Odyssey preview #2: Gravships and space

Posted June 27th, 2025 by Tia Young

A look at RimWorld’s new nomadic colonies, shuttles, and orbital locations

Hey again! We’re back with our second blog post about the upcoming Odyssey expansion.

Release date: Odyssey comes out on July 11, 2025! (If you missed the announcement, you can check it out here. Wishlist Odyssey so Steam will let you know when it’s out!

Today’s blog describes Odyssey’s headline feature: the gravship. Your gravship is your flying home – a mobile colony you build, expand, move around the planet, and launch into orbit. Let’s get into it.

The gravship: your traveling base

It starts when a grav engine falls from the sky, still functional despite the crash. Along with some salvaged gravlite panels, you’ve got the beginnings of your first gravship.

It starts small: a deck built from gravlite panels, the engine placed at the center, a few thrusters, chemfuel tanks, and a pilot’s console. Add some basic rooms – barracks, kitchen, storage – and get your colonists aboard.

The moment you take off, the world opens up.

Travel all over the planet. Explore exotic biomes, discover new landmarks, and chase quests across continents. Or, set your own goals: circumnavigate the globe in 100 days, recruit a team entirely made up of kidnapped enemies, collect one of every new animal, or build a gunship covered in turrets.

And when it’s time to leave? Just lift off. Your whole colony comes with you – colonists, animals, prisoners, gear, even the raiders who happened to be standing in your hallway.

Eventually, you’ll want more space. That’s when you start hunting for gravcores– rare gravtech you can only find in dangerous places. You’ll need to search through insect megahives, trap-filled ruins, and frozen space debris in low orbit, patrolled by human scavengers and killer mechanoids.

You can use gravcores to build gravship extenders so your ship can support more substructure, making room for bigger workshops, hydroponics gardens, and more. Or use them to create gravcore power cells as an advanced power solution that passively draws energy from the ship’s gravitational field. You can also use gravcores in signal jammers which allow you to slip past space defense systems and land on protected orbital platforms.

Some upgrades can only be acquired as rewards from grateful allied factions, ancient structures, and space wrecks. A fuel optimizer gets you more trips out of your chemfuel before refueling. The gravship shield generator creates a massive temporary shield around your ship, which can help you survive pirate drop pod ambushes. Activate it mid-raid and enjoy the protection it gives your colonists against enemy gunfire. And a pilot subpersona core provides a low-grade AI that reduces the chances of your pilot doing an oopsie while flying (though nothing can fully account for human error).

The gravship isn’t your only travel method. You can also build passenger shuttles – small, short-range vessels perfect for rescue missions, trade runs, or quick hops to places your gravship can’t go. They can be placed on your gravship’s substructure so you can take them with you if you decide to leave a map. Shuttles can also fly into orbit.

Whether you’re a nomadic explorer, a flying trader carrying peacocks and porcupines, a stationary colony only using shuttles, or a hermit living in an asteroid, Odyssey opens up all kinds of new playstyles.

Space

Yes, we’re finally going to space!

Space requires some prep to keep your colonists safe. Seal your ship with airtight walls to protect your colonists from the vacuum. Set up a life support system: oxygen pumps, heaters, and a stable power supply to keep it all running. Create airlocks by using vac barriers and metal doors, and equip your spacefaring colonists with vacsuits and vacsuit helmets, or other advanced armors.

As mentioned before – shuttles are also capable of entering orbit, as are transport pods. So it’s still accessible without building a gravship, you’ll just have less life support, and transport pods are one-way, so you’ll need to find a way back…

Gravships take you into low orbit where there are many orbiting objects to explore. Rare locations require you to build an orbital scanner which passively detects overhead orbital wrecks, satellites, asteroids, orbital platforms, and mech platforms. Alternatively, you can discover new orbital sites by hacking ancient uplink satellite dishes scattered around the planet.

Orbital wrecks: The history of a planet can be seen in its orbital debris fields, abandoned platforms and space stations. You can search these wrecks for valuable loot – if you’re willing to fight off rival salvagers.

Satellites: Most are unmanned and inhospitable, built for narrow purposes like power collection, surveillance, or orbital weaponry. Landing on one means navigating the narrow bridges and travelling long distances between platforms to scavenge valuable technology. But many are still guarded by automated security systems – locked doors, turrets, and drones.

Asteroids may look like empty rocks, but they’re packed with value. Many still hold veins of plasteel, uranium, and gold ore – remnants of old mining operations that never finished the job. All asteroids are made of vacstone, a special rock type used to craft vacstone blocks and gravlite panels.

