Welcome back! I’m Tia, and I’m here to bring you more Ideology preview info while we wait for the big release day.

Today, I’m talking about Ideology’s new social roles and rituals. I’m also including another UI shot since everyone loved Spacer Manporkism so much in the reveal announcement. You can wish list Ideology on its store page here!

Social roles

We’ve all had that one favourite colonist. The soldier who made it through hell and back, the medic capable of defying death, the one guy who refuses to do anything useful and spends most of the day binging on insect meat due to lack of tables…

Now you can make use of your colonists’ special strengths by assigning them formal social roles. Each belief system in Ideology defines a roles that believers can take on.

There are three categories of roles:

The leader role can only be assigned to one colonist. Leaders give inspirational speeches, buff combat allies around them, encourage harder work, and play a special role in some rituals. They can even accuse prisoners or colonists of crimes. If they successfully prosecute the defendant in a trial you can punish the accused without social consequence. (Whether the accusations are true or false is up to you.)

The moral guide role can be assigned once for each belief system which is represented by at least three colonists. Moral guides support the mental well-being and spiritual strength of your people, and lead many rituals including funerals, sacrifices, and more. They can preach health to the sick to speed up healing, provide counsel to sad colonists to lift their moods, reassure believers that they are correct, and convert non-believers to their own belief system.

Finally, the specialist roles can be assigned to any number of believers. There are a variety of specialist role types – one for each skill. Specialists are better at their primary skill, and also gain a unique ability related to that skill. As a tradeoff, specialists become more focused on their specific skill and won’t do some other work. Different belief systems each have a specialist type related to their core beliefs. For example, a colony of darkness-worshipping tunnelers will probably have a specialist role focused on mining.

Colonists with social roles will want a change of appearance to suit their position. They may ask for elegant capes, creepy visage masks, solemn hoods, painful torture crowns, or anything else to set themselves apart according to their traditions.

Rituals

Celebrate your colony’s unique belief system by holding rituals. These player-controlled events are special gatherings that have a variety of impacts depending on how they are carried out, and really contribute to the story of your colony.

You can hold somber funerals for fallen soldiers, quell rebellious behaviour with public executions, pit slaves and prisoners against one another in vicious gladiator duels, host parties in dance halls or drum circles or around Christmas trees, set hated effigies on fire to watch them burn, or breathe in smokeleaf fumes from a giant bong. There are also scrumptious feasts of human meat, ceremonial blindings and scarifications, skylantern festivals on moonlit nights, and majestic trees with creatures inside of them.

How a ritual plays out depends on the circumstances – who is there (and what roles they hold), the quality of the room it takes place in, the equipment and buildings available, and so on. For example, colonists can have fun at a dance party with just a few people outdoors by clapping and stamping feet. But if you build them a giant nightclub with speakers, a lightball and a richly-decorated room they’ll have more fun and get better outcomes. Early-game rituals are less demanding than those in the late game, so you’ll get benefits at every stage.

Participants that have a good time will leave with mood boosts, and if the ritual was truly spectacular, there may be additional bonuses. We’re talking unlocked psychic powers, new recruits, improved goodwill with your neighbours, and locations of treasure-filled ancient complexes. At the same time, certain rituals may upset spectators and cause a mood deficit – it depends on their personal beliefs.

More on the way

That’s it for now! I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and have gotten a chance to try the 1.3 beta. Remember to wish list Ideology on the Steam store page. You can also read the original 1.3 update and Ideology announcement here.

Bye bye!

Tia

Hello everyone! I’m Tia, an insect lover and spelopede sympathizer at Ludeon. Today, I get to share some big news!

Soon, we’ll be releasing RimWorld update 1.3 with new free content and a variety of improvements including animal fences, breach raids, beards, and many quality-of-life improvements.

You can play 1.3 now on the Steam branch 1.3-preview. (To access it, go to your Steam library, right-click RimWorld and select “Properties”, then select the BETAS tab and choose branch 1.3-preview. Restart Steam if needed.)

The beta is to give modders ample time to update, as well as help us fix those final bugs. As a reminder, RimWorld supports multi-version mods, so anyone should be able to continue playing 1.2 as long as they like and change over when desired, as long as modders don’t remove 1.2 support.

We worked to ensure mod updating would be as easy as possible. Modders who tested the update process said it was quite easy, some reporting zero changes required, others 5 minutes, an hour, a few hours. Of course it’ll depend exactly what a mod touches.

We’re looking at releasing 1.3 in about 2 weeks, though this could change.

With the 1.3 release, we’ll also be releasing a new expansion called RimWorld – Ideology. This expansion focuses on belief systems, social roles, rituals, hunts for ancient relics and cross-cultural interaction. See below for more info and screenshots, or wish list it on the store page here! 

About 1.3

There are 15 months of improvements in 1.3, so it’s a pretty big one.

There is a new pens-and-fences system for animals. Now animals are more productive, with more focused roles, but some of them need to be kept in fenced pens and led around by your trusty farmers. It gives the colony a more ‘ranchy’ look and feel, as opposed to just having random cows always wandering through bedrooms or staying in pens via mind control. You’ve also got egg boxes and a new straw matting terrain type to build true-looking farms that actually work.

There are search bars all over the interface now, so you can type in text on the architect menu, stats dialog, research menu, stockpile filter, and elsewhere to jump directly to exactly what you want. No more hunting through lists – even with lots of modded items!

The faction goodwill system has been reworked so neighbors keep a record of what you’ve done and why they feel the way they do about you. You’ll have a better idea of why exactly they want to destroy or reward you.

Enemies will now use a new style of breach raid to get through your defenses. They’ll bring special wall-breaking tools and tunnel into the side of your base instead of using the main entrance. Tribals do this with a new breach-axe, while pirates use grenades, and mechanoids use a new mechanoid type called the termite. This new strategy option for the AI adds more variation and dynamism to the defensive combats – fighting through bedrooms is very exciting! Making the AI analyze bases, find good breach paths, and follow them effectively was an interesting and novel problem. Of course, all the old raid strategies still exists and the breach raids only show up from time to time to add variation.

Drag-move formations allow you to order your fighters to arrange themselves in a line using a single mouse command.

You can order a fighter to pick up a downed person, then carry them wherever you wish using the normal movement controls. No more harrowing and unnecessary rescues directly to bed!

Your colonists can now carry medicine in their inventory and use it directly on the battlefield.

Beards! Beards. What more do I need to say? People have beards, and they look beardy and awesome.

Characters now render more efficiently (the game prints them onto a texture and render that in one pass, instead of rendering each body layer separately on every frame). We punched up their look with visible wounds, bandages, and body modifications, so you can really see when someone (or your pet guinea pig) has taken some hits.

We also consulted with modders, collected their requests and made a bunch of technical changes to make modding easier.

There’s tons more than this. For those interested, here is the full 1.3 change log.

Next, Tynan would like to talk about the Ideology expansion and why he decided to make it.

Why Ideology?

More info coming soon

Tia here again!

I am so ready for the fantastic stories that you guys will be making with 1.3 and Ideology. There is so much for both new and old players to discover. And to think — we didn’t even get to all of the content in this announcement!

So in the future, I’ll be posting teasers of the upcoming stuff in Ideology. Be sure to check back here for your sneak peek.

See you soon,

Tia

I’m happy to bring you another RimWorld update! This is a refinement update for 1.2 which also includes some new apparel and permits. Below is the full list of changes.

Compatibility: Hundreds of testers have been trying this build for weeks, so it doesn’t have major known mod incompatibilities. Of course, with thousands of mods out there I expect a few hiccups but in general it should be compatible. Non-modded savegames will of course be totally compatible.

If for any reason you want to continue with an old version, please use the Steam betas feature to go back to the version you want.

Thanks to all the testers, translators, and our amazing developers!

-Ty

New features

– New apparel – Beret: Worn by various lower-ranking Imperial nobles.
– New apparel – Cape: This stylish cape functions similarly to a duster. Worn by various middle-ranking Imperial nobles.
– New apparel – Gunlink: This tactical headgear offers no protection, but increases shooting accuracy. It is used by Imperial troops.
– New apparel – Eltex skullcap: This offers little protection, but improves psycasting. Worn by some middle-ranking Imperial nobles.
– New apparel – Stellic crown: A unique, gigantic crown worn by the high stellarch.
– New permit – Steel drop: Call down some steel resources.
– New permit – Glitterworld medicine drop: Call down some glitterworld medicine.
– New permit – Silver drop: Call down some silver.
– New permit – Food drop: Call down some food.
– When forming a caravan, animals now instantly go to the caravan packing spot instead of waiting for a colonist to take them. This speeds up the caravan formation process significantly.
– You can now place blueprints separately for different types of buildings in a monument, so you can make them of different materials.
– We now display a text mote when a player pawn gains a new level in a skill.
– If you have a menu with a very large number of commands, as in a powerful psycaster, some of them will be displayed smaller.
– Use drug commands are now condensed onto a single command if a pawn carries more than one drug type.
– Allow projectiles to be rendered with a visual arc and ground shadow. Activated this behavior for: Phoenix and Grenadier armor, frag grenades, molotovs, emp/smoke/incendiary launchers.
– Allow right clicking on the shuttle with multiple pawns selected to load all allowed ones.
– Mods can now be tagged as translations in the workshop.
– We now automatically add appropriate bedrolls to caravan.
– Pawns will now not lose their skill levels until they fall 1000 XP under zero. This stops pawns from quickly leveling up and down around a threshold.
– Added a warning confirmation for calling for resources that would cause the caravan to be immobile.
– Add some text content to refugee hospitality quest.
– Recipes for crafted things now show work to make in their info card.
– New artwork for orbital targeters.
– Allow quick loading via permit shuttle from non-home maps with no hostiles.
– Upon death, all titles will not be instantly transferred to their heirs. Instead, we give favor up to the inherited title and generate a bestowing quest for the heir.

