Why are we trying to get off the RimWorld?

[byrnsey]

Ok, so the game is fun and all, for what it is here's my question.  Why is anyone trying to get off the RimWorld?  We've established that FTL travel is impossible. There's no one for our colonists to go back to, and given that the assumption that empires rise and fall and go from glitterworld to stoneage and back again, no where. 

This assumes that the original 3 colonists survive.  Given the way this game plays out, especially if you embark with a real old member of the starting three, that's unlikely.  So what you have is a majority of of brainwashed raiders, runaways from the raider camps, and random wanderers, all striving and pushing themselves to build this ship at the expense of growing food.  Why not just go to one of the civilized settlements, and work to either leave from there, or settle down permanently?

This might be a much later thing, but I feel like there could be some sort of motivation put into the game.  There has got to be a reason why this planet is *fucked* and you need to get off.  Doesn't have to be the same every game.  Your ship was running from a Mechanoid fleet.  Shot down, you've got to get yourself back into space to warn the coreworlds. Obviously you aren't in a crazy rush, because it will take centuries for the mechanoids to get there.  But along the way you might have to excavate sections of the ship from either the ground or rock formations, for parts, for information etc.  You wouldn't join one of the settlements, because the mechanoids are looking for you, and those settlements will be targets.  There could be events where a civilization is exterminated, by the mechanoids and you have to absorb a host of stressed, hungry refugees.  Refuse, and they attack, followed by mechanoids.  Accept them, and you still fight the mechanoids, but with the rag tag assistance of the fugees, and after you have to feed, house, clothe, and de-PTSD a large amount of new colonists.

And so on and so forth.  You land on the planet, and it's run by trans-animals, and you've got to get off the Planet of The Apes.  Or there's some plague or something similar.   Or the world could be a dead transcendent world, and you're surrounded by angry pirates who don't want to share.  There's no trading, because any ship that enters the airspace is shot down as yours was, but there's plenty of guns to be lifted off of raider corpses and plenty of high level tech laying around to be used to defend yourself.

Another nice thing is this could make a tech tree scenario dependent.  With the mechanoids, you need to get offworld fast.  Against the animals, handling and social related techs, so that you can even communicate with the different factions of animals, and make alliances.  With a plague, a series of medical advances to make recovery faster, and confer immunity in advance (vaccines, better farm chickens). All this could be researched in any game, but the investment will probably not be worth it.  But when you need to do so for your win (or survival condition) it will change the way the game plays in terms of your strengths and weaknesses.

I dunno.  I know it's early days, and this is wish listy.  But right now, the game lore and game play don't jibe.

[REMworlder]

A hypothetical question: a big part of RimWorld is allowing players to develop their own emergent storylines by being purposely vague or generic. What's a good way of providing a rationale for the spaceship ending without being too heavy handed with the narrative?

Given RimWorld's scaling difficulty, the space ship ending is really the best case scenario for any colony. When threats eventually get big enough, like humongous raid sizes, the only way for colonists to survive is to leave.

For a more lore-centric reason for leaving, cryosleep does seem to offer a lot of answers. To someone from a glitterworld, used to a super high standard of living, spending millenia unconscious in space might be preferable to a slow death on an undeveloped RimWorld.

[NuclearStudent]

The game never makes you build a spaceship-that's entirely your choice. Nor do you have to get off, even if you have one. For example, you can launch as a last ditch effort if you are being overwhelmed. You can put a visitors greeting center housing your spaceship (they apparently have a high impressiveness value, which makes hilarious sense.)

It's a pretty good question as to why we don't join any outlanders. Are we space racists or something?

[Limdood]

It's a pretty good question as to why we don't join any outlanders. Are we space racists or something?

Another hypothetical question:
Make your own rules, or follow someone else's?

[NuclearStudent]

That doesn't seem likely. It's clear that we're not all fiercely independent rebels determined to make our own way. We're just random spacers.

Even if there's a language barrier, at least of these people should seem decent enough that'd we'd consider hanging out with them. My best guess is that we think all the other groups are kinda dodgy, and we would rather stay with what we know. By the time we'd have had years of contact and feel comfortable, we've built a decent base already.

[Livingston I Presume]

Also because I'd imagine most people are getting sick of being shot, these people are not soldiers, like imagine being shot at every couple of months and being forced to kill?

[Shurp]

Does the game allow you to launch a spaceship with just a few colonists onboard?  Maybe you're running a religious retreat sending missionaries out to evangelize other planets...

[Dodging Rain]

Yes it does.  You can constantly send off people into space while leaving a reliable size workforce to constantly draft (covert?) others into your colony.  Or you can send off colonists that are being a liability (slothful, dementia) when your colony is large enough that removing them doesn't affect your production much.

[Toggle]

Yes it does.  You can constantly send off people into space while leaving a reliable size workforce to constantly draft (covert?) others into your colony.  Or you can send off colonists that are being a liability (slothful, dementia) when your colony is large enough that removing them doesn't affect your production much.

Although if you could afford to send off some bad colonists to space, you could probably afford to put a few extra luxury items into their workspaces and bedrooms so you could butcher the worthless colonists.

[Dodging Rain]

That's probably true but I never really like to butcher my colonists' body due to the medical study mod that turns bodies into medical xp.  Aside that, I only used the ship feature once to end my current game when a recently released mod requires me to start a new game.