If you are playing with mods but were on the unstable branch from an earlier testing phase, change back to default branch now. The code for this update should be 99% mod-compatible, but the mods won’t work until they’re recompiled because the binary API for the translation system changed.
The game content is exactly the same as Beta 19. There are some bugfixes, but the most important thing is the new localization system. It’ll help translators more accurately translate the game into non-English languages, with issues like grammatical gender (e.g. le/la in French) respected and better automatic handling of grammar for a variety of languages.
Below is a forum post from Piotr Walczak, who implemented the latest improvements, explaining what translators can do to take advantage of the new functionality.
For anyone interested in helping translate, now would be a great time! The game content is stable, the grammar code is in, and we’re on the final push to get things set for the 1.0 release. Potential translators should please take a look the forum post below to learn how to contribute. Thanks in advance.
So, RimWorld’s early access price has been $30 USD since we first started selling the game in 2013.
Buying an early access game is risky compared to buying a finished game. Also, RimWorld’s value in content (and the time players tend to play it) have gone up a lot since those early days. There’s also the matter of simple financial inflation. Because of these factors, the final price will be higher than the early access price.
The early access price will remain the same for the rest of the early access period – this change will only occur when 1.0 is released. And of course, anyone who bought during Early Access will get the final version for no additional cost.
I wanted to let everyone know about this ahead of time so people have time to make an informed purchasing decision without surprises.
As of now there’s no announced release date for 1.0 yet – still working on filling in all those final details!
RimWorld Beta 19 – Polish the Cannons is released!
To get the update: If you’re on Steam, the game will update automatically. If you’re DRM-free, you can re-download from the same link you got the game from originally. It always has the latest version.
If you want to keep playing Beta 18 on Steam: Right click RimWorld in the Library list -> Properties -> Betas -> Choose beta18 from the drop-down menu.
You can play savegames from Beta 18 (and probably before), though some details will change upon loading.
I did want this build to be 1.0 for a while, but it became apparent the game would benefit from one more refinement round, so we’re doing Beta 19 first. I very much want the 1.0 version to be worthy of its version number, which means not rushing it.
EDIT: This build did include 64-bit support. It works fine in the DRM-free build, but caused old builds to become unplayable when added to Steam, because of complications in Steam’s system for deciding which version to serve to which player. It seems Steam doesn’t easily support an old beta branch being 32-bit only with a new one being 32/64 – in this case it starts serving 64-bit content into the old branch, making it unusable since the files are mixed between versions. Since the 32-bit version works fine for almost every use case (aside from very rare and extreme massively-modded situations), I’m removing 64-bit until I can get in touch with Valve and figure out how to get it working smoothly.
Below is a list of notable changes. If anything below seems to change game balance, you can bet that related variables were adjusted to maintain roughly the same challenge as before – I just don’t write down every single change because otherwise this list would be way too long. This list also does not including a ton of more behind-the-scenes optimization, refactoring, fixing, and adjustments we did.
Added bridges. You can build bridges over rivers and non-deep lake/ocean water. Bridges support all but the heaviest structures, can burn, and collapse under damage.
Added new “Messages” section of the History tab. This section shows the last 200 messages and letters you’ve received.
Added low-tech plate armor.
New scenario: Naked Brutality – Start naked with no items.
New main tab: Wildlife. Allows easy counting, finding, and designating of wild animals.
Ship end sequence: Starting up the ship reactor now takes 15 days, during which you will be attacked constantly by desperadoes and mechanoids.
New raid arrival mode: Multiple groups.
New raid arrival mode: Enemy pods scattered all over the map.
Split mechanoid scyther into scyther (close combat specialist) and lancer (fast sniper)
Split tribal warrior into warrior (mid-range melee) and penitent (poverty melee, similar to drifter)
Faction relations are now categorized as hostile/neutral/ally instead of just hostile/neutral. Allies will randomly send military aid and will respond to certain special requests.
You can now offer gifts to improve faction relations by using transport pods, sending caravans, or giving gifts to their traders. Gifts can be silver, items, or slaves. No more magical teleporting silver gifts.
Visitors of allied factions will now occasionally leave gifts before leaving.
New buildings:
Watermill generator: Generate power from moving water.
