Anomaly preview #2: Containment facilities, creatures, and release date

Posted March 28th, 2024 by Tia Young

Hello, it’s Tia and I’m back with our next preview blog of RimWorld – Anomaly!

Also, mark your calendars: Anomaly releases on April 11, 2024. Wishlist now to be notified when it’s out!

Check out our previous blog posts below:

🚨 SPOILER WARNING: Read ahead at your own risk! These preview blogs WILL SPOIL some of the surprises in the expansion. 🚨

Today, we’re talking about how you’ll capture, research, and exploit the mysterious phenomena formed by the enraged monolith’s influence. You can build a grand containment facility with strong walls, floors, and doors to keep these entities locked up, and study them to further your knowledge of the madness that’s taken over the world. Exploit your chained horrors to use their power against your enemies – but be careful not to push them too far!

CAPTURE: SHAMBLERS

The first step is to work out how to take down and capture these entities without killing them.

The most straightforward entities are the walking corpses known as shamblers.

Deadlife dust is a cloud of corrupted archites that raises any corpse it settles on as shamblers, repairing their rotting bodies for a time. It’s similar to the old resurrector mech serum, but far more twisted.

Deadlife dust works on all kinds of creatures (even your own dead colonists and beloved pets), but it doesn’t last forever. In a few days, the archites run out of power and the shambler returns to death. Colonists can weaponize deadlife dust as mortar shells and IEDs. Shamblers created this way will not attack your colonists, which means a battlefield of corpses can suddenly become gruesome weapons for your colony.

The shambling dead you encounter will attack all living creatures relentlessly and their immunity to pain makes them difficult to kill. However, that resilience is useful, because you want to take one “alive”. Work to incapacitate one by firing at it or hitting it with a blunt weapon. Then you can move on to step two: contain (described further down).

CAPTURE: REVENANTS

More difficult to capture is the revenant, a psychically-invisible human hunter that alternates between hunting people and hiding in its lair.

The name “revenant” comes from an old outlander tale about an evil spectre that haunts a village and every night rips a victim’s soul from their body. It leaves the vacant body behind, keeping the soul enslaved in its own personal hell.

Revenants can use psychic influence to appear invisible and enter your colony unseen. Once they get hold of a colonist, they can hypnotize him into an endless nightmare. The revenant will return again and again over time, hypnotizing your people one by one until it is stopped.

There are ways to track the revenant. If you damage it, the creature may leave chunks of flesh behind which you can study to improve your tracking. It can also be detected by proximity alarms, and its invisibility can be disrupted when it’s hit by EMPs, explosions, fireform, fire or special bioferrite disruptor flares.

After each hypnotic attack, the revenant needs to sleep. Take this opportunity to form your hunting squad and find its lair while it hibernates – and attack it before it wakes.

CAPTURE: METALHORROR INFESTATIONS

Someone is infested. Someone is not who they seem. But who?

Metalhorrors are parasitic creatures that control their hosts with filaments spread throughout the nervous system. They imitate their hosts’ behavior nearly perfectly, manipulating them to find opportunities to secretly infest other colonists.

As they multiply and grow in your colonists, they shed fleshy gray tissue – liquefied remains of their victims. If you find this tissue in your base, it is time to become suspicious and afraid.

There are many ways you can identify the infested. Analyze the gray flesh you discover to identify the metalhorror’s host, then perform surgical tests on your colonists… but can you trust your doctors? You could quarantine colonists to their rooms to see who the flesh comes from, or imprison and interrogate suspects to see if they give anything away. Of course, this all takes time, and the infestation could be spreading…

If detected, the metalhorror will cut its way out of the host and attack. Be careful when investigating – you may have a fight on your hands.

CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS

So you’ve damaged an anomalous entity enough that it’s incapacitated? And some of your colonists are still alive? Well done! Now you can contain it and experiment on it! 🧪

Have one of your colonists carry the downed entity to a holding spot. These primitive roped locations can briefly restrain the weakest entities. Here your colonists can study them for uncanny research.

However, if you don’t actually want them to escape and tear your colonists to pieces, a mere holding spot won’t do. Build a proper secure facility, starting with a containment platform, which comes with built-in restraints. (You need one platform for each entity.)

To prevent an escape, colonists can also suppress entities or build an electric inhibitor to suppress them automatically. Wise colonists will also build separate containment cells, using special bioferrite flooring and walls that further suppress the creatures.

Be sure to lay out your containment facilities carefully. Keep an eye on each entity’s suppression level. Have killing fields and layered defenses prepared for when they escape. Because they will, inevitably, and every containment plan is only as strong as its weakest point.

RESEARCH & HARVEST

Once an entity is restrained, colonists can study it. To do this, you’ll need to ensure a colonist is assigned to dark research.

This separate technology track gradually increases your knowledge of the dark archotech behind the incursion. It also teaches you more about rituals, archotechnology, serums, and weapons.

Each entity can also be harvested. Build an electroharvester to draw electric power from the entity. A bioferrite harvester will generate organic metal which can be used for later power generation, sculpture, or outdoor heating, or for crafting at the new bioferrite shaper.

Note that both of these activities increase the entity’s rage, making it more likely to escape and take its revenge.

DARK ARTS AND CRAFTS

Now you have a regular supply of bioferrite, you can have fun with it – if your idea of fun is creating impossible monsters and strange machinery. (We know ours is.)

If you build a bioferrite shaper workbench, you can craft new gear and weapons from the organic metal. The weapons include:

  • Nerve spiker: A crossbow loaded with toxic spikes that stun organic creatures.
  • Incinerator: A terrifying flamethrower with an alternate-fire mode that produces a giant gout of flame (shared by the Hellcat assault rifle).
  • Deadlife IEDs, mortars and packs: Distribution packs that allow you to raise shamblers from nearby corpses.
  • Disruptor flares: Short-lived bioferrite beacons which stun psychic creatures and reveal invisible ones  – useful for sightstealers and revenants.

Bioferrite can be used to make psychic weapons with various effects, from driving enemies into berserk rages, to sending them into psychic shock, to biomutating them into fleshbeasts. Other psychic pulsers can make every animal in the region either turn into a fleshbeast or go into a manhunting rage.

Bioferrite is also crucial for making serums at the new serum lab workbench. The serums include:

  • Voidsight serum: Increases dark research speed at the cost of sanity.
  • Juggernaut serum: Increases strength, speed, and recovery time.
  • Metalblood serum: Makes a person resilient to damage, but vulnerable to fire.
  • Mind-numb serum: Deadens emotions, preventing mental breaks at the cost of stopping inspirations too.

Using bioferrite, humans can be surgically (irreversibly) transformed into ghouls. These are mindless flesh-craving killers and fearless melee combatants who can be augmented with a variety of dreadful implants. (Ghouls will be discussed in a future blog post!)

TO COME

We’ve still got more horrifying reveals to come for Anomaly, and April 11th is only 2 weeks away!

Let us know what you think on Reddit and please wishlist Anomaly so you’re notified when it’s out!

– Tia

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