Adjustments

– Adjust text and icon for the ‘Take drug’ command.
– In custom difficulty settings, rename “fixed wealth” mode to “wealth-independent” mode, and give the player a slider to control how many years until this mode delivers its maximum threat level.
– Move ‘take to inventory’ column over just to the right of the drug name.
– Dirt now washes away in rain.
– Changed precious lump hostile threats description to something more concise.
– Psycasts are now sorted on the interface by category and then level.
– Changed psychic droner to start off with medium bad strength as baseline and when spawned on sites its determined by points now, same as the ‘raw’ gamecondition.
– Ensure all the mech cluster buildings wake up once it was attacked.
– Adjustments to Precious Lump quest text and world object info.
– Make pawns count as guilty while in aggro mental state.
– Disable corpse obsession break for prisoners, as it’s very unlikely to happen and is not implemented around this possibility.
– Reorganized permit UI. Exchanged horizontal scrollbar for vertical.
– Give the broadshield pack a smaller drawsize, so that its icon/map-icon is more congruent with its appearance on a pawn.
– Added faction icon to main work tab with click through to faction and scroll to faction.
– Added max lodger count to hospitality refugee quest.
– AI will now only deploy an NPC’s Smokepop or Broadshield pack if the offending attacker is hostile. This prevents friendly-fire from activating an NPC’s Smokepop/Broadshield.
– Rewrite noble requests for help in the pawn lending quest.
– Increase frequency of bandit camp mission and shuttle crash quests.
– Food and medicine renamed to travel supplies.
– Add hediff links to recipes for implants and parts.
– Apparel with utility now has a score offset to make AI more likely to automatically wear it.
– Made nature shrines minifiable and reinstallable.
– Made shrines improve anima tree meditation.
– Farskip now affects colony animals if not on the home map.
– Colonists and pack animals unload inventory automatically once farskipped to a player home map.
– Climate adjuster no longer will choose negative temperature offset for deserts nor positive offset for ice sheets (it will avoid being not dangerous).
– NPC pawns with titles now purchase random permits on generation.
– We now show the player a feedback message when calling resources to a caravan.
– Trade requests will no longer request patchleather.
– Added quest look target when bestowing ceremony cannot be accepted due to threat.
– Bestowing ceremony text now says that player is expected to keep bestower safe.
– Jump packs and locust armor now require enough chemfuel to provide their initial fuel, and one more component.
– Ensure auto-selected travel supplies doesn’t exceed caravan mass capacity.
– Use phrase “Force equip” instead of “Force wear” when referring to utility-slot apparel items.
– Change the “Tornado generator” targeter to a utility-slot apparel item.
– Change the “Orbital mech cluster targeter” to a utility-slot apparel item.
– Increased warmup time for aerodrone permits by 1 second.
– Removed full-map light up effect of all strikes except orbital beam.
– Icons of spacer armor now display as off-white instead of dark gray.
– Adjust eltex gear colors to be darker.
– Shield renaming for clarity and consistency. “Mortar shield” is now “mech high-shield”. “Bullet shield” is now “mech low-shield”. “Broadshield pack” is now “low-shield pack”. “Broadshield projector” is now “burnout low-shield”. “bullet shield” psycast is now “skipshield”. No code or defNames were changed.
– Rename orbital strike permits to aerodrone strike (for fiction coherence reasons).
– Don’t autoselect beer, ambrosia, flowers or insect jelly in the form caravan dialog.
– Bestower is no longer required to have archotech eyes.
– Neural heat overload can no longer cause psylink degradation or any other permanent damage.
– Member stripped goodwill penalty increased from 10 to 40.
– Royal apparel production costs rebalanced.
– Prevent farskip when caravan is overweight.
– Improve meditation and medical rest priorities to allow meditation for pawns with healing injuries if they’re on meditation schedule.
– Optimize monument marker drawing.

Technical

– Use the old root keys in PawnLend script to avoid breaking translations.
– Reset pawns enemyTarget after recovering from aggro mental state.
– Selectively finalize equipped stat offsets
– Use ThingDefCountClass to list dropped resources in permits. Added missing honor values. Zero honor cost produces a config error.
– Spread out re-validating FloatMenuOption across multiple frames.
– Improve FloatMenuMap caching and AddUndraftedOrders check order for better performance.
– Make the ‘try add to inventory’ debug option.
– Tweak the drawSize of various headgear to ensure their on-map size is congruent with their on-pawn size.
– Royal title requirement thought workers now pass RoyalTitle object into Formatted and GrammarResolverSimple provides all required symbols.
– Added some missing apparel score offsets for utility armor.
– GenStep_ConditionCauser now checks for existing buildings at scatter spot.
– Medieval surgeries now have links to the proper hediffs.
– Fixed an issue where if the “Insect spawning rate” custom difficulty setting was set to zero, it caused unnecessary every-tick re-checking of whether a hive should spawn more pawns.
– Remove remaining mentions of “default” load folder from ModUpdating.txt.

Fixes

– Fix: Colonist with a sick thought won’t meditate at all.
– Fix: Pawn lend initial description and final letter mismatch.
– Fix: Ability duration on the tooltip is shown in hours even for low values.
– Fix: Gunlink displays shooting accuracy stat offset as %.
– Fix: Becoming neutral/allied with imperials after taking the deserter quest then entering their site allows you to take the neuroformers without a fight.
– Fix: Auto-rebuild doesn’t work on bridges.
– Fix: Quest prisoners can spawn on door tiles and walk away.
– Fix: Overlapping keybinds for assigning pawn and toggle prisoner-owned for beds.
– Fix: Psycast disabled status is not being updated in shrunk mode.
– Fix: Auto mortars are always active.
– Fix: Compressed commands are drawn from top to bottom.
– Fix: Quest reward pawn died before quest was accepted.
– Fix: Not all curve marks being drawn on graphs.
– Fix: Errors on generating long range mineral scanner quest via debug tools.
– Fix: Psyfocus target value on the gizmo tooltip is not updated until you finished adjusting it.
– Fix: Colonist pods returning from a ‘pawn lend’ quest can roof punch.
– Fix: No mech cluster building is multi-selectable
– Fix: Keyed translations from a mod can’t replace existing values with the same key and log an error instead.
– Fix: XML Attribute IsNull only works on simple fields.
– Fix: Psylink neuroformers that are in a storage area do not appear on a resource readout.
– Fix: Ensure Graphic_RandomRotated preserves the <drawSize> of wrapped graphics.
– Fix: Projectiles were invisible for the first few cells of flight, due to them inheriting and interpolating their launcher’s y layer, and being clipped/obscured out of the camera
– Fix: Auto Charge Turret fires when stunned
– Fix: Can’t prioritize chatting with a prisoner if some other warden is already doing it.
– Fix: Unfogging adjacent cells of buildings which are more than 1×1 of size doesn’t work properly.
– Fix: Grammar errors in a few ‘title requirements not met’ thought descriptions.
– Fix: Apparel scoring algorithm ignores heat armor.
– Fix: Rescuing downed noble ends shuttle rescue quest.
– Fix: Bandit camp returnees don’t unload.
– Fix: Its possible to arrest non-violent/downed pawns and not have their faction notified of member captured.
– Fix: Some wrong import settings on a few UI icon graphics.
– Fix: “Unchangeable” text from visually overlaps with “Clear forced” button in assign-outfits panel.
– Fix: Incorrect memory thought when refugee arrested or violated and incorrect letter text when violated in refugee hospitality quest.
– Fix: Join letter in hospitality refugee quest remains (with disabled accept) if pawn leaves map before quest has ended.
– Fix: Rare exception when changing the “Allowed area” restriction of a colonist in the Schedule tab, while the colonist is performing certain multi-step actions (such as being in the middle of reloading a mortar).
– Fix: Gloomlight would prevent a Sun lamp from producing “brightly lit” cells within the radius of the Gloomlight. Due to: the glowColor of the Gloomlight not having an explicit alpha of zero. We now correctly ignore the alpha from the xml.
– Fix: Bestower quest has a rootSelectionWeight of 1.
– Fix: Quest helper went wild man, now wandering around on map, can’t arrest or empire becomes hostile.
– Fix: Drug scheduling for inventory does not function when set to 1.
– Fix: Stellarch and other non-rewardable title holding pawns don’t get any permits.
– Fix: Logging null leader error for factions which don’t need a leader.
– Fix: Meditation preventing pawn from attending a gathering or giving speech.
– Fix: Using explanation text meant for anima tree (after letting letting it being enhanced with shrines) on other focus objects.
– Fix: Condition causer can be spawned ontop of power conduits (wiping them).
– Fix: lastPsylinkAvailable is reset whenever a game is loaded, causing fewer neuroformer quest rewards.
– Fix: Finding throne room spot for bestowing ceremony does not work if throne is blocked in front and back.
– Fix: In custom-difficulty settings, the minimum value of “Turret rearm cost” was set to 1%.
– Fix: Bestowing ceremony doesn’t update permit points.
– Fix: Extra newlines in quest descriptions.
– Fix: If the “Insect spawning rate” custom difficulty setting was set to zero, it caused insect/mech hives to spawn every tick once they reached their next spawn time.
– Fix: Calling a shuttle to a caravan always costs favor instead of initiating cooldown.
– Fix: Resources with null stuffProps can be accepted as “Stony” resources in monuments.
– Fix: NRE when trying to get all pawns with specific mental state in quest part.
– Fix: Shuttle auto-load does not properly work on shuttle assault quest return.
– Fix: Bestowing ceremony escorte can be used as a fighting force. There will now be negative effects if they are killed.
– Fix: Bestower goes to wrong room for ceremony (added fallbacks when no spot in thronerome can be found).
– Fix: Animals refusing to eat reachable food when restricted to an area.
– Fix: Exception during reward-giving Quests when custom-difficulty setting “Quest Rewards” is set to 0%.
– Fix: Pawns don’t face table when eating.
– Fix: Healer mech serum heals love
– Fix: Player blueprints prevent mech clusters from dropping.
– Fix: Attacking a settlement with a shuttle causes the map to be smaller compared to caravans and transport pods.
– Fix: Some single-use utility items could be used multiple times via shift-clicking.
– Fix: GenStep_MechCluster spawns mech that are awake, but marked as dormant.
– Fix: Pawn keeps meditating with a focus object that has 0 focus offset.
– Fix: “Clear prioritised work” command can interrupt neuroquake cast.
– Fix: Can’t rescue invisible colonists.
– Fix: Lack of back-compatibility for mods that use old style of defining offsets in FocusStrengthOffset_BuildingDefs.
– Fix: Caravan food auto selection gives rotting food higher weight.
– Fix: Sick pawns falling out of bed because of trying to do meditation for joy.
– Fix: Errors on viewing bestowing quest while target pawn is not spawned.
– Fix: Uncapitalized first letters in some paragraphs.
– Fix: Arrested Refugee Leader can not be sold, leaves to unusual behavior.
– Fix: The mouse-attachment that indicates what resource is contained in areas found by ground-penetrating radars should show even when the area is fogged (such as under a mountain).
– Fix: Setting the butchering or mining yield to a high value in the custom difficulty settings may not result in actual increased yields.
– Fix: Mission shuttles cannot auto loot.
– Fix: Taking wake-up to inventory same wording as taking wake-up.
– Fix: Non-heat psycasts can be spammed when it shouldn’t be possible.
– Fix: GetBuildingDefsForCluster_NewTemp() creates an infinite loop.
– Fix: Teetotalers can use drugs normally by using the new gizmos.
– Fix: JobGiver_OptimizeApparel.ApparelScoreRaw() reads an uninitialized variable which can lead to some weird behavior especially if there are modded races.
– Fix: You can use farskip on the caravan you’re in.
– Fix: Received spelt recieved in mood and notification letter for titles.
– Fix: SoundDefOf.MeditationGainPsyfocus plays on loop after done meditating.
– Fix: Prisoner refugee leaves when refugee quest ends normally.
– Fix: Arrested refugees will join the player colony if arrest job is interupted before placing refugee in cell.
– Fix: Permit prerequisites are removed even when you don’t have the permit.
– Fix: Can banish quest lodgers through character card UI.
– Fix: Game breaks if quest lodgers have RunWild mental break.
– Fix: Various typos.

The 1.2 release of RimWorld adds a variety of new content and a few new systems.

COMPATIBILITY: You can set your Steam beta branch to ‘version-1.1.2654’ to keep playing on the previous version. It should be mostly unnecessary though, since this update should be compatible with savegames and most mods. Many mods have already updated to 1.2 using the multi-version mod system outlined in the ModUpdating.txt file that comes with the game.

There are a few major parts to this update.

For many years, some specific balance changes have been requested repeatedly by dedicated players, but I didn’t implement them because I thought they would harm the game for more casual players. Now, we added a custom plasystyle system. You can adjust a couple dozen different settings like threat scaling, colonist instakill chances, and crop yield. This means advanced players can set up the game exactly as they prefer. All the old playstyle settings are still available; I expect custom difficulties to be a feature mainly for experienced power gamers looking for something just for them.

