the colony to live with the animals, taking all of his combat gear with him. Then he took it all off and went naked. Then we captured him again and started coaxing him back into the colony. Then he went berserk again and broke out of the prison during a cold snap, still naked. Then he froze to death because he collapsed in the exact square where the prison cell door used to be and I couldn't enclose the prison again in time to re-capture him.
And that was the end of that New Empire. It was a spectacularly unexpected, disastrous ending after 27 half-hour videos, worse even than the demise of the Bringa Tribe. But at least nobody had to eat any corpses. Because they were all shot dead by two mechanoid centipedes with crazy powerful machine gun energy weapons who systematically worked their way through the entire complex killing everyone and everything. My mortar operator made it easy for them to get inside, since she accidentally dropped a mortar on her own base and opened up huge hole in the wall. The raiders, incidentally, had the luxury of being able to run away.

P. S. I probably shouldn’t have written all that text as “captions” but this is the new and improved WordPress editor and it’s just too much work to manipulate text in this thing now.

Next: On The Radar For 2019

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was converted from HTML to Markdown format before being built by Hugo. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to show them on the new site.

Note: Comments are disabled on older posts.