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.

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.

I invite discussion on this post at this forum thread!

A summary of the changes in this alpha follows:

Roads and rivers

• World now generates with roads and rivers
• 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).
• Information on how to use def modifiers is in this forum thread: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=32735.0
• 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.

I invite discussion on this post at this forum thread!

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!

Still working, no release date! To discuss this post, please join us on the forum thread for this post.

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.

I invite your thoughts on this in this forum poll and thread.

RimWorld Alpha 16 – Wanderlust is released! This update adds a spherical world and the ability to travel across it with multiple caravans, having simultaneous encounters on the way and settling new colonies.

If you’re on Steam, your game will update automatically. Because of huge structural changes to the game, this update will break save games. If you want to continue an old save just change to the “alpha15” beta branch on Steam. To do so, go to Steam library, right-click RimWorld, click Properties, click the Betas tab, and use the drop-down to select the branch you want.

If you’re not on Steam, just download from your permanent personal download link – it’s always updated to the latest version.

Change list:

Spherical planet

• World map is now modeled as a sphere covered with hexagons (and a few pentagons).
• New map generation to make nicer mountain ranges, hill clusters, and continents.
• Nice backdrop with stars and sun.
• Time of day is modeled on the planet view; local time of day corresponds to how the sunlight hits the planet.
• Time zones are now modeled, out of necessity.
• New planet generation parameter: temperature. You can make worlds that are overall hotter or overall colder.
• New planet generation parameter: rainfall. You can make worlds where there is overall more or less precipitation.
• New biome: sea ice.
• Factions can now have many bases; non-player factions generate with lots of bases.

Multiple simultaneous maps

• There can now be multiple local maps active at once. For example, you can have your colony running as well, as a group of soldiers attacking an enemy base, at the same time.
• The character bar at the top of the screen shows all of your colonists and allows you to change which map you’re looking at. It groups characters togehter by the map they’re on.
• You can settle multiple colonies at once. However, for balance and performance reasons, the default limit is one colony at a time. This can be increased in the options menu if you want to experiment, but we don’t recommend it.

Caravans

• Player can now gather up groups of colonists, prisoners, and animals, and form caravans to travel across the world surface.
• Caravans are formed using a special “create caravan” dialog, which allows you to easily decide what people, animals, and items should be included in the caravan up to its carry weight limit. The colonists do the busywork.
• Caravans appear as units in the world map, where they can be ordered around similarly to drafted soldiers in the local map.
• Caravans can be ambushed by enemy factions or manhunting animals. This produces a temporary local map.
• Caravans can incidentally meet friendly traders and trade.
• Caravans can visit other faction bases and trade with them. Faction bases have more stock and better prices than traders who come and visit your colony.
• Caravans can attack faction bases. The game generates a simple faction base map with defenders and loot, and you raid it. If you defeat the defenders, you can move in and take over the base (for now, generated bases are quite simple.)
• Caravans can settle and form new colonies.
• You can abandon your bases to shift to new ones.
• Caravans move at different speeds depending on the biome, the time of year (cold biomes close off with the winter snows), local hilliness, the movement speeds of people in the caravan, and whether there are wounded to carry.
• It is possible to abandon people and items from caravans. Abandoning people will, depending on the context, produce sad thoughts from their friends and relatives, especially if you abandon them in circumstances that seem impossible to survive.

Travel victory

• New game ending: A friendly person offers a ship, but it is distant, across the world map. If you travel there, you can escape the planet and complete the game. But, traveling there will take a long time and you’ll need to stop at various points to build up supplies or solve problems.

Transport pods

• You can build transport pod launchers and transport pods. These let you launch their contents long distances across the world map, over oceans or mountains.
• Pods can be targeted on empty world tiles, to send a caravan of people and gear there.
• Pods can be targeted on enemy bases, where you can perform “drop-in” raids and drop right on top of the base, or drop outside it – just like raiders do to you!
• Pods can be targeted on existing combat maps or other bases you control. This allows you to do things like resupply an ongoing siege with artillery shells (just like raiders do when besieging you), reinforce a weak caravan that just got ambushed, or send supplies and people between two bases you control.
• Pods are loaded by selecting several and creating a “launch group”. An interface like that for creating caravans appears, allowing you to define what and who should be included. The colonists do the detail work.
• Transport pods require chemfuel, which can be bought, founded, drilled from the ground, or refined from wood or food using the new refinery building.

Usability improvements

• New research screen! Research projects are laid out visually according to their dependencies in a left-to-right arrangement similar to the Civilization games. Modders need to manually place their projects, but if two overlap the game will automatically move them apart.
• Redesigned how medical system generates text feedback. Tooltips now contain much more information with less ambiguity. Wound tendings are now of any percentage quality (not just good/poor).
• Game now warns you when you order slaughter of a bonded animal (because of the mood impact).
• Added visual feedback thought bubbles for when pawns gain certain good and bad thoughts, so it’s easier to see when something just bothered or pleased them.
• Rich soil is darker in color and so easier to see.
• Added a “hold fire” toggle on drafted pawns that makes them not automatically shoot at enemies.
• In order to avoid annoying players by having animals always follow their masters, even into combat, players can configure when animals will follow their masters. There are two toggles: Follow while drafted, follow while hunting/taming