The larger part of this update is in all the new content. There are several entirely new patterns for quest generation that see you interacting with poor refugees, acting as airborne shock troops for Imperial nobles, or defending crashed shuttles. We built a system that lets your colonists carry utility items or special armor with consumable abilities like grenades, shields, or jump packs. We added a whole new class of psycasts designed for non-combat economic or social purposes. Imperial titles can now give several new kinds of permits including the right to use a shuttle, and there is a new system for choosing between them, so you can customize your noble into different types. Persona weapons now actually have personality with randomized traits. And there are many other additions described in the full list below.

We really hope you like it. Thank you so much to everyone who gave test feedback and helped translate!

– Tynan

– Custom playstyle system: You can now select a new custom playstyle setting. This opens up a new menu that allows you to customize a large number of different settings exactly as you prefer. For example, you can make a game with lots of enemies, but high yields from crops and mining. The settings are:
— Storyteller ignore wealth, and instead replace it with a factor from time alone. This can make the game fall off the rails easily, but is appropriate for someone who wants a pure challenge.
— Player friendly fire chances.
— Colonist instakill chance. This setting allows you to apply a damage filter that prevents colonists being killed by a single shot, because that can feel arbitrary. Colonists can still be downed by one shot and bleed out soon after, or take permanent injuries in one shot.
— Overall threat scale
— Major threats toggle
— Quests threats toggle
— Intro threats toggle
— Predators hunt humans toggle
— Extreme weather toggle
— Harvest, mining, and butchering yield
— Quest rewards
— Raid loot
— Trade prices
— Turret rearm cost
— Scaria rot chance
— Enemy death on downed chance
— Colonist mood
— Food poison chance
— Animal revenge chance
— Infection chance
— Disease frequency
— Hive insect spawn rate
— Deep drill infestation chance
— Ancient structure threats toggle
— Passive hives at map generation toggle
— Toggles to allow/disallow player building traps, turrets, and mortars
— Damage adaptation growth rate: Adaptation means the storyteller makes the game more challenging over time as long as you are not taking losses. This is separate from the story effects of wealth and population. This adjusts the rate of that challenge growth.
— Damage adaptation effect: Adaptation means the storyteller makes the game more challenging over time as long as you are not taking losses. This is separate from the story effects of wealth and population. This adjusts the effect of that adaptation value on actual threats.

– Raid loot generation: Previously raids would just drop whatever rewards were associated with the characters in that raid. Now, each raid generates a single core reward like a stack of drugs, medicine, jade, or plasteel. The reward is chosen semi-randomly according to the raider faction, and placed in the inventory of a few of the raiders. This allows us and users to accurately tune raid rewards, and solves issues where higher difficulties got bigger rewards.

– Utility gear system: Wearable belts have been expanded into a system of wearable utility items. One person can wear one utility item. Utility items can be passive like a shield belt, but most give an ability the player can trigger. Most have a certain number of charges before they run out. Some can be reloaded, while others are consumed by use.
— Utility item: Smokepop belt. Previously, this was triggered automatically by the wearer taking damage, and disappeared on use. Now it can be triggered at any time, and it can be used several times, and can be reloaded with chemfuel. The AI knows how to use this to obscure turret shots.
— Utility item: Shield belt. Same as before.
— Utility item: Psychic insanity lance. Previously, this could only be used directly, and once. Now it’s a utility item that can be carried and used twice before exhaustion.
— Utility item: Psychic shock lance. Same as the psychic insanity lance, this was changed from a one-use item to a two-use utility item.

– Automatic caravan setup: The caravan setup screen now automatically loads enough food and medicine for the journey. This can be overridden if desired. This interface was also restructured to ask for the route first, and to clean up placement of some UI elements. Overall, caravan forming takes less effort and fewer clicks.

– ‘Smash mechanoid’ bill: This allows tribals to break down mechanoid corpses without a machining table, albeit at a slower rate.

– New system for handling time limits on caravan encounter maps. Previously on encounter maps, the player caravan was just automatically reformed after a certain amount of time. Now, the colonists will be detected by enemies after some time. Later, enemy reinforcements will begin arriving to attack. The player can choose when to leave, and this scenario can play out even on maps where other enemies remain (e.g. If player is executing a siege).

– Direct button to use drugs from inventory: This makes combat drugs more usable.

– New visual effects:
— Building destruction. Screen shake, dust, and so on.
— Improvements to orbital bombardments. You can see and hear incoming projectiles and other details are improved.
— EMP state on mechs or turrets, with electrical arcs and sparks.

– New sound effects:
— Many types of building destructions of various sizes and materials
— EMP blast and EMP state
— Windmill, watermill, wood generator, chemfuel generator ambience
— Quest accepted, succeeded, concluded, failed
— Mech serum used
— Toxic buildup gained
— Melee dodge
— Power claw hit/miss
— Human bite hit/miss

– Major quest – Shuttle defense: An Imperial shuttle has been damaged and needs a place to land. They’re being hunted by raiders! If you accept the quest, the shuttle crash-lands on your colony map. Some civilians, plus a some Imperial soldiers, will get out and defend themselves at the shuttle as a raid comes after them. You have to help defend them until a rescue shuttle arrives to pick them up. Get to tha shuttle! Go!

– Major quest – Bandit camp mission: The quest giver wants troops to help assault a bandit camp. He will provide a shuttle to bring you to and from the camp. A specific number of people must be provided. This creates a self-contained combat challenge without the fiddliness and time commitment of full travel.

– Major quest – Refugee hospitality: A ragged group of travelers arrives. They ask to stay at your colony for a while. They have no rewards to offer, but there are other reasons to take them in. They will work for you during their time at the colony. If you keep their mood high, some of them may offer to join you permanently. After they leave, there is a chance they will pay you back later. One new aspect of this quest is that the travelers aren’t part of any major faction, which means you can choose to capture them, harvest them, or sell them – though they may rebel or flee if you try. There is also chance they will betray and attack you, and a chance that some other party will contact you and offer a reward to betray and kill the travelers. Overall, this quest is designed to break out of the predictable challenge/reward structure of traditional quests and create more of a fluid, unpredictable situation with many options and outcomes.

– Bestower: Titles are no longer given instantly when enough honor has been acquired, and psylink neuroformers are no longer sent to you by drop pods. Instead, a colonist with enough honor for a new title can invoke the bestower, a ceremonial priest-like figure who arrives by shuttle with a retinue of guards. He goes to the colonist’s throne room, confirming that it satisfies the title requirements, and does the bestowing ceremony there. The ceremony itself gives the psylink upgrade and title. You can also betray the bestower to steal psylink neuroformers if you wish.

– Hood apparel: A simple hood used by the bestower.

– Permit selection system: When a colonist gains a royal title, you can now choose which royal permits you want to come with that title. There are more permits to choose from than before. Some permits require minimum titles before they can be chosen. This lets you customize your nobles somewhat.
— New permit: Transport shuttle. This permit calls a transport shuttle. You can load whatever you like in it and send it on a one-way trip across the world map. This can be used for attacking sites, extracting fighters from combat, simple travel, sending gifts, and so on.
— New permits: Call laborer team and call laborer gang. These permits call a group of laborers to work for you. They are the civilian equivalent of calling military aid.
— New permits: Call orbital strike and call orbital salvo. The Empire will use their ships to bombard targets that you designate.

– Psycasts can now have psyfocus costs: This lets us create psycasts that are useful over the long term instead of just in combat. The player can use them any time, but must restore psyfocus somehow.

– Psycast – Solar Pinhole: Generate a microscopic skipgate linked to the core of a nearby star. Solar material leaks through the pinprick in spacetime, illuminating and warming the surrounding area until it closes.

– Psycast – Word of Trust: Speak to the prisoner while using psychic suggestion to reduce his resistance to recruitment. This psycast can only reduce a prisoner’s resistance, but cannot recruit him.

– Psycast – Word of Joy: Speak happy, calming words to someone while using psychic suggestion to implant a joyfuzz loop in his mind. The joyfuzz will suppress uncomfortable thoughts and sensations in the target to improve mood. This has the side-effect of dulling sensation and decision-making, which reduces consciousness.

– Psycast – Word of Love: Speak about someone’s romantic virtues while using psychic suggestion to implant romantic desire in the listener. For days afterward, the listener will feel psychically-induced romantic attraction towards the other person. This greatly increases opinion and makes them much more likely to attempt romantic advances and marriage proposals if they get the chance. This psycast can be used to connect two other peopl, induce love for the caster, or force oneself to love another.

– Psycast – Word of Serenity: Use calming words and psychic suggestion to end a mental break on a person or animal. The target will fall into a short psychic sleep. The psyfocus cost depends on the intensity of the target’s mental break.

– Psycast – Word of Inspiration: Speak words encouraging creativity while psychically hypercharging the target’s mind with new ideas. The target will experience a random inspiration appropriate to them.

– Psycast – Chunk skip: Skip the 5 chunks of rock or slag to scatter them near the target point. This is useful for producing cover during offensive operations.

– Psycast – Farskip: Skip the caster, along with anyone standing near him, to an ally at a distant location. This can send people far across the planet, but only works if there is a willing ally on the other side to use as a navigation beacon. The skipped people will always appear near a random ally on the target map.

– Psycast – Neuroquake: Find a discontinuity in the psychic field and unfold it, releasing a massive amount of psychic energy. Every creature on the map outside of a safe circle near the caster will be driven violently insane. Casting this takes three hours of meditation, and afterwards, the caster will go into a three-day psychic coma. The disturbing neuroquake echoes will inflict pain on everyone for many kilometers around, causing diplomatic consequences with all factions.

– Gear:
— Broadshield pack: A single-use man-portable bullet shield projector. Deployed on the ground, it generates a circular shield that allows bullets out but not in. The unit is designed to last only a short time before burning out. These can be crafted, but doing so requires a special broadshield unit that can be harvested from mechanoid shields.
— Jump pack: A single-person burst rocket for short-ranged flight. The jump pack allows anyone to leap long distances at high speed, even over obstacles. It must be recharged after several uses.
— Locust armor: Recon armor with a built-in jump pack.
— Grenadier armor: Marine armor with a built-in grenade launcher.
— Phoenix armor: Cataphract armor with a built-in flame launcher and extreme heat resistance.

– Persona weapon traits: Now persona weapons have individual traits to reflect their individual personalities. Each weapon will have one or two traits. Some traits are good, some are bad, some are just different. Traits affect the weapon’s market value, so a weapon with a negative trait will be cheaper. The traits are:
— Psychic hypersensitizer: Psychic sensitivity +40% when wielded.
— Psychic sensitizer: Psychic sensitivity +20% when wielded.
— Psychic quiet: Psychic sensitivity -15% when wielded.
— Psychic fog: Psychic sensitivity -30% when wielded.
— Kind thoughts: Thought while bonded “[weaponName]’s kind thoughts +6”
— Calm thoughts: Thought while bonded “[weaponName]’s calm thoughts +3”
— Mad muttering: Thought while bonded “[weaponName]’s muttering -3”.
— Mad wailing: Thought while bonded “[weaponName]’s wailing -6”.
— Kill-focused: A pawn who kills someone with the weapon gains 20% psyfocus instantly.
— Kill-happy: A pawn who kills someone with the weapon gains a “weaponname’s kill happiness +6” thought for 3 days. It stacks but the effect falls off fast.
— Kill-sorrow: A pawn who kills someone with the weapon gains a “weaponname’s kill sorrow -3” thought lasting 3 days. It stacks but the effect falls off fast.
— Painless: Pain locked to zero while wielded due to a psychic brain hediff.
— Fast mover: Move faster while equipped due to a psychic brain hediff.
— Hunger pangs: Hunger +50% while bonded due to a psychic brain hediff.
— Neural cooling: Neural heat fall rate improved by 0.15 per second.
— Psy-meditative: Wielder psyfocus gains from meditation increased by 10% (like increasing focus effectiveness by 10%).
— Freewielder: The weapon does not bond. Anyone can grab it and use it.
— Jealous: If you use another weapon while bonded, get a memory thought “weaponname’s jealous rage -15” for 1 day.
— Kill thirst: If weapon has not killed anyone in 20 days, bonded pawn has a “[weaponName]’s kill thirst -4” thought.