Some asteroids are more unusual. Rare archean trees occasionally grow directly on their surface, feeding on trace elements in the rock and transforming patches of barren stone into fertile soil. (A plucky spacefaring colonist might consider planting potatoes here.)

Occasionally, you’ll find asteroids with hollow cores where previous visitors have left stashes of treasure. You could break in, but come ready to deal with any remaining defenses.

(Tester screenshot: Example of an asteroid base with all expansions active.)

Orbital platforms: These floating platforms are orbital settlements used by trading guilds. They don’t appreciate visitors, so landing is considered an act of aggression. Just approaching them safely requires your ship to have a signal jammer aboard to get past the platform’s defenses.

You can also use an orbital scanner to find abandoned platforms if you’re not ready for these interactions. Just be careful of the defense systems. It’s also rumoured that fugitives tend to hole up in these places… and people pay good money to dig them out.

Mechanoid platforms: These wrecks promise the most advanced gravtech and unique treasures, but murderous machines still lurk in the shattered structures. It’s a maze of airless hallways, crawling with machines, turrets and sealed doors at every turn, with nowhere to flee except the void of space.

The gravship scenario

Odyssey comes with a new starting scenario designed for experienced players who want to dive straight into gravship gameplay, or start a nomadic colony.

You begin with a three-person crew and a functional gravship, docked at an abandoned orbital relay. While salvaging equipment, your colonists unknowingly activate a mechanoid beacon. Within moments, a war alert pings across the void – and now, the mechanoids are hunting you.

They won’t stop until every last member of your crew is dead. To stop them, you must find and defeat the mechhive itself.

Next time

Thank you for reading! Odyssey releases in 2 weeks on July 11, 2025. Wishlist so that you’re notified when it’s out!

Let us know what you think over on Reddit, X, and BlueSky.

Next week, we’ll look at the new animals that you can tame, train, and eat in Odyssey.

See you soon!

– Ludeon Studios

Website | X | BlueSky | Reddit | Facebook

New map features, landmarks, biomes, and weather

Hey everyone! We’re back with the first Odyssey blog post where we take a closer look at the expansion’s new content. We’ll be posting leading up to release – which is in approximately 3 weeks.

If you missed Odyssey’s announcement, check it out here, and please wishlist Odyssey on Steam.

Today’s post is all about the planet. We look at the map features and landmark system, five new biomes, and new weather types.

We spent a lot of time on new map generation systems and content Odyssey. For the gravship to be fun, you need new and exciting places to travel to!

(And don’t worry, we’ll be going into detail about the gravship itself soon.)

Map features and landmarks

Odyssey revamps map generation with over 85 dynamic map features. These include lava caves, obsidian deposits, drug stockpiles, and hippo habitats. Multiple features can be combined together on one map. Some are random, while others depend on their world map location. For example:

River varieties: Rivers come in more shapes and sizes, and they’re affected by their location on the world map. You’ll find confluences at points where rivers meet, deltas where rivers reach the ocean, and islands where the current splits and rejoins. At the river’s source is a headwater – a set of big water pools that flow downstream.

Mixed biomes: With Odyssey, biomes can blend together on a single map. For example, a map might have a temperate forest in the north and a desert in the south. This creates a mix of plants, animals, terrain and threats from both biomes.

Features and biomes can combine in countless ways – you might settle on a tropical swamp/forest peninsula with wild cocoa trees, extra fish, and warm, sunny weather.

Landmarks are the most dramatic and gameplay-changing map features, and frequently combine with multiple map features. They’re marked with custom art on the world map. A chemfuel refinery landmark, for example, might include an industrial building guarded by security systems – alongside a toxic lake, ancient heat vents, and an insect megahive burrowed beneath.

There are over 45 landmarks to explore – here are just a few of them:

Bays, lakes, atolls, archipelagos, peninsulas, and islands: Settle near the water or on coastal islands, and build your base on heavy bridges directly over the water. Fish for food, build quaint fishing villages, adapt to springtime floods, and enjoy the natural protection water provides from enemies.

Abandoned colonies: Why start from scratch? Take over old bases and make them your own. You might find working heaters, defenses, charged batteries, ripe crops, stocked barracks, medical stockpiles, and more. (But what happened? And why did they leave?)

Valleys, crevasses, caverns, chasms, and hollows: These rock formations create defensible and visually striking maps. Undergrounders will love the winding tunnels, natural chokepoints, and surrounding rock – they offer the perfect foundation for your subterranean fortress.

Oases: Lush, isolated sanctuaries hidden in the desert. Live off the rich soil, swim in the warm water, and carefully harvest the few precious palms.