Fabrication bench: Craft advanced components and some advanced tech items.
Waterproof conduit: Transmit power under water for bases on both sides of a river.
Butcher spot: Butcher without building a bench, at an efficiency penalty.
Double sleeping spot: Sleep with your partner, even in crushing poverty.
New traits:
Undergrounder: Don’t mind never seeing the sky, don’t mind being in darkness.
Great memory: Slower skill decay.
Tough: Take less damage.
Gourmand: Eat a lot, random eating binges, cooking skill bonus.
Sickly: Get sick often.
Quick sleeper: Take less time to sleep.
New items:
Flak pants
Prosthetic heart
Bionic spine/heart/stomach
Archotech eye/arm/leg
Tornado generator
Patchleather: Poor-quality leather made from any combination of other leather
New incident: “Wild man wanders in”.
New terrain: Soft sand – doesn’t allow building medium or heavy structures.
New designators: Mass-forbid and unforbid.
Infestations now begin with the insects tunneling towards the colony, which gives the player time to respond.
You can now write job titles for your colonists.
New type of attack: Kick sand/water in eyes.
Condensed leathers together into fewer types. Instead of a separate type for each animal, there are categories.
You can now smooth natural rough rock walls into high-quality walls.
Trained animal skills and tameness now decay over time. Animals can revert to the wild, depending on their natural wildness.
Deep drill use will now sometimes cause insect attacks (by tunneling through the ground near the drill, with a warning).
New edge shader for blueprints looks much nicer and more visible than before.
Workbench bills can now be assigned to specific colonists.
Added “Show what will buy” window which shows all items a trader will buy.
Trees’ color now depends on the current season.
Added tainted-apparel thing filter.
Increased prisoner recruitment chance and added a resistance which must be reduced to zero before recruitment can begin.
Animals can now be renamed.
Animals can now get diseases.
Added an automatic destroyed building replacement toggle. When active, a destroyed building will leave behind a blueprint and be automatically rebuilt.
Added translation report tool: Generates a report about the currently-loaded language data stating which translations are missing, which are unnecessary, and lots of other useful information.
Added translation cleaner tool: Corrects many common problems in translation files and adds/updates English language reference for every string in the game.
You can mass-toggle various checkboxes and drop-down selections by clicking and dragging the mouse over them.
Workbench bills can now be copied and pasted.
Colonists now opportunistically haul items while working if their current target is roughly in the same direction.
The player can now request AI-core quests from allies.
It’s now possible to craft prosthetic and bionic body parts, grenades, and molotovs.
It’s now possible to mass-cancel all designations with a designator’s right-click menu.
It’s now possible to forbid/unforbid all items and rearm all traps with a designator’s right-click menu.
You can now drag and reorder colonists in the colonist bar.
Social interaction log now has flavorful randomized text instead of the same repeated interaction text every time.
Mods page now has a search bar so you can easily find one mod in your list of hundreds.
In some very bad situations, a mysterious Man in Black may arrive. Can he set things right in these parts?
Armor system reworked into a 3-outcome system with armor penetration. The armor penetration of the weapon is subtracted from the armor value of the armor. This gives an effective armor rating, measured as a percent. We roll a RNG out of 100%. If the result is under half the effective AR, the hit is totally deflected. If the result is over half the effective AR, but under the effective AR, the hit is mitigated – damage is reduced by half and sharp hits are converted to bruise. If the result is over the effective AR, the hit passes the armor and applies normally. As before, armor is applied in sequence from the outside in. AR maxes out at 200%. Default armor penetration is 1.5% per point of damage, but some weapons vary from this.
Totally reworked how plants grow; they now grow everywhere at once instead of reproducing plant-by-plant. Wild plants after several in-game years should now look more or less as good as at the beginning.
Long-range mineral scanner can now be tuned to seek specific minerals, and must be worked by a researcher.
Battles in the Combat tab are now named.
Items of the same type in the Items tab are now grouped together.
Items in the Items tab can now be sorted by mass, market value, etc.
Instead of shooting them, hunters now execute downed creatures with a neck cut (except explosive creatures).
When placing or selecting work stations where pawns can sit while working, the spot where the pawn goes is indicated by a chair outline so the player realizes that a chair can be built there.
