Crashed Club

Basic Training Course

RimWorld is a colony construction and management simulator video game developed by Ludeon Games, this how the game looks:

Unlike how it looks, the game is quite complex and in-depth with its mechanics, you can do pretty much whatever your imagination tells you. From the most wholesome thoughts of giving a blind person their vision again to the most vile, such as removing all of their other senses, this game has pretty much everything at your hands and control… Kinda.

The game has a “AI Storyteller” which you pick at the start, and they will determine the tone, difficulty and periodically make events to affect your colony, much like a “director”. There are 3 of these storytellers, but for the purposes of this story, we will be talking about “Randy Random” only. This is his description in game:

Randy Random

“Randy doesn’t follow rules

He’ll generate random events, and he doesn't care if they make a story of triumph or utter hopelessness. It’s all drama to him.

Warning: Since Randy is truly random, he will sometimes send extremely difficult or unfair groups of events at you.

It makes for high drama - and unavoidable sacrifices."

I think you can get the picture of what he does by that description, he is truly random.

To add to that, your actions as the player do not come without consequences as well. The pawns you guide to build/ maintain your colony have feelings and beliefs, are capable of creating relationships with other pawns and have things they are capable of doing and things they struggle or can not do.

Below is the needs tab for a paw as a example:

We have all the basics such as hunger, comfort and rest bars, but we also have recreation, which is fulfilled by giving them things to have fun with that is not work, and beauty bar, which increases or decreases according to their environment. All of this + other things have an effect on the main bar called Mood.

Treat your pawns poorly and/or make them do something they hate and that bar will decrease, and if low enough, they will riot or have a mental breakdown resulting in you losing control of that pawn. These problems can be as simple as a pawn hiding in their room for a day or so to them going on a murderous rampage, it all depends on their personality.

This is one of the most unique parts of this game, management of your pawns' moods is the key to maintaining stability in your colony.

However, there is still something that decides how a pawn will be and act like, that is their stats, traits and backstory.

Below is a image of what a pawn looks like, their stats, traits and backstory:

I will breakdown this menu into everything necessary:

Here we have name, age, human type and faction at the top, I do not need to go in-depth on that, pretty much self-explanatory.

Childhood and Adulthood are really important parts of a pawn however. These are the pawns “Backstories”, and these will determine what they can and can not do and what they specialize in sometimes.

These are your pawns stats, they level up as they do them in the game and the higher it is, the faster/ more efficient they will be.

The fire besides some of them means “Passion”, the stronger the fire, the more passion they have for that work.

Passion increases the amount of exp they gain from working on that stat and gives a mood boost making them happier!

These are the… traits of your pawn!

There are many traits a pawn can have, from positive to negative ones, think of them as the “flavor” of your pawn.

For example: This one has a “Slow learner” which means they will level up their stats slower, “Jogger” means they will walk faster than everybody and “Trigger-happy” trait makes them shoot guns faster at the cost of accuracy.

I think you can see how these make all pawns different from each other.

The rest I do not need to get much into, they are either self-explanatory or not too relevant to the story.

And that is almost it!

There is also a few other things I wanted to mention before ending this part:

1. There is a religion system that has a huge effect on the mood system, but it was much simplified and mostly not mentioned in this story.

2. There are many factions that populate the world, all with different kinds of humans and humanoid creatures of different types of technologies, some hostile and others not.

The game is very complex, there are a lot of cogs moving all at the sametime in different speeds in this machine, but it is super fun too! I find a lot of joy managing your resources, working towards a long term goal while dealing with the hand your storyteller of choice gave you and the pawns at your colony. If this part made you want to play the game, I highly encourage you to buy it and play the game for yourself! It’s available on Steam. I only covered the parts of the game that are needed to fully appreciate the story, but if you need further help getting into the game, you can read more via this guide here!