Biotech preview #4: Xenotypes, world factions, and the dark blood-drinkers

Posted October 18th, 2022 by Tia Young

Meet the new factions and existing xenotypes, as well as a blood-drinking cult of immortals

Update: RimWorld – Biotech is now available!

It’s Tynan here, bringing you our final Biotech preview covering the xenohumans who inhabit the world, their factions, and the mysterious blood-drinking sanguophages, and Biotech’s price and release day.

Just a reminder that Biotech releases this week on Friday, October 21, 2022! Wishlist it now to get a reminder when it’s out!

Read the previous previews posts for Biotech:

Version 1.4 is on testing now, on the “unstable” beta branch on Steam; modders can (and hopefully will) use this to update their mods to work on 1.4 before it drops. Note that RimWorld has support for multi-version mods which work on several game versions at once; there is no need to break 1.3 support (modders see here for full info).

If you intend to stay on version 1.3 after Friday (for mod compatibility or for any other reason), please switch your Steam beta branch to “version-1.3”. Now, let’s talk about Biotech’s new xenohumans!

Xenohumans in the world

As you’ve seen before, Biotech lets you create your own kinds of xenohumans by mixing and matching from over 200 different genes. But this isn’t just a player tool – xenohumans are part of the universe of RimWorld. Whereas RimWorld’s base game has all human factions, with Biotech, you’ll interact with a variety of xenohumans and their new factions.

We designed the xenohuman types to emerge naturally from RimWorld’s fictional universe, play distinctly from each other, and enrich the game as foes, prisoners, gene farms, allies, and colonists.

Embedding xenohumans into the world helps the game in a lot of ways. It lets players experience the new gene-linked abilities both as player tools and as enemy threats. NPC xenohumans are a way for you to access many genes by capturing a foe and placing them in a gene extractor. Seeing other xenohumans helps show the player the kinds of things that are possible with their own genetic experiments. Also, the xenohuman types work as a scaffolding for more content, like the sanguophages’ special secret quests (more on that later).

Fundamentally, xenohumans make the human world more diverse. Factions feel more different when they have different combat abilities and physical characteristics. The recruits you get from different places will have more exotic abilities. Characters are more distinct from each other in gameplay mechanics and style. Handling a group of frenzied fire-breathers launching burning arrows is different from stopping the wolf escorts sent by furry yttakin riflemen. Fighting neanderthals is a slugfest; fighting wasters is a chokehold; fighting impids is a flame war.

Writing the name generators for each xenotype culture was also a ton of fun.

Let’s look at the xenotypes in Biotech:

Pigskins

Pigskins are human-pig hybrids which are capable of two-legged movement, tool use, and speech, but which also retain many pig-like qualities. They are hardy and can eat almost anything without getting sick, but their trotter-shaped hands leave them at a disadvantage when attempting to precisely manipulate tools and objects. They don’t see well at a distance, so pigskin gangs usually focus on close-range weapons. They also have a strong taste for explosives.

Pigskins were made for their organs. Uncomfortable with the idea of harvesting organs from baseliner humans, a long-gone government merged human DNA into pigs to make the animals produce more easily-transplantable hearts and livers. They succeeded, but the resulting creatures became more humanlike than anyone anticipated.

The pigskins’ faction is the rough pig union, a loose union of hardy pigskin townships. They’re willing to make friends, even with thinsnouts, but they’re also ready to toss a bomb and gnaw human gristle when it suits them. Treat them with respect and they’ll offer a trotter to an ally in need. Turn against them and the last thing you hear might be a triumphant battle squeal.

Impids

Made for desert life, impid cultures live on many rimworlds and dry deathworlds. Impids are extremely fast-moving, easily tolerate high temperatures, and can spew fire from their mouths. Though they are masters on the sand, impids struggle in other environments. They are terrible with farming. They fight well at range, but in close combat their physical weakness becomes apparent.

Outlanders call them dustrunners because of their speed over open terrain and resistance to heat. Some tribes call them devils because of their horns and because they burn their enemies.

The savage impid tribe has no intention of coexisting peacefully with anyone else. Their warriors are experts at using their natural speed and flame attacks to burn the towns and children of other peoples. Impid tribes’ combat tactics usually center on rapid-approach incendiary attacks using both handheld fire weapons and their fire spew ability.

Having been on the planet for thousands of years, the origins of this tribe are lost in myth. They might descend from a group of settlers who lost their technology, or an impid community in some long-ruined civilization.

Yttakin

Yttakin (pronounced roughly as ee-ta-keen) descend from colonists engineered to thrive on ultra-cold planets. Their great size and fur make them hardy in frozen environments. Yttakin share a psychic connection with the wildlife and can summon animals to their side during battles. They are not fast or energetic or precise, but can keep going when others would have collapsed long before.

Since they migrated off their icy birthworld of Yttak, Yttakin settlements live on many planets. Their fur, roaring voices, and aversion to urban living sometimes leads naive outsiders to believe they are simple-minded animals. Quick-minded Yttakin are happy to make good use of such wrong beliefs, whether at the negotiating table or on the battlefield.

The faction of yttakin pirates choose to be isolated, and they refuse to deal with outsiders. They’re quick to call animal warriors against anyone who threatens or disrespects them. Underestimating their wild animal companions would be a mistake. However, a captured and recruited yttakin can be a strong ally.

Neanderthals

Neanderthals are stocky, powerfully-built humanoids. Their most salient characteristic is that they are difficult to hurt: they are very resistant to injury, and their strong immune systems protect them from infection. However, without ever having evolved in a complex civilization, they are less adept than baseliner humans at intellectual and social tasks, and their impulsiveness can make them dangerously aggressive.

Homo neanderthalensis was originally an archaic population of hominids that emerged over 200,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. After they were replaced by and merged with humans 30,000 years ago, they were absent for tens of thousands of years until scientists resurrected them from ancient DNA. Neanderthals now survive in sub-societies on some settled planets. On the rimworlds, neanderthal tribes carve out the same existence as their Earth ancestors did so long ago.

The fierce neanderthal tribe lives in the deep wilderness. They are open to peaceful trade, but are otherwise unfriendly and territorial. Warriors from their tribe won’t hesitate to bash in the skulls of anyone they deem dangerous. Their numbers, and the extreme amounts of damage they absorb before falling make them serious foes despite their lack of technology and analytical ability.

Having been on this planet for countless generations, they have no memory of how they got here. They might be the descendants of a neanderthal service caste from a dead civilization, or even the leftovers from some ancient science experiment.

Dirtmoles

 

With gray skin adapted to artificial light, dirtmoles thrive in cramped and dark spaces where combat and travel happen over short distances. They are extremely capable at digging or mining tasks. In the open, however, they suffer from a sensitivity to light, slow speed and poor eyesight at distance.

After the first tunnel colonies failed due to the stress of confinement, colonization agencies began genetically altering colonists to live without open space or sunlight. This xenotype are known colloquially as dirtmoles. Today, dirtmoles have expanded out of their original tunnel homes and rule many confined spaces in the anthrosphere. They can be found in deep mines, cramped low-tech spacecraft, and teeming by the billions in the dark underlayers of countless urbworlds.

Genies

Designed to be engineers, genies’ delicate bones and natural aptitude with machines allow them to manipulate devices with remarkable precision. They are emotionally cold and can follow orders where others might panic. However, they are fragile, and their amplified nerve impulses make them easy to debilitate with relatively little pain. With so much of their brains dedicated to analyzing machines, they lack the neural hardware to analyze emotions, so they sometimes come off as socially inept. Their dead calm makes it even harder for them to relate to what they see as madly-hotheaded baseliner humans.

Genies were engineered thousands of years ago by a long-disbanded space navy to hold engineering positions on large starships. Today, genies still serve as engineers in great cities and fleets, but many can also be found working as lawyers, pilots, and musicians.

Hussars

Hussars are engineered soldiers. They fight aggressively and with precision, heal fast, thrive in extreme temperatures, and freely ingest military drugs. They have a genetic dependence on the drug go-juice, which also makes them less likely to rebel against their commanders.