– Meditation enhancers: Meditation focus objects can now be enhanced by other objects placed nearby. This gives a reason to construct more integrated and expansive meditation temples instead of just a single object.
— Anima tree and animus stone are enhanced by nearby animus stones.
— Sculptures are enhanced by nearby sculptures.
— Grave is enhanced by nearby graves.

– Flame meditation focus: This is usable by pyromaniacs. They can focus on torches, campfires, or braziers. These are enhanced by nearby torches, campfires, or braziers.

– Gloomlight mechanoid building: This building has two purposes. First, it emits a sickly light, so adds some visual interest to mech clusters, especially at night. Second, it can be reinstalled as a light or deconstructed for valuable resources. However, it is quite fragile so probably won’t survive indiscriminate bombardment of a mech cluster. Similar to the unstable power cell, it’s a reward which can be claimed only if the cluster is approached a certain way.

– Bandits set up problem causer incident: This is a new way hostiles can threaten you besides raiding you. Now, sometimes they will set up a camp near your colony from which they will harass you using some kind of problem causer device, like a weather controller or smoke spewer. You have to attack the camp and eliminate it.

– Shuttle pad for Empire bases: When you attack an Empire base it will have a shuttle pad, often with a shuttle on the pad about to take off. This just distinguishes these bases from other factions better.
– Throne rooms in Empire bases:

– Speech inspirations: When your noble gives an inspiring speech, each listener has a 5% chance of getting an inspiration in addition to the mood bonus.

– Abasia disease incident: This random incident makes someone in the colony get paralytic abasia, which paralyzes them for a while.

– Blood rot disease incident: This random incident makes someone in the colony get blood rot, which requires regular medical treatment for a while.

– Abasia joiner incident: In this random incident, someone joins you, but they have paralytic abasia, so they must recover from that before they can work. It’s your choice whether you want to heal them and let them join, or handle them another way.

– Visual effects redone for all skip psycasts. It now has a resemblance to a charged black hole or a spherical cut in spacetime. The new effect is more science-themed and avoids magic-like elements to focus on the hard sci-fi RimWorld feel.

– Visual effect redone for invisibility psycast. It now looks like light distortion, instead of a transparent glowing person. The new effect is more science-themed and avoids magic-like elements to focus on the hard sci-fi RimWorld feel.

– Added visual effect for wallraise rocks expiring.

– New sound effects:
— Skip psycasts
— Mech cluster defeated
— Shuttle entry, exit, and ambience
— Mechanoid assembled
— Techprint applied
— Meditation gain psyfocus
— Mech building ambience: Sun blocker, smoke spewer, weather affecter, psychic harmer, EMI dynamo
— Bionic slash hit/miss
— Drill arm hit/miss
— Field hand hit/miss
— Mech turret small and large ambient calls
— Bullet shield and mortar shield ambience
— Proximity activator and countdown activator ambience

– Renamed royal favor to honor.
– Underground resources readout now shows what resource is in each underground cell and how many there are.
– Desired psyfocus UI controls are more robust.
– Refined room stats readout.
– Storyteller now ignores HP for purposes of wealth calculation.
– Monument placing feedback is improved. When you try to place a monument, now the specific reason it can’t be placed is highlighted on the map and noted in a message.
– Map generator doesn’t generate little inaccessible islands any more (since they break various aspects of gameplay).
– Anima tree will no longer be destroyed by meteors, crashed ship parts, or shuttles.
– Empire soldiers now have more distinctive haircuts.
– Pawns can now only bond one persona weapon at a time (otherwise trait effects can stack in broken ways).
– Anima trees now reduce their anima grass progress rate after they’re heavily used within a single day. This still permits power-leveling the anima grass with many meditators, but at reduced effectiveness.
– Empire is no longer enemy with civil NPC factions. We added a warning to inform players if they call Empire military aid when there are enemies on the map that the aid won’t fight (this is a rare scenario).
– Display meat icon in butchery recipe float menu option.
– Removed naming animals through nuzzling. Animals only get names by bonding, or if given names by the player (so you can implicitly tell which animals are bonded by seeing which have names).
– Speech duration reduced from 5 hours to 4 hours.
– Plasmasword damage increased from 19 to 20. Extra flame damage chance increased from 30% to 50%. Flame damage amount increased from 8 to 10. Persona plasmasword damage increased from 20 to 22. Persona plasmasword extra flame damage chance increased from 50% to 70%. Monosword damage reduced from 27 to 25. Persona monosword damage reduced from 29 to 27.
– Stele and nature shrine now have terrain affordances appropriate for their sizes.
– Certain sounds now change speed if game speed changes, so they stay in sync with on-screen motion.
– Eltex gear’s psychic sensitivity effect now scales with quality. Added feedback for this.
– All anima tree psylink levels now take 20 anima grass (instead of 18 or 22).
– On the research tab, we now draw icons for techprint faction and research bench requirements (the latter as hyperlinks).
– Quest helpers no longer spawn with the greedy trait.
– Relabel skill neurotrainers to “skilltrainer” and give them their own category similar to psytrainers.
– Removed special letter icon for choice letters.
– Sort transporter contents list so humans are unloaded first, followed by animals, then by items.
– Optimized UI gizmo drawing by skipping the layout phase.
– Pawns of the same home faction (i.e. quest lodgers) will no longer arrest each other.
– Soften anima tree glow. Remove anima grass glow.
– Orbital mech cluster targeter will no longer spawn a cluster with condition causer.
– Re-label ruffle shirt to formal shirt, royal vest to formal vest, royal robe to prestige robe (since these apparel may have other uses beside royalty).
– Change threat text color to a lighter red for better readability. Applied it to more text where it makes sense.
– Gear tab now expands if it needs space and there is space, before using scroll bar.
– Added labelMale and labelFemale to traits.
– Updated Korean language worker.
– You can now navigate debug menus with keyboard alone.
– All textures now use trilinear filtering instead of bilinear filtering for better sharpness at some zoom levels.
– All textures now use kaiser filtered mipmaps instead of box filtered for better sharpness at some zoom levels.
– Many, many other smaller improvements.

– Added temporary factions system. These are used in the refugee quest, but can be used in other places as well.
– Refactored quest generation to run the generation script in C# instead of in XML data. This was done for all the new quests and will make quest coding easier in future.
– PatchOperationInsert: Only apply node normalization for text nodes, just in case.

– Fix: Log files can get extremely big. We now handle direct log messages as well (e.g. internal Unity messages or mods using Debug.Log directly) when handling max message count.
– Fix: Anima tree doesn’t heal properly.
– Fix: Joy meditation can cause pawns to fall out of bed.
– Fix: Condition causer destroyed message sent whenever it was despawned instead of just when it was actually destroyed.
– Fix: Text rounding issue with re-enter cooldown text.
– Fix: Pawn bio tab -> double empty lines in tooltips just before the line that says when a backstory unlocks a psyfocus type.
– Fix: Haircuts don’t display their partly-transparent sections. This mostly made the shaved haircut invisible.
– Fix: Many neural heat gizmos shown if many psycasters are selected.
– Fix: Situational thoughts with reason don’t give access to PAWN symbol.
– Fix: Pawns interrupting their throne meditation for other jobs.
– Fix: Curing scaria doesn’t remove manhunting.
– Fix: Not saving drawAimPie field in Stance_Warmup.
– Fix: Insect glowpods affect anima meditation.
– Fix: Uncapitalized tagged content in some circumstances.
– Fix: Uncolored names in some letters. Added a color tag for quest threats.
– Fix: LOS calcs for purpose of royal aid don’t match LOS for guns.
– Fix: Humans with 0% hearing get thoughts from listening to instruments.
– Fix: Sounds with tempoAffectedByGameSpeed stop playing forever when the game is paused.
– Fix: Pawn can get random inspiration while not capable of being conscious.
– Fix: Bug where items from <costList> would never be returned from deconstructing a building if the stackCount of that item was exactly 1.
– Fix: Peace talks can generate for factions with goodwill rewards disabled.
– Fix: Inconsistent stat report for stuff, not reporting all stat factors/offsets if you open it via hyperlink.
– Fix: Thoughts about not being master of a bonded animal appear even if pawn is too low-skilled to be master of their bonded animal.
– Fix: Banishing quest lodgers causes “banished” thoughts.
– Fix: Downed refugee icon on the quest info has permanent red tint from DamageFlasher.
– Fix: The call to InnerThing.GetStatValue ignores the null check.
– Fix: Siege buildings retain their faction after siege ended.
– Fix: Manhunter animal quest and incedent don’t cap out at 100 animals.
– Fix: “Considered: Fine” stat appears on floors with royalty not active.
– Fix: Psylink counts as an artificial part for a transhumanist.
– Fix: Pawns not gaining comfort from throne while meditating.
– Fix: Royalty-only stats appear in scenario editor with Royalty.
– Fix: Colonists can lose their psylink entirely when being resurrected.
– Fix: Pawns can spawn with missing heads.
– Fix: References to Braziers in core.
– Fix: While paused, musical instruments constantly loop, this also occurs while in the trade menu.
– Fix: Pawn in cryptosleep requires bedroom.
– Fix: Some raid pawn kind defs allow Brawler trait while having ranged weapons.
– Fix: It’s possible to use doors as electricity-less coolers.
– Fix: Exception when selecting brazier construction ghost.
– Fix: Undignified throne room alert causes FPS drop for a throne that is outdoors.
– Fix: Just claimed artificial structures don’t affect nature focus objects.
– Fix: Throwing grenades only 1 cell away makes the graphic distorted
– Fix: Pawns meditate in bed without being sick. They should go for a better meditation spot.
– Fix: Mechanoids not waking up if you skip them.
– Fix: Mechanoid capacity tooltip displays hidden capacity impactors.
– Fix: “Created at” stat has duplicates for things with bulk and normal recipes.
– Fix: Non-royal colonists will not wear royal apparel even if outfit requires it.
– Fix: Empire is hostile to neutral ancients by default.
– Fix: Several world feature names not being used.
– Fix: Can’t right click directly on pawn to prioritize hunting.
– Fix: Psychic drone level increased letter doesn’t mention affected gender.
– Fix: RadialDistinctThingsAround doesn’t work correctly for 1:X size things.
– Fix: Text that says research speed will be multiplied by eg. 200% because of tech level is incorrect.
– Fix: “s” on the end of “colonists” isn’t colored in quest text.
– Fix: Quest lodgers show up on history graph.
– Fix: Incorrect calculation for packaged survival meal bulk recipe.
– Fix: Wild men who are incapable of violence can hunt animals for food.
– Fix: Shuttles sometimes land on natural roofs.
– Fix: Some enemies spawn with smoke launchers who shouldn’t.
– Many more small fixes.

For all you Epic fans, RimWorld is out on the Epic Games Store! Check it out here.

This is a follow-on update to last week’s major content additions with some refinements and fixes.

This update should be fully compatible with all savegames and mods.

Since Royalty content is less mature (3 months vs 6 years), most of these refinements are focused on it, but there are things for the base game as well.

Thanks to everyone who helped test!

