Alpha 9 is out! This time we’ve added alcohol, drunkenness, binges, hangovers, multiple sculpture types with generated art based on historical events, personal shields for melee fighters, and dozens of smaller improvements. A full change list is at the end of this post.

If you own the game, you can get Alpha 9 by re-downloading from the link you used before (it is a permanent link and always has the newest version). You should also get an update email from us. Anyone still having trouble should start at this thread.

Also note that this build will not load old savegames or old worlds, so please don’t try to load these in the new version. They’ll probably just crash the game.

4:21 EST: I fixed a bug with forbidding and sculptures just two hours after initial release and hotfixed the build to Alpha9b. If you already got it, please re-download. Alpha 9 saves won’t be affected.

Change list:

Alcohol

• Added hops growing, beer brewing, beer drinking, inebriated thoughts and ability impacts
• Added special ‘binge’ mental breaks
• Added teetotaler and chemical fascination traits
• Added hangovers

Tales and art

• There are now three tiers of sculpture: small, large, and grand. Grand sculptures are 2×2 cells.
• Sculptures now have generated descriptions of what they depict.
• Sculptures will depict events that happened earlier in a colony’s life, include: killings, drunkenness,vomiting, landing in drop pods, artwork created, struck ore, person captured, person recruited, animal hunted, surgery done, someone was on fire, someone went psychotic, someone gave up
• High-quality weapons have art engraved into them.
• All weapons now have quality levels, including guns and bows.

Age

• Old characters have gray hair and more fleshed-out old age illnesses.
• Old characters tend to spawn with higher skills.
• Since people don’t age in cryptosleep, characters now have both chronolotical age and biological age. Even animals and mechanoids have ages.
• Dates are now relative to specific years. The game starts in 5500.

New stuff

• Personal shields added. These one-person shields block a certain amount of damage from ranged attacks and also prevent shooting out. Great for melee fighters.
• Artillery shells are now needed by artillery cannons. Shells on the ground can explode. Siegers will come with shells to use to bombard you. Shells can be crafted at the machining table.
• Added deterioration: items left outside for a very long time will deteriorate and eventually crumble away.
• Surgery can fail now, sometimes catastrophically. Failure chance is related to the surgeon’s medical skill and the quality of the medicine.
• You can now rescue incapacitated neutral people and heal them. Their faction will be appreciative.
• Guns now have quality levels which affect accuracy.
• Added Heavy SMG
• Added psychic foil helmet
• Added corn and rice crops.
• Vomiting: Some diseases, drunkenness, cryptosleep sickness, and hangovers now cause people to vomit.
• People can now get food poisoning. Bad cooks are more likely to accidentally poison meals.
• Game now records total real playtime per colony.
• Added ‘pause on load game’ option.
• Many new sound effects from Alistair Lindsay for UI, work, and combat.

Misc improvements

• Deep optimization on various systems – especially AI. This should make big colonies run much more smoothly.
• Added bad thought for wearing tattered clothes.
• Apparel becomes damaged when owner dies from violence.
• Apparel actually takes the damage it absorbs as armor.
• Apparel wears out over very long periods of use.
• Uranium ore now appears as a minable natural rock.
• Colonists will now go to extinguish nearby fires even if someone else is already coming to do it.
• Cryptosleep caskets are now sealed, come with warnings, and can contain deadly ancient defenders.
• Reworked the ‘do until you have X’ option on bills; it now works for more bills and shows the number you currently have.
• Eating now takes priority even over emergency work (doctoring, firefighting) if a colonist is starving.
• Colonists, when hauling to stockpiles, always haul the max amount they can carry, and drop the extra nearby if the target cell can’t hold it all.
• Reworked ship takeoff sequence into a proper whiteout with nice credits.
• Player can no longer magically toggle power on any item. Rather, you designate power to be toggled and the colonists go do it.
• Temperature now equalizes through both walls and roof/floor.
• Lengthened day from 20,000 to 24,000 ticks. Shortened month to 12 days.
• Reworked auto-tutor to rely more on passive alerts and less on in-your-face interrupting modal dialogs.
• Colonists are now bothered by people walking around inside the room while they sleep.
• People newly woken from cryptosleep have cryptosleep sickness for a while.
• Wind varies over time (not just with weather changes), and so will the power output of wind turbines.
• Fonts are now nicely antialiased.
• Tons of other refinements, rebalancings, and bugfixes.