Removed tornado incident.
Improved caravaning:
Redesigned how world movement speed is fed back per-world tile.
Pack animals now follow colonists to speed up the packing process.
Added Caravan tab with caravan loading progress.
Redesigned “Form caravan” window: stats like carried mass, caravan speed, days worth of food, and visibility are now explained better.
Caravans now automatically forage for food while traveling.
Added “Remove from caravan” command: remove people or animals from the caravan even if it hasn’t left the map yet.
Added “Load into caravan” right-click option: designate extra items to be picked up by the caravan before leaving.
Caravan speed now depends on the carried weight.
Caravan members now slowly gain social recreation when the caravan is not moving.
Caravan visibility is now explicitly expressed and better explained than the old caravan stealth. This makes small caravans more relevant.
Quest prompts now give much more information about what kinds of challenges to expect.
When reforming a caravan, we now list colonists’ inventory separately so the player can choose what to take and what to leave.
Caravans who are not moving now have a lower chance of being attacked.
Transport pods now have a contents list which allows removing things from the pod.
Blunt weapons now have a chance to stun the target.
Joy is renamed to ‘recreation’.
Using deep drills can cause insect attacks.
Changed deep moving water to chest-deep moving water: walkable but slower than shallow water.
Turrets are cheaper and more powerful, but now consume steel/uranium for maintenance after firing a lot.
Character log now integrates log messages from combat and social interactions.
Deadfall trap redesigned to Spike trap: Much more powerful with a 100% chance to spring on targets, and has armor penetration (depending on what it’s made of) but requires resources to replace.
Insects will now go into an insect-specific “hypothermic slowdown” instead of getting hypothermia and dying on the first winter.
Alphabeavers incident now only occurs in biomes with sparse plants so they’re not meaningless.
The refugee from the “downed refugee” world quest can be instantly recruited by offering help.
Removed scyther blade.
Mechanoids now always die on downed.
Doing passionate work now affects mood instead of recreation.
Deep drills now yield stone chunks if no resource is below.
Firefoam poppers will now pop whenever there’s a fire in a 3-cell radius, instead of only when the fire touches them.
Food poisoning now has three stages it moves through over the course of a day.
Pawns hit by ranged attacks now stagger the same way as pawns hit by melee attacks. This effect only happens if the weapon’s stopping power stat is equal or greater than the target’s body size.
Most crafting benches are now uninstallable and reinstallable.
Removed shiv since it’s basically a low-quality knife.
It’s now possible to craft knives at crafting spots.
“autostart.rws” is now automatically loaded on start in dev mode, for faster testing.
Techprof subpersona core now completes current research instead of random research.
Combined rib body parts into rib cage.
Reworked the “advanced map options” dialog layout, extreme game-breaking map sizes are now disabled by default and must be enabled in the options.
Tribal factions can now do sapper raids.
Added medical care column to the Assign tab.
Removed shoddy and superior item qualities.
Rebalanced and refactored quality generation. Masterwork/legendary level items never generate on enemies, traders, bases. Masterwork items are extra hard to craft, and legendary requires an inspiration.
Removed the distinction between allowed areas and animal areas.
Wearing new apparel now takes time. Colonists now take off the colliding apparel first (which takes time) before wearing the new one.
Added minimum crafting skill to various weapon and apparel crafting recipes.
Removed the requirement to pay fee to initiate the item stash quest.
Various floors now require research.
Settling very near another faction base will now cause faction relations loss every quadrum because of anger due to territorial encroachment.
Fulfilling trade requests now gives goodwill.
Destroying a faction base of a mutual enemy now gives goodwill.
All traders are now unwilling to buy tainted apparel and short-life meals.
Improved animal fleeing behavior
No human enemies spawn with weapons above industrial tech.
Charge lance is now craftable and usable by humans.
Explosive weapons now explode when set on fire.
Wood-powered fires and coolers no longer vanish when fuel is exhausted; they wait to be refueled.
Tons of art has been redone and adjusted.
Many, many other bugfixes, interface and balance adjustments
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RimWorld has now sold over a million copies. Platinum status!
This is a remarkably unexpected moment for me. The original Kickstarter only sought 1,000 sales, and that seemed like a lot. This is… crazy.