Improvements
– You can now configure a desired psyfocus level on your psycasters and they will meditate enough to maintain it, without needing to use the schedule.
– Reworked how destroyed buildings generate slag so small buildings don’t generate giant slag blooms; they’ll leave steel behind instead.
– Implemented toggle for anima trees that toggles whether building ghosts are showing connections to meditation foci or not.
– All Empire pawns have at least the title of Freeholder.
– Player-created names update.

Training and feedback
– Implemented warning message for pawns with psychically dull or deaf traits when becoming a royal or trying to gain a psylink by anima tree.
– Rename difficulty: “The price of survival is blood” to “Blood and dust”.
– Rename esquire to acolyte. Adjust some title descriptions.
– Added warning message when designating an anima tree for cutting.
– Clarify undignified thronerooms reason text.
– Anima tree now sends a letter when enough anima grass is available for linking.
– We now prompt the user to confirm using a psytrainer if the pawn’s psylink level is too low to use the psycast.
– Add “Meditation desired psyfocus” learning helper lesson.
– Add “Meditation schedule” learning helper lesson.
– Show base and max value for MeditationFocusStrength stats with offsets.
– Improved organization of drug stats listing.
– Various text adjustments.

Tuning
– Increase rewards per points for quests game-wide.
– Reduce the threat points for fights generated off the home map, and increase bandit camp quest rewards.
– Double the rate of nuzzling by animals to buff mood-oriented pets.
– Extend the thought for when you buried someone in a sarcophagus.
– Reduce monument sizes about 15%.
– Reduce psyfocus decay rates 0.5% at each level.
– Increase psyfocus gain of wall from 11 to 22.
– Increase psyfocus gain range of grave from 4~20 to 6~26.
– Increase psyfocus gain range of sarcophagus from 8~24 to 10~30.
– Increase psyfocus gain of animus stone from 25 to 34.
– Increase psyfocus gain of sculptures by 2, up to a max of 28 at legendary quality.
– Increase psyfocus gain of small nature shrine from 15 to 22.
– Increase psyfocus gain of large nature shrine from 22 to 30.
– Remove psylink neuroformer from traders (but most still buy it).
– Reduce nature shrine build times by 40%.
– Reduced yayo new addiction chance from 10% to 1%, and removed the min tolerance to addict.
– Reduce flake new addition chance from 20% to 5%. Reduce flake tolerance gain from 4.5% to 4% (matches yayo).
– Increase toxic fallout earliestDay from 20 to 60. Reduce base chance from 0.14 to 0.12. Increase volcanic winter earliest day from 30 to 60.
– Reduce anima tree regrowth check cycle from 40 days to 30 days.
– Ship chunks now leave a component if killed, even if not deconstructed.
– Reduce blood rot severity per day gain from 60% to 40%.
– Reduce chance for diseases in caravans by 4x.
– Min market value for neuroformer quest rewards reduced from 720 to 600. Neuroformer market value increased from 1200 to 2600.
– Reduced the selection weight of hostile factions as quest askers to 15%.
– Disabled paralysis in hospitality quests.
– Anima grass glows less brightly.
– Various internal tunings in quests.

Technical
– Moved Abasia and BloodRot to Royalty XML files.
– Rename CompWarnInBuildingRadius -> ToggleDrawAffectedMeditationFoci.

Fixes
– Fix: Psyfocus meditation effect shown for psychically deaf pawns.
– Fix: Wake-up meditation focus gain is overtuned, should be 20% not 40%. Also it needs to be expressed in the right format of % per day.
– Fix: Lodgers with blood rot and abasia spawn with equipment that immediately gets dropped.
– Fix: Tree sowing research project lists anima tree as hyperlink.
– Fix: Incorrect pluralisation in goodwill letter text and removed reference to asker in success/failure letter to match quest text.
– Fix: Item stash quest uses asker’s short name instead of full name.
– Fix: Typo in deserter quest description.
– Fix: Unstable power cell can be rotated.
– Fix: Accidentally referencing MeditationFocusStrength directly in StatWorker_PossibleCompOffsets.

We’ve released the May 2020 update for RimWorld!

This update is still on version 1.1, because it should be compatible with savegames and mods. For Steam users, if for any reason you have trouble, you can set your Steam beta branch to ‘version-1.1.2624’ to keep playing on the previous version.

This update has improvements affecting the base game and the Royalty expansion, though since Royalty is much less mature (3 months vs 6 years), it’s what got major focus on the content side. This update is the add-on we promised back on March 2.

The big theme of this update was opening up new play paths so you can take on the game’s world in whatever way you like, and the game will respond in a way that’s sensible. This means you can be tribal, outlander, pro-Empire, anti-Empire, neutral Empire, use psycasters or not, use drugs or not, use ranching or not, and so on. See below for the writeup on major changes, and the change log.

Beyond this, there’s more stuff in progress, and I’m looking forward to letting you all know about it when the time is right.

Thanks to everyone that helped test and give feedback! Please keep it coming.

-Ty

Psyfocus and meditation

Psyfocus is a new long-term resource on psycasters. Fictionally, it’s a sort of mental structuring that a psycaster can build up. Each psycast consumes a bit of it. It also very slowly ticks down over time. Higher levels of psyfocus allow you to use higher level psycasts, but the psyfocus also ticks down a bit faster at higher levels. This means that you can easily maintain your lower-level psycasters at low levels, but high-level psycasts will need a bit more investment to maintain their power.

There’s no downside to letting psyfocus exhaust, aside from losing the ability to use psycasts. So if you have a psycaster whose powers you don’t want to invest in any more, you can just stop any time and reactivate them later.

Psyfocus is primarily built up by meditation. You can place meditation spots on the ground and assign them to colonists, though if you don’t they’ll try to find an optimal spot themselves anyway. There’s a new entry in the scheduling tab which allows assigning them to meditation time.

The most basic kind of meditation is simply to meditate without any kind of aid at all. Pawns will do this in caravans, in prison, or in hospital, but in normal situations they’ll meditate using meditation focus objects to gain psyfocus faster. With a focus object, the psycaster meditates near the object and focuses on it to gain extra psyfocus during meditation.

Where it gets interesting is that not anyone can use any focus object. They can only use an object if it matches one of their focus types. A person’s focus types are specific to them, based on their childhood backstory, traits, and titles. Psychic meditation is a personal/cultural activity which is done differently in different traditions, and people do it according to their own tradition and preferences. It means that different people will act differently, which centers their characterization – it’s always a goal with RimWorld’s design to make characterization matter.

There are currently five focus types:

Dignified: This can be used by psycasters with Empire royal titles. They meditate on meditation thrones, and gain more focus for more grand and dignified thronerooms. This is part of a shift in emphasis for the Empire, somewhat away from the pampered noble image, and more towards the quasi-religious psychic order aspect that they’ve always had. You’ll note that this kind of meditation is a direct replacement for the old ‘authority’ need that your titled pawns would have. Now, instead of sitting on the throne to boost their own ego, they do it to meditate and regain psyfocus. The throneroom is a social gathering place, but it is also a meditation temple expressing deep traditions of an honor-bound culture.

Natural: This focus type is used by those with tribal childhood backstories – whether you started as a tribal faction, or simply recruited someone with a tribal backstory. Natural meditation foci all need to be in nature – they lose their power if there are artifical structures too close by. The concept here is that they want to go away from people and do a psychic practice by communing with the stillness and eternity of the natural world.

The most important meditation focus for the natural focus is the anima tree. One of these unique trees spawns on every map with a biome where it’s at all feasible. The tree glows with bioluminescent micro-organisms and has a connection with the surrounding psychic field. Anima trees are powerful foci for building up psyfocus, but also serve another purpose – they can actually upgrade your psycasters. When meditated to, the anima tree slowly develops anima grass around its base. Once enough is grown, you can send someone to link with the tree through a tribal ritual and gain a new level of psylink. This gives a reason to have lots of people meditate to the tree sometimes – possibly even the whole tribe – to grow the grass faster. Anima trees are not vulnerable to toxic fallout and animal will respect them and not eat them (except the jerk alphabeavers). If it’s destroyed, a new one will spawn some time later.

Besides anima trees, you can also build nature shrines or acquire ancient animus stones and place them in nature to meditate to them. These won’t give new psylink levels like the tree, but it can be useful if you’re on an ice sheet and there is no tree, or you feel you want a meditation focus in a specific spot (though they still lose power if too close to artificial buildings). Raiders won’t see or attack the hidden nature shrines and animus stone.

Morbid: This focus type is used by those with certain traits like psychopath, cannibal, or blood lust. They draw psyfocus by meditating on death. To that end, graves and sarcophagi are a meditation focus for them. This kind of meditation is more powerful with a corpse inside the grave, and even more powerful if the corpse is related to the meditator.

Minimal: This focus type is used by ascetics. They want the absolute minimum, so they meditate to blank walls. It’s a powerful type of meditation, but only ascetics can use it, and they can’t use some other types.

Artistic: This type of meditation is usable by most people. The psycaster will meditate to art. Higher-quality art builds psyfocus faster. This kind of focus object is very accessible, but not quite as powerful as other methods.

The above all means that the Empire no longer needs to have laws against psychic powers – so they don’t. If you want to be tribal psychics drawing power from the anima tree, while being friendly with the Empire, you can. The Empire also no longer tries to prevent anyone from using bladelink weapons (renamed to persona weapons), again, simply because it wasn’t worth restricting players this way. Such weapons are still very hard to get, so if you get one, use it.

Gaining psylink

The way psycasts become usable has changed slightly. Previously it was from the psychic amplifier. You would collect these little items and stick them on your head. Having more of them unlocked higher levels of psycasts. This was somewhat limiting since it locked the progression of psychic powers to this one specific object.

Now the psychic amplifier is changed to an object called a psylink neuroformer. It upgrades a property on the brain called psylink. Psylink is an organic property of the brain which can be built in other ways too, like the anima tree linking described above.

Psylink neuroformers are still given for new royal titles, but we also did some work tightening how often they’ll be seen as quest rewards to ensure that it’s possible to develop psycasters consistently even if you’re not doing royal title progression. This is connected to the new reward choices (described below).

With different meditation types and different ways of gaining psylink, the overall goal is that players should have distinct but co-equal pathways to develop psycasters depending on which play path they want to go down – whether they want to climb the royal title progression, play as neutral tribals, or fight as outlanders against the empire.

Other changes

The rest of the changes can be expressed more concisely in the below change log.

Quests

– Quests now offer three reward options for the player to choose between. These three reward options are always distinct from each other. They are displayed in a condensed pictorial layout instead of text, making for easy reading and selection. Player can still set reward preferences to prevent rewards like goodwill or royal favor from being offered, if desired.
– We condensed and focused a ton of quest texts for better readability.
– Texts for Empire quests have been adjusted to de-emphasize the pampered aspect somewhat. The nobles should be a lot more straightforward to match the new dignified meditation. They’re more honor-bound than pampered.
– All quests have been deeply reviewed and tuned to give good reward and challenge balances at all stages of the game in all situations.

Psychic mechanics

– Psychic entropy was renamed to neural heat. This distinguishes it from psyfocus better, and expresses the context of a short-term measure that quickly dissipates, but can ‘burn’ you if pushed too high. It doesn’t represent physical heat of the brain; it’s an expression reflecting the same psychic phenomenon as before.
– Psychic hangover removed. Since we now have psyfocus as a long-term cost for psycasts, there’s no need for psychic hangover. (Its original purpose was to remove from the player the micromanagement burden of casting psycasts like Focus over and over on workers, which would have been a good strategy without it).
– Neural heat overload is no longer dangerous and can often be a good strategy. It won’t burn anyone’s brain, though it may still knock your psycaster into a coma for a few days and in some cases can burn out a psylink level. It’s a good strategy in difficult situations. I’d like to see more players pushing the boundaries of neural heat limits. Overall this powers up psycasters by making it much more viable to push out a lot of psycasts at once.