Drugs and health

• Drug rebalance. Increase drug addictiveness in general. Drugs can now damage the body in various ways: Alcohol can cause brain damage or liver cirrhosis or liver cancer, smokeleaf can cause asthma or lung cancer, psychite can damage kidneys, wake-up and go-juice can damage the brain, and generalized overdoses can cause brain damage.
• Drugs are more lucrative on the market.
• Added a third toggle in drug policy saying whether you can use the drug to feed an addiction, separately from joy usage.
• There is now a random chance of a overdose when taking drugs, even if just taking one dose.
• Added a way to administer specific drugs to people, including prisoners, animals, and downed people. So you can give Luciferium to someone who needs it.
• Malari-block reworked into Penoxycyline, which prevents a wide variety of infections (not just malaria).
• Drug chemical effects are modulated by body size. So elephants need a lot of beer to get hammered; squirrels not so much.
• Luciferium occasionally heals old wounds/scars. Luciferium is harder to get (less of it in old shrines, higher prices).
• Stats now stack differently (more additive, less multiplying) to reduce some exploits.

Misc

• Reworked surgery failure into three modes – minor, catastrophic, and ridiculous. Ridiculous hits all body parts, minor and catastrophic hit parts near the surgery site.
• Reworked trade prices across the board. Simplified trade price calculations and added rich tooltips to feed them back.
• The mood effects from room impressiveness have been redesigned and rebalanced. Characters now have consistently reasonable thoughts about the quality of their personal room, so there is a reason to make better rooms (though high-quality rooms aren’t absolutely necessary). Mood effects from eating in or convalescing in nice/poor rooms are also more reasonable and better-fed back.
• Rebalanced plant growth timings.
• UI can now be scaled to arbitrary scaling factors, for players who play in really high resolution.
• Rescued people (especially space refugees etc) should sometimes join the colony. If the environment isn’t survivable (e.g. bad temperature, toxic fallout) they should always join the colony.
• Animals carrying inventory now have visible packs on.
• Added new separate bills to stonecut each type of stone.
• Prisoners are now temporarily marked “guilty” when they do certain actions, like killing a colonist or attempting escape. Guilty prisoners can be executed without mood penalties.
• Faction names are now much more interesting and varied, and are separate from specific community names.
• New Peaceful difficulty mode, for players who just want to build stuff. Disables major involuntary threats like raids.
• Rename Megatherium -> Megasloth
• New alert: Unhappy nudity
• Backstories can be translated now
• New translation tool gives a readout of exactly what translation data remains to be written and what data is unused.
• Added proper chick peeping sounds.
• You can now only request one trader per 4 days from a faction.
• Colonists now get mood boosts for defeating big enemies or enemy faction leaders.
• Cleaning and harvesting jobs are now given in batches (more efficient and sensible AI).
• Default medical care for non-colonists is now herbal meds. Switches to best meds on recruit.
• Rebalanced most range weapons so more time is in cooldown and less is in aiming – especially for light weapons.
• Pawns generated below age 20 now have no adulthood backstory.
• Hundreds of other balance improvements, exploit solutions, AI improvements, and bugfixes.

Hi everyone. We suffered a small data loss in the creative content system. Luckily we managed to recover almost everything from backup. But in five cases, we lost the corresponding email addresses of creations that need review. So we can’t notify you to come review your content. If you entered any of the below content, please go back to the content creation page and recreate it.

• Name: Anthony ‘Tony’ Mheifcaster
• Name: Prem ‘Prem’ Premmington
• Name: Booty Bandit
• Backstory: Matthew Po
• Backstory: Tyler ‘Hammer’ Endorf

I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

And now, I’m back to working on the unstable update. I’m hoping to release a build with some of the most important fixes tonight.

UPDATE: Unstable version is being updated more or less (week)daily. The forum thread has the ongoing discussion and update details.

Alpha 16 release is upcoming. If you are on Steam, and in the middle of a game, please use the Steam betas feature to set your game to the “alpha15” branch. This will prevent it from automatically-updating to A16 upon release and breaking your save games.

If you’re willing to play with bugs and imbalances, and to have your saves broken randomly and without warning, you can now test the unstable version of Alpha 16! Just load the the ‘unstable’ branch on Steam. (To access the unstable branch, right-click RimWorld in the Steam library, open Properties, go to the Betas tab, select the ‘unstable’ branch, and restart Steam.)

This isn’t a ‘real’ release, and if you want to play the bug-free update you should retain your hype and wait until it’s properly released!

Please leave balance and design feedback in this forum thread. I’m especially interested in play stories around the new world system. Bugs should please be reported in the Bugs forum.

Modders can use this opportunity to prep their mods for the new update! Translators can use it to translate (there is a new translations tool; access it by turning on dev mode and hitting / in the main menu).

I’m also requesting that video makers, YouTubers and streamers please not make videos of this release. I don’t want to leave false impressions with a buggy and unbalanced unstable version.

There’s no change list yet; I plan to release that with the stable Alpha 16 release. Note that not all player content is included yet.

Thanks to all those who test and give feedback!

(I am deliberately not announcing this everywhere at once because I want to be able to draw in more fresh testers later as needed.)