Alpha 5 – Under Siege released

Posted July 4th, 2014 by Tynan Sylvester

We’re back with another alpha of RimWorld! Alpha 5 brings on lots of juicy new features and improvements. You can follow our day-to-day work on the changelog.

If you own the game, you should get an update email from us. You can also get Alpha 5 by re-downloading from the link you used before (it is a permanent link and always has the newest version). Anyone still having trouble should start at this thread.

Also note that this build will not load old savegames, so keep your old install separate if you want to finish an Alpha 4 colony.

A quick recap of improvements in Alpha 5:

  • Sieges added. Raiders will now sometimes besiege the colony by setting up a fortified position nearby and bombarding you until you die or come out to break the siege. Of course this also means there are now researchable and buildable mortar weapons – both explosive and incendiary.
  • Escape ship added. You can now, at great cost, build a ship to escape the planet if you wish.
  • Crashed ancient ship part incident added. Sometimes this bad boy will crash-land nearby and start emitting an ever-increasing psychic drone that slowly drives colonists insane. Attack it to make it stop, but beware its defenses.
  • New mechanoid type added – the scyther.
  • Many new sound effects from the illustrious Alistair Lindsay.
  • A new gear system allows changing out of clothing. Clothing now has basic effects, like reducing damage or movement speed.
  • There is now an info card you can view for most things in the game. For weapons, it shows statistics about damage, accuracy, and so on. For animals, it displays health, damage, meat amounts. Lots of other things can be inspected as well.
  • A game history tracker records the history of your colony in graphs of wealth, population, and happiness, as well as recording individual important events.
  • Game history is now uploaded automatically to our servers after an opt-in prompt is agreed to. This uploads your game history – the same one you see on your history graph – to us to help us balance future versions.
  • More translations added (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, others) and existing translations updated.
  • Language can now be switched by clicking the flag on the main game screen.
  • Lots of other small improvements.

Thanks for the ongoing support everyone!

19 Responses to “Alpha 5 – Under Siege released”

  1. DeadalusLP

    Uhii, nice Job and thank you for you work. πŸ™‚
    Greetings Deadalus

  2. WMP

    This is super, epic release πŸ˜‰ I love you πŸ˜‰

  3. Muz

    Sweet. Finally an ending to work at. I love that it’s uploading game histories to tweak balance and stuff. Always felt it was a bit pointless to build up defenses to almost exploit levels, but now it’s for a good cause πŸ™‚

  4. AFatalpapercut

    This is an awesome update!

  5. BillSmith

    What a great game. Don’t usually like building sims but the survival and social aspect of this game is outstanding

  6. Jin Hai

    Love this game. Lovin it since I first heard of it. Hoping for an update where you can give your colonists haircuts, but I’m fully aware it’s a minor thing. πŸ™‚ Awesome update!

  7. Alen

    Another great update. for this great game, kudos

  8. MFortier

    I dont know if its just me but my colonies now just have everyone go insane way to easily just from simply eating raw food and having a gross environment but i dont see how that would make anyone go insane

  9. Bersch

    GREAT UPDATE! This really improved the game (a lot lot lot), and the game was already very good πŸ™‚ nice job!

  10. xEl Gringo Loco

    Woot! This was much needed, I was fed up of having people walking around my colonies butt ass naked all the time.

  11. JKTD1919

    YAY, an update where we don’t have at least three letter updates within twenty-four hours! Good to have you back Tynan, <3

    Just kidding, I know those were problems that only mass testing would have revealed. Keep up the good work, fantastic update as always. Love the new apparel buffs! Probably my favorite part of the update.

  12. Berrigon

    Awesome update, thank you! Great game with a smooth learning curve and lots of fun πŸ™‚

  13. ZONEcold4evr

    Love this game, seen it a lot on YouTube. Will get in near future! Keep up the good work!


  14. Great game, already playable AND enjoyable. Mechanics are already set up, may need some balancing, but actualy works well.

    The game escalate in difficulty as you build a more mature colony.

  15. Martin Burne

    Hey. There’s kind of a bug with the siege. The siegers can arrive at a place which is too close to set up mortars (which can’t fire on close targets). Which means they just mill around and I guess eventually die from starvation without building any – I guess I’ll find out later on.

    Also, there doesn’t seem to be much of a minimum delay between one siege and the next, this happened like a day or so after another siege ended.

    Sieges sort of die out due to the siegers going crazy and, usually towards the end, killing each other. But they can go on for a while and so maybe the delay (if there is one) is only between the beginning of each event.

    They also do seem pretty heavy in terms of collectable loot. Why pay a combat trader for LMGs when you can wait for a siege and get them free?


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