New psycasts

– New psycast – Neural heat dump: Reduces caster neural heat to zero instantly, but puts the allied target into a psychic shock coma for a day. This replaces entropy link.
– New psycast – Waterskip: Drops some water at the target point, extinguishing nearby fires.
– New psycast – Flashstorm: Generates a small flashstorm at the target point, which will drop lighting bolts from time to time.
– New psycast – Bullet shield: Creates a circular skipgate field which will absorb shots in or out around a targeted point, for a short time. Great for retreats or advances.

Hosting quest improvements

– You can now sometimes gain goodwill sometimes by keeping the guests’ mood extra high.
– Threats configuration totally redesigned. There are new fewer individual threats, with more variation in their pacing and scale. For example, rather than four normal mech clusters in a row, which gets monotonous, you might get two double cluster or one triple-size cluster, providing challenges outside what normal play offers.
– Lodgers now generally have lodger conditions like being unwilling to work, or requiring mood to be kept up, or a disease. This reduces the cases where the lodger is rewarding you for the chance to work for you. More difficult conditions offer bigger rewards.
– Helpers brought to fight for you now start with an ‘on duty’ mood bonus thought.
– Added blood rot disease to support hosting quests.
– Added paralytic abasia disease to support hosting quests.

Drugs

– Drugs output a lot more stats on their info card, including high gain per dose, high fall per day, high duration per dose, psyfocus gain per dose, tolerance gain per dose, tolerance fall per day, random overdose chance, minimum tolerance for addiction, addiction chance per dose, addiction recovery time, addict need fill per dose, addict need fall rate, addict need cost per day, addict need dose interval, safe dose interval. This should help make drugs my viable by giving players information to reason about costs and benefits.
– You can now make pawns keep drugs in inventory even if they’re not scheduled to take it. Good for combat drugs.
– Drug taking is faster and the pawn won’t move when they do it. Good for combat drugs.
– Wake-up and go-juice rebalanced. Now instead of being safe for some interval but then absolutely suicidal to take, the risk and consequences of addiction are lower but the safe dose interval is removed.
– Go-juice instantly gives psyfocus when taken by psycasters.
– Wake-up speeds psyfocus gain from meditation when taken by psycasters.
– Addiction is now rolled before tolerance build-up, making more drugs like yayo more viable and making the drug stats output easier to understand.
– Addicts now take their drug automatically at 10% need instead of 30% (which is too early and wasteful). Chemicals restore 90% to their need instead of 100% for more consistent math.
– Drug tolerances are visible at all severity levels instead of being hidden at low tolerance.

Miscellaneous content

– Added new sound effects for: Mech serums, neurotrainers, psytrainers, condition causers, quest accepted, succeded, failed, concluded, techprint applied, shuttle idle, shuttle board and disembark.
– Added prestige recon armor, prestige marine armor, and prestige cataphract armor. These gold-enhanced power armors enhance psychic abilities and are needed to satisfy noble apparel requirements.
– Psyfocus gear renamed to eltex.
– Cleanly slaughtering your tame animals now gives 50% bonus meat. This powers up the previously-underused ranching.
– When manhunters attack the colony en masse, they now come with the rabies-like scaria disease. Fictionally, this gives a reason why manhunters are attacking, but its design purpose is to flatten out the reward level for manhunter attacks between different difficulty levels. At each difficulty level, a percentage of animals killed with scaria will become unbutcherable on death; this percentage is tuned inversely from the animal count at each difficulty such that higher difficulties now get the same resource reward as lower difficulties. Scaria can also be cured quite easily if you down an animal with it, which makes it possible to make them into pets or meat for slaughter if you are ready to trade medicine for food.
– Smelting slag is much faster to reduce clutter.
– Random decrees for nobles are removed.
– Mech clusters drop less slag and more steel to compensate.
– Mech cluster central problem causer buildings drop some special reward resources when destroyed.
– Filth like blood, dirt, rubble, etc now expires after a long time. This should reduce clutter buildup in long games.
– Added new smoke shells and smoke IED.
– Royal aid can now be targeted on a position instead of just dropping on the caller. So you can tell them to drop on top of a mech cluster, into enemies, etc – anywhere in line of sight of the caller, within a certain radius.
– Monuments can now be rotated while placing.
– Monument generation was reworked to prevent monuments from having big empty spaces inside and increase the value density. This should make monuments more compact and easier to place.
– UI: Follow the master while drafted/hunting now appears on the animal’s training tab as well as the main animals tab.
– Renamed bladelink to persona weapons.
– Added colorblind-friendly point labels for history charts, visible on mouseover.
– Difficulty settings were renamed with more flavor and to better indicate what they really mean. Descriptions were condensed and clarified, and coded to appear instantly on mouseover so they can’t be missed.
– Updated player-created names.

Small miscellaneous

– Increased eltex staff market value from 1000 to 2000.
– Quest rewards now give more goodwill if the faction is hostile.
– Tuned various trees’ harvest work and yield towards a standard of about 30 harvest work per yield.
– Renamed and rewrote difficulty settings (tuning was not changed).
– Mortars now have a visible progress bar while cooling down.
– Removed psychic silencer implant since it no longer has any purpose. The deserter quest now gives an additional psylink neuroformer.
– Cleaned up how pawn hunger rate is fed back through stats. Gourmand trait now directly affects hunger rate. Hunger rate multiplier stat is not used anywhere anymore (but was not removed for compatibility).
– Increase range of manhunter pulse psycast by 10.
– Stripping neutral or allied pawns now causes goodwill loss.
– Now only quest asker lodger can issue decrees.
– Improved melee DPS and armor penetration stat texts.
– Shuttles now avoid landing near mechanoid cluster proximity activators.
– Added various loading tips.
– Reduce call cataphracts royal favor cost if used before cooldown from 12 to 8 favor.
– Psycasts tuning: Painblock entropy cost reduced from 10 to 8. Stun range increased from 20 to 25. Blinding pulse range increased from 20 to 25. Entropy dump range increased from 15 to 25. Vertigo pulse range increased from 20 to 25. Skip range and radius increased from 25 to 28. Wallraise range increased from 20 to 25. Smokepop range increased from 20 to 25. Focus range increased from 25 to 28. Berserk range increased from 15 to 20. Invisibility range increased from 15 to 20. Waterskip range increased from 20 to 25. Bullet shield range increased from 20 to 25.
– Reduce work for cremating a corpse from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
– Relabel the ‘restrict’ main tab to ‘schedule’ since that’s its main function.
– Only allow stone floor (tiles and flagstone) in monuments.
– Made sure empire never gives royal favor reward if hostile.
– Change psychic entropy fall rate to be measured per second instead of per 30 seconds.
– Rebalance bandit camp quest to have better rewards and less challenge, and add more name content to it.
– Removed the self-destruct outcome from the journey ship endgame. Quest now only ends if reactor is destroyed or tile is deliberately abandoned.
– High tooltip displays severity percentage in tooltip.
– High label displays hours remaining. Addiction label displays severity percent. Addiction tooltip displays the need it creates.

Technical

– Implemented quest rewards debug output table which helps analyze maximum, minimum, and average quest rewards for quests at different points levels.
– Implemented TKey system. This is a system which will allow us to tag XML text with TKeys, which translators can then use to address the text. This saves translators from having to work with long, overly-complex paths to modify text, and allows us to restructure our XML without breaking translations. We have added TKeys to QuestScriptDefs and TipSetDefs so far.
– Create full debug output for tuning drugs.
– Swapped XML-like format for colored text tags to use different symbols.
– Hospitality quests now fail if asker faction becomes hostile.

Fixes

– Fix: Manhunter animals don’t leave properly after 1-2 days.
– Fix: Can’t use gender symbols in “FinalStraw” translation.
– Fix: Persona core request text incorrect grammar.
– Fix: Pawn lend quest always uses plural form of ‘have’, regardless of pawn count.
– Fix: Reduce resistance job report string shows ‘attempting to recruit xy’ instead of reducing resistance.
– Fix: Ingredient radius slider handle becoming invisible at unlimited radius.
– Fix: Penoxycyline blocks diseases longer than it should.
– Fix: DeepDrill optimization breaks map seeds (regression).
– Fix: When deep resources are exhausted, the message notifying the player states incorrect next base resource.
– Fix: Sometimes when deep resource is exhausted the drill is not properly forbidden.
– Fix: Colonist who is away on a quest formed bond with animal.
– Fix: Mechanoids assembled by a mech assembler have high ages. Pawns created by Spawners now have their age set to minimum age for last life stage, so it works correctly for insects as well.
– Fix: You can teleport pawns onto unwalkable terrain.
– Fix: Wedding guests sometimes don’t stay for ceremony after party and don’t get “Attended wedding” bonus.
– Fix: Able to remove implants on pawns without repercussions.
– Fix: Monument construction quests from permanent enemies sometimes talk about goodwill change on destruction, even though goodwill can’t change.
– Fix: Potential null ref for pawns with no Rest need.
– Fix: Bad grammar on hospitality letter with single lodger.
– Fix: Gray UI color from ‘none’ label when there are no traits affects first skill items in CharacterCard.
– Fix: Improperly colored time strings in some cases.
– Fix: Translation key CannotGiveToPackAnimal missing ‘cannot’.
– Fix: Can build stone doors on bridges.
– Fix: CataphractArmor research project in the base game; should be in Royalty.
– Fix: GetStatValue overload causing patching issues in some mods.
– Fix: Lag when sapping raiders are being hit by bullets.
– Fix: Hosted quest prisoners can be placed in cryptosleep caskets.
– Fix: Error if PatchOperationConditional didn’t match and doesn’t have nomatch path.
– Fix: Translation files cleaner stripped away (*Name)(/Name) tags on keyed translations.
– Fix: Dormant mech assemblers not reporting next mech they’re gonna assemble.
– Fix: PsychicHarmonizer description typo.
– Fix: If the pawn goes from safe to brain roasting entropy in 1 psycast, I think he will skip over the overloaded Message.
– Fix: Wallraise can be cast to invalid positions by queuing cast commands.
– Fix: berserk/berserk pulse abilities can be cast on pawn in mental state to interrupt it.
– Fix: Quests that end before they are accepted because of faction hostility display “This quest was completed”
– Fix: Spelling error in psychic insanity lance sound folder name.
– Fix: Psychic effects on dead bodies don’t disappear.
– Fix: Pawns with chemical interest/fascination adhere to drug policy allowForJoy when they should not.
– Fix: Shooting skill disabled by hunting work type.
– Fix: Incapable of violent shows shooting skill.
– Many other smaller fixes and typo fixes.

This is a refinements and fixes update with improvements for the base game and Royalty expansion. It should be compatible with all savegames and mods. This biggest changes will be tunings designed to move deep drilling from the lategame towards the midgame and make them more viable for marginal drilling projects. As always, everything is on the table for further adjustment as we go forward.

On Steam, if you want to play the previous version for any reason, just use the Steam beta branch called ‘previous’.

We’re also working on some deeper gameplay improvements and content additions – look forward to those! However, for stability reasons those are being held back for now.

Thanks to all those who helped test on the official testing Discord server. Come join to test future releases!