Many thanks to all the players for buying the game, to Piotr Walczak, Ben Rog-Wilhelm and all others who worked on it, to modders for making a huge variety of mods that are intricate, scary, useful, and amusing. Also to everyone who ever made a video about RimWorld, or streamed it, or just told a friend about it. And to those making comics and art interpretations, to those moderating forums and chat channels, and everyone else bringing life into the community. I can’t thank you enough.
Here’s hoping RimWorld and its community keep going strong for a long time to come.
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RimWorld Beta 18 – A World of Story is released! Here’s the video (where I accidentally call it Alpha 18 – old habits die hard).
To get the update: If you’re on Steam, the game will update automatically. If you’re DRM-free, you can re-download from the same link you got the game from originally. It always has the latest version.
If you want to keep playing Alpha 17 on Steam: Right click RimWorld in the Library list -> Properties -> Betas -> Choose alpha17b from the drop-down menu.
It’s finally in Beta! This is build 0.18.1722 of RimWorld. That last number is the number of days since I first started working on RimWorld in February 2012. 1722 days – almost five years. It’s come a very long way since the first public look in September 2013. It’s time to start bringing it to a close, which is why version 0.18 is Beta 18 instead of Alpha 18.
The “Beta” designation means that we’re on the final stretch before the 1.0 release, and that there won’t be major content additions like whole new game systems. Of course we will almost certainly add more content, before the 1.0 release or after. We will also continue seeking feedback so we can fix those little bugs and design problems that only become apparent after tens or hundreds of hours of play. RimWorld has become an exceptionally complex game, and it takes a long time and a huge amount of play to understand how to improve it. So it’ll keep evolving for a while.
In any case, enjoy Beta 18. There is a lot of new stuff. See the features list below for details, and watch the video.
Compatibility: Saved games from non-modded Alpha 17 should still be loadable, though some things may change upon loading (e.g. characters may forget what they are doing; buildings may insta-deconstruct if they changed size and no longer fit, etc). Complex mods made for A17 won’t be usable and will need to be updated. Very simple mods may still load.
Rough features list:
New swamp biomes: Swamp biomes are hard to move through due to choking vegetation, and hard to build in due to swampy terrain. Many new plants were added to fill out these and other biomes.
Tropical swamp
Temperate swamp
Cold bog
New incidents:
Meteorite impact. A meteorite impacts, leaving a lump of mineable ore.
Aurora. A beautiful aurora lights up the night sky, improving mood.
Tornado
Peace talks quest
World refugee quest
Prisoner rescue quest
Storyful combat: A major rework of melee combat, and a new way to report all combat interactions. Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat. During or after a fight, you can review the combat log to see what happened, to generate a richer story.
Various research has been split up
Gun research is now broken into several stages, so making advanced guns like assault rifles takes more research than making simple revolvers
Melee weapon research is now broken into several stages
New furniture
Bedroll: Portable bed
Dresser: Passively improves room
Endtable: Passive improves room
Various new table sizes
New quest reward special items:
Psychic emanator
Vanometric power cell
Infinite chemreactor
Techprof subpersona core
Healer mechanite superdose
Resurrector mechanite superdose
Orbital bombardment targeter
Orbital power beam targeter
Tribal content upgrade:
Ikwa melee weapon
War mask
Tribal headdress
Recurve bow
Tribal hunter
Tribal heavy archer
Tribal berserker
New world site components (used in various situations):
Sleeping mechanoids
Animal ambush
Enemy ambush
New mental breaks:
Insulting spree. Randomly go around and insult people.
Targeted insulting spree. Follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly.
Tantrum. Go around randomly smashing furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
Bedroom tantrum. Go to your own room and randomly smash furniture, buildings, and damageable items.
Targeted tantrum. Go to destroy a single, specific, randomly-chosen, valuable item or building.
Sadistic rage. Melee attack prisoners for a while. Fists only. Only occurs when there are prisoners to attack. Does not attack downed prisoners.
Corpse obsession. Dig up a corpse and drop it on a meeting spot table or in a random high-traffic area. The mental break then ends.