While hussars’ emotions make them dangerous in combat, they can’t relate to baseliner humans. They are famous for their blood-red eyes and “hussar stare”, a dead expression that unsettles many people.
Their lack of expression and burning aggressive nature has led to many violent misunderstandings.

In most societies where they live, hussars are kept separated from the rest of the population. Hussars are single-purpose tools – and they generally aren’t bothered by the fact.

Highmates

Empathic and effortlessly beautiful, these designed companions and concubines have the unique ability to psychically bond with a mate. In a certain context, they seem to be perfect – happy, charming, and kind. However, they are also inept at manual tasks, physically weak, and mentally incapable of violence even if their life depends on it.

On a few wealthy worlds, highmate xenogerms are commercially available and some people become highmates as a sort of career. However, many societies find them abhorrent, either because they distract people from forming natural families, or because they are humans shaped to serve the pleasures of another. On such worlds they are either reserved as playthings of the powerful, or banned entirely. This particular line of highmate fits the fashions of classical Novaroma, but many other variants exist.

Wasters

Wasters are gaunt-faced, grey-skinned, aggressive, immune to toxic pollution, almost impervious to disease, and can ingest as much psychite and wake-up drugs as they wish with no ill effects. Their toxin-adapted metabolism means they must consume some form of psychite to survive – usually flake or yayo.

Originally engineered to prevent resettlement of post-apocalyptic deathworlds, wasters are living area-denial weapons. Waster pirates armed with toxic weapons are the bane of many frontier peoples, both on the rimworlds and in the depths of the urbworld hyperstructures.
The faction of waster pirates are a diverse collection of violent xenohumans. They are mostly wasters, with a smattering of hussars, neanderthals, genies, dirtmoles, genies, yttakins, and pigskins. They have little interest in building, or farming, preferring to take their sustenance from others using violence. Their technology level depends mostly on who they’ve managed to steal from recently. Mostly they carry gunpowder weapons, though some prefer to stab victims at close range. They’ll always be a threat.

Sanguophages

Minor spoilers in this section – skip if you want the purest play experience!

Sanguophages pass among other xenotypes undetected while concealing superhuman powers and working to satiate their genetic need for human blood. They are subjects of wild stories and childrens’ nightmares, and their very existence is debated. They do not reveal themselves without good reason.

Powered by archites, unique micro-machines created by archotech superintelligence, sanguophages’ abilities go far beyond normal genetic enhancements. They are mentally adept across domains and preternaturally beautiful. In combat, they can launch deadly spines and heal injured friends. They don’t age or die naturally and never suffer from disease or poison. A sanguophage can make a new sanguophage by reimplanting their own xenogerm into a person.

The price of all this is the endless red thirst. Sanguophages must regularly consume hemogen derived from human blood. Hemogen acts as a sort of fuel for the sanguophages’ powers. They’re easily destroyed by fire, and slowed down by UV light.

Sanguophages must also go into deathrest every now and then, where they enter a dormant state for several days in the darkness to regenerate their powers. This process of deathrest can be enhanced by a variety of technological structures, chief among them is the deathrest casket.

The deathrest casket is an enclosed med-casket that accelerates the process of deathrest. It can connect to other devices which confer additional bonuses on the deathrester. The number of devices that can connect depends on the person’s deathrest capacity, which can be seen by selecting them. The devices to connect are:

  • Hemopump: This blood-refining pump increases the amount of hemogen a deathresting person can store in their body.
  • Hemogen amplifier: This device leaves a deathrester in a hemogen-amplified state so they gain more hemogen from any hemogen source. Using a gland probe and blood analyzer, it links with a deathresting person, stimulating hemogen glands into a more active state.
  • Glucosoid pump: This device allows a deathrester to move faster after deathrest is complete. It pumps the body with extra muscle-signaling factors while cleaning waste products from muscle tissue.
  • Psychofluoid pump: This device enhances the psychic sensitivity of a deathresting person by rhythmically stimulating neural tissues.
  • Deathrest accelerator: This device connects with a deathresting person and makes deathrest complete quicker. It enhances the effect of the deathrest casket using finer blood analysis and more powerful chemicals.

There is a secret faction of sanguophages. Every now and then, you may get an opportunity to perform a service for them by giving protection, secrecy, or salvation. If you succeed, one of them may offer you the dark gift of immortality. Alternatively, if a sanguophage can be disabled and captured, then a new sanguophage can be made against the blood-drinker’s will.

The first sanguophage appeared thousands of years ago when the lord-explorer Varan-Dur sought to control a hyperintelligent archotech and found himself transformed by it instead. Every sanguophage is descended from him. Since then, sanguophages have often been hunted because of their destabilizing power and their need for blood. Since they can pass for baseliners, many live in hiding among typical humans.

Their numbers are unknown. Some think they are legends or rare irrelevancies. Some believe sanguophages secretly direct entire human civilizations. The stories speak of eternal lords ruling billions from slate-black space stations, or directing blood sacrifices at conferences in the underlayers of the deepest urbworlds.

If you want to engineer your own xenotype with sanguophage-like powers, you can find copies of the sanguophages’ special superhuman genes via quests and trade. However, many of them require a unique resource called archites to be reinstalled in a new person. Archites are rare, but can be found via quests, trade, and other special means.It is possible to be a sanguophage and another xenotype at the same time – pigskin sanguophages look pretty great in their dark hooded robes.

You can start the game as a sanguophage with a single human servant, if you want to build your own blood-harvest empire from scratch.

We made sure to design all the character-oriented enhancements so they can be used freely in any combination. We are very much looking forward to the stories of people making their favorite colonist into a royal, a psycaster, a priest, a mechanitor, a unique xenotype, and a sanguophage all at once.

Biotech’s price

Biotech will be priced slightly differently from our previous expansions, at $24.99 USD. (Other territories have different prices on Steam.) We hired a lot of people and took a lot of time (15 months) to make Biotech because that’s what it took to properly explore the ideas that we set out to explore. The feature set got big enough that we seriously discussed splitting this into two expansions, but decided to keep it as one.

Some companies have a “cost first” model where they decide up front to make an expansion in a fixed time/price (e.g. 6 months/$20) and force the creative process to live in those constraints. We take ideas and build them until they feel well-rounded and complete. We believe that different ideas naturally take different amounts of resources to explore, so it must be okay for different expansions to have different prices, for the same reason different games have different prices. Forcing every expansion to have the same price would mean trying to squeeze or stretch every idea into the same amount of production resources, which is not a path to creative flourishing. That’s why our expansions aren’t all priced the same – because they’re different in scope, because that’s what the ideas wanted.

Biotech’s release day!

RimWorld – Biotech and free update 1.4 release this Friday, October 21, 2022.

Please wishlist Biotech on Steam and share the exciting news with your pals. We seriously cannot thank the community enough for all of your passion and support (and the awesome fan art).

Also chat about the discussion of this post on Reddit!

Thanks for joining us on this journey.

– Tynan

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Biotech preview #3: Reproduction, children, genetic modification, & release date

Posted October 15th, 2022 by Tia Young

RimWorld – Biotech releases on October 21, 2022, plus the joys of raising children and genetic engineering

Update: RimWorld – Biotech is now available!

Hi everyone, Jay and Matt here – we’re developers at Ludeon.

We’ve got a release date for you: RimWorld – Biotech is coming out on October 21, 2022. Mark your calendars and wishlist Biotech now!

Today’s preview covers reproduction, children, vatgrowing, and genetic engineering.

You can also check out our previous blog posts below:

Biotech lets you have children and raise a family! Children end up in your life in many ways – colonists could give birth or use a surrogate mother, take in a band of orphans, and even gestate embryos in machines.

Pregnancy can occur through natural means or advanced fertility procedures. You can let your colonists’ relationships develop organically, or play matchmaker with new romance options! Browse your colonists’ romantic interests and encourage them to make a move on a potential sweetheart. (Hopefully they share some kind of chemistry, or someone will be brutally rejected.)

We sped up pregnancy to last only 18 in-game days, given the short-lived nature of many colonies. Take care of mom during this time – pregnant colonists get real big, slow, and hungry. They also struggle with waves of morning sickness and brutal mood swings from the highest highs to the lowest lows.

