Disaster at Grizzly Pass

[Kryo]

My first game of Rimworld was a bit of a rollercoaster. Now I've had plenty of experience with this genre of games (namely DF and Banished), but none of that could have prepared me for Rimworld. This is uncharted territory. Now I'm going to tell the story of my first playthrough, mainly because this game has greatly inspired me to share it. Some details may be lost, since this happened a few days ago, and the specific seasons that the events occured may be switched. What I do know is that I survived for roughly 2 years.

And here we go. I began by choosing 3 colonists: Andy the Engineer, Anna the Doctor, and Brown the Gardener. I noticed that Andy and Brown were coincidentally brothers. It's the little details like this that make the game interesting for me. The more depth the better. I started on Cassandra, casual, and chose temperate plains to start things off easy, but I knew by experience that it would end up to be anything but easy.

Our three brave settlers landed and I instantly built a main hall, a rice field, and sandbags. Tutorial basics. Once I got that out of the way I started to familiarize myself with the rest of the features.
I armed Andy with the rifle and Brown with the pistol.(Anna was a pacifist) I sent Andy off to hunt while Brown and Anna tended to the field.
I very soon noticed the large amount of bears roaming around the map. I had no udea how the AI worked in this game so I played it safe by hunting as far away from them as possible. It was only natural that when Brown asked what we were to name our new budding colony, I chose Grizzly Pass. The bears, plus the western vibe that I was getting from the music, just made the name seem to stick.

Our first few raids were nothing. We got some free clothes out of it and even a spare pistol to give to a future colonist. Andy picked up a pretty sweet looking cowboy hat from one of the dead raiders and from then on I thought of him as a sort of "Rick Grimes" in the colony. Can't get more badass than a cowboy hat, rifle, and duster.

I later expanded the house by adding a housing wing on the left side. During the summer a heat wave struck and I installed some AC units. I even built a walk in freezer room. Things were looking up. A woman who was apparently Anna's daughter crashed down and was bleeding badly outside our base. Sadly during this time I thought that rescuing people would make them join your colony, but as soon as she recovered she up and left. Shame.

During one night a man named Kees scrambled out of the bushes wearing nothing but a winter hat. He later turned out to be not so crazy as you might think and he was a hell of an artist. He immediately threw a party for some reason and the colonists looked like they were enjoying themselves. Literally the next morning, when Brown was tending to the crops he got too close to one of the map's many grizzlies and was instantly mauled to death in our backyard. We took the fat bastard down, suffering minor injuries, but Andy was wounded on a much deeper level.

He spent the night wandering around the forest, taking iff his clothes in a psychotic daze, ge soon snapped out of it and returned to his normal duties, but he still moped around.

A few days later, in a sick turn of events, a raid struck, of which one person who you would least expect, was a part of. Andy's freaking mother, Ferneji. Small rimworld. We shot and killed one of the bandits and Andy fired and downed his own mother. He ain't no mama's boy.

We dragged Ferneji to the hospital/prison/whatever the hell it needed to be that day. Ferneji was recruited surprisingly quickly despite having a 2% recruitment chance. We sent her to work right away, but she suffered a major mood loss from the loss of Brown, who up until now probably didn't even matter in her mind. Even criminal moms have feelings it seems.

Those damn bears wandered too close again and tore poor Tinker, the little terrier we started with, to shreds. Luckily the bear was too preoccupied with feasting on the little canine to notice Kees, Andy, and Ferneji firing rounds into its rear end. Once the dog was fully swallowed it turned on Kees and they sat hitting each other. The bear was killed and Kees surprisingly only had bruises and cuts. Now there was only one pet left, and that was a strange little self tamed rat that Ferneji decided for some reason to name Jagged. Jagged followed Ferneji everywhere and they bonded.

A little farther into the future, Kees and and Anna developed a love relationship. I set a marriage spot right in front of a statue Kees had completed, depicting Andy spitting into Ferneji's eye during her imprisonment. Very romantic.

Fate proves itself to have a very sick sense of humor because not long after, Kees suffers from a heart attack in the rice fields. (That place had to be cursed) He survives, thankfully.

A vat grown female soldier, Daniels, shows up. I don't remember much of her because she was quite frankly very uninteresting. She had a spike hairdo going on though, that much a can remember. She crash landed in a pod and, learbing from last time, decided to capture her and recruit her later. I had to euthanize the previous occupant of the prison, a bandit named Deathclaw. We had shot his leg off and replaced it with a peg leg, hoping to recruit him. He just turned out to be a huge bother, resource-wise and safety-wise. Don't look at me like that, it was for the best.

A woman named Toni joined us, and turned out to be a pretty damn good surgeon. She would soon prove to be a great help in the event that followed shortly after.

Up until that second summer, I hadn't taken boomrats seriously. The name amused me and they didn't look very threatening. So you can see where this went wrong from the start. The boomrats decended on my colonists, who I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to keep in the building.

Ferneji was the first to encounter one. After beating it, it blew up right in her face and incapacitated her. Kees and Toni were running around on fire. Andy and Anna were surprisingly flame-free and strted to stimp out the massive fires enveloping the main hall, freezer, and butchering shed.