Catatonic. Collapse on the spot into a downed state with a psychological breakdown. Recover some days later. This can be implemented by a “catatonic breakdown” hediff.
Jailbreaker. Colonist goes to a random prisoner (who is capable of prison breaking), and upon doing a special “spark jailbreak” action with them, induces an immediate prison break in that prisoner.
Slaughterer. Slaughter random colony animal(s) periodically.
Murderous rage. Hunt down a specific colonist or prisoner (randomly chosen) and attempt to kill them by melee attack. Uses melee weapon or fists, as equipped. Keep attacking until the target is dead.
Run wild. The pawn basically starts acting like an animal. You can tame him to try to get him to rejoin.
New mental inspirations. Basically reverse mental breaks – these give temporary bonuses to colonists in high moods.
Work frenzy (1 day): Global work speed 2.5x
Go frenzy (1 day): Walk speed 1.5x
Shoot frenzy (3 days): Shooting hit chance improved as though the pawn is 10 skill levels higher.
Inspired trade
Inspired recruitment
Inspired surgery
Inspired art
World features like lakes, mountain ranges, and bays are now detected and named. Names are displayed in the world view.
Caves now form sometimes in mountainous maps. Inside there are special cave plants. There can also be dormant insect hives.
Many new tale types were added. So, the game will record many new types of events, and colonists can make art about them. Art descriptions should be much more diverse.
Crop blights now appear and spread over time instead of instantly destroying crops
Spaceship is now bigger and has one more component, the sensor cluster
Spaceship quest ending phase: When going to the hidden space ship to finish the game, the game does not end instantly on arrival. The map generates with the ship intact. To take off, first you must power up the ship, which takes some days, during which you must survive raids.
Space ship construction now requires advanced components, which have their own tech tree and production method
Split pistol into revolver and autopistol
Boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel
Added chemfuel generator, which generates electricity from chemfuel
Artillery works differently now. There is one type of mortar, which can fire any type of shell, with each shell creating a different effect. The shells are explosive, incendiary, firefoam, and antigrain (a special high-tech warhead).
Seasonal latitudes: Seasons now more reasonably adjust depending on latitude. Instead of flipping at the equator, there is a seasonless crossover zone.
Redesigned alert letter types and sounds to be more specific.
Pawns can now be banished. This is analogous to abandoning pawns in caravans.
Technical: The save file now contains the actual contents of the planet map, instead of just the seed to generate it. This speed up loading, makes forward compatibility possible, and makes it technically possible to modify the world map during play.
Many many tunings, bugfixes, and redesigns.
EDIT (Nov 20): I forgot to mention another feature we added, which is queuing orders. You can now queue multiple orders for colonists. This was a ton of work to do because it forced us to separate the code that validates jobs from the code that initiates jobs, but should make many things much more convenient for players.
We’ll be closing sales for to the Backstory-in-Game package and Pirate King packages on November 7, 2017. The Name-in-game package will remain on sale. Anyone who already purchased any of these packages won’t be affected, only new sales will be closed.
I’m closing these sales because the game is maturing and it’s coming to the right time to make the content final. In addition, closing these will free up more time for us to work on the game itself.
Thanks everyone for all the great content submitted over the last few years! As any player can tell you, it’s really enriched the game.
I’ve just released Alpha17b, a performance hotfix for Alpha17. Steam users will get it automatically, while non-Steam users can download from their existing permanent download link (there won’t be an update email sent out). This is build 0.17.1557.
When we made the targeting AI smarter in Alpha 17, we also made it harder on the CPU. Players in late game were seeing drastically reduced performance. Alpha17b optimizes this and several other things. There are no changes to gameplay – just optimization of what’s there already.
This update will work with your existing saved games, XML-only mods and (hopefully) most or all code mods.
If for any reason you want to continue on the older version, you can set your Steam beta branch to ‘alpha17a’.
Sorry for any disruption! We’re also hard at work on Alpha 18.
Alpha 17 – On the Road has been released! This version brings roads and rivers to the world, new world quests, new tools for modders, new combat tools, smarter AI, and rebalancings and adjustments across the whole design.