Prepare for your little one before labor begins. Birth is difficult and dangerous for both the mother and child – you’d be smart to have a good, clean birthing room with supportive family members and a skilled doctor nearby – it could make the difference. Complicated births can be turned off via storyteller setting.

Taking care of babies

A baby’s life is simple: eat, sleep, and play.

Newborns won’t move on their own and rely on adults to feed and protect them. Colonists assigned to “childcare” work will be responsible for all the babysitting!

Keep your baby’s tummy full with lots of good eats. Babies can’t stomach the complex meals adults like, so keep mom nearby for breastfeeding or cook up some mushy gooey baby food. (Adults forced to eat baby food will not like it.) In a pinch, insect jelly and animal milk do a great job of keeping babies full.

Everyone benefits from playtime. Build an adorable nursery brimming with toy chests and baby decorations that help fulfill the little ones’ play need. Adults will play with the youngsters and carry them around the colony. When it’s naptime, babies sleep a lot better in a high-quality crib made from good materials – no splinters please!

Happy babies make for happy colonists. Parents share a special bond with their children, and will be in high spirits when their children are happy (or feel terrible when their kids are unhappy). Keeping babies happy is vital for the short and long term health of your colony. Unhappy babies unleash a powerful sonic-psychic weapon (known as crying) which can reduce the mood of any person within earshot. Likewise, a happy baby’s giggling brightens the day of anyone who hears it. It pays to keep the youngsters and the adults in a good mood!

Raising children

At age three, children will be walking, talking and getting into trouble. We adjusted the speed they grow so that you’ll see the most important life moments in a single game. Those that prefer a more “natural” progression can adjust the speed in the storyteller settings.

Children have a unique “learning” need. Satisfying this need depends on what their current learning desire is – they may want to chat over the radio, explore nature, scribble on the floor, take lessons in class, daydream on the ground, or watch the adults as they work. Fulfilling children’s learning desires contributes to their overall development and improves their chances. While children are generally slower and less skilled than adults, they have a natural optimism and a curiosity for the world around them. Like newborns, when children are happy, it improves the mood of the adult colonists around them. Children will also require clothing tailored just for them. Make sure you’ve got enough child-sized parkas to keep them warm in the winter!

At ages seven, ten, and thirteen, children reach developmental milestones known as “growth moments” where you choose their traits and passions, and unlock new work types for them. Children that spend more time fulfilling their learning needs have a greater variety of advantageous traits to pick from. Balance your children’s work and leisure schedules with care. A rich childhood with lots of attention gives them better chances to be a capable adult, but doesn’t guarantee anything.

Vatgrowing

Technology offers an alternative to long and burdensome human pregnancies: growth vats. Extract and combine genetic material from the parents to create an embryo, and insert it into the machine.

Growth vats accelerate development and sustain the embryo without subjecting a mother to the unpleasantness of pregnancy. In a mere 9 days, embryos develop into babies. You could remove your child at this time – or leave them inside to continue growing.

Children grow significantly faster in the vat than if they were out and about in the world. However, they’ll miss out on childhood and never pursue their learning desires, resulting in poorer choices of traits and passions during growth moments. Whether you keep children floating in growth vats or let them out to experience life depends on your goals.

Growth vats are excellent tools for churning out super-soldier and simple workers, but require large amounts of nutrition. Without an adequate supply of nutrition, individuals in the vats will suffer from bio-starvation.

Genetic modifications

With Biotech, you can create your very own genetically-engineered colonists, known as xenohumans.

To create a xenohuman, you’ll first need genepacks – small capsules containing a handful of genes. Genepacks can be purchased from traders, earned as quest rewards, or extracted from a host using a high-tech gene extractor. The process is not terribly comfortable, but the result is a genepack containing a random assortment of the specimen’s germline genes and xenogenes. Using a gene assembler, you can recombine several genepacks together into an implantable organ called a xenogerm. Once implanted into a human, they will immediately gain the traits associated with the xenogerm’s contained genes.

Don’t want to wait to make xenohumans? When starting a new game, you can select premade xenotypes for your starting colonists – or create your very own! We’ve also added a number of xenohuman factions (but more on that in a later blog post).

Genes

So what do genes do? Well, quite a bit. Let’s preview a few of them:

  • Fire spew: The carrier of this gene gains the ability to spew flammable bile. The bile sticks to anything in a small area and can ignite people, objects, and the ground. (Just make sure to have a firefoam pop pack handy.)
  • Longjump legs: This gene gives the ability to jump long distances, letting melee attackers quickly close distance between them and their foe.
  • Furskin: The body of a carrier is covered in thick fur, providing some insulation and changing the person’s appearance. Furskin is perfect for cold climates.
  • Smooth tail: Carriers of this gene grow a slender tail that can act as a dexterous fifth limb, increasing their manipulation.
  • Strong stomach: Carriers have an extra toxin-filtering organ in their stomach and will never suffer from food poisoning even after eating rotten food.
  • Psychic bonding: People with this gene bond with a single person for life, sharing a psychic bond with them. As long as they remain close to their mate, they will be happy – but if their partner dies, it can be catastrophic to their mental health.
  • Robust: Carriers take less injuries than others from the same damage. This can stack with the ‘tough’ trait to create incredible powerhouses.
  • Never sleep: This gene completely prevents the need for sleep.
  • Ageless: Carriers of this gene do not age biologically. Stay young forever!
  • Great shooting: Greatly increases a person’s aptitude for shooting, effectively increasing their shooting skill by +8.
  • Psychite addict-immune: Carriers are immune to addictions caused by consuming psychite.
  • Deathrest: Carriers of this gene must periodically regenerate themselves in a special coma called deathrest. Deathrest takes days, but can confer substantial bonuses with the right infrastructure. Deathrest can be accelerated and its effects enhanced by the use of a variety of special buildings and technologies.

…and that’s just a small sample from more than 200 genes available in Biotech!

Genes come in two distinct flavors: germline genes and xenogenes. Germline genes are present in every cell of the host’s body and are able to be passed onto children. Examples in a baseline human would include hair and skin color. Xenogenes, on the other hand, are technologically implanted and cannot be passed on.

You’ll need to pick genes carefully. Powerful genes will decrease a person’s metabolic efficiency, making them need more food. On the other hand, genes with drawbacks will increase a person’s metabolic efficiency. Creating a functioning xenotype is a thoughtful balancing act of picking the right strengths and weaknesses. Create a muscular cave dweller who’s afraid of the sun, or a sleepless genius who needs smokeleaf to survive. The possibilities are endless.

The most powerful genes require archite capsules – small containers of microscopic machines produced by superintelligent archotechs. These devices are capable of enabling genes with physical and psychic feats which would otherwise be impossible, from perfect immunity, to super healing, to immortality.

Next time

Remember, Biotech releases on October 21, 2022! Stay tuned for our last blog post and please wishlist Biotech on Steam.

Join the blog post discussion on Reddit here!

– Jay and Matt

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Biotech preview #2: Combat mechanoids, pollution, and super-mechanoid bosses

Posted October 11th, 2022 by Tia Young

Beautiful polluted wastelands, and three super-mechanoids to fight for fun and profit!

Update: RimWorld – Biotech is now available!

Hey everybody! I’m Will, a designer working on RimWorld – Biotech. In our last blog post, we covered how Biotech lets you build mechanoid colonies run by high-tech mechanitor overseers. You can also read the original 1.4 update and Biotech announcement here.

Today, we’ll look at combat mechanoids, commander mechanoids, and pollution! New combat mechanoids open up many avenues for offensive and defensive tactics, and special super-dangerous mechs hold the key to greater power for your mechanitor. Mechanoid production also generates pollution which has its own unique challenges and uses.

Later this week we’ll take a look at reproduction, children, vatgrowing, and genetic modifications.

Check out the other preview blogs:

Mechanoid commanders

Biotech introduces three new commander mechanoids to fight. Defeat these super-deadly enemies and harvest special mechanoid chips from their smoking husks to advance your mechanoid technology. You can provoke super-mechs into attacking your colony by using signaller devices – but be prepared!

Each mechanoid commander drops a different mechanoid chip. The first time you acquire each type of chip, you’ll unlock a new tier of mechanoid research. Mechanoid chips are also used as resources to produce top-tier mechanoids and mechanitor upgrades. With enough chips, you can power up your humble mechanitor into an unstoppable mechlord.