Ancient garrisons, launch sites, chemfuel refineries, and warehouses: These ancient structures can be looted, used as temporary bases, or repurposed as deadly traps for raiders. But be careful – their security systems may still be functional.

Landmarks are great for starting colonies, exploring new areas, finding quests, or making pit stops with caravans, shuttles, and gravships. But even “ordinary” map tiles offer surprises and new content. We hope that this richness and variety will make each playthrough even more unique.

New biomes

Odyssey adds five new biomes, each with their own survival challenges and advantages.

Glowforests: Beneath sulfur-choked skies, the world glows with bioluminescent fungal light. There’s no day – only the shimmer of boomshrooms and clouds of hallucinogenic spores. Normal crops won’t grow, but who needs the sun? Convert biomass into chemfuel and power your own hydroponics garden. Fish in the marshy ponds, hunt creatures that live among the mushrooms, and give your colonists psilocaps to enjoy if they start complaining about the dark.

Lava fields: Settling near active volcanoes is madness – and opportunity. The mineral-rich soil is perfect for crops, and obsidian and rare ores lie exposed on the surface. But the land is dangerously unstable. Volcanic debris crashes down from above. Ash scorches your colonists’ lungs. Lava can erupt without warning, consuming entire outposts – along with their people, animals, and possessions. Survival requires planning and quick-thinking: build fireproof walls, divert lava with barriers, and keep firefoam tools close for emergencies.

Scarlands: It was once a thriving city. Now, it is a shattered wasteland leveled by weapons of mass destruction. You can build here, but survival is brutal. The water is poison, the rain is toxic, and scaria runs rampant among the wild animals. Come well-prepared with supplies and firepower – there’s no food or help out there. Treasure may lie buried in the rubble, but the old defenses still work, and dormant mechanoids sleep in the ruins, waiting for their next chance to kill.

Grasslands: Endless golden fields, fertile land, and strong winds – this is a cowboy’s paradise! The long growing seasons are perfect for farming, and the steady breeze keeps your turbines spinning day and night. But trees are scarce, and drought can strike at any time – don’t count on the rain to get you out of trouble. Out here, fire moves fast, and many homesteads have gone up in flames. Space out your ranch, pave paths as firebreaks between pastures, and build with stone to keep your cattle safe.

Glacial plains: Food is scarce, fuel is precious, and the cold never lets up. Inspired by ice age survival, this biome is characterized by cold temperatures, crevasses, and prehistoric animals like mastodons, scimitar cats, and greatwolves. Carve shelter into the glaciers, fish from ice holes, and hunt the megafauna for meat and fur. But the real prize lies buried within the ice: the frozen ruins of a lost world. You’ll find collapsed homes, crates of forgotten supplies, and cryptosleep caskets that still pulse with life.

Dynamic terrain and weather

Odyssey adds several systems to make maps feel more organic and alive.

For example, the terrain changes! Water freezes and melts as the temperature shifts. In winter, thin ice forms over bodies of water. Build a cozy fishing hut on top, cut a hole in the ice, and add a campfire so colonists can fish in warmth all winter long.

Lakes, rivers, and ponds can flood in spring or during torrential rains. Shallow floodwater will spread across the land, destroying crops and irritating your colonists with wet feet. Build barriers like walls, sandbags, or barricades to stop water from getting everywhere.

There are also new weather types in Odyssey.

Sandstorms sweep through deserts, getting sand everywhere – annoying your colonists and leaving a big mess to clean up. Nobody likes sand.

Torrential rain causes rivers and lakes to overflow, flooding the land. The downpour also makes it hard to see or aim accurately.

Toxic rain occurs in the scarlands, and it’s dangerous for colonists caught outside. It causes toxins to build up in their bloodstream, gradually poisoning them.

Strong winds hinder movement across open ground, but keep your wind turbines turning.

Blizzards bring heavy snow and fierce winds, obscuring vision and turning walks into slow, cold trudges.

Blind fog rolls in thick, drastically reducing visibility and the maximum range of weapons and abilities.

Overcast skies are gloomy and block out the sun, decreasing solar power generation.

More blog posts on the way

We’re really excited to see the maps and colonies you guys build when you get your hands on Odyssey. Even the dev team is surprised with the maps we make – every map is truly unique.

This is just the first preview, and next week, we’ll look at the gravship and spaaaaaace!

Until then, wishlist Odyssey on Steam, and chat with us about today’s blog on Reddit, X, and BlueSky.

– Ludeon Studios

Website | X | BlueSky | Reddit | Facebook

Announcing Odyssey and update 1.6!

Posted June 11th, 2025 by Tia Young

Build a flying base, explore exotic biomes, tame unique animals, and launch into orbit.