I’m afraid that this build is not compatible with saved games from previous versions, or mods from previous versions. However, you can continue to use the old version until you’re ready to update. If you’re on Steam, to continue using the old version, go to your Steam Library, right-click on RimWorld, click Properties. Open the Betas tab and use the drop-down menu to select the alpha16 version. Restart Steam to force an update.
If you downloaded the game DRM-free, you can update whenever you like by re-downloading from your existing download link. Your link is always the same and always gives the latest version.
In the old builds, balance problems meant that some exploit-y strategies did work and obviated some of the challenges in the game. Since those problems are now fixed, you may find the game a little bit more difficult. It wouldn’t hurt to play at one notch lower difficulty to start with in Alpha 17. You can always increase the difficulty later, even during the game, through the options menu.
There are five road types: path, dirt road, stone road, ancient asphalt road, ancient asphalt highway
Some roads generate with things alongside, like concrete barriers or ancient lampposts
There are four sizes of river: huge river, large river, river, and creek
Rivers generate more in rainy areas, move towards the sea (ignoring tiny lakes) and merge as appropriate
Rivers and roads generate on local maps as expected.
Stone roads generate using local stone and a new flagstone terrain type.
Visitors, caravans, traders, and raiders tend to arrive and leave on the roads.
World generation is more chronological now. First continents form, then rivers, then an ancient society is shallowly simulated to generate ancient roads, then modern settlements and roads are generated (alongside ancient roads, often).
World quests
New “site parts” world site generation system. It allows assembling together a world destination from several ‘parts’. Mixing and matching will allow us to create a huge number of combinations.
New world quest incident: Item stash. An allied faction tells you about a stash of randomly-generated reward items, guarded by a random threat. You can send a caravan to defeat the threat and collect the reward.
New world quest incident: Bandit camp. An allied faction asks you to defeat a bandit camp, and offers you a reward if you do so.
New world quest incident: Caravan request. An allied faction asks you to deliver a particular resource to a particular base in a particular time frame, for a special reward.
New ‘long-range mineral scanner’ building slowly scans for precious resource lumps nearby in the world. You need to send a caravan to collect them. Lumps may be defended.
New caravan incident: Payment demand. Raiders demand items or slaves from your caravan; if you refuse, they attack.
Other new stuff
Added smokepop belt. Emits a cloud of accuracy-reducing smoke when the wearer is shot. Smoke also prevents turret targeting.
Characters can now tend their own wounds (with a penalty to effectiveness).
Added bowler hat.
Corpses now leak black corpse bile while rotting.
Vents can be opened and closed with a flick action.
Add option to render hats only on the main game map (but not on the portraits in the pawn bar).
Bills can now be temporarily paused when satisfied, until automatically reactivated at a lower level. This reduces the need for pawns to repeatedly return to the work bench each time the count falls just one below the target count.
You can now create your own packaged survival meals (with appropriate research and ingredients).
All pawns now have “head butt” attacks they can use if they’re missing all other attacking body parts.
Added a “caravan packing spot” so you can tell your caravans where to assemble.
When trees burn, they leave behind burned tree stumps.
When structures and plants burn, they leave behind ash.
Carpets and wooden floors can now burn.
New training lessons for explaining shield belts, and how door opening speed is affected by material type.
Added ambrosia sprout incident. This sprouts a grove of the pleasurable, nutrition, and addictive ambrosia fruit trees nearby.
New ‘wimp’ trait makes pawn incapacitated from even a relatively small amount of pain.
New chain shotgun weapon
Modding
Modders can now add “def modifiers” which, instead of replacing a whole def, change specific fields of that def. This allows multiple mods to change the same def without wiping each others’ changes (unless they change the same field, of course).
Various enums are now defs so modders can add new ones (TrainableIntelligence , DamageArmorCategory, ImpactSoundType, ReservationLayer, BillRepeatMode, PrisonerInteractionMode, FleshType).
GUI tables (like most of the main tabs along the bottom of the screen) are now defined by data, making it easier to add, rearrange, sort, and change columns on the UI.
Increasing skill relevance
Mining skill reworked: Steeper speed penalty for low skill. Mining yield is now slightly dependent on mining skill.
Trade price spread made much wider, but social skill also has a much greater effect on it.
Added “animal gather speed” stat which makes some pawns faster at gathering wool or milk.
