Rimworld is a very popular colony sim game.  I’ve seen a number of other games paint themselves with it’s brush, aping its style and mechanics, and yet none have come close to offering what Rimworld offers.  Rimworld puts you in the shoes of 3 survivors who crashland on a sparsely populated world at the edge of human habitation.  The survivors must immediately get to work building shelter, growing food, and finding some way to escape their new home.  The planet is also home to hostile pirates, insane robots, and murderous bug creatures, so the deck is stacked against you.  But if you can learn to grow and manage your colony, you can survive, thrive, and escape.

This basic outline of growing a colony and surviving against enemies and nature alike is used in a number of other games I’ve played. But none of them really offer the same experience that Rimworld does. Now, cards on the table, I think Rimworld is good-not-great, and I enjoy some of those other games a lot more. But I wanted to examine why it is I think that Rimworld is offering such a rarified experience when the basic outline is so widely used.

One of the things to understand about Rimworld is that this is a game of entropy.  Your position in the world is always decaying and you need to work just to maintain it.  You’re fighting an uphill battle just to survive, so growing and prospering is going to be pretty hard.  Food is not plentiful, so your first job is to immediately start farming, foraging, and hunting for raw food.  But raw food isn’t healthy or fun to eat, so you also need to set up a cooking station to make meals.  Meals spoil quickly so you need a refrigerator to store them in.  And unsanitary conditions lead to disease so you need to keep your food areas as clean as possible.  

Keeping your colony fed it a hell of a lot of work on its own, and that isn’t even getting into all the other entropy the game has, like how clothes degrade and need replacing, or how electric appliances short circuit, or how your colonist will eventually age and acquire new ailments that need treatment.  Surviving on a barren world is hard, and Rimworld wants you to realize it.

Now, other games I’ve played have included some amount of survival mechanics.  Kenshi and Oxygen Not Included both include the need for food.  But in those games I never really felt like I struggled to survive.  The games were tuned so that keeping everyone fed felt like an occasional annoyance, not a difficult necessity like it is in Rimworld.  

SURVIVAL IS DIFFICULT

In Rimworld, there’s a lot to do and only so much time in the day.  At the start of the game your colonists might spend half of their day on basic needs (eating, sleeping, etc) and a third of their day doing the work needed for the colony (cooking, getting food).  That leaves just ⅙ of their day to work on expanding and improving the colony, doing things like making new weapons or building better living quarters.  

You can try to finagle the numbers a but, but they’re pretty tight.  If you have your colonists work less on the colony’s needs, you might run out of food and starve.  If you don’t let colonists sleep, they’ll have a mental break and stop working for you.  Mental breaks and dead colonists decrease the total amount of work you have available, so it’s best to err on the side of caution and not rush towards colony expansion.

So in Rimworld, playing the game “well” involves making the colony run as efficiently as possible so you can get as much work out of your colonists as possible.  If the beds and food storage are near the dining halls, colonists don’t have to walk as far for breakfast.  And if you make sure the skilled planter does the farming and the skilled builder does the building, basic necessities will get done a lot faster than they would otherwise.  This lets you siphon off more and more of your colonists’ day towards expansion and improvement.

But this is where the “storytellers” of Rimworld come in.  At semi-regular intervals, the game will drop some crisis in your lap that needs solving.  Maybe half your colonists get sick and need healing, maybe space pirates start attacking your colony.  Either way you now have to drop what you’re doing and fight for survival.  

These crises are multifaceted in how they test you: first of all your colony needs to be well enough run that you can drop everything for a day without your colony going to crap.  Secondly, these crises will often bleed you of scarce resources, such as medicine or single-use-items.  Thirdly, you rarely come out of these crises unscathed.  Even if no colonists die, Rimworld battles tend to include long-term and even permanent injuries that not only need to be treated but can also make your colonists less efficient for the rest of their lives.  