Hey everyone, it’s time. We’re thrilled to announce RimWorld’s fifth expansion, RimWorld – Odyssey!

Odyssey enriches the world and expands your adventure beyond a single map. Build a gravship – your flying home – to travel across the planet. Settle in new biomes filled with diverse landforms and exotic wildlife. Go on quests to hunt the alpha thrumbo or raid ancient cryptosleep bunkers. Launch into orbit and scavenge tech from space stations and asteroids. But out in the void, an ancient machine mind stirs…

The free 1.6 update for the base game will also launch at the same time as Odyssey! 1.6 includes big performance improvements, quality of life changes, better tools for designing bases, caravan improvements, greater variety in maps, flying chickens, and more.

If you’d like to test update 1.6, it’s currently available on the unstable Steam beta branch. (See the section “Update 1.6” at the bottom of this page for details.)

Odyssey releases in one month! In the meantime, we’ll be posting weekly teaser blogs with deep dives into the new content, so watch this space.

ABOUT ODYSSEY

Build your own gravship

Build your own gravship and travel across the planet! Land anywhere you want to explore, hunt for treasure, scavenge forgotten gravtech, and bring back souvenirs like a charming hermit crab or a gold-plated charge rifle.

It starts small: just a grav engine, a few rooms, some thrusters, and a tank of chemfuel to get you airborne. But over time, it becomes a home – a mobile colony of bedrooms, labs, hospitals, workshops, and everything else your colonists need.

To expand your ship and go further, you’ll need to collect gravcores. You can recover these glittertech devices from insect-infested caverns, ancient reactors rigged with traps, crashlanded space wrecks, and orbital platforms.

Odyssey is about exploration, adventure, and new ways to play. Live as nomads that move with the seasons, and kidnap raiders by taking off while they’re aboard! Embark on a 100-day journey around the world, and collect one of every animal to build your own zoo. Design the weirdest, ugliest, most gloriously unhinged gravship and see how far it gets you. Or, hunker down inside an asteroid and live as long as you can in space. You can play Odyssey any way you like.

Explore new biomes and landmarks

Odyssey adds several new biomes that change how and where you play.

  • In the glowforest, bioluminescent mushrooms and psychedelic spores glow in the permanent darkness. Geothermal vents belch sulfur that blocks out the sun, and normal plants can’t grow here – you’ll need to survive on fungi alone.
  • The scarlands are the war-torn remains of once-thriving cities. Craters rupture the roads, vents release heat and gas, and toxic rain pours constantly. Mechanoids stalk the ruins and the only surviving animals are dangerous mutants.
  • The grasslands are a ranching cowpoke’s dream: endless fields of golden fertile land. While trees are rare here, the growing seasons are long and bountiful, and strong winds guarantee power for your turbines. However, drought can strike at any time and many farms have been lost to the raging brushfires.
  • The glacial plains feel prehistoric: blizzards smother the land, herds of mastodons roam, and scimitar cats prowl the frozen expanse. Carve shelters into walls of ice, or seek refuge among the buried frozen ruins and live as the old ones did.
  • The lava fields constantly change. Rivers of molten rock flow across the land in sudden bursts, swallowing up animals, buildings, and colonists alike. Volcanic debris crashes down from the sky, and thick ash makes it hard to breathe. Stay safe by building barriers to divert incoming lava and wear face masks to protect your lungs.

The new landmarks system combines with these biomes to create endless landscape variation. Landmarks have different features that can affect everything from map generation to plant variety to rare resources like obsidian. Some features even add explorable underground maps – like the insect megahive! No two landmarks are alike.

  • Carve sprawling tunnels into cliffs, chasms, crevasses, and valleys for natural defenses – undergrounders rejoice!
  • Settle near the ocean and build quaint fishing towns on islands, archipelagos, atolls, peninsulas, and fjords, or construct a whole town on the water using Odyssey’s new heavy bridges!
  • Take over abandoned colonies and repurpose them for your own base. Repair the walls, use the furniture, harvest the gardens, and give someone’s old home a second life.
  • Raid ancient structures for resources like chemfuel, weapons, packaged meals, components, minerals, and more.

Survive beyond the atmosphere

Break past the atmosphere and fly into orbit with your gravship!

In space, you’ll land on wrecked orbital platforms, explore derelict satellites, and mine ore-rich asteroids. But look out – rival space scavengers don’t take kindly to competition.

Mechanoid wrecks promise the most advanced gravtech and unique treasures, but murderous machines lurk among the frozen debris.

