A lot of players on Mac have reported that they can’t play the game; they just get a black screen on startup.

A temporary fix is to hit Command+Esc to force the game into windowed mode and play that way.

If that doesn’t work, you can use these other steps for solving game startup problems.

Sorry about this. I’m investigating now and will release a Mac version hotfix ASAP. There is a forum thread working to track down this issue.

One question – is there anyone out there on Mac who is not getting this bug?

Alpha 7 is out! This time we’ve added artificial limbs and prosthetics, jungle biome, new trade system, organ harvesting and trading, and a whole ‘stuff and stats’ system where certain things can be made of other things.

If you own the game, you should get an update email from us. You can also get Alpha 7 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 6 colony.

Change summary:

• Stuff system allows you to build walls, furniture, and other structures out of arbitrary materials.
• New stats system for calculating and reporting thing stats from skill, race, stuff, and other factors.
• There are now multiple types of stone: sandstone, granite, marble, slate, and limestone.
• There are now multiple mineable minerals: metal, silver, gold, plasteel.
• Leather harvesting from animals, and cloth harvesting from cotton crops. Special space-tech cloth types.
• Make clothing from arbitrary fabrics or leathers.
• Reworked damage deflection chance per-damagetype armor system. Some animals and mechanoids have natural armor.
• New biome: tropical rainforest. A choking, disease-infested jungle. Disease rates are linked to biomes.
• Prosthetic limbs, from simple to complex: peg legs, wood dentures, simple prosthetics, enhanced bionic limbs and eyes.
• Organ harvesting and transplanting.
• Diseases: flu, plague, malaria, sleeping sickness.
• Chronic conditions (age-related): Cataracts, bad back
• A bunch of new traits. Brawler, prosthophile, and more
• New trade system and interface.
• Traders carry and buy any item, including prosthetics, neurotrainers, organs, slaves, weapons, apparel, commodities.
• Neutrotrainers: Matrix-style instant training devices.
• Lockable doors
• Melee weapons: Club, knife, spear, shiv, short sword
• New animals: cobra, monkey, camel, tortoise, boar, rhino.
• Storyteller redesigned and rebalanced.
• Visitors carry their own food and hopefully won’t raid your food supplies.
• Translations can be set to avoid using tiny text (useful for Asian languages where tiny characters are unreadable).
• Rewritten credits system integrates translator credits from each translation automatically.
• Piles of other additions, fixes, and tunings.

It’s a whole new world! Here’s Alpha 6, the update with world generation, biomes, a medical system that tracks every wound and body part, and personality traits. 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 6 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 5 colony.

A quick recap of improvements in Alpha 6:

• World generation added. You can now generate a world from a seed value and choose where to land your escape pods.
• Biomes added. There are six biomes on the world map, but only three of them are implemented so far – desert, arid shrubland (the only choice, previously), and temperate forest.
• Obviously, biomes have distinct animal and plant life which present unique challenges and opportunities.
• Coastlines added. If you land on a seashore, your map will have a coastline in it (though it doesn’t do much, it’s fun to play on the beach.)
• Medical system added. Instead of simply having hit points, characters, animals, and mechanoids have a body health tracker that records every wound and every body part and how they interact. Wounds will affect specific abilities, so someone with eyes burned out can’t shoot or do surgery well, and someone with leg wounds will move slow. Wounds can also become permanent if left untreated, or kill someone due to bleeding.
• Pain level is tracked. A character in too much pain will become incapacitated.
• Doctors and medicine now have a purpose! Your doctor will attempt to heal wounded colonists and prisoner (if the prisoner is marked to receive care). If there is medicine available, he will use it to increase the chance of giving quality care. Wounds treated with quality care are much less likely to become permanent.
• Delicate body parts like brains or eyes usually end up with permanent damage when harmed.
• Characters now have personality traits which affect gameplay! Enjoy playing with colonists who are lazy or hardworking, neurotic, psychically sensitive or deaf, bloodlusty, or nudist.
• EMP weapons added. Useful for fighting mechanoids, and for enemies attacking your turrets.
• Spacey new menu music from Alistair Lindsay. More in-game music and sound effects from Al added as well.
• More translations added and existing translations updated.
• Lots of other small improvements and dozens of bug fixes, as well as new bugs to discover!

You all knew a hotfix was coming! It’s like a tradition now!

The good thing is that this isn’t a bug hotfix, but a balance one. I’d been hearing a lot of reports that the global psychic drone event – causing -25 to mood – was harming play. So until I can rebalance it, it’s disabled in Alpha5b. The crashed ship part event seen in the release video is still present.

To update, you just have to change one number in one file:

Open Notepad or some other text editor.

With Notepad, open [YourRimWorldFolder]/Mods/Core/Defs/IncidentDefs/BaseIncidents.xml, and find this text:

  <IncidentDef>
<defName>PsychicDrone</defName>
<workerClass>IncidentWorker_PsychicDrone</workerClass>
<chance>1.2</chance>
<minRefireDays>8</minRefireDays>
<favorability>Bad</favorability>
</IncidentDef>

Set <chance>1.2</chance> to <chance>0</chance>.

Or, you can re-download the game from your old link.

I’ll be reworking this event in future versions.

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!

Just a quick heads up to everyone. Apparently the Randy Random storyteller is broken in Alpha 4. It starts off all right, but over time it doesn’t ramp up challenges, which makes the endgame dull.

If anyone is playing a Randy game, you can change your storyteller to Cassandra, who is working well. Just follow these steps:

1. Start the game, go to options, click “open savegame folder”.
2. In a text editor, open the save file you want to modify.
3. Do a search for “Randy”. (You’ll find it between two <defName> tags.)
4. Replace the word “Randy” with “Cassandra”.
5. Save the document, close your text editor, and restart the game. Your Randy game should now run with Cassandra.

