If Rimworld had imagination

[b0rsuk]

There is a notable lack of quirkyness in Rimworld. What if it had animals like these ?








http://www.boredpanda.com/animals-hybrids-photoshop/

[Shurp]

What if we could capture people, harvest their organs, and sell them into slavery?  And then sit around the campfire drinking beer & celebrating?

Rimworld has plenty of imagination... you just have to be on the right wavelength.

[iame6162013]

Well you could easily mod it.

[NoImageAvailable]

Yeah, the game could have like, an antelope that explodes or something.

[Limdood]

well, you have boomalopes, boomrats, thrumbos, and kind-of wargs and muffalos.

All other animals are DIRECT earth animals.

[Daman453]

Although it would be fun, no dwarf fortress mega bea- wait you got a point

[Simon_The_Space_Engineer]

Well if there was animals like the ones in the photos I would just murder them all as they kinda scare me (as I care for my colonist and I don't want some t-Rex seahorse ripping their legs off when they walk around in water) and there is plenty of creativity in rimworld

[b0rsuk]

Rimworld has many Earth animals.

There's nothing special about Mufallo, Warg or Thrumbo.

Boomalopes, Boomrats are the only remotely creative animal, and they sound like a joke. That kind of animal couldn't survive. A single predator would kill an entire pack.

It's as if Tynan disliked imagination. Rimworld's setting is more like futuristic fantasy than science fiction. Science is just there to provide a new setting, new frontier, new Wild West - clearly not to limit anything by worrying about plausibility.

So why even bother sticking to very mundane animals ? Short stories by Robert Sheckley show you can have fun and creative worlds within the futuristic (not necessarily science fiction) convention. His books read more like Discworld than actual science fiction.

One of my favourite short stories is The Odor of Thought (1954 - still copyrighted). A man crash lands on an alien planet. All animals living there have green fur. So he meets green squirrels, green wolves and so on. They're also completely blind... and telepathic.

Another author which wrote good, lightweight sci-fi that could serve to spice up Rimworld setting - Henry Kuttner.

[Alistaire]

So.... you suggest the massively creative idea of merged earth animals.... because someone wrote about green earth animals....

I'm sorry what - how is that any more imaginative.

[REMworlder]

What's interesting is the RimWorld lore talks about lots of genetic experimentation and makes it sound somewhat underrepresented in our colonies.

Genetic engineering - Genetic engineering is relatively easy on many planets and has been used for everything from creating xenohuman super-soldiers to perfect mates to talking dogs, explosive plants, and air-spewing terraformer algae.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pIZyKif0bFbBWten4drrm7kfSSfvBoJPgG9-ywfN8j8/pub

One consistent class of modification we've seen applied to a wide variety of creatures is intelligence enhancement. Dogs, pigs, monkeys, gorillas, whales, dolphins, and elephants have all been engineered and combined with human DNA to produce smarter variations. Some variants are created as pets. Other are made to do work too dangerous or unpleasant for humans, and beyond the capacities of a culture's AI. Some are created as warriors and weapons - hyper-intelligent guard dog, a bird scout that can speak what is sees, a bomb-carrying suicide monkey. These brain modifications are often paired with physical changes - fingers so a pig can manipulate tools, or a humanlike larynx and mouth so a dog can talk.
Such intelligence-enhanced animals are collectively classified by their degree of brain power and called by a specific prefix like so:
Opti - Indicates enhanced but still sub-human intelligence. Optianimals can usually use tools, form long-term goals and organize into primitive social groups, but can't speak more than a few words, read, or think abstractly. Optidog, optipig, optiwhale, optimonkey.
Trans - Indicates intelligence in the human range. Transanimals can read, use tools, form teams, hold conversations, and think about complex ideas. Transdog, transbear, transgoat, transsimian.

[NoImageAvailable]

Rimworld has many Earth animals.

There's nothing special about Mufallo, Warg or Thrumbo.