We created the super-mechanoid enemies to add meaningful milestones to mechanoid progression. While research is fine for most advancements, we wanted mechanitors to feel different. Progression is actively earned by overcoming tougher and tougher challenges, instead of research alone. We added tons of new controllable mechanoids, brain implants, buildings, and gear to each tier of mechanoid tech to make progression extra rewarding.

You’ll be able to fight mechanoid commanders at your own speed. Unlike other challenges in RimWorld that scale as your colony grows wealthier, super-mechanoid enemies scale with the number of times you call them. This allows you to tackle them early on to beef up your tech, or wait and carefully prepare your colony for the big fight.

Super-mechanoids come with escort mechs of all other types to add combat power. Commanders bring a new escort every time they are called, and require a different tactical approach for each engagement. We designed them to be as distinct from each other as possible, so each group is a new challenge. From swarming, to sniping, to scorching, super-mechs have a huge range of combat styles.

Let’s look at the super-mechanoid types:

Diabolus: An ultra-heavy mechanoid with a high-energy hellsphere cannon. Made for siege-breaking, its hellsphere cannon takes time to charge up a shot, but can melt concrete and vaporize bone. The diabolus dissipates its waste power through a heat column mounted on its back, allowing it to produce massive fiery explosions as a defensive measure if surrounded at close range. While extremely powerful, the diabolus lacks maneuverability – meaning you’ll need to be fast and agile to defeat it! Keep your colonists moving to outpace its hellsphere cannon, or distract it with cannon fodder.

War queen: A terrifying mechanoid with a built-in mech gestator. The war queen can gestate small war urchin combat mechs inside its massive carapace and deploy them into combat. Given time to build up numbers, a war queen can overwhelm any opponent with dozens of war urchins. The war queen demands respect – failing to destroy it quickly could have devastating consequences as it grows its swarm and overruns your colony.

Apocriton: The mysterious apocriton is an intelligent commander mechanoid and psychic warrior that harbors endless hatred for humanity. Not much is known about it, except that its psychic powers poison the human mind with rage. Its weapon is hatred.

Combat mechanoids

Crush enemies and raiders with your own mechanoid army.

Biotech lets you control hordes of killer mechs, all connected to your mechanitor overseer. Even death won’t stop them – you can resurrect your destroyed mechanoids in gestator tanks.

However, protecting your very mortal mechanitor is crucial. Drafted combat mechanoids need to stay within range of their overseer to receive commands. While mechanoids can work autonomously at any distance, they can only be ordered to move or attack targets that are within their mechanitor’s range. Mechanoids that become severed from their overseer risk defecting to hostile mech hives.

The new combat mechanoids in Biotech include:

Militor: The cannon-fodder of any sizable mechanoid army. These small combat mechanoids are armed with a low-power mini-shotgun. Roughly four feet tall, militors lack the power, range, and toughness of more senior combat mechs. However, they are cheap to gestate and maintain, making them the perfect swarmer.

Scorcher: A close-approach war mechanoid that specializes in incendiary attacks. Its flame burst attack has little reach, but once it closes on defenders, it can ignite and disrupt them with blasts of searing flame. Scorchers quickly turn firefights into “fire” fights. These mechanoids start wildfires with ease and are especially effective against large groups of attackers or those taking shelter in flammable defenses.

Legionary: A combat support mechanoid with a wide-range bullet shield and long-range needle gun. Legionaries are excellent for defending long-range allies. Its shield absorbs incoming projectiles, while allowing colonists and mechanoids to shoot out freely. However, legionaries are weak to melee attackers, and their shield can be quickly broken with an EMP.

Tesseron: A medium-range combat mechanoid with a powerful, sweeping beam graser attack. Their gamma ray laser is powerful enough to ignite its targets and can even pass through shields. This lets tesserons strike multiple foes from a safe distance, and breach shielded enemies. However, tesserons are unable to focus their laser at close range, making them susceptible to fast-moving melee opponents.

Centurion: A nearly unstoppable ultra-heavy mech with a built-in shield bubble generator and point-defense bulb turret capable of firing even while the mechanoid is moving. The centurion acts as a mobile defense platform. Its massive shield is one of the strongest among mechanoids, providing large numbers of allies with strong defense while allowing them to shoot outwards.

In addition to the new mechanoids, you’ll be able to control the classic mechanoid types – pikemen, scythers, centipedes, and lancers. With the right technology, you can even create your own super-mechanoids like the diabolus and war queen!

We had two main goals with combat mechanoids. First, we wanted to create more diversity in combat. Colonists are only human, which puts limitations on how diverse they can be in battle, whereas mechanoids can have very exotic movement types, abilities, weapons, and tools. From swarms of cheap, disposable gunners to slow-moving, tanky tunnelers and shield-projecting defenders, mechanoids bring a ton of variety to the battlefield and allow for many creative tactics.

Second, we didn’t want to entirely remove the human element from combat. Some of the most interesting RimWorld stories come from defending your colony – or attacking another! By requiring mechanitors to fight alongside their mechanoids, we preserve the human element – and the tension – of facing down hostile mechs, pirates raids, and manhunter packs.

Mechanoid colors and names

Style your mechanoids with dozens of different colors to give them a personalized look, and distinguish them from enemy units. And yes – you can rename your mechanoids.

Mechanitor upgrades

By unlocking more powerful mechanoid technology, you’ll gain access to a wide variety of mechanitor upgrades, from neural implants to special mechanitor armor.

Here’s an overview of the mechanitor implants you’ll have access to in Biotech:

  • Control sublink: These neural implants expand a mechanitor’s processing power, giving them additional control groups and increasing the work speed of labor mechs.
  • Remote repairer: A mechlink upgrade that allows a mechanitor to repair mechanoids at a distance. The user links with the mechanoid and psychically guides the self-repair mechanites. It’s great for long-distance mid-combat repairs.
  • Remote shielder: An implant that allows a mechanitor to project a shield onto a friendly mechanoid. Use this during critical moments to save your mechanoid!
  • Mech gestation processor: This implant connects the mechanitor directly to their gestator tanks and increases the speed of mechanoid production or resurrection.
  • Repair probe: The more mechanoids, the more repairs! Repair probe implants substantially increase the repair speed of a mechanitor.

Most mechanitor implants can be installed multiple times. There’s a ton of room for progression to make an extremely powerful mechanitor. However, all power comes at a cost. High-level mechanitor upgrades can only be made using high-tech chips obtained from defeating super-mechanoids.

In addition to implants, mechanitors have a wide variety of specialized gear:

  • Mechanitor headsets: These head-mounted comms computers increase the number of mechanoids that your mechanitor can control.
  • Mechanitor packs: Control packs and bandwidth packs allow mechanitors additional flexibility, granting more control groups, or more bandwidth.
  • Mechcommander and mechlord armor: The ultimate in mechanitor gear! This power-assisted armor dramatically amplifies a mechanitor’s bandwidth.

The basics of pollution

Mechanoids make for powerful allies, but they come with a unique cost – pollution.

Creating and recharging mechanoids creates toxic wastepacks. Unless frozen, these packs of toxic waste will eventually deteriorate and pollute nearby terrain. Even worse, if they’re burned or damaged, they’ll pop like a balloon and release deadly tox gas. Storing them close by may be convenient, but be careful!

Mechanoids aren’t the only source of pollution. Toxifier generators provide a steady supply of power but directly pollute the terrain around them. These generators are perfect for mechanoid colonies that need plenty of cheap power… so long as you don’t mind some toxic buildup. While a small amount of pollution is manageable, it can quickly get out of hand if you’re not careful.

While mechanoids are immune to pollution, your colonists aren’t (depending on their genes, of course). Pollution makes living things sick. It poisons colonists and animals, causing them to slowly gain toxic buildup. Anyone who’s encountered toxic fallout in the base game will be familiar with the deadly effects of toxic poisoning. High levels of toxic buildup can cause vomiting, dementia, carcinomas, and ultimately death. Additionally, normal crops and animals can’t survive on polluted terrain. The more polluted your colony becomes, the more it will attract toxin-adapted plants and animals. From the twisted witchwood tree to the gas-filled toxalope, pollution will slowly corrupt the land and animals around you.

