I’ve been playing Rimworld now for many months, so long in fact that I’ve written this Rimworld review, this brief Rimworld Colony Starting guide and this follow-up post here. So much information, yet there is still much more that I’ve learned. More information, that well help you during your first careful years in this sci fi survival game. The Rimworld Reddit is an incredible source of information, stories, and Rimworld mod help so it’s always worth going there. However, these are a few things I’ve figured out including how to deal with ‘Ancient Dangers’ within only a few days of starting your colony.
Dealing with Ancient Dangers
If you’ve just started the game, and you get alerted of an ancient danger. Do not break through the enclosure without planning. What is contained within, can completely destroy your colony in a matter of seconds if you release it without planning first. However, they can yield some pretty nice stuff, plus maybe some unconscious colonists you can capture, rescue or harvest. Often colonists found in these cryocaskets have gold or Plasteel on them.
Step 1
Wait until a large trading party (ideally around 10 people) is visiting you and is fairly close to your base.
Step 2
Take one colonist with construction and hauling and a gun and destroy the wall to the enclosed Ancient Danger. Ensure you can see what’s inside and then pause the game while you plan your actions. What happens next very much depends on the contents of the room.
If there are insects or mechanoids in there, then fire at them and then run back to the base making sure they are following you, ideally through the traders. It may take more than one shot, but once the traders see them, they’ll open fire and destroy all the insects and mechs they see. Ensure you heal up any traders left alive, for some rep boost. If you’re feeling extra fastidious you could always haul lots of stone blocks to outside of the danger to slow down anyone chasing you and to provide cover for your pawn.
Centipedes move slowly so you may need to pop into the doorway and keep firing, until they go down. They should get out eventually, but you may take a little damage killing them.
Another option is that there is nothing except Cryptosleep caskets inside. These Cryptosleep caskets can contain friendly, or hostile, corpses, injured or fully mobile colonists. If hostile, they do tend to be well armed, so divide and conquer is the way forward here.
Before opening the Cryptosleep casket, I would separate as many of the caskets as I could with walls (wood is fine, if you can’t use walls made from granite, limestone, slate chunks) so that if you open them and there is more than one hostile, at least they’re trapped behind a wall for now. Allowing you to take them down one by one. If they’re friendly, well it doesn’t take long to destroy the walls to save them.
It’s not fool-proof but with the exception of Centipedes, most enemies can be easily despatched with a little planning and waiting for the right moment to lure them.
Boars! Boars! Boars!
I used to avoid taming animals at the start of the game, mainly because they can consume a crap load of food. However, after a couple of self-taming boars joined my colony the entire thoughts about this changed.
- Firstly, you don’t need a high Handling skill to tame them. In fact, a fairly low 3 is all that’s required.
- Secondly, they can be taught to haul and save colonists, you can never have enough haulers right?
- Thirdly, they eat pretty much anything. When you get raided and you’re not sure where to put the dead attackers, well simply build a small freezer next to the stable and haul all the dead bodies into there. The boars just wander into there and have a good gnaw at the naughty men.
Before long I had about 20-30 boars, who would fight to the death for anyone attacking their master and were rapidly becoming quite the hauling force. If they start costing you too much in food, simply slaughter a few for some extra meat and leather. Simple.
Right, this one is a pandora’s box. Once opened you will never play Rimworld in the same way again, well not unless you’re strong enough to resist its powerful law in the future. It’s not even one of the many Rimworld mods, it’s built into the core game. If you go into the options menu, there is a little option called Development Mode. Activate that and a menu appears at the top of your screen. This little menu, among a great many other things can allow you to build things instantly (Even things you shouldn’t be allowed to build yet), you can instantly kill or resurrect someone, conjure up piles of any material you need.
Of course, you can also make it trickier for yourself by starting any event you want, including the different size raids. You can inflict illnesses on your own colonists, or simply cover your colony in filth. The difficult part is not using this beauty to overcome every issue you have. It’s something, I am woefully bad at.
So, there’s three more Rimworld tips for you. If you have some tips to share, then please do drop them in the comments, as I’m always happy to learn.