Boomalopes, Boomrats are the only remotely creative animal, and they sound like a joke. That kind of animal couldn't survive. A single predator would kill an entire pack.

It's as if Tynan disliked imagination. Rimworld's setting is more like futuristic fantasy than science fiction. Science is just there to provide a new setting, new frontier, new Wild West - clearly not to limit anything by worrying about plausibility.

So why even bother sticking to very mundane animals ? Short stories by Robert Sheckley show you can have fun and creative worlds within the futuristic (not necessarily science fiction) convention. His books read more like Discworld than actual science fiction.

One of my favourite short stories is The Odor of Thought (1954 - still copyrighted). A man crash lands on an alien planet. All animals living there have green fur. So he meets green squirrels, green wolves and so on. They're also completely blind... and telepathic.

Another author which wrote good, lightweight sci-fi that could serve to spice up Rimworld setting - Henry Kuttner.

So on one hand you complain about muffalos yet your suggestion for "more creative" animals includes coloring Earth animals different colors, i.e. exactly what the muffalo is? You complain about boomalopes and boomrats being silly yet your OP suggests randomly mashing together Earth animals, which is just about one of the laziest, most boring and stupidest methods of creating fictional animals?

As it stands, you simply criticize the game while demanding the same things you supposedly dislike be included. If you want to complain about Rimworld lacking imagination, at least come up with something that actually is more imaginative than what's in the game already.

P.S. There cannot be predation of boomrats and boomalopes since no predator can withstand the explosion

[b0rsuk]

re: P.S. also, boomrats and boomalopes can't have accidents. If a tree falls on a boomrat, or a mufallo steps on it, the entire colony dies.

Read the short story "The Odour of Thought" before you accuse me of lack of creativity. I could go into detail, but I don't want to spoil that excellent story.

As it is, Rimworld animals are below the level of lazy animal mashups. Mufallos are yaks with the first letter changed.

[Alistaire]

Read the short story "The Odour of Thought" before you accuse me of lack of creativity. I could go into detail, but I don't want to spoil that excellent story.

You having read a story doesn't say anything about you nor does it make you in any way an authority on deciding what's creative or not. We are not accusing you of lack of creativity, the title of this thread was written by YOU not by US.

As it is, Rimworld animals are below the level of lazy animal mashups. Mufallos are yaks with the first letter changed.

Would you rather have green muffalos?

[NoImageAvailable]

Read the short story "The Odour of Thought" before you accuse me of lack of creativity. I could go into detail, but I don't want to spoil that excellent story.

Nobody will read books or short stories just to understand some point you're making. If you want to use it as an example to illustrate something you need to name the aspects relevant to your argument, otherwise people will have no idea what you're talking about. If you can't or don't want to do that you shouldn't bring it up in the first place.

As it is, Rimworld animals are below the level of lazy animal mashups. Mufallos are yaks with the first letter changed.

No, they're buffaloes/bisons but blue instead of brown, which is exactly the type of recolored Earth animal you've been suggesting in your previous post.

[Limdood]

OP bashing aside,

A few more interesting animals could be useful.  Seeing a boomrat/boomalope predator with 100% fire resistance could be feasible, and a very interesting indirect threat to the colony (forest fires anyone?)

We already have wargs, why not some of the other less "out there" fantasy monsters.  Rust Monsters to damage equipment more?  Tribbles (from Star Trek) to provide an overpopulation threat - they're completely benign, but reproduce like crazy and eat the map clean. 

We don't even need super-crazy-off-the-wall-weird animals.  Even a couple more earth animals could be useful...sheep?  Old earth animals - Mammoths, saber-toothed tigers.....dinosaurs?

No, i don't claim any level of "creativity" - I'm just brainstorming.  Animal taming was introduced early enough that there isn't much reason to expect a super-diverse selection of animals.  Now that there is a lot bigger focus on the animals, there will probably be more animals introduced (Tynan even has a thread around here somewhere asking for animals people want to see in game)