Space is harsh: no oxygen, sub-zero temperatures, and a single hull breach can be lethal. Airtight walls protect your colonists and their pets from the vacuum of space. Keep the power on, or the oxygen pumps will shut down. Build airlocks with vac barriers to prevent depressurization, and equip spacefaring colonists with vac suits before they exit into the void.

Cute, terrifying, and intelligent wildlife

Odyssey adds over 40 new animals that can be tamed, trained, traded, and eaten. You might start your game in the grasslands with a single crow that steals your crops, but as your story progresses, your gravship could end up as an aviary filled with swans, peacocks, flamingos, and quail.

Animals can be taught new skills that make them cute and useful. For example, cats and dogs can now nuzzle colonists more often to lift their mood. Predators like wolves and big cats will hunt down specific targets for you. Other pets may dig up minerals or bring back foraged snacks. Even animals that can’t normally be trained – like the humble walrus – can now be upgraded using a sentience catalyst: an ultratech injection that enables the animal to learn new tasks. So now Wally the walrus can fight your enemies.

Some species can do more than just bite and scratch. The mastodon’s deafening trumpet rattles enemies and throws off their aim, while the legendary alpha thrumbo’s roar is said to send attackers fleeing before the first shot is fired.

You can also fish! Different fish appear in different biomes and bodies of water. Colonists can reel in meals like tuna and salmon, as well as other strange catches.

Quests across the planet and beyond

You’ll discover new quests through ancient maps, passing travelers, and mysterious signals.

  • Track down the mythical alpha thrumbo by following its herd across the wilderness. If you can bring it down, its priceless, razor-sharp horn is yours.
  • Raid ancient mercenary crypts where the soldiers have recently awoken from cryptosleep. They guard glitterworld supplies, and the gang leader owns a valuable weapon that could be yours.
  • Abandoned orbital platforms and derelict satellites drift through low orbit. They promise stockpiles of loot, but you’re competing with hostile salvage crews. Sometimes orbital fugitives hole up in the wreckage. There are also defensive turrets, traps, and leftover mechanoids.
  • Asteroid mines offer rich veins of plasteel, uranium, and gold, but they’re vulnerable to pirates and debris from space. Get in and get out, fast.
  • And more!

New weapons, traps, and enemies

A new unique weapon system lets you arm your colonists with special weapons they find – a sawed-off shotgun clears the room in a second, an AI-assisted rifle scope makes the worst shooter accurate, and a fully golden revolver just looks cool.

New gear helps with new threats. Hunter drones chase their targets and explode on contact. Wasp drones jab their prey with paralyzing needles. Ancient sentries patrol ruins with a scattergun to blast apart intruders. The cyclops mechanoid barrages enemies with shield-piercing gamma beams. And deep below, the insect hive queen stirs among her chittering spawn.

The machine hive mind

Far above the planet, the mechhive pulses with hate. Its mechanoids reproduce endlessly, and they will never stop attacking until every human on the planet is dead. When you reach the inhuman mind behind this terror, you face a choice. Will you destroy it and shut down every mechanoid for good – or take control of its power?

Odyssey comes with a brand new album of music by Alistair Lindsay, composer of the RimWorld soundtrack. If you’d like to support Al, the OST will also be available to purchase the same day Odyssey releases.

UPDATE 1.6

Update 1.6 is available right now on the unstable Steam branch for public beta testing! To get access, go to your Steam library, right-click RimWorld and select “Properties”, then select the Betas tab and choose branch “unstable”. Restart Steam if your game does not automatically update.

(Note that the main branch that most people play on is unaffected and still on version 1.5 for now.)

This public 1.6 unstable branch should allow modders to update their mods before update 1.6 is released to everyone in about 1 month. We also have the 1.6 Modder Primer document to help with this process.

Here’s the full 1.6 changelog, or you can read the summary below!

Performance improvements: A major part of update 1.6 is performance optimizations, especially for late game colonies that often struggle with performance. We reworked many systems to spread out their workload. The pathfinding system is now fully multithreaded and batched, and the lighting system is also multithreaded to make it much faster. There were lots of optimizations made to caravan foraging calculations, egg-laying pawns, alerts, hauling, animal pen calculations, as well as fixes to several major memory leaks.

We significantly reduced game launch times in version 1.6! For example, on our development machines version 1.5 previously launched in 18.57s with all expansions. Now version 1.6 launches in 4.66s – and that’s with an additional expansion!

Note that your startup times and performance improvements may differ from our tests due to bottlenecks unique to your PC or mods.

Better planning: Plans are more versatile than ever. Sketch out your base using 9 colors to differentiate your plans. Use blue for living quarters like rec rooms and bedrooms, orange for production and workshops, red for furniture, and so on. Plans are a lot easier to use too. You can copy and paste plans, rotate them, and give them names to remember what they’re for.