The ‘saw corpse’ thought is stacking far too high because of a bug. In cases where there are lots of corpses, it can reach absurd levels and make it nearly impossible to keep colonists sane.

The fix is only one line in a single file. You can do it yourself:

1. Go to the directory (RimWorldDirectory)/Mods/Core/Defs/ThoughtDefs
2. Edit the file Thoughts_Memories.xml
3. Go to the “ObservedLayingCorpse” mood effect (usually line 173 to 189). (Usually it’s easiest to do this by hitting Ctrl+F to search for ObservedLayingCorpse).
4. Change the line “<stackedEffectMultiplier>1</stackedEffectMultiplier>” to “<stackedEffectMultiplier>0.5</stackedEffectMultiplier>”

I’ve also uploaded a fixed version. So, if you wish, you can also just re-download the game from your existing download link.

Saved games won’t be affected either way.

Alpha8c created a major bug where colonists would never plant in hydroponics basins. The fixed build, Alpha8d, is now uploaded.

As always, you can update with your existing download link.

Sorry about that. Hopefully not too many of you downloaded the game in the hours between 8c and 8d.

UPDATE: I just released a nonessential fix to reduce the mood impact of seeing rotting corpses from -14 to -4. You can patch as usual, or just go into RimWorld657/Mods/Core/Defs/ThoughtDefs/Thoughts_Memories.xml, search for ObservedLayingRottingCorpse, and change <baseMoodEffect>-14</baseMoodEffect> to <baseMoodEffect>-4</baseMoodEffect>.

Note: This hotfix created it’s own new bug (colonists can’t use hydroponics). Sorry! I’m uploading a fix now.

I’ve released a hotfix to some further important issues discovered in Alpha 8. You can get the update by downloading from the download link we sent you before (this is your personal permanent link and will never change). There will be no email sent for this non-essential update.

Changes:

• Mostly fixed some hard performance hitching that occurred when there were a lot of blueprints that lacked resources (usually when laying large amounts of carpet without enough cloth).
• Surgically removing bionic parts from living people will now yield the removed part for reinstallation or sale.
• The binding between workers and bills will no longer time out. This should eliminate problems with workers starting the same bill several times and ending up with multiple unfinished versions of the same item.
• The ‘was imprisoned’ thought now has a greater effect on mood.
• Fixed growers just standing there when there was a nearby growing job that was not accessible (e.g. a plant pot in a locked room).
• Plant not growing now text uses the word ‘resting’ to clarify that the problem isn’t a lack of light.

There was a bug in Alpha 8: If a colonist smoothed a terrain that wasn’t rough stone, the game would crash.

I thought this would be impossible, because you cannot designate a non-rough-stone terrain to be smoothed. But if you designate some rough stone for smoothing, then designate a floor to be built over it, and the floor is built, and then the smoother finally comes by, the game will die because the floor has no ‘terrain I should become if I’m smoothed’.

If you think you can just not build floors over smoothing designations, you can just avoid the crash that way. I’ve also uploaded a hotfixed version, Alpha8b, which you can download from your existing download links.

Sorry about this.

Alpha 8 is out! This time we’ve added a seasonal cycle and temperature simulation, snow, two more biomes (boreal forest and tundra) with all the attached animals, art sculpting, crafted item quality, weapon and apparel crafting, homegrown medicine, wind turbines, and more.

If you own the game, you can get Alpha 8 by re-downloading from the link you used before (it is a permanent link and always has the newest version). You should also get an update email from us. 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 7 colony.

Change summary below:

Temperature and seasons

• A new temperature system tracks temperatures indoors and outdoors.
• Characters can get hypothermia, frostbite, heatstroke, or burns from being in extreme-temperature areas.
• Certain clothing can protect against temperature discomfort/harm.
• Temperature changes daily and on a yearly cycle according to where you are on the planet. There are distinct seasons.
• There are special heat wave/cold snap events.
• Added heater and cooler buildings.
• Food spoils. This can be slowed or prevented with refrigeration.
• Snow falls and accumulates over winter. It slows down movement.
• Snow can be cleared manually, and will melt if heated.
• New apparel: Parka and tuque.
• Added new biomes: boreal forest and tundra

Art and crafting

• Sculptor’s table added. Colonists can create abstract sculptures.
• Sculptures and melee weapons have a quality. Quality is influenced by crafter skill and affects beauty and damage.
• Apparel crafting now allows crafting any kind of apparel.
• Can now craft any kind of melee weapon from appropriate materials.
• Created ‘unfinished thing’ step to crafting. Crafting can now take several days per item (as in the case of advanced weapons or art).
• Added art trading.