Pollution also affects the planet at a larger scale. The more polluted an area, the more it affects the surrounding world. High levels of nearby pollution can cause acidic smog to roll in that’ll make your colonists’ eyes water. Acidic smog blocks the sun and slows plant growth, and the vaporized chemicals corrode exposed items. When starting a new game, you can adjust the world’s pollution level. Turn it off for a relaxing game, or turn it up for some extra challenge.

Managing pollution

There’s no shortage of tools to deal with (or even embrace) pollution. Wearing anti-pollution gear, like face masks and gas masks, reduces your colonists’ exposure to pollutants. Transplanting artificial detoxifier organs makes your colonists immune to pollution’s toxic effects. There’s even pollution-related genetic modifications – but we’ll discuss those in a later post.

Order colonists to manually clean up polluted terrain and they’ll package it back into toxic wastepacks. However, the safer option is to use automated pollution pumps to keep vulnerable colonists away from the pollution.

Now, what to do with the heaping piles of wastepacks?

  • Freeze them. Frozen wastepacks won’t dissolve, but they take up a lot of space.
  • Export them. Use caravans or transport pods to dump your wastepacks on the world map. For extra fun, you can even leave them as a gift in your enemies’ bases. People may not love you doing this.
  • Polux them. Heavily polluted maps will eventually sprout special polux trees. These trees slowly purify polluted terrain around them. Their delicate root network prevents them from being replanted.
  • Atomize them. High-tech wastepack atomizers let you completely neutralize the threat of toxic wastepacks. The process is somewhat slow – and quite expensive.
  • …or ignore them! Polluting the land does have some benefits. Polluted terrain can grow new crops, like the fast-growing toxipotato. (Just don’t eat it raw.) Pollution can also attract new animal variants, like toxalopes and waste rats.

Pollution and insects

Giant insects love pollution. Originally engineered as anti-mechanoid bioweapons, these insects are stimulated by the toxic fumes of polluted terrain, making them faster and deadlier.

When conditions are inhospitable, insects form stasis cocoons and burrow underground. These cocoons keep insects safe from fire, extreme temperatures, and other threats for decades. Many planets are littered with these cocoons, lying just below the surface. The scent of a dissolving wastepack can trigger the cocoons to resurface in a dormant state, until they’re disturbed… causing a mass eruption of insects.

Cocoon infestations are threatening, but have their uses. They can be intentionally triggered to farm insect meat or be set up defensively in strategic locations. (Stop raiders in their tracks with a horde of angry insects!) You can also avoid cocoons altogether with strict wastepack management.

Tox gas

Tox gas is a deadly chemical irritant. It burns the lungs and eyes, causing temporary shortness of breath and reduced sight. Chronic exposure to tox gas results in toxic buildup, and eventually death. It can be created by burning toxic wastepacks, or weaponized with a new research project. Tox gas weapons include tox grenades, toxbomb launchers, tox mortar shells, tox IEDs, and wearable tox packs.

Tox gas adds a lot of interesting combat tactics. Tox gas clouds can greatly diminish the effectiveness of ranged attackers. After all, it’s hard to shoot a gun if you can’t see or breathe. Additionally, attackers that are exposed to tox gas for long enough will eventually be downed from toxic buildup. You’ll also need to learn how to defend against tox gas (it’s the signature weapon of one of our new factions – more on that later!) Wear gas masks or be smart about your colonists’ movement to negate the effects of tox gas.

More on the way

Stay tuned! We have more Biotech details coming soon. In the meantime, wishlist Biotech on Steam!

Have something to say? Join the discussion on Reddit!

– Will

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Biotech preview #1: Mechanitor infrastructure and labor mechs

Posted October 8th, 2022 by Tia Young

Mechanoid control in a human-centered way, with big power and big challenges

Update: RimWorld – Biotech is now available!

Hey all – Tynan here. This is the first of our Biotech preview blog posts, where we lay out the features of the Biotech expansion, and the thought behind them, in more detail. You can look forward to more posts on the way. (If you missed the Biotech announcement, you probably want to start there. You can wishlist RimWorld – Biotech here.)

Today’s preview post covers mechanitor core concepts, mechanoid infrastructure, and labor mechanoids. The next post is in a few days, and will cover combat mechanoids, enemy super-mechanoids, and other mechanitor-related features, and there will be many more after that.

Check out the other blog posts:

The mechanitor

A mechlink is a new implant that allows a person to form a direct mental link to mechanoids and control them via electromagnetic signals and psychic influence. Someone who has a mechlink is called a mechanitor.

Mechanoids aren’t controlled independently, but through a human – this design intentionally keeps the mechanoid systems focused on a human being, which is critical to building an emotional story.

Mechanoids can perform in both work and combat. Some mechanoids are workers that will politely harvest crops or haul items as long as their little power cells are charged. Some can work or fight, crushing rock and bone with equal ease. Finally, there are a wide array of pure combat mechanoids with very diverse abilities. Incendiary beam weapons, movable projectile shields, long-range charge lances, blade-covered scythers, flame-spitters and more can be deployed in many combinations to defeat any threat via interlocking tactics.

There are a few ways to become a mechanitor, and all involve looting technology from an ancient dead mechanitor. If you can dig a datacore out of an ancient ruined super-mechanoid, you can use it to call an ancient mechanitor’s ship to land at your colony and harvest the mechlink from his body. Alternatively, you might be able to learn about an ancient mechanitor’s command complex, go there, penetrate inside through the security systems and grab the mechlink from him. You can also start the game with the new mechanitor scenario, where you begin the game as a solitary mechanitor with a mechanoid buddy.

It’s possible to do a single-person mechanitor run, where one mad scientist type lives alone in a grand base surrounded by walking, semi-thinking machines. Making this possible was a design goal from day one, because exotic play paths are so fun to explore. However, we expect mechanitors to most often live more normally among other colonists, commanding mechanoids to work and fight alongside human allies. If you really want to scale up, it is possible to collect multiple mechlinks and turn several colonists into mechanitors, though this takes a long time.

All our game mechanics interact freely. It’s possible for your mechanitor to also be a high noble with the Royalty expansion, a religious prophet with the Ideology expansion, and a deathless blood-drinker with this Biotech expansion, because why not?

Mechanitors start out with the ability to command just a few small mechs. Over time, they can grow a grand swarm. They do this by gaining more bandwidth and control groups:

  • Bandwidth determines how many mechs a mechanitor can gestate and control at once. A mechanitor who loses bandwidth will temporarily disconnect from some of their mechanoids. If a mech is left disconnected for too long, it may reconnect with the wild mech hive and leave – or attack.
  • Control groups are groups of mechs who can be controlled as a unit. A mechanitor with more control groups can send mechanoids to do more separate tasks at the same time. A more advanced mechanitor can have combat mechs patrolling a colony, labor mechs toiling in the field, and bodyguard mechs escorting them around, all at the same time.

Mechanoid challenges

A basic game design principle is to push things as far as they can go without breaking the game – that means make tools more powerful, enemies more dangerous, changes more overwhelming than seems safe at first. The idea is to ensure you’re exploring the full range of experience that’s possible in your game systems.

So we wanted mechanoids to be very powerful in order to create more extreme situations and distinct playstyles. The more impact they have, the more they can transform your game. However, in order to not unbalance the game, this meant that they needed to come with serious challenges as well. But what?

Existing costs in the game are things like consuming food, chemfuel, or steel over time. But simply making mechanoids consume resources wouldn’t feel transformative, and wouldn’t substantial alter gameplay since the mechanoids can pay for themselves by producing the resources they consume. The collect/spend loop is too simple and has almost no side-effects on the world, story, or characters.

So we decided to emphasize two new challenges that would come with mechanoids: Infrastructure and pollution. We cover infrastructure below – A future post will cover pollution, its causes, consequences, aspects, uses, and solutions.

Mechanoid infrastructure

Mechanoids require heavy infrastructure that takes up a lot of space and burns a lot of electricity. Big sections of your colony can turn into mechanoid maintenance, production, and control centers. You’ll feel your plucky wooden village transforming into a grand integrated machine of generators, chargers, control nodes, and gestators. Your base will tend to grow large with a lot of mechanoids, and have a lot of things moving and consuming.