Tuning
– Defeating a mech cluster now gives a mood boost to all player pawns on the same map.
– Reduce work cost of smelting metal from slag from 1600 to 800 (to help reduce clutter).
– Reduce uranium slug turret cost per shot from 4 to 3 and increase its damage from 45 to 50.
– Butchered cenitpedes now yield 10 plasteel when shredded, modified by difficulty and pawn skill.
– Crashed ship parts now drop an advanced component.
– Plasteel no longer burns.
– Reduced commonality of mechanoid raids at high points levels.
– Reduced deep drilling research cost from 4000 to 1000 and moved from multi-analyzer tier to microelectronics tier.
– Reduced cost of deep drill from 200 steel and 4 components to 100 steel and 2 components.
– Reduced cost of ground-penetrating scanner from 2 advanced components, 6 components, and 200 steel to 1 advanced component, 4 components, and 150 steel.
– Increased deep drill yield for steel, plasteel, uranium, silver, and jade. Reduced yield for gold.
– Reduced max deep lump size for gold, and jade, and steel.
– Reduced deep drill power consumption from 300W to 200W.
– Deep drill can now extract from the 21 closest cells instead of only the 9 closest.
– Imperial settlements offer more psytrainers.
– Mechs created by the mech assembler mechs now defend the cluster instead of attacking.
– Mech assembler now shuts down after spawning 4 mechs.
– Double the effect of pain focus.
– Seperated deep drilling speed from mining speed. Drill arm now affects deep drilling speed less than normal mining speed.
– Tune monument size and construction time.
– Monument damage consequence size is no longer affected by challenge rating.
– Removed extra selection weight for mech cluster as monument damage consequence.
– Adjusted monument protection duration based on challenge rating.
– Colonists with bloodlust no longer suffer a mood debuff when harvesting organs.
– Adjust Alzheimer’s to nullify fewer conditional thoughts, otherwise it can be impossible to keep guests happy with Alzheimer’s and it’s a bit weird that their mood ends up locked at default.

Misc
– Reworked how monuments are generated to produce more compact structures without weird large gaps.
– Optimized deep drilling for modded games with more rock types.
– Explicitly mark some more things as part of Royalty in code for clarity: Shuttle, bladelink weapons, muscial instruments, thrones, projectile interceptors (shields).
– Refactor royal title warning texts in order to do the formatting programatically.
– Removed unnecessary ‘You must keep [guestName] at colony’ from hospitality quests as lodgers should not be able to be transferred.
– Removed ‘showCreatedAt’ on recipe def and used existing IsSurgery property instead.
– Removed unnecessary check on text height for architect category tab.
– Changed psychic amplifier graphic to match archotech artstyle, since it’s an archotech item.
– Moved IncomingDamageFactor damage mitigation to ApplyDamageToPart.
– Optimization: Make GridsUtility.GetDoor use GetEdifice instead of checking every thing in the cell.
– Adjusted apparel debug outputs.

Text
– Monument quest descriptions now better handle multiple allowed floor types.
– Added more quest name content for PawnLend quests.
– Adjusted monument resource readout to include all possible floor type required resources.
– Added a warning popup about conceited colonists when a royal favor quest is about to be accepted (similar to anti-social colonists).
– Combine warnings when attempting to accept a royal favor quest for someone who is both conceited and anti-social.
– Made it clearer why a Praetor cannot call an orbital imperial trader.
– Reduced the tooltip delay on storyteller difficulty selections to zero
– Rewrote natural goodwill rise/fall tooltip to display yearly change. Removed redundant text.
– Pain focus readout now rounds to the nearest whole number.
– Adjust text and fully define mining stat order.
– Added an explanation to the psycast ‘Target’ stat entry.

Fixes
– Fix: You cannot shoot over unstable power cells.
– Fix: Sometimes the wrong people can be ordered to enter shuttles.
– Fix: Quests sometimes generate manhunting packs with > 100 animals.
– Fix: Spawning sketch that wipes doors with no adjacent regions causes an error.
– Fix: The translation files cleaner tool uses LF in the end of the first line (xml root).
– Fix: Cocoa trees are marked as unlocked for both ‘Tree sowing’ and ‘Cocoa’ research projects.
– Fix: Quest lodgers being attacked by colonists (temporary or permanent) during murderous rage and other aggro mental states cause relations loss.
– Fix: Typo in peaceful difficulty description.
– Fix: Some custom backstories with gender set to “either” have a default gendered body type.
– Fix: Manhunter incident can fail for very high points.
– Fix: Padding for mod requirement box is uneven.
– Fix: QuestPart_RequirementsToAcceptBedroom causes errors for pawns with royal titles which don’t have bedroom requirements.
– Fix: Tough trait incoming damage multiplier doesn’t work properly.
– Fix: Item hitpoint slider precision – unequal values shown as same.
– Fix: NPCs incabable of doctoring can self tend.
– Fix: In the info card for a psycast, all entries in the lists of Target are capitalized.
– Fix: Formatter tool adds and deletes same values because cyclic reference prevention would skip value types falsely.
– Fix: Luciferium not healing chronic conditions but the message says it did.
– Fix: Ship parts sometimes land on walls and skip upon spawning inner thing.
– Fix: TryFindSafeLandingSpotCloseToColony only checks single cell instead of occupied rect for blocking things.
– Fix: Accepting two shuttle-based quests one after another causes one to land on top of the other.
– Fix: Siegers receive extra supplies they don’t need.
– Fix: Various StockGenerator_Tag missing countRanges which made some settlements not carry items they should have.

This is a relatively minor update focused on fixes and balance. The major content we’re working on is still being held back for release as the content add-on later.

This update should be compatible with all savegames and mods. DRM-free users can update by re-downloading and re-installing from their personal download link – it always has the latest version and never changes.

Thanks to everyone who has given feedback at the unstable testing Discord server. Come join to test future releases!

Improvements
– Monuments can now be sastisfied with any floor type instead of requiring specific floor types.
– Monument generation has been adjusted to make monuments more dense and consistent.
– Reworked how quests decide whether to appear based on player progress to solve an issue that would cause quests not to appear for a long time at lower populations on certain difficulty settings.
– “Choose rewards” window renamed to “Reward preferences”. Added explanation at the top of the window. Increased height of reward prefs window.
– Man in black is now always capable of violent and caring work.
– Quests will no longer offer rewards with unreasonably small numbers of items (e.g. 5x hyperweave).
– Improved clarity of monument marker placement feedback. Added messages for incompatible terrain or blocking buildings.
– Prices now only display decimals when under $10.
– Now, only esquire and higher titles will be inherited.
– Hospitality threats with mech clusters now display more accurate sizing in generated text.

Tuning
– Praetors can now give speeches.
– Lodger minimum mood now only applies to the asker, not any others who accompany him.
– Mech clusters now have more chance of using walls at low points levels, but less chance at high points levels.
– Mech clusters are more likely to have mechanoid guards instead of just turrets.
– Mech clusters at low points are more likely to have unstable power cells.
– Reduce duration of berserk pulse from 15 seconds to 11 seconds.
– Increase cost of mortars.
– Siegers now recieve 6 replenish shells at a time instead of 10.
– Decrease joywire brain efficiency impact from 30% to 20% (reverts previous change).
– Increased human turrets damage and fuel consumption.
– Increased uranium slug turret range.
– Reduce steel from smelting steel chunks from 20 to 15. Reduce resource yield from destroying/disassembing mechs and their buildings. This should reduce late-game clutter, reduce weird economic imbalances between difficulty levels, make it more relevant to actually have an economy besides killing things, and improve challenge spread between difficulties.
– Quest ThreatReward_Manhunters_Joiner: Manhunter arrival is much sooner, and comes not too long after the joiner arrives.

Technical
– Removed null asker possibility from hospitality quests.
– Added try/catch to StaticConstructorOnStartupUtility.CallAll() so 1 broken mod doesn’t break all other mods.
– DesignatorFor -> FindAllowedDesignatorRoot
– Monument placement now checks overlap before adjacency.
– Minimum mech cluster points can be set for mech cluster buildings.
– Rename “ludeon” constant in ModContentPack to LudeonPackageIdAuthor Fix typos in a related check.
– Reward from lodgersMoodThreshold in hospitality quests is now factored based on lodgersMoodThreshold value.
– QuestNode_IsInList now uses previously unused function.
– Removed redundant checks from IsSpawningBlocked. IsSpawningBlockedPermanently checks proper location.
– Moved TerrainDef.genericLabel to DesignatorDropdownGroupDef label.
– Move the delegate inside ModContentPack.ReloadContent into a class function to prevent future issues with mods.
– Added null check for QuestGenUtility method IsInList.
– lodgersMoodThreshold is now selected from 4 discrete random values.
– Renamed allowedThreats to threatType in hospitality quests; a back-compatibility rule for the old name remains.

Fixes
– Fix: Can’t target caster or pawns of the same faction with psycasts if they’re invisible.
– Fix: Text overlap for some items on architect tab description.
– Fix: Kind label is not gender-aware in RulesForPawn
– Fix: Pawns can stand on drapes are standable.
– Fix: Some hospitality quest fields report missing translations even though they shouldn’t
– Fix: Alerts throwing errors after choosing “Load mod list from save” while in-game.
– Fix: Smoke spewer does nothing.
– Fix: Psycasts don’t check cooldown in CanCast method.
– Fix: Tribute collector doesn’t arrive unless you have a knight.
– Fix: Black screen on startup if a workshop mod folder was deleted without unsubbing from the mod.
– Fix: Force loading animals into a shuttle while forming a caravan and then sending the shuttle causes errors.
– Fix: Asker potentially not being set when setting lodgersHaveMoodThreshold.
– Fix: Monuments can be placed over non-edifice buildings without warning.
– Fix: Languages listed as seperate even if they share the same legacy folder name.
– Fix: Manhunter pack quests and incidents fail to generate for higher points.

In addition to a ton of general improvements for the base game and Royalty, this update focuses on tightening quest generation and making nobles more flexible. Full change log is below.

For DRM-free players, just re-download from your original download link to get the updated version(s). Your download link never changes.

If for any reason you want to play the previous version on Steam, please use the Steam beta branch called ‘previous’.

RimWorld is a very flexible game with many different game states, and our quest generation system uses some pretty complex scripting to generate quests appropriate at different difficulties, diplomatic configurations, and colony sizes. Since releasing 1.1, we’ve been seeing some cases where quests would generate that weren’t rewarded appropriately or had the wrong difficulty and complexity level for the stage of the game they were appearing in. All this should be a lot tighter in this build, and there are further plans for refining and enriching quest content in the future. All the feedback we’ve gotten about this has been invaluable – thank you!

This update also works on making nobles more flexible. Players have indicated that they want to use royal colonists in more different ways, and it’s always been a goal with RimWorld to support players choosing their own path as much as possible, exploring different strategies and role-playing different stories. The original nobility design focused on advancing a single character up the noble ranks, but if players want to have 6 knights and they’re willing to do the quests to earn that royal favor, the game should reward that gracefully. Shared throne rooms and controllable speeches are a step in that direction. As always, we’ll be watching how this plays and seeking more ways to enable players’ goals.

This update should be compatible with all vanilla savegames. We also tested with a wide variety of mods and found it compatible (though it’s hard to guarantee this since mods can change any time and do anything). We’ll be watching carefully and working to fix anything that comes up. Whether you’re a modder or a player who has discovered a problem, please don’t hesitate to come chat with us about technical issues on the public testing Discord server!

The content add-on discussed some weeks ago is still coming. These updates represent the more urgent and straightforward improvements I want to get out quickly, while we work on the deeper changes separately. I’m excited to show you what’s coming but, as always, it’s better to keep it under wraps because the design is still changing as we iterate on it.