These crises are an excellent way to test your colony and see how well you’re managing your supply of “work.”  If space pirates kill your best planter, can you still grow enough food to survive?  If half your colonists get space-flu, can the other half take care of them?  And after you’ve spent your resources and lost your colonists (or your colonists have lost their arms), can you build yourself back up and continue?

So survival is very hard, and the storyteller makes it harder, but even that’s not the end.  I said before that expanding your colony is part of the goal of getting off-planet, well Rimworld makes sure that expansion is even harder than survival.  

COLONY EXPANSION

To expand your colony you’re going to need new colonists, but while Rimworld is a war-torn backwater there aren’t just plenty of people wandering around happy to join your dirt farm.  There’s a few different ways to get new colonists:

First, you can incapacitate enemies who attack you, lock them in a jail cell, and then persuade them to join your colony.  This will require you to spend a lot of work feeding your prisoner and keeping them alive, as well as dealing with the occasional jailbreak.  For a colony just barely scraping by, a single extra mouth to feed can be the breaking point, so this method isn’t easy.  Also the game makes sure that the vast majority of enemies will die rather than surrender, so the Stockholm Syndrome route isn’t very productive.

The second option is to rescue colonists as part of a quest, at which point they will join you in gratitude.  This option is a gamble itself since the quests usually involve a lot of fighting, and as I said above Rimworld’s combat is a huge test to your colony’s survival.  Still, if you can manage it, this is usually the quickest route to growing your colony.  

Finally, you can sometimes pay to have a colonist join you, but this usually costs an exorbitant amount of money, way more than an early game colony can afford and way more than a mid-game colony would usually spend.  These opportunities are also few and far between, so even if you are rolling in cash this option isn’t a given.  

Finally, in all three of these options you don’t have the ability to “pick and choose” what type of colonist you want, you get what you get.  And if you end up with 4 artists who your single planter/chef/doctor struggles to keep alive, then oh well.

Expanding your colony is the easiest way to have more “work” available to do things.  The game knows this, and will fight you to prevent it.  As stated above, the game is finicky about giving you new colonists, but that’s not the only trick up its sleeve.  If you do luck into a big colony, you’ll find you don’t have as much extra work available as you might think.  This is because the game increases the difficulty as your base gets larger, and always keeps you in check to make things challenging.

NEVER SATISFIED

The game measures how much “wealth” your colony has.  Wealth includes the rooms your colonists sleep in, the food in their pantry, and the number and abilities of the colonists themselves.  As your colony expands, it has more wealth.  As it has more wealth, the colonists will get more and more picky.  

Remember what I said about mental breaks, they are one of the ways that the game forces you to look after your colonists’ needs.  If you don’t keep them happy, colonists may hide in their room, start setting fire to things, or start taking drugs in order to cope.  When you’ve just crashlanded on the planet, the colonists are happy just to be alive, and their mood will be high enough that they’re unlikely to break over little things like not having good food or clothing.  As your colony expands, your colonists’ needs expand too.  They’ll want more entertainment, better living quarters, more time to themselves.  As colonists’ needs increase, you need to spend more and more of their labor on meeting those needs, having less and less available to do other things.  

So growing your colony isn’t always going to give you more available “work.”  With 3 colonists, you can perhaps use ⅙ of their daily labor to do your own things, while ⅚ are needed for their survival.  If 3 more colonists are added, everyone may suddenly demand more niceties such that all their daily labor is spent keeping themselves alive and happy.  If another 3 colonists join, maybe people will demand so much stuff that you can’t keep all of them happy.  Again, good play means making your colony efficient enough that each new colonist gives you enough labor to offset the expense of keeping them alive and happy.

And even that’s not the end of it!  Your colony’s wealth will also determine the difficulties of the challenges that your colony faces.  Your crashlanded survivors will only be attacked by small animals or single, melee-armed humans.  A large and wealthy colony will be attacked by wasting diseases, herds of wild megafauna, killer robots and more.  The game is constantly testing you, and the tests get harder as you get better.