Added “animal product yield” stat which makes some pawns more/less likely to waste the product when gathering wool or milk.
Removed post-process curve from melee hit chance so it uses the simple level-by-level tuning. It’ll be much harder to hit things now at low melee skills. Note: Default hit chance is 0.6 for pawns without skills. This equals the chance of a pawn with melee skill 6.
Added a melee dodge stat, so better melee-skilled pawns will have more advantage. Pawns don’t melee dodge while aiming or firing ranged weapons.
Work tab boxes are easier to identify skill level for visually.
Added small crunching sound that plays when you assign a pawn to a skill they’re terrible at.
AI
AI has more intelligent ranged shot target selection with random elements. Harder to exploit, and looks less dumb, doesn’t shoot at chickens as much.
Raider with mega-weapons will now avoid friendly fire
Sapper groups will now choose another sapper if the first one is killed, making them much more persistent.
Sapper groups will now continue digging even while defending from attack.
Animals flee when harmed.
Added a new state to caravan lord job, “bloody exit”, which makes the exit individually, as aggressively as possible. This makes it a bit hard to rob caravans.
Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors.
Base defense AI is touchier; stealth raids will be much much more difficult (and probably infeasible most of the time).
Doctors now tend heavy bleeding injuries and diseases near lethal severity first.
Misc
Plants now have different graphics when they are harvestable – you can see the berries/cotton/corn on the plant ready to be taken.
Buy/sell price spread for trading is much wider (150%/50%).
Drugs are now slower to produce, slower to grow, and heavier.
Cannibalism is harder on mood.
Integrated incidents (ambush, manhunters, etc) better with caravans and temporary maps. Incidents can now target both of these, and the story state (incident cooldowns, etc) is passed back and forth between a caravan and its map to maintain continuity.
Plant generation algorithm for map start reworked to generate plants in more interesting patterns, with denser areas and more clear areas interspersed, and groves of trees in sparse biomes.
New graphics for some floor types and things (stone floors, stone chunks, etc).
Made crop growing cycles significantly longer, especially for long-cycle plants like corn.
Shifted all medical potencies so that normal medicine has potency of 1.0. (This increases surgery success chances).
Added global sell price factor for apparel (70%) and furniture (70%).
Rebalanced drug economy so it’s viable to buy neutroamine, make drugs with it, and sell them.
Because it was way OP, chemfuel can no longer be made from haygrass.
Reworked surgery success chances. We now feedback room surgery success chance on medical bed. Rebalanced room surgery success chance calculations and fixed a bug where it was 100% when outdoors. Removed surgery success chance exponents.
Colonists wearing human leather clothes now get a negative thought (unless they have a bloodlust or cannibal trait, in which case they get a mood bonus).
Balanced blood loss recovery time to be much slower (50 real seconds -> 4 game days)
Buffed mortars so players use them: Cheaper/faster to build, faster shooting, greater accuracy, cheaper shells
Armor now takes a constant fraction of incoming damage instead of absorbing all prevented damage. This solves an issue where good quality armor would be destroyed sooner.
Sun lamps now turn themselves off when plants are resting
Equipment rack is now a general shelf which can hold pretty much anything.
Small items like gold and silver are now 10x smaller, not 20x, so it’s more feasible to build things from them.
Jade is not small any more.
Other bases regenerate their trade stock less often.
Changed flammability for fur and leather to 100%, and for meat to 50%.
Manhunter pack incident can now use any kind of animal.
Rebalanced all trader stock generation.
Traders will generate with fewer extreme quality items.
Pawns missing heads will have visually missing heads.
It’s no longer possible to create a settlement directly adjacent to an existing settlement.
Caravans now enter/leave tiles when touching the tile boundary, instead of when in the center of the adjacent tile.
Redesigned how capacities are calculated from body part efficiencies with an entirely new collection of algorithms, to stop various nonsensical cases and simplify how health conditions can affect the body.
Gear tab now displays item stack masses.
Caravans now generate a lot tougher.
All caravans now buy art. Art is lighter (e.g. easier to sell) and has a sell price bonus so it’s now a better trade good.
Catharsis thought is more powerful but shorter in duration.
Redesigned stats so that in almost all cases, high numbers are better.