Thanks again to everyone who is playing and offering feedback.

-Ty

EDIT: We’ve discovered an incompatibility with the Startup Impact mod. This shouldn’t affect play at all, but the mod’s special loading screen won’t work until it’s updated.

Improvements

– Multiple thrones can now share one throneroom.
– Allow non-noble pawns to play music. High culture recreation type is re-labeled to music recreation. Allow non-conceited nobles use dexterity play.
– Make speech from the throne an ability player can control. High-level royals gain the ability to do a speech from the throne. It has a cooldown (so the speaker can think of ideas for the next speech). The feedback for throne speeches now tells the player the chances of different outcomes, along with the relevant social stat.
– Removed minimum expectations for non-conceited titles (that is, titles of pawns who were not born royalty and are not greedy or jealous).
– Implemented category-based melee verb selection. Previously, pawns would select which melee verb to use simply by a weighted random selection according to the power of their different verbs. However, this created an incoherency where adding, for example, a knee spike to a pawn with a longsword would actually make him worse, since the knee spike is less powerful than the longsword but now he is more likely to choose a verb besides the longsword. The new verb category system places each verb in one of three categories – best, mid, and worst. It then chooses randomly between best (75% of the time) and mid (25% of the time). So adding a knee spike to a longsword wielder will not make him use the longsword less often; rather it will replace his fists as the mid-tier verb and improve his damage per second.
– Colonists can now be set as master to any animal they are bonded with regardless of skill. This prevents situations where starting animals begin bonded to colonists who cannot become their master, leading to a permanent negative thought for the colonist not being master of the bonded animal.
– “New quest” letters now link directly to the relevant quest instead of requiring an extra click.
– Shuttles that don’t land on landing pads will now avoid crushing buildings, items, and trees.

Tuning

– Redesigned how hosting quests generate threats. Instead of always generating points-based threats on a 24-hour cycle with the same timing in all cases, the system now chooses from a designed menu of different duration ranges, threat counts, and threat intensities. Each challenge rating (star level) has a different menu of threats. These are all modified by the possibility of adding helpers, different guests with different conditions, and so on.
– Quests’ reward value is now always at least 250 silver, no matter how small the quest.
– Quest guests can now only be downed or sick if quest points are over 300.
– Non-royal guests can now have mood threshold set only if quest points are over 400.
– Helpers can no longer generate for 1-star hospitality quests (since these quests have no violent threats).
– Reworked how the guest count for quests is generated, taking points into account better, and adjusted the rate to have fewer guests at really low points levels.
– Hosting quests can only use 2 or 3 challenge stars above specific points thresholds.
– Random quests no longer generate at all under 100 points, and lerp to generating as normal at 200 points.
– Tune random quest selection weights for more variation.
– You can no longer get quests about fighting mech clusters at unreasonably low points levels.
– You can no longer get infestation quests at unreasonably low points levels. Change the code that determines the hive count to round normally without randomness, for greater accuracy.
– Increase monument protection times from 10~30 days to 20~50 days, and increased reward factor to match.
– We no longer generate as many cheap items at high reward values, in order to focus on a few big juicy rewards.
– Adjusted the rewards for various game conditions in condition-for-pay quests (this means quests where e.g. you get a toxic fallout but also get a reward). Also linked specific conditions to specific star ratings.
– Balance down the reward you get just for keeping a hospitality guest without threats (since often this can even be advantageous).
– Deny choosing Empire as asker for a hospitality joiners quest if points are under 240, to avoid sending nobles when a colony can’t realistically support them and they wouldn’t want to visit.
– Adjust how hospitality quests determine the royal title of royal guests so early-mid-game guests don’t have unsupportably high titles.
– Tune the default relationship between quest points and reward value to make it scale better lower and higher points levels.
– Slightly increase chance of population-gaining quests.
– Quest threat sites will no longer generate with ‘possibly unknown threats’ all the time, and especially not at lower challenge levels.
– Quest threat sites will now limit the number of threats at the site according to the quest points.
– Extended hive spawning delay the 14 seconds to 28 seconds.
– Reduced luciferium market value from 120 to 70.
– Increased joywire consciousness impact from 20% to 30%.
– Increased spike trap build cost from 35 to 45.
– Reduced wood sharp damage multiplier from 0.45 to 0.40.
– Colored lights research project no longer requires high tech research bench.
– Difficulty settings now modify butcher yield similarly to crop yield.
– Moisture pumps now leave resources behind when destroyed.
– Fine floors now give 75% of resources back upon deconstruction, similar to other floors.
– Changed research prerequisite for ship landing beacon from microelectronics to electricity.
– Greatbow can now be made at crafting spot.
– Health conditions can now have negative pawn price offsets. Mindscrew now has a negative price offset.

Technical

– Improve grammar resolution trace format by putting the trace first, then variables, then custom rules.
– Make mech capsules avoid placing multiple mechs on the same cell.
– Suppress “dependency needs to have downloadUrl” warning for dependencies on official content.
– Moved ‘Copy debug to clipboard’ button to above debug text. Made the signal text box button narrower and changed the ‘…’ button label to ‘Send defined signal’.
– Shuttles can now take off when under roofs to prevent breaking quests if it moves under a thick roof after landing.
– Added a new quest node for creating multiple incident quest parts periodically or randomly.
– Moved quest part debug window contents to a virtual method. Added a debug button to complete Pawn Lend return shuttle delay.
– Improve ‘write storyteller’ debug output.
– Special thing filters are now always shown based on the root category of the filter listing.
– ThingFilter now resolves the display root category lazily.

Text

– Adjust description of ArrestSuccessChance stat.
– Replace obsolete loading tip about noble foods.
– Removed some nouns that don’t pluralize well by adding “s” to the end.
– Name generator now always uses GenText.CapitalizeAsTitle.
– Bladelink weapons now report the minimum title required to legally use them in their info card.
– Re-arranged some parts of “title gained” letter to put important stuff near the top.
– Adjust feedback for when protected monument is destroyed.
– Adjust some repetitive text in game condition quest descriptions.
– Refine description text for the infestation/joiner quest generation script.
– “Caused by title” trait tooltip text is now white to match other “caused by” text.
– Display quest info on monument marker inspect pane. Don’t show “Complete”
– Add tooltip about allies sending random traders and military aid.
– Recreation type stat report now describes what it is and lists all recreation types.
– Removed some redundant text from animal hospitality quests.
– Display quest info on monument marker inspect pane. Don’t show “Complete”
– Recreation type stat report now describes what it is and lists all recreation types.
– Changed the “royal incapable of social” warning dialog to prompt the user to confirm before accepting the quest, instead of simply closing and requring the user to accept the quest again.
– Updated player-created backstories and names.
– Fix: Typo in duck description.
– Fix: Trap hit letter label for friendly pawns not capitalized.
– Fix: Incorrect tooltip about surgically upgrading psychic amplifier (it doesn’t actually require surgery).
– Fix: Quest guests not being unhealthy even though quest description says they are.
– Fix: Pawn lend quest specifies how colonists will be returned, when it could be either shuttle or drop pods depending on asking faction.
– Fix: World inspect pane showing always the label of the first selected object instead of ‘(various)’.
– Fix: Incorrect capitalization in plant attributes.
– Fix: Site threat quests sometimes mention a faction which is not even used for the site threats.

Fixes

– Fix: Error spam if a herd of boomalopes explodes.
– Fix: If a shuttle drops off downed pawns, they’re dropped on top of each other.
– fix: On dismissing a quest, a seemingly-random one is selected.
– Fix: Can get pyromaniac trait for medical assistant backstory where it doesn’t make any sense.
– Fix: Pawns being carried don’t show up on the social tab.
– Fix: Debug text overlapping with hyperlinks.
– Fix: Old methods not calling _NewTemp versions.
– Fix: Recreating cantTakeReasons List<string> recreated every time in Selector. Resurrection utility now checks for artificial body parts using hediffSet.PartOrAnyAncestorHasDirectlyAddedParts.
– Fix: Exception in pawn creation panel.
– Fix: Resurrection blindness affecting unnatural body parts.
– Fix: Ordering more than 1 drafted pawn to move somewhere they cannot go does not show a ‘no path’ hint.
– Fix: Listing_TreeThingFilter.Visible having new parameter but no _NewTemp appended. Old method with same signature now always returns true and is not called anywhere.
– Fix: Armor prevents damage from surgery failures.
– Fix: Mech cluster lord not receiving wake up signal if there are no spawned mechs initially.
– Fix: Threat response icon color doesn’t match icons beside it.
– Fix: Wild decree mental break can happen to prisoners.
– Fix: Modded factions that have no color set for their icon break the ‘choose rewards’ window.
– Fix: Wick not being rendered on defoliator when it’s about to explode.
– Fix: Attacking infestation hives causes nearby ancient danger hives to aggro.
– Fix: Replacement body parts not affecting pawn price. HediffDef priceImpact now defaults to false, and we explicitly state which hediffs have price impact.
– Fix: Architect tab looks darker than other tabs in bright snow.
– Fix: Some shelves have ‘Allow fresh’ whereas others do not. Display root category in ThingFilter is now updated properly.
– Fix: ListsEqualIgnoreOrder is incorrect.
– Fix: Asymmetric faction relations caused by permanentEnemyToEveryoneExceptPlayer FactionDef flag.
– Fix: Piano uses stuffed unfinished thing.
– Fix: Wild men/women suffer from naked moodlet.
– Fix: Affordance grid doesn’t update when edifices are built or removed.
– Fix: ‘Choose rewards’ button is cut off at the bottom.
– Fix: Loading an old scenario file can break the UI if it references a stuff that isn’t in the game any more.
– Fix: Hediff combatLogEntry is referenced but not deep-saved.
– Fix: Selecting a minified ship landing beacon causes errors.
– Fix: QuestNode_GetRandomPawnKindForFaction sometimes makes the quest description unresolvable (fallback is a string).
– Fix: Outlander combat suppliers don’t buy drugs.
– Fix: Errors with melee verbs when drafting pawns carrying ranged weapons.
– Fix: Ship landing area alert text displays improper dimensions.
– Fix: ‘Prisoner released’ thoughts remain after recapturing the pawn.
– Fix: Psychopath has a negative social opinion after another colonist sells slaves.
– Fix: Language worker not capitalizing words in quotes properly.
– Fix: Name generator capitalizing letters after apostrophes.
– Fix: White fringes on harpsichord art. Note that harpsichord also needs HQ tex compression because of the dark low-contrast gradients.
– Fix: Text uncapitalized after colon.
– Fix: Error on using quest script defs debug table.
– Fix: Capacities aren’t updated when equipping gear that affects stats.
– Fix: Stats show all gear if any one piece affects it.
– Fix: Red interface button has no right border.
– Fix: Noble given a speech walks to a throne really slowly.
– Fix: TranslateWithBackup didn’t work.
– Fix: Missing ‘shuttle arrived’ signal that disables hospitality threats after shuttle delay.
– Fix: Thought reporting incorrect start / finish expiration date.
– Fix: GetPawn not filtering by excluded factions on existing pawns.
– Fix: Stone blocks (and other recipe products without hitpoints) not counted properly by recipe.
– Fix: Tribute collector arriving when there’s another caravan hostile to empire on the map.
– Fix: Dismiss quest icon is asymmetrical.
– Fix: Incorrectly rotated monument marker thing not detected properly as part of monument.
– Fix: “Sequence contains no matching element” in BuildDifferenceExplanationText for some mods.
– Fix: Secondary guests don’t use faction name rulepacks.
– Fix: SketchThing detecting incorrect things as part of the monument.