So that’s what Rimworld is.  I may not have explained it well but it is a game of entropy.  Every day is a fight for survival, your position in the world is always moving backwards.  You need to struggle to keep what you have and struggle harder to get anything more.  Even as you run forward, the game ups the speed on the treadmill giving you harder and harder challenges so you’re always struggling.

THE UNIQUENESS OF RIMWORLD

This contrasts pretty strongly with the other games that I’ve been told are “colony sims” and “like Rimworld.”  Now to lay my cards on the table, I like these other games a hell of a lot more than I like Rimworld. But I don’t like them for their “Rimworldness,” in fact I’d say I like them because they do a lot of things better than Rimworld, and their “Rimworldness” often holds them back. But these games keep being talked about in the same breath as Rimworld and I’d like to discuss why I think they really aren’t like it at all.

The closest approximation of Rimworld I’ve played is Oxygen Not Included.  Like Rimworld it gives you a few colonists and tells you to keep them alive and grow your colony.  Unlike Rimworld, keeping them alive isn’t the hard part.  I haven’t played more than 20 hours of Oxygen Not Included, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a mental break or been close to starvation.  Dirt and water on their own can be turned into cheap food, and a single skill can turn that food into something the colonists actually enjoy.  You don’t have to put a huge amount of energy into farming, fueling your stoves, or even keeping your food clean.  Food is very cheap and a simple CO2 trap keeps it fresh and unspoiled forever.

Not only that, Oxygen Not Included isn’t shy about giving you more resources.  Every hour or so of game time it gives you a new colonist for free.  You don’t have to take the colonist mind, but unlike Rimworld I was struggling to keep my base small, not struggling to grow it.  Before I knew it I had more labor than I knew what to do with, and half my colonists were wandering around aimlessly.  In Rimworld this is usually a sign of a very efficient colony, in Oxygen Not Included it was a sign that I didn’t really know what else I should be doing. 

Kenshi is a game I like much more than Rimworld, but again I think comparing the two is unfitting.  Kenshi will also let you set up a colony to farm, grow, and survive, but it’s not hard for the reason Rimworld is hard.  In Rimworld it’s hard to stay fed and clothed, and the random events add spice to your entropy sandwich.  In Kenshi it was very easy to stay fed and clothed, I found a single farmer and a single cook could keep 20 people fed no problem.  The difficulty in Kenshi is entirely in the politics and combat.  

Everywhere you can settle in Kenshi is already “owned” by some organization, either a nation or a bandit tribe, and so if you set up a dirt farm the owners will come to collect.  Sometimes they’ll demand tribute, sometimes they’ll ransack your storage, sometimes they’ll try to kill you, but keeping them assuaged or fighting them off is the real test of your colony.  

Unlike Rimworld and its “wealth” system though, Kenshi doesn’t have a way to scale these challenges up or down.  The same horde of bandits will descend upon a dirt farm as will descend upon a thriving metropolis with harpoons guarding the doors.  Once you’re strong enough to fight off the attacks, nothing else can touch you.  

Furthermore, Kenshi isn’t shy about giving you colonists either.  You can pay for people to join, but unlike in Rimworld the costs isn’t that great compared to the amount of money you can expect to have on hand.  It’s not difficult to fill your ranks in Kenshi, and as I said it’s not difficult to keep a large horde of people healthy and happy.  The difficulty is because (in true action movie fashion), untrained mooks are useless in combat while trained swordsmen cleave through them like butter. Kenshi rewards you for your skill, not your numbers.

So Rimworld is a game that’s all about Entropy, and I think that makes it different to every other “colony” sim I’ve ever played, including several I haven’t mentioned here.  It’s difficult to survive in Rimworld, most of your time will be spent on bare necessities with little left time over for expansion.  And even if you do expand, you’ve only increased the challenges you’ll face and the needs of your people, so they game ensures you’ll always struggle.  I’ve stopped playing Rimworld, but I think this is what people need to understand if they want to make a game to challenge it.  It’s not about adding farming and a “mental break” mechanic, it’s about making the mere act of existing a genuine struggle.  That’s what Rimworld is really about.