Each mechanoid must contain a mechanoid brain known as a subcore (short for subpersona core – the psychic substrate on which a dim, sub-human-level intelligence can be hosted). There are several tiers of subcores, with more advanced mechanoids requiring more advanced subcores.

Basic-level subcores can be produced by a mechanitor with just some resources and time at the subcode encoder.

More advanced subcores require scanning the psychic pattern from human minds. A person can be placed in a subcore softscanner and scanned to produce a subcore. This causes temporary mental effects but is ultimately harmless.

The most advanced mechanoids need extremely high-fidelity psychic patterns to work, and these can only be readily produced using the subcore ripscanner, which scans the brain quickly at ultra-high energy, destroying it in the process.

Once a subcore and resources are ready, mechanoids can be produced in mech gestators. Instead of being built like normal machines, mechanoids are gestated in a mechanite-rich solution that accretes the mechanoid molecule-by-molecule in a quasi-biological process. Gestation takes time, electricity, resources, and occasional guidance by your mechanitor.

Only a mechanitor can guide the gestation process, since it requires a psychic link to the growing mechanoid. As always, everything about the mechanoids links back to the human whom they serve.

The gestator can also resurrect some types of mechanoids. This makes your mechanoids more expendable in combat, which makes using them in combat give more distinct strategies compared to using human fighters.

There are several sizes of gestators. Small gestators are used for smaller mechs, while larger gestators are needed to produce ultra-heavy war machines. Little mechs gestate quickly, while big bosses take a long time to grow.

Mechanoids consume their onboard energy supply over time and must recharge at mech rechargers. Mechanoids will automatically seek out available rechargers so they don’t run out of energy. If they do run out of energy they’ll enter a self-shutdown state and recover energy very slowly – it’s much better to have a mech recharger available to keep your mechs working hard. There are several sizes of mech rechargers appropriate to different tiers of mechanoids. They consume a lot of electricity, and produce pollution as well – the characteristic cost of mechanoids.

Band nodes are signal amplifiers that can increase a mechanitors total bandwidth. They can be quickly tuned to a specific mechanitor. However, returning a band node to a different mechanitor is a complex task and requires a long time. There is no limit to how many band nodes a mechanitor can build, so a mechanitor can have a huge swarm, though it will require heavy infrastructure to control.

Mech boosters are enhancer buildings that boost the speed and work ability of mechanoids nearby. Great for powering up mechanoid-based factories.

Mech signallers are a set of single-use structures that can be used by a mechanitor to call in fearsome super-mechanoid enemies to attack you. You need to call these enemies so you can loot their corpses for special high-tech mechanoid chips. These chips are core to the mechanitor’s progression since they are needed to advance to the next tier of mechanoid technology. This structure of “choose your enemy and be ready” is a little bit new for RimWorld, and creates a new kind of self-directed game pace for the player (as opposed to being blindsided by raids at any time).

We’ll explore these super-mechanoids in more detail in the next blog post.

Labor mechs

Labor mechs can perform a variety of work tasks (but not absolutely everything – some things still need a human touch). Some are plucky little worker bois who are best kept away from danger, while others are hulking crusher machines that tank damage with ease.

Paramedic mechs are designed to aid in emergency situations. They can rescue the wounded, fight fires and even perform surgery. The paramedic has a built-in jump launcher for quickly getting into and out of emergency situations, making it excellent for extracting downed colonists from battle. It also has a built-in firefoam popper which it can use to extinguish fires. It also has basic medical skills – it can tend the wounded and sick, and even perform surgery when a skilled human isn’t available.

Lifters are there to move things where they need to go. They’re small, weak, pretty easy to get and always useful. They will haul a corpse to a grave or rearm a turret. They lack a real weapon.

Constructoids can perform an array of construction tasks, from building roofs to repairing buildings and even hauling resources to blueprints. The constructoid is equipped with a small slug gun for light defense and built-in cutting blades, but is not a good frontline fighter.

Agrihands are small mechanoids designed to sow and harvest crops and can perform a blunt melee attack.

Cleansweepers are light mechanoids that clean filth and do blunt melee attacks.

Fabricors will craft all manner of manufactured objects at your work benches (though they can’t do the same quality of work as a skilled human). Like the constructoid, the fabricor has a small slug gun.

Tunnelers are massive, heavily-armored mechs equipped with gigantic crusher claws. The tunneler can dig tunnels and mine resources tirelessly. In combat, it is slow but its very strong armor makes it an excellent tank for absorbing enemy fire while your other fighters deal damage. The tunneler has a small built-in smokepop pack which is can activate to spread smoke and shield itself from incoming fire. It also has a shield pack that recharges over time. Its weakness is that each time it takes damage, it slows for a few seconds – this means that when tunnelers attack you, even if you can’t kill them quickly, you can intelligently kite them by falling back from your position to escape the blocking smoke, maintain distance and slowly whittle the tunnelers down. (More on mech combat in the next post.)

That’s it for today! You can wishlist Biotech on the Steam store page and please join the discussion of this post on Reddit.

We’re planning on several of these blog posts, so there’s no shortage of more Biotech info on the way. Cheers for now, thanks for reading.

– Ty

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Biotech expansion announced! Update 1.4 on unstable branch

Posted October 5th, 2022 by Tia Young

New expansion adds children, mechanoid control, and gene modding

RimWorld’s third expansion, RimWorld – Biotech, is coming out in a few weeks!

We’re also making the free vanilla 1.4 update available now for play on the unstable Steam branch. More details about that near the bottom of this post.

This post will:

  • Describe Biotech’s features
  • Present Tynan’s thoughts on why he decided to make Biotech as it is
  • Go over new features in the free 1.4 update

You can wishlist RimWorld – Biotech now!

About Biotech

Biotech is focused around three major features:
  • Control mechanoids, including many new mechanoid types, by making your colonist into a mechanitor
  • Raise babies and children. Reproduce and create families – by both natural and artificial means
  • Genetically-modify children and adults, and interact with new gene-modded factions

Children and reproduction

Now you can raise a family and tell your story for generations to come!

 

With Biotech, colonists (and outsiders) can become pregnant and give birth. Pregnancy can begin naturally, or via technological means, and can be controlled by a variety of methods.

Babies bring joy, but also challenges. Colonists’ hearts will melt when the baby coos and giggles in their arms. But it takes effort to keep a baby happy and healthy and loved – create a safe haven for them in a cozy pastel nursery where there is always warm milk, a comfortable crib, overflowing toy chests and kind caregivers.

They grow up fast (especially if you use a growth vat) – soon your child will be walking, talking, and getting into trouble. They’ll soak up knowledge in the classroom and tag along with adults to watch them work. Kids find many ways to entertain themselves with art, exploring nature, playing with technology, and more. Teach them lessons and they’ll learn how to survive, cook, make friends, create art, build, craft, hunt, and fight. Watch as they grow up and make mistakes, lose loved ones, and survive hardships.

A rich childhood makes a capable adult. Every few years, you choose which traits and passions a child will develop. The better-raised a child is, with smarter education and more attention, the more choices you’ll have, and the better their chances are to become a happy and talented adult. Some colonies will sacrifice everything to give a child the best upbringing, while others will use growth vats to pump out cheap workers and soldiers. The choice is up to you.

 

The mechanitor

Build and control mechanoids by making your colonist into a mechanitor – a person with a special brain implant that lets them psychically command semi-living machines.

Create mechanoids by growing them inside high-tech gestator tanks. Command the original centipede, lancer, and scyther, plus a wide variety of new combat and labor mechanoids. Grow your swarm from a few small workers and fighters to a fearsome squadron of massive ultratech war machines and industrial behemoths.

 

Mechanoid laborers can manufacture goods, rescue and tend to your colonists, build and repair structures, sow and harvest crops, haul stuff, and more. They never get sick. They don’t freeze in the snow or get poisoned in toxic fallout. They don’t suffer mental breaks from long hours in dark mineshafts or filthy garbage yards.