Designator draw styles: Designator tools, like placing walls and floors and giving orders, now have different drawing styles – this changes their pattern when you click and drag them. Previously, there were only rectangles and straight lines. Now, you can choose from shapes like angled lines and filled or empty ovals. Great news for builders who want to add more shape variety to their base! (No more googling pixel circle generators.) Squares are also easy to make – just hold control while drawing with a designator.

Caravan camps and quality-of-life changes: Pitch temporary camps while travelling as a caravan. This creates a playable map for your colonists to eat, stabilize, and regroup when someone’s bleeding out, starving, or sick with the flu. But don’t get comfy – after a few days, enemies will close in. Camps can also be formed when a caravan would be considered “lost” (like everyone becoming incapacitated from food poisoning), giving you one last shot at survival.

The caravan tab makes it a lot easier to load or unload items. And in an emergency, you can order your caravan to depart immediately – colonists will get out of there ASAP, leaving behind unpacked items, animals, and even downed friends.

Easier building upgrades: You can now place blueprints over certain buildings to swap materials or upgrade them. This applies to walls, conduits, doors, sandbags, barriers, fences, chairs, and beds. For example, you can place a plasteel wall blueprint over an existing wooden wall – this means you don’t have to manually deconstruct the wall, wait for it to finish, and then place the new wall blueprint down.

Search bar improvements: The in-game search bar (bottom right corner magnifying glass, or hotkey “Z”) is better at finding things. It’ll look at your colonists’ gear and any containers, and you can use it on the world map. We’ve also added a search bar to the save / load menu to find that old favorite savegame “asjkdsjkdfs2_final_final2_dying”.

Map generation: We’ve reworked how map features behave to make the world feel more organic and varied. Rivers now curve more naturally and carve walkable banks when running through rock – larger rivers even form canyons. They also better match their angle on the world map and can generate with fertile riverbank terrain for farming.

We’ve made rocks more interesting! Coasts and mountains come in more diverse shapes, and the world map now shows where features like caves are in the tile inspect pane.

We’ve also added smaller environmental flair like cypress trees that grow in mud and marsh, and glow pods that always spawn by insect hives for nasty ambiance.

Flying animals: Chickens, ducks, and geese can now fly! Flying makes them faster, lets them soar over obstacles like fences, and means they can land or leave from just about anywhere.

Scaria rework: Scaria got scarier! Infected animals now look the part – mangy, red, and covered in sores. You really don’t want to get close, because wounds from scaria-infected creatures cause “scaria infections” – these behave like a normal infection, but cause full blown scaria upon reaching 100%. Humans turn too.

Room changes: Colonists are happy with mediocre bedrooms, and they’re less upset by awful ones. Medical beds contribute less toward a room becoming a hospital due to situations where barracks could become hospitals from a single bed. Some production buildings now get their best work done when they’re in the right room (e.g. research benches in labs). This makes it more rewarding to build reasonable-looking bases with purpose-specific rooms, instead of stuffing everything into one big hell-chamber.

Armor and weapon changes: We’ve rebalanced some combat gear to make things more useful and less clunky. Plate armor benefits more from high-end materials. Advanced armors don’t slow you down as much. Flak jackets and pants offer better sharp protection, while flak vests no longer cover the shoulders.

Some ranged weapons are deadlier. Sniper rifles fire faster and hit more often. Charge lances reach further. Revolvers and miniguns are more accurate. Pila hit harder and faster. Charge rifles deal more damage and reach further. LMGs shoot faster with a small damage boost.

UI improvements: On the world map, there’s a “Jump to…” gizmo that shows your colonies, caravans, and quest locations so you don’t have to spin the globe to find them. There are also special colored borders for world objects: green for active maps and yellow for anything you type in the search bar. You can rename bills and use the new “make default” button for policies. Plus many minor but convenient UI improvements.

New art: Water is more beautiful – it reflects the sky and ripples when walked through. There are also new desiccated corpses for big birds and filth textures for sandbags.

Quality of life: Tons of little QOL changes! Quests joiners now show their best skill before you accept them so it’s not a total dice roll. Colonists always prioritize burying people in sarcophagi over graves, and they won’t burn your medical supplies by default if you have a “burn drugs” bill. They’ll also move items out of the way before building doors. Plus, steam geysers are easy to spot when placing a geothermal generator.

Miscellaneous: We’ve got a bunch more small things for 1.6 that are covered in the full changelog. Among these changes are paintable bridges, the ability to dress other people (like prisoners), and toggles on special trees to stop them from being accidentally cut down.

What’s next?