Sorry about this everyone. We’ll have him fixed up good for Alpha 5.

I’ve just uploaded Alpha4f, a balance and design hotfix. Everyone who bought the game will be getting emails about it. Even if you didn’t, any of your old download links will always get you the latest version.

Warning: This version will not work with savegames from any older version (including Alpha4a through Alpha4e).

As always, anyone with download trouble should please read this forum post for info on what to do.

Note that this update does not include Alpha 5 content like artillery mentioned in the changelog. That you’ll have to wait for.

The major changes are:

• Wood log and wood planks are now merged into one wood resource. This reduces pointless early-game busywork for colonists (sawmill work), and reduces confusion about exactly what kind of wood is needed to build what. I hope to bring back the wood/plank distinction in the future, but it will have to be part of a larger system where many objects can be constructed of different materials while still being the same object type. See this forum discussion.
• Storytellers balance has been redesigned. They now cue on different signals and will generally track against the player in a more entertaining way.
• Randy Random is no longer totally broken and unbeatable.
• Pila weapon is nerfed from 45 damage to 30 damage per hit.
• Stone wall health raised from 400 to 650.
• Animal insanity waves were broken and never occurred. They are now, again, part of the threat mix the storytellers will use against you.

Hope you guys like it! Let’s hope this one is the charm for Alpha 4.

Alpha 4 has been hotfixed to Alpha4e. If you want to update, you can re-use your existing download link. It never changes and always has the latest version.

If you’re not sure about your version, open Version.txt in the RimWorld folder. The latest is 0.4.462 rev40### (where # can be anything).

• Alpha4b added the source code which is supposed to be included.
• Alpha4c fixed the storytellers, who had a bug that made them permanently placid instead of ramping up over long games. Now they will ramp up properly and eventually, probably, kill you. But hey, it’s all about the drama!
• Alpha4d lengthened the ramp-up time for challenge. It also adds a “need sawmill” alert to reduce confusion around the wood planks system.
• Alpha4e rebalanced the storytellers again in light of this poll.

Sorry for all the hotfixes. Testing storytellers properly is really hard. We’re working on some automated metrics so balancing won’t be such a scattershot process in the future.

Your savegames from all Alpha 4 versions will still work.

Here it is, Alpha 4, featuring giant centipede robots and lots of other fun stuff. If you bought the game you should get an email with the update. If not, check out this forum thread.

I forgot to mention in the video: the map generator has more variation now and tends towards more verdant surroundings, so it’s a bit less of a desert. I redesigned the storytellers to focus on colony wealth more than combat strength in determining what to throw at you (no more avoiding turrets just to seem weak). The storytellers are also much better at handling near-death situations. If you’re almost dead, your wealth will be low and the raids will soften (since you have nothing worth stealing), so you may be able to recover instead of being guaranteed to get steamrolled.

Also, we now have tension music from Alistair Lindsay when a combat situation is in progress.

We also have good support for a wide variety of languages now: German, French, Polish, Chinese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch. If you speak any of these languages and are part of a non-English-language game community, let them know that this game will work for them!

Major improvements in this build:

• Wood economy. Logs, sawing, planks, flooring, tree growing, and more.
• More stuff to research.
• Crematorium.
• Slag refinery.
• More map variation.
• Mechanoids raids.
• Tension music for combat situations.
• More songs for normal gameplay.
• Smarter AI storytellers that focus on wealth and let you recover from serious damage.
• Region system for better performance.
• Tons of AI and usability improvements to hunting AI, player tutor, alerts, etc.

You can check out my full work log for more detail on exactly what was accomplished.

Come chill with us on the forums if you have something to say!

APRIL 15 UPDATE: Silently updated to Alpha3f. This version fixes a bug that caused save games to sometimes fail to load. Alpha3f will break save compatibility from earlier versions.

APRIL 13 UPDATE: Silently updated to Alpha3e with one minor fix.

APRIL 12 UPDATE: Silently updated to Alpha3d. Fixes specified below.

I’ve just uploaded Alpha3c, a slightly changed version which fixes a number of rare bugs that cropped up after the Alpha 3 release.

Your savegames from Alpha 3 should still work (though you’ll have to copy the .rim files over to a Saves folder in the new install directory).

The bugs fixed were:

• 633: Occasional crash on load associated with the TerrainGrid.
• 635: Performance killer associated with forbidden items under blueprints in certain conditions.
• 638: Game crashes if you load a map under 256 squares wide, then load one over 256 squares wide (flood fill and path grids not resetting their sizes).
• 636: Minor error message as pawns drop and tried to pick up created items at bill tables.
• 637: Warden/doctor loop when feeding incapacitated prisoner set to get no food.
• 504: Muffalos draw with wrong texture.
• 644: Pawn spaz loop when eating stackable food off the same square someone else is eating off of (e.g. corner of table).
• (Alpha3d) 656: Cooks don’t haul meals to stockpiles
• (Alpha3d) 646: New Colony button doesn’t work with special characters in folder path
• (Alpha3f) Fixed a bug causing savegames to fail to load.

Sorry about asking you to update twice in two days three times in three days. We did a lot of testing with a good-sized test team, but it’s amazing what crops up when thousands of people get their hands on the game. I’m going to have to consider other test and development processes to try to avoid this kind of situation in the future.

Original post regarding Alpha 3b follows:

Someone found a bug that will sometimes make it impossible to load savegame. I’d added error recovery code to the game and re-uploaded it as Alpha3b. If you downloaded the game earlier today, you may want to re-download (using the original link). Your download limit will reset. You’ll know you got the new version because the zip file is called “RimWorldAlpha3b”. Saves from Alpha3 will probably still work (even ones that were broken before).