Combat mechanoids are very diverse in form and function. Some are cheap swarmers that overwhelm the enemy with numbers. Others project shields over their allies, or roast enemies with beam weapons, or charge up for massive concrete-melting hellsphere attacks. Mechanoids wield melee claws and blades, sniper weapons, even flamethrowers. Depending on which mechanoids you command, your tactical options will vary dramatically.

 

Mechanoid infrastructure has a special price: Pollution. Left unfrozen, toxic wastepacks deteriorate and leak pollutants into the environment. Pollution makes living things sick. It poisons your colonists and pets. It blocks the sunlight with smog and irritates your colonists’ lungs. It triggers hibernating insects to emerge on the planet’s surface. Some areas of the planet are so polluted that only twisted, toxin-adapted variants of plants and animals can survive there. Pollution is a challenge that you can handle in a variety of ways – freezing, export (neighbors might not like this), adaptation, high-tech atomization.

Advance your mechanitor’s capabilities by acquiring ancient mechanoid technology. This means calling dangerous new super-mechanoids to attack, in order to defeat them and steal technology from their smoking corpses. There are three types of hyper-deadly commander mechs to fight, each with its own weapons and combat style. Be sure you’re ready before you call these machine beasts to attack. Learn enough, and some day, you may command them as your own.

 

Gene modding

You can genetically-modify people to create xenohumans – humans with exotic traits. Genetic modifications range from subtle personality traits and eye color to hulking furry bodies, glands for fire-breathing, rapid regeneration, and even immortality.

The world contains a new set of xenohuman types and factions, including unstoppable super soldiers, fur-covered animal-controlling arctic settlers, toxin-immune human bioweapons, fire-breathing horned desert imp-people, psychic-bonding concubines, and more. The darkest of them drink blood and live in shadows, deathless for eternity.

 

You can make your own xenotypes from scratch, and build infrastructure in your colony to enhance your people. Curate a collection of exotic genes by purchasing them from traders, accepting them as quest rewards, or extracting them from your menagerie of xenohuman prisoners. You can harvest the genes from anyone and implant those genes into your colonists and prisoners. You can also recombine genes to make bizarre and advantageous mixes of traits for implantation. Experiment with gene extraction and recombination to build your colony of xenohumans!

 

Why Biotech?

Hey everyone – Tynan here. I thought it would be worth explaining the thought process behind why we decided to make this expansion. Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

Why mechanitors?

Mechanoids have been RimWorld’s end-game foes since way back in 2014. Fictionally, however, they are human-created for human purposes, so it was natural to extend this and allow the player to control the mechanoids somehow.

Since RimWorld is a character-oriented story generator, I didn’t want to just add the mechanoids as independently-controlled robots the player can order around like an RTS. This would have been moving away from the character-orientation that defines RimWorld. The mechanoids needed to be human-connected.

That’s why I designed a system where each mechanoid is linked to a specific person, the mechanitor. The mechanoids are an extension of the human who controls them, with all the human complexity that entails.

I also didn’t want to destroy the economic balance or progression rate of mechanoids. This would have been easy to do. Human beings are inherently quite expensive – they need complex foods, decent living quarters, social relationships, entertainment, even rituals with the Ideology expansion. In a naive game design, a colony of mechanoids could skip most of these needs and be absurdly overpowered – fun for a short time but ultimately uninteresting.

Making the mechanoids human-linked alleviated part of this concern, but they needed another cost since they are inherently so much less needy than people. Just eating resources wouldn’t feel novel or interesting enough, so we needed a new kind of cost. I decided to explore the concept of pollution. Pollution doesn’t cost anything to make, but it incurs challenges that come afterwards. It’s a bit like going into debt – not a problem at first, but if you let it catch up to you, it soon becomes a transformative challenge. We made sure there are a variety of ways to approach pollution, so players can choose whether to try to stay clean, suppress the effects, or just let it happen and adapt to the changing landscape. This linked in nicely with the gene modding system as well, since some genes help with pollution resistance.

Pollution itself is designed to be interesting – it interacts with the insects, generating them and powering them up. It transforms the landscape visually and economically, replacing normal plants and animals with a new set of pollution-specific plants and creatures. The new polux tree is a natural way to alleviate pollution. It’s livable, but there are special challenges to living in pollution.

Finally, player-controlled mechanoids were going to open up new ways to do combat. In the past, the player’s units were limited in how diverse they could be since they were mostly humans. Mechanoids can have much more exotic types of movement, weaponry, and combat tools. They can also be more expendable than humans. All this opened up opportunities for more types of player-side combat strategies, which we’ve explored in depth with new types of combat mechanoids. It gives the player more tactical choices in combat, and more ways to be aggressive instead of risk-avoidant.

The naturalness of fiction, human-connectedness, unique new costs and strategies together made player-controlled mechanoids a really attractive design path. It took a lot of work to build all that but we had the time and resources to do it right.

Why reproduction and children?

The core design goal of RimWorld is to generate emotionally-compelling human stories.
This has always been a challenge when designing a game, because games tend to be very impersonal. In games, progress often focuses on economic gains, increases in power, or expansion of map control. These sorts of numbers-oriented systems work great for games because they’re predictable and mechanistic, which means players can reason about them strategically, and computers can simulate them.

The problem is that a good story isn’t just a sequence of changes in economic numbers, damage amounts, or map control markings. Good stories are about people, emotions, and relationships. Good stories take things that individual humans value – safety, family, love – and put these things up for grabs, and let the character struggle to gain them, or avoid losing them. There must be a relatable person at the center of the story, who is experiencing strong and relatable emotions about something they value.

Which are some of the strongest and most relatable emotions? Those that come from family relationships.

They’re powerful because family is important to us. They’re relatable because everyone has a family, so everyone can empathize with what it might be like to help a brother or parent, have a child, help them, or fear losing them.

This is, of course, obvious, and that’s why other narrative media have explored this topic for thousands of years. Family-linked drama is the bread and butter of stories across older media. From the most classic novels of high culture to the bawdiest barroom tales, questions of family obligation, sacrifice, life and death, and relationships are central to our most compelling stories. From “No, I am your father,” to “I will find you and I will kill you,” to “You are the father,” family relationships are at the center of story. This is true in the western stories that RimWorld is inspired by as well.

Extending that into RimWorld makes obvious sense and it’s something I’ve always been interested in. However, it took a long time to get here because these are such complex topics. Reproduction, birth, baby care and child raising all have a lot of fine details and rich content that I always knew would take substantial effort to get right. I wanted to make sure we had the development power to make the game generate these kinds of powerful family-oriented emotions without cutting corners or excessive jank.

Biotech

being the longest expansion development cycle, with the most developers we’ve ever had, I decided that it was time to bite off this big challenge.

Why gene modding?

Genetically-modified xenohumans have always been part of the RimWorld universe fiction. They are RimWorld’s way to explore how biologically-different humanoids might tell new stories or unlock new types of gameplay. With reproduction already being part of this expansion, it was natural to extend that into allowing genetic modification.

Like everything else in RimWorld, gene-modding is an inherently character-oriented system. It changes who people are and what they can do, which alters their relationships and the emotions those will produce. It also opens up new gameplay paths – genes can unlock new combat tactics, economic roles, and so on. It gives individuals more distinct visual identities. It even generates new moral choices, as players decide what kinds of modifications they are willing to apply to their people, their children, or their prisoners.

It added more variation to the human world, in the form of different types of factions. Instead of just different human factions with different diplomatic orientations, now those different factions are dominated by different types of xenohumans. This alters how they fight, which makes combats more distinct from each other. Fighting a raid of furred yttakin warriors is quite different from a raid of baseliner humans, or neanderthals, or fire-breathing impids, or pigskins. There’s a lot of fun colorful differences between them too – a raid of squealing pig people feels quite different from a raid of bear-calling furred yttakin.

It took a lot of design iteration to get all the genes in and tuned to be fun and exotic without breaking the game. We had the resources and time to do it, though, and all together it works great.

(I also had a ton of fun writing the name generators for the new xenohuman factions – especially the pigskins. Polork!)

Update 1.4

Update 1.4 is available now on the Steam unstable branch for public beta testing, and to give modders more time to update before release. (The main branch that most people play is unaffected and still on version 1.3 for now).