Wishlist RimWorld – Odyssey and come back for our weekly dev blogs showcasing Odyssey’s content.

We’ve heard what you were asking for and it made sense. After 10+ years of building RimWorld colonies on a single map, Odyssey opens up an entirely new play style. We’re super excited to see what you’ll do with it (and all your wild, beautiful, and ridiculous gravships).

Chat with us about Odyssey and 1.6!

If you’d like to help test the 1.6 unstable build and report bugs, join the RimWorld Official Development Discord.

Thank you for your incredible support, see you in the skies!

– Ludeon Studios
Website | X | BlueSky | Reddit | Facebook

Incoming transmission: 06.11.2025

Posted June 9th, 2025 by Tia Young

New merch arrivals have crashlanded!

Posted May 7th, 2025 by Tia Young

Storyteller and thrumbo t-shirts, plus your new favorite desk mat

Hey everyone, we’ve teamed up with Fangamer to bring you a new wave of RimWorld merch! (And three makes the perfect start.)

All items are available now on the Worldwide store and the EU store!

The new Fangamer collection includes:

  • Wisest Creature T-Shirt: Soft, thrumbo-grade apparel, plus a unique Thrumbo stamp sticker.
  • The Storytellers T-Shirt: Featuring Cassandra, Phoebe, and Randy, as well as a RimWorld logo sticker.
  • Home Base Desk Mat: 35×16″ of colony to play on. (Hidden conduits only.)

Hope to see you in the wild wearing these!

Ludeon Studios

X | BlueSky | Website

The RimWorld merch store is live until Jan 9!

Posted November 22nd, 2024 by Tia Young

Limited edition Randy Random hoodie, muffalo plush, megasloth plush, and RimWorld sticker pack!

Hi everyone, the official RimWorld merch store is live, but only until Jan 9, 2025!

We’re sending out transport pods with our new Randy Random hoodie, muffalo plush, megasloth plush (plus wool), and RimWorld sticker pack!

They’re all available here: https://rimworld.store/

And a little reminder that you can keep up to date with all things RimWorld on our XReddit, and website (you’re here now)!

– Ludeon Studios

20% off the bundle or 20% off the game you don’t own!

Hi there, we’re back with the Terraform Titans Duo where you’ll get the ultimate survival and strategy experience!

With Oxygen Not Included and RimWorld, you’ll master resource management, build intricate bases, conquer hostile planets and face unpredictable challenges. These two critically acclaimed games offer endless hours of creativity, strategy, and survival in harsh, off-world environments on the soil and in the stars!

Get 20% off with the bundle! And if you already own one of the games, get 20% off the other!

Oxygen Not Included: Oxygen Not Included is a space-colony simulation game. Deep inside an alien space rock your industrious crew will need to master science, overcome strange new lifeforms, and harness incredible space tech to survive, and possibly, thrive.

RimWorld: A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.

Happy 11th Birthday RimWorld!

Posted November 4th, 2024 by Tia Young

That’s 11 years of Randy raids, Zzzts, and swarms of rabid guinea pigs. Thank you for celebrating another trip around the sun with us! ☀️

RimWorld’s birthday and community event!

Posted October 8th, 2024 by Tia Young

Celebrate RimWorld’s birthday with us and participate in our community event

RimWorld turns 11 years old on November 4th! To celebrate, we’re holding a birthday community event to showcase all things RimWorld. 🎂

Everyone that participates (and follows the rules below) will be entered in a random giveaway for one of three sets of YouTooz’s War Queen figure and RimWorld pin sets!

We’ve also got a small update for RimWorld in version 1.5.4241, and the changelog is below.

Thank you so much for continuing to support and show your love for our game over the last decade.

Happy birthday RimWorld! 🎉 – Ludeon Studios

RimWorld Birthday Community Event 🎂

By participating in our birthday event, you’ll be entered in a random giveaway to get one of three sets of YouTooz’s War Queen figure and RimWorld enamel pins!

Please read all of the event rules and giveaway details before participating.

Event rules

  • 1 entry per person.
  • To participate, share your RimWorld creations with us! It can be RimWorld fanart, in-game screenshots or gameplay videos (vanilla/non-modded content only), writing, and other creative media. Share it with us by replying to the X @LudeonStudios birthday post or share a link on the official RimWorld birthday Reddit thread. All submissions must be human-made works, no AI-generated content permitted.
  • Participation closes on Oct 25, 11:59PM Pacific. Giveaway recipients will be announced on Oct 28 on Twitter/Reddit by TiaPixel.
  • Those selected for the giveaway will be contacted on Twitter/Reddit by TiaPixel (and no one else, be careful if someone other than TiaPixel reaches out).
  • You must respond before Oct 31 or someone else will receive the giveaway.

