What holidays are found on RimWorlds? What are they like?

[REMworlder]

Holidays, festivals, celebrations... Groups come together seasonally to remember historical events, pay respects, practice traditions and rituals, or just have a good time with lots of food and alcohol. How do they look in RimWorld? Here's how holidays feature in similar games, and some thoughts on what holidays in RimWorld might look like.

Holidays in comparable games

Stonehearth added festivals as part of a stretch goal. Festivals will probably create worker bonuses as long as enough celebratory food is available. From the stretch goal description: Join your townsfolk as they celebrate popular holidays like Solstice, Harvest, and The Monday of The Twelve Golden Fruit. Properly provisioned festivals produce happy, energetic workers. Forgotten events invite the wrath of greater powers...

Dwarf Fortress has festivals as well, though they currently only happen in the world generation and adventure mode. While players may celebrate certain times of the game themselves, Gobin Christmas isn't technically a festival. A note on how festivals will work from dev notes:

We're well into the world gen festivals. Their main purpose at this point is to provide something interesting and interconnecting for the new artists to do before we move on to dwarf mode. The festivals that rise to the level of importance required for legends mode tracking are established as part of a fair in large markets with multiple trade partners, for religious purposes in temple cities, or to commemorate specific events such as the slaying of a dragon. The game looks at the values and ethics of the civilization and the overall purpose of the occasion to come up with the schedule of events -- performances, competitions (from art to various races to wrestling to etc. etc.), processions and ceremonies, with various little details. We're still on track to finish this part in a day or two.

Sim City 3000 Unlimited has several mostly appearance-based holidays and seasonal items, with Christmas lights, Gingerbread houses, and Christmas tree lights in December and occasional Thanksgiving parades in the fall -- provided the city was big enough. Not technically a Dwarf Fortress-esque game, but the pool of examples is kind of limited.

Where are the holidays?

I was surprised holidays or their equivalents weren't more commonly found in similar games. Holidays strike me as a great way to enforce pacing and make both in-game and lore events memorable by reminding players about them. Holidays also keep a game topical. A great example of this is League's Harrowing or Warcraft's Feast of Winter Veil, though arguably player engagement is the greatest priority for these types of games that live and die by their player base and subscription size. This doesn't discount the importance of holidays for single-purchase games like RimWorld, though, and the fact the biggest game franchises use holiday events heavily suggests just how important they are.

^{Vincent van Gogh - Celebration of July 14 in Paris (1886)}

What's a good holiday?

The worst holidays are copied directly from reality. In a game with open-ended lore and lots of creative possibilities, probably the worst narrative choice is to give the player something 100% familiar. Worse than being boring, events ripped from reality highlight in-game shortcomings and highlight all the ways the copied event is hollow and incongruous with reality.

That doesn't mean reality isn't a good source of inspiration. Being able to intuitively figure out the basis for a holiday without having to read a wall of background text is good. Plus the foundational reasons for some holidays can make a lot of sense, like harvest or solstice celebrations. The trick is grounding all these things in the RimWorld universe.

The good holiday checklist:
[ ]Unique - not simply a copy of Christmas cuz that's boring
[ ]Relatable or Intuitive - does the celebration purpose make sense
[ ]Reinforces in-game events or lore - does the rest of the living, breathing world celebrate this?
[ ]Sentence Simple - I can describe it in a simple sentence

Instead of some examples of good events, here are some not-so-good ones:
-Derivativemas: celebrates the discovery of derivatives. Unique, but not relatable or intuitive or tied to the lore.
-Ka'Val Dun's Swift Victory Over Sisters in the Agnatic Conflict Over Inheritance in Western Tribe Lands: Ka'Val Dun's advisor swiftly decapitated the king's arch enemy on the field of battle by using a powerful weapon that was made by a forge on this RimWorld by some craftspeople who liked ale because their genetic history predisposed them towards it. Deep lore maybe, but overly complicated and unclear.
-Birthday of X: Not really unique, and a little bland because literally everyone has a birthday. Is X even notable?
-Thanksgiving: At least call it Space-giving or something, remind the player he's not on Earth.

Anyways, I've devolved pretty heavily into word vomit by this point. What are your sexiest RimWorld Holiday suggestions?

[A Friend]

Boomalope Wrestling

You capture a wild and angry boomalope, bring it in a ring, and you get a pawn to beat it into submission. While a surrounding crowd cheers on.

Heh, but in seriousness
Something related to shooting boomrats and boomalopes. Something resembling 4th of July but instead of firecrackers you use the local explosive animals. Each kill nets a pretty decent mood boost for the participants. Dunno what to call it or what it celebrates though. Just seems like a fun concept.

[REMworlder]

Tieing in a holiday to wildlife sounds interesting. How do you think it relates to RimWorld lore? Is it something the colonist randomly start doing? That definitely gives a nice reason to 'splode some boomrats.

[MeowRailroad]

Boomalope Wrestling

You capture a wild and angry boomalope, bring it in a ring, and you get a pawn to beat it into submission. While a surrounding crowd cheers on.

Heh, but in seriousness
Something related to shooting boomrats and boomalopes. Something resembling 4th of July but instead of firecrackers you use the local explosive animals. Each kill nets a pretty decent mood boost for the participants. Dunno what to call it or what it celebrates though. Just seems like a fun concept.

And beer would also be provided. Nothing like explosives, firearms, and alcohol to get a party going!

How about the yearly anniversary of the colony's landing/naming being celebrated? Also if there was a planet-wide holiday, then pirates would have a chance of trucing. It would be cool if the event was something like this: "Your comms console crackles to life and a representative of [insert pirate group name here] says, 'In spirit of the holiday season, we ought to stop fighting for awhile. You know, just so we can celebrate peacefully." This would improve relations for awhile which would gradually come to an end. Also, you could invite outlander towns over for meals and festivities.

[DoctorNick]

Heh, but in seriousness
Something related to shooting boomrats and boomalopes. Something resembling 4th of July but instead of firecrackers you use the local explosive animals. Each kill nets a pretty decent mood boost for the participants. Dunno what to call it or what it celebrates though. Just seems like a fun concept.

So a more explosive version of Weasel Stomping Day?

Anyways, in my not very deep and off the top of my head thoughts on the matter holidays tend to be based on either the yearly cycle of seasons and historical events.  So here's what I've come up with in a couple minutes of pondering:

• Historical:
  
  
  • Colony founding day, could be called: Founding, Landing, Footfall, Touchdown, Crashday, so on so forth.
  • Ship launch day, if you launch a ship without everyone on board so the colony continues.
  • Major battles remembrances, we're talking like the AI ship part showed up and half of the colony died or a giant pirate raid where there were a LOT more raiders than colonists but still the colony held out.
• Seasonal:
  
  
  • Harvest festival, should follow the last crop harvest before the cold season sets in.
  • Major animal migrations in relation to the season changes, the great herds of muffalos passing by towards their winter grazing lands for example.
  • Summer and winter solstices, marking the 'high' and 'low' points of the year.
  • Solar eclipses could have a observation of 'Midnight at Midday' of some sort.

I've tried to keep all of those kind of generic and relateable to the colony itself.  Sure someone who crashes in a pod from some glitterworld might personally observe Union Day, when the two major inhabited planets of their star system joined into one political unit so their combined strength could fight off a mechanoid hive that had moved into the outer solar system and was a long term existential threat to them, but their fellow colony member who's an ex-slave from a medieval world 12 lightyears the opposite direction isn't going to know or give a crap about that.