New content

• New animals: elk, hare
• New plants: pine tree, birch tree, moss, xerigium
• Xerigium plants can be farmed and refined into herbal medicine.
• New power plant: wind turbine.
• New weapons: triple rocket launcher, doomsday rocket launcher.
• New items: Glitterworld medicine, herbal medicine.
• Alphabeaver event creates alphabeavers who will consume trees until stopped.
• Ancient cryptosleep shrines now generate on the map. Open the cryptosleep caskets if you dare – the occupants may not be friendly.
• Economy and trader stock generation reworked and rebalanced from the ground up.
• Stats inspector allows inspecting more things in more places, and provides more, clearer info.
• Several new songs from Alistair Lindsay.
• You can now release prisoners. This gains you goodwill from their faction.
• You can now configure your keyboard hotkeys.
• Dozens of other fixes and improvements.

Hey all, just wanted to quickly celebrate with you. RimWorld sold its 50,000th copy two days ago!

There’s not much more to say, except for that I greatly appreciate the support from all you players, modders, and especially translators and testers. It’s great to see a community spring up and strengthen over time like this. And for me, it’s great to be able to do the work that I love to do every day, and have it mean something to people. So thank you all.

Hi all. This is just a quick update on what’s going on in development. As always, you can follow my day-to-day development progress on my changelog.

The time between Alpha 7 and Alpha 8 will be the longest yet. This is for a number of reasons.

Partly, it’s because a lot of things have slowed me down. Piotr ‘ison’ Walczak was helping out over summer, but he went back to school. Work on the Ludeon Launcher took a lot of time – more than expected. Ludeon’s tax year ended, which meant a huge pile of paperwork that doesn’t appear on the changelog. The game is bigger, which means that there is more maintenance and fixing work to do every alpha. And I moved houses, which took many hours.

Besides all that, though, I’ve decided to start targeting somewhat longer spans between releases. This is to improve long-term productivity.

Each release takes a ton of time in and of itself. I can’t just package up the game and release it. It has to go through a multi-week, multi-stage testing and bugfixing process. The private testers have to bang on it, then the public testers. I have to manage dozens of bug reports, close duplicates, invite new testers, test it myself, and of course fix piles and piles of bugs. As the game’s gotten more complex this whole process has gotten more involved. The first public releases wrapped up their testing cycles in about a week. Alpha 7 took about three weeks. There’s just more stuff to test now. I can still work on future content during a testing cycle, but it’s slower as every change and fix needs to be merged forward – sometimes dozens of times. Then, once it’s released, there is a barrage of support requests and often more bug reports and hotfixes to test and release and publicize.

I believe I can maximize long-term output by reducing the number of actual releases and being able to just work with the game in an unstable state for longer. Because that’s where the good super-productive period is: when I can simply pour in features without constantly worrying about every little bug that might be getting introduced. I want to expand that period of the release cycle proportional to the testing period, to maintain a good ratio.

The good news is that the next release will at least feature boreal forest and tundra biomes, a full temperature and season system with fire, heaters, air conditioners, warm/cool clothing, hypothermia and heat stroke, and oodles of other smaller content additions like herbal medicine, weaponsmithing, and properly reworked economy and stats systems.

I’m migrating the website to another server in the next day or two. If you see the forums in restricted read-only mode, or some site down or acting glitchy, that’ll be the reason. Only the ludeon.com domain will be affected.

I’ll try to have it all back and running clean as soon as possible.

UPDATE: Alpha7b had a typo that made plague 10x too common in temperate biomes.

You can fix your game by re-downloading and reinstalling it, or by replacing Mods/Core/Defs/BiomeDefs/BiomesBase.xml with this corrected version of the file.

—–

I’m uploading a silent non-essential hotfixed version of Alpha7.

Alpha7b has reduced disease frequency, so diseases will appear less often.

To update, you can re-download from your old link.

Alternatively, you can just go into your game folder and look in Mods/Core/Defs/BiomeDefs/BiomesBase.xml, search for every instance of <chancePerDay>, and cut all the values in half. There are about 12 entries.