Here are some ideas/inspiration if you’d like to participate, but don’t know what to do. (Of course, you’re not limited to these!)

  • Birthday themes: Birthday cakes, party decorations, presents, and joyful celebrations!
  • Screenshots: Colonies/bases, individual rooms (throne rooms, ritual chambers, war-torn battlegrounds), and interesting events (weddings, rituals, intense battles, hilarious moments).
  • Artwork: Illustrations of your colonists, pets, mechanoids, xenotypes, ideoligions, etc. Comics depicting funny in-game moments or stories of your colonists. Speedpaintings of your artwork.

Giveaway details

  • 1 set of the YouTooz War Queen figure and YouTooz RimWorld enamel pins will be randomly given to 3 different participants.
  • Note: YouTooz is unable to ship their merchandise to certain countries, please check yours before participating: https://youtooz.com/pages/shipping-policy

RimWorld Sales

RimWorld and the expansions BiotechIdeology, and Royalty are all on sale until October 18!

Changelog

  • Improve performance of “need warm clothes” alert with large numbers of clothes in stockpile.
  • Moved “CausedBy” translation key to core.
  • Insect jelly will now be deprioritized when selecting caravan food.
  • Disable room space need thoughts when asleep.
  • Smoke launchers, incinerators, and gunlinks no longer have qualities.
  • Re-flavor royal titles.
  • Allow timbershrooms to grow on polluted ground.
  • Allow prisoners to be downed for prisoner sacrifice and execution rituals.
  • Updated creative rewards content.
  • Updated translations.

Fixes

  • Fix: Dev palette cached incidents being skipped if target is the wrong type.
  • Fix: Hard-coded formatting on injury label in brackets for body part sources.
  • Fix: Copying colonist ScenParts with configurable lists edits in-place instead of copying data over.
  • Fix: Wall torch has inconsistent max fuel compared to other similar buildings.
  • Fix: Brain isn’t properly destroyed by execution cutting on deathless pawns.
  • Fix: Electroharvester has flipped graphics.
  • Fix: Pawns without reading policies producing error when prisoners have joy need via mods.
  • Fix: Randomly scattered things don’t retain quality from scenario config.
  • Fix: Shamblers not able to walk through open doors in some circumstances.
  • Fix: Coagulate can be used on pawn with no tendable hediffs.
  • Fix: Hunting work site generation can cause errors with modded games if leatherDef is null.
  • Fix: Global learning speed factors do not appear on skill tooltip.
  • Fix: Missing eyepatch drawn over blindfolds.
  • Fix: Some anomaly debug actions visible without anomaly active.
  • Fix: Breastfeeding moms dropping babies if no bed.
  • Fix: Healer Mech Serum prioritizes sterilized over mental ailments.
  • Fix: Having bloodfeeding and cannibalism memes sometimes generates an ideoligion with no positive cannibalism precept.
  • Fix: Misconfigured distRange on SubcoreEncoder_Working sound.
  • Fix: Exception ticking mothballed world pawn.
  • Fix: Room size space calculations can add cells from outdoor locations.
  • Fix: Error if simulate killing unspawned pawn with a shield.
  • Fix: Deconstructing firefoam popper with auto rebuild on places a blueprint on deconstruct.
  • Fix: Ascetic pawns judge others for their appearance, contrary to trait description.
  • Fix: Deadlife shamblers appearing on schedule.
  • Fix: Ideology buildings not respecting interaction spot overlap.
  • Fix: Anima Tree artificial structure radius inconsistencies.
  • Fix: Incorrect wealth calculation on buildings with def-defined base market value
  • Fix: Sanguaphage meeting quest not completing if join offer is postponed.
  • Fix: Error in inspect string when saving game directly after a pawn has used a verb.

Bow down to the War Queen! (Plus RimWorld enamel pins)

Posted October 4th, 2024 by Tia Young

Majestic War Queen figure and RimWorld 5-pack enamel pins now available

Hey there, we’re excited to share that our majestic vinyl War Queen figurine and RimWorld enamel pin set are now available on YouTooz for the next 4 weeks!

War Queen vinyl figure: We sent out a signal pulse… and a War Queen responded! She’ll make a great addition to your colony at home.

RimWorld enamel pin set:  Features 5 RimWorld-themed designs including:
– RimWorld logo
– “Ate without table -3” thought
– Crashlanded colonist
– Scyther
– Thrumbo

We’re also running a birthday month sale for RimWorld and its expansions until Oct 18. 🎉

Long live the War Queen!

– Ludeon Studios