If you’d like to try 1.4, you can play on the Steam branch unstable. (To get access, go to your Steam library, right-click RimWorld and select “Properties”, then select the BETAS tab and choose branch unstable. Restart Steam if your game does not automatically update.)

See info on key features below (changelog at the end):

Startup performance improvements: We spent months optimizing launch and game loading times. In our tests launching RimWorld and loading savegames are roughly 37% faster! On an example system, that’s a startup time improvement from 33 to 21 seconds. Loading a fresh savegame dropped from 7.9 to 4.6 seconds.

Painting and color customization for walls, floors, furniture, and lights: Give your colony a custom look by painting the walls, floors, and furniture of your settlement any of a huge variety of colors using dye harvested from the tinctoria crop. Install a range of new colored carpets in your colonists’ living spaces. Set the mood with lamps that you can set to any color to create your romantic rouge bedroom or an eerie fluorescent laboratory. We expect screenshots to get even more wild thanks to this.

Styles always available: You can now use all styles of all buildings, items, and floors and visually customize your colony even without Ideology active.

Actually useful shelves that store lots of stuff: Fill your storerooms with shelves, which can now hold up to 3 stacks of most items. (Our testers were very excited with this one!) There is also a 1-tile mini-shelf. Shelves should help to keep your colony tidy and organized, and protect your items.

 

Two new turret types: We added two new turret types. The foam turret spits firefoam to extinguish nearby blazes. The rocketswarm turret is a defensive launcher – when triggered, it blankets a wide area in a barrage of small missiles. It is excellent against large groups of weaker enemies, but only works when you press the button, for extra drama!

Starting possessions: Depending on backstory, your starting colonists might come with their own possessions! Not only does it make it a bit easier to start with imperfect colonists, it also gives them a personal touch.

Rot stink: Keep rotten corpses and meat away from your colonists. In addition to being disturbing to look at, decomposing tissue now releases rot stink gas. Colonists that are chronically exposed to rot stink may develop the new “lung rot” disease. Keep extra empty graves and garbage dumps available for times when you’re overwhelmed with bodies!

More prisoners to trade, release, and interact with: In addition to all the prisoners you got before, now you’ll get a new class of prisoner who is unwaveringly loyal to their home. They can’t be recruited, but they can be sold, sent home for diplomatic benefits, used for gene extraction or blood farming in Biotech, or used in rituals and enslaved in Ideology. We did it this way because we wanted to make all the uses for prisoners besides recruitment more viable. Adding a new stream of unwaveringly loyal prisoners does that without destroying the population progression balance. They can be disabled in the storyteller settings.

New mod manager UI: Managing your mods is really easy and smooth with the new UI. Mods are now visibly split into active and inactive lists. You can access your mod options directly from the manager screen. You can also save and load mod lists and mass unsubscribe to any outdated or disabled mods. Press CTRL + left click to select multiple mods and drag them around. Also, new art banners!

New mod mismatch window: Mods are now displayed in three columns: added, missing, and shared. You can save your current mod list and load it later on.

New options menu: We’ve organized the options menu into tabs. (Mods get their own tab!) It is much easier to navigate.

Heat overlay: A togglable heat overlay on the map visually shows you how chilly or hot it is indoors and outdoors.

Quest search bar: A search bar in the quests menu to help you sort through all your available, active, and historical quests.

Tile inspector: Shows you the details of a specific tile when you hover over it and press the “alt” key.

Read the full 1.4 changelog here.

What’s next?

We’ll be posting blog posts over the next few weeks about specific features of Biotech – read them here:

The Biotech expansion is our biggest yet. We hired more people and took more time than ever before to create more systems, content, and storytelling possibilities. There’s so much that we considered splitting this into two separate products – but decided to keep it all together as one extra-juicy expansion.

Biotech’s release date isn’t quite announced, but will be within weeks. More info to come!

After 14 months of work, the team is very excited to finally bring you Biotech! 🧬⚙️

– Tia

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RimWorld Console Edition is now available!

Posted July 29th, 2022 by Tia Young

It’s finally here! You can now play RimWorld Console Edition on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The console edition was designed with intuitive, easy-to-use controls and polished UI that suits television screens. The same emotional stories, tense battles, and complex systems await you on console.

We’re so proud of all the work that’s been done to port RimWorld to console. Thank you to our fans who support us and to Double Eleven for their genius.

Strategy games are for everyone and every platform. We can’t wait to see what new stories you all have for us!

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RimWorld Console Edition is coming to Xbox One and PS4 on July 29!

Posted June 29th, 2022 by Tia Young

 

RimWorld Console Edition releases on July 29th! You can pre-order it now for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. 🌙

Find out more here: rimworld.double11.com/

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Update 1.3.3387 includes improvements for Steam Deck and other bits

Posted June 6th, 2022 by Tia Young

Hi there, we’ve got another update for you today! This update cleans up some rough edges in Steam Deck, and expands the number of game modes that can use Ideology functionality.

The update should be compatible with all saves and mods.

If the update cause problems and you have a bug to report, or you want to help us test, please join the Official RimWorld Development Discord! Thank you to all of our testers for your feedback.

Have a great week!

– Tia

Steam Deck Improvements

– Fixed multiple cases where on Steam Deck some keyboard shortcuts were mentioned
– Commands now show “button A” glyph instead of “A” label on Steam Deck.
– When architect search bar is focused on a Steam Deck and the on-screen keyboard is visible, move gizmos up so that they’re still visible.
– Added “Keyboard mode” option on Steam Deck in case someone connects a keyboard to the SteamDeck.

Ideology Improvements

– Drum and dance parties can be held in the “Ideology system inactive” mode. Party hard!
– Relics system now works in “Ideology system inactive” mode. You can do the relic chase, quests, build the reliquaries, and so on.
– Colonists no longer get upset for delaying a ritual.
– Colorized some ideoligion-related text in ritual trigger letter.
– Negative thoughts related to not having enough scarification scars do not apply at very low expectations or lower.
– “No slaves in colony” thought does not apply at “Very low” expectations or below.
– Ritual opportunity letters are skipped for most rituals for the first 10 days of play.
– Adjusted reliquary description.
– Adjusted inspect pane and stat readout for relics in classic mode.

Misc

– Updated player creative content.
– Changed the nutrients needed for lavish vegetarian and lavish carnivore meals to 1.25 (previously 2.5).

Fixes

– Fix: Dismissing on-screen keyboard on SteamDeck doesn’t unfocus the text field.
– Fix: Not all precepts are added to memes during fluid ideoligion development.
– Fix: Malformed letters are sent to the player regarding ritual obligations that should not send letters.
– Fix: Multiple funerals generating for ideoligions.
– Fix: Word of serenity does not work on catatonic breakdown.
– Some minor fixes to how ideoligions are generated.

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RimWorld is back on Steam in Australia

Posted April 20th, 2022 by Tia Young

Hello everyone! We have great news for our Australian players – RimWorld is once again available for purchase on Steam in Australia. This means Australians have access to the RimWorld Steam store page and can gift and receive Steam keys for the game. (It also means you can read this news update. 😉) Everything should be back to normal!

For context: Back in February, the Australian Classification Board classified RimWorld as “Refused Classification (RC)” which banned the game from sale in Australia. This news was sudden and a surprise to everyone.

We appealed to the Classification Review Board and they agreed to review the game’s rating on April 20. We assembled a lot of useful evidence and had a great legal team to help us. Our community was also amazing and helped us by providing examples of games on Steam that had similar cases to us, like Disco Elysium and Fallout. The review concluded with a happy ending – RimWorld’s classification changed from “Refused Classification (RC)” to “R 18+ (Restricted)”, and now we’re back on Steam!

So a big thanks to everyone for your support, that was a wild couple of months!

– Tia

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RimWorld EULA Updated

Posted April 8th, 2022 by Tia Young

Happy Friday everyone! Just a short post from me that we updated RimWorld’s EULA, and you can find it here. The last one was six years old, written quickly, and it needed a pass from some legal professionals. We know that reading licenses is boring, so as before we did our best to keep it clear and concise, and followed the same general structure as the old EULA.

That’s it, have a great weekend!

– Tia

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