Rebalanced the beauty system to be much more dependent on art; random furniture has less or no beauty effect.
Ship part crash incident now scatters rubble and chunks around the crash site.
Healroot grows wild now, in some biomes
Added caravan route planner. It allows placing several waypoints, and measures the time to travel the route along them.
There is now a progress dialog while the planet mesh is generating (so people don’t think the game crashed).
Date system reworked. Seasons are now arbitrary “quadrums” which cover 1/4 of the year and are the same on the whole planet.
Fixed various memory leaks.
Many exploits mitigated or prevented by various design tweaks.
Many, many, many other bugfixes, tunings, and redesigns.
We recently asked whether players would rather have the bugfix-only update released, or if they’d prefer we just kept working and waited until we had new content to release.
The results aligned with my personal thinking, which is that the disruptive effect of a release (breaking various compatibilities) isn’t worth it for a bugfix-only release. So, we’ve been adding new content! Alpha 17 will basically be two updates combined, where one of them was a refinement-and-fix overhaul.
I’m not going to go into detail on exactly what’s coming (that’s what the update videos are for!) But here are some basic notes on things in progress. The update will focus on enriching the content in the world, and create more reasons to use the planet-travel caravan system:
Roads and rivers across the world (multiple categories of each).
Redone enemy base generation.
Enemy AI overhauls. They’ll be harder to cheese in various ways and act more sensibly.
A new class of incidents that initiate quest opportunities on the world map. These are driven by a new combinatorial “site” system that allows us to create destinations to go to out of multiple “pieces”. This creates more variation than we would get if we just had single quest destinations. Now we can take any “site core” from a library, surround it with “site parts” from another library and the system will generate them all together. So, you could have a core that is a stash of gold, and add on “manhunter animals” and “abandoned turret line” around it, and the map generator will combine those. The number of possible combinations can get large quickly. This update will keep it pretty basic, but for future updates I hope to have larger site part libraries, which will create massive variation.
People can tend their own wounds now!
Tons and tons of rebalancing and detailed redesign to make skills matter more, make the economy more coherent and balanced, make animal farming for meat viable, make cannibalism a bit less ho-hum, make surgery not absurd, make room stats matter in a sensible way, make storyteller incidents more varied, and so on.
Based on man-hours, Alpha 17 will probably be the most substantial update yet. RimWorld has become quite a beast in terms of design complexity, so it does take a lot longer now to design and tune things so they integrate into the rest of the game well, don’t overwhelm players with complexity, and don’t create weird exploits or nonsensical outcomes. But, that’s all part of the inherent challenge of designing a tightly-integrated, wholly-procedural colony sim!
This is just a quick update on what we’re working on now, since it’s been some time since Alpha 16 came out and I don’t want anyone thinking I died or became a Venezuelan monk or something.
Alpha 17 is in progress. This update is going to be a refinement build. That means we’re focusing entirely on fixing things that are wrong with the game, and are not adding wholly new features.
So far we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs. I’ve made a collection of new balance analysis tools and using those, along with community feedback and videos, have rebalanced several gameplay systems. We’re also doing a review of how memory is handled, to reduce memory waste that leads to sub-optimal performance or out-of-memory crashes. I’ve compiled a list of exploit strategies that players use to gain advantage by exploiting tricky gaps in game logic, or bugs, and worked out solutions to most of them. Some exploit fixes are mechanics changes, some are balance changes, and quite a few involve reworking the AI. We’ve also been adding bits of feedback or micro-features here and there where needed; one example would be the new “mass” column in each character’s “gear” tab, so you can tell how heavy each stack is.
It turns out that in a game this complex, there are quite a few places for subtle problems to hide! In fact I’m continually amazed at how many problems can be layered into a game that still manages to entertain so many people.
The current plan is to finish refinements and then release that as Alpha 17. But – there is the possibility we’ll not release a “refinements-only” update and just wait until we’ve finished the refinements, and then some additional features beyond, to push a public release. This is because each release does create some chaos in the community, since it inevitably breaks mod compatibility (though maybe not vanilla save game compatibility, since the mechanics aren’t being redesigned drastically). The question of whether we’ll release Alpha 17 as a refinements-only build, or wait to add on significant new content remains open.