I don't remember Daniels's part in this so bear with me. I believe she rescued Ferneji and carried her back to the hospital. I must have forgotten to undraft her and she may have stayed in the hospital with Ferneji throughout the entire crisis.

Meanwhile, Anna continued to beat out the flames in the main building, Toni miraculously stopped being on fire, and Kees collapsed from the pain. I immediately sent Andy to rescue Kees and bring him to safety, but a nearby boomrat made him drop Kees and chased him into the botchering shed. Toni fought the last boomrat outside, while Anna fought the flames still. Andy killed the boomrat and luckily didn't start on fire.

I sent him out the back to extinguish the growing inferno on the main building. Toni worked on the freezer room while Andy and Anna carved a path to the butchering shed. So the fire was out and the boomrats were gone. Everything was fine right? It seems that during the confusion I had forgotten all about Kees, who had been dropped, and he was discovered in one of the flames next to the shed. He had burnt to death.

Anna suffered from a mental breakdown and started to pig out on the food supplies. I placed one of his statues, depicting Kees shaking hands with Ferneji during her recruitment, in the main building to honor him.

Later during the second fall I had began construction on an indoor hydroponics farm. I discovered to my relief that you could mine for components rather than trading for them, which would take an extremely long time. Poor little Jagged the rat was killed by a boar during a hunt. The colonists showed their grief by immediately hauling him off to the chopping block. Brutal.

One night 3 huskies joined our colony out of nowhere. One of them later had 5 puppies and I trained all of the oldest ones to haul.

Bowen the nurse soon after joined the colony. We didn't get to know him for very long though. He was gored by another boar during a mining trip and he was sent to the infirmary. We later discovered that he was a drug addict and he spent the remainder of the game in bed recovering from withdrawal.

Which wasn't very long.

One cold fall evening, I was admiring the work I had done during that day. The colonists went to bed, unsuspecting of what the next morning had in store for them. I felt my stomach drop that night when I read a little notification at the side of my screen that said a pack of manhunting wargs had entered the area.

Up until then, I had no reason to believe that freaking wargs existed in this game, let alone anywhere other than Middle Earth. I pasued the game to get a look at the new challengers. They looked like a cross between a wolf and a bear. My colonists had handled plenty of bears and timber wolves up until that night, so I had a tiny bit of hope.

I drafted all of the colonists who could fight and placed them in the main building so they wouldn't wander outside. The dogs strolled outside, to my horror, but the wargs didn't seem to mind them. Must be a canine thing.

It was at that morning that Anna awoke and decided to go outside and get some breakfast. I had completely forgotten to draft her because she didn't like violence and by the time I set the game to normal speed she was already out the door. I couldn't draft her in time to head back and the wargs were already onto here so she fled into the butchering shed. Anna and the others soon got very hungry and the wargs didn't seem like they would let up anytime soon.

I decided to do something very stupid. I sent out all of the armed colonists and decided to make a mad dash to rescue Anna. The wargs quickly overwhelmed us. The colonists killed two of them and greatly injured another two. But it was all for naught, as they were taken to the ground by the three living wargs.

So there they were, 5 colonists bleeding out in the cold, 8 huskies milling around in the house, and one bedridden drug addict. And as crazy as it sounds I had hope for abwhile there. These guys had been through hell and I didn't think that they would all give in this easily. Sadly I was wrong. Anna got up after a while to go eat, so I ordered her to rescue Toni, in an effort to save the other healer. She only made it twi steps with Toni in her arms before passing out again. They bled out one by one.

Two warg bodies were on the ground next to them, another two had bled out a little farther away, and the last I assume had left the area. The huskies had nothing to do, but haul the wargs to the butchering stockpile and the colonists bodies to the graveyard stockpile. Bowen lay in his hospital bed, probably soiling himself from the sounds from outside, starving to death. He was only at 75% recovery. The rate was too slow.

But what's this? A colonist has appeared! A vat grown soldier woman named Jackie. Who... cannot haul, cook, or doctor.

This has to be some kind of sick joke, right?

Bowen, the last hope of the colony, starves to death because miss Jackie over here couldn't play doctor. The generators run out of fuel because she refuses to haul,spoiling the food reserves and destroying the hydroponics crops. She digs the graves for the colonists, but doesn't give them the burial they rightfully deserve. They later rot to into skeletons next to their open graves.

The only work that's being done is the harvest of the rice, which the huskies haul to the unpowered freezer room. Jackie spends three nights eating raw rice. Sadly she didn't choke on it. The 5 husky puppies are traded for food and medicine.

Almost a week after the disaster a bandit raid of 5 comes knocking. Jackie arms herself with Andy's trusty old survival rifle. The colony may be dying, but it wasn't going to go quietly. Jackie kills one bandit instantly, but misses the rest of her shots. The huskies take down one and wound another. Jackie is downed and the bandits start shooting at the now fleeing huskies. They abruptly give up and kidnap Jackie.

Someone ought to tell them that she would make a terrible slave.

Two of the dogs are wounded, but I never get to see if they survived because. A few in-game hours later the notification came up that the colony had reached the end of its journey.

Thus ends the tale of Grizzly Pass.

Hope you guys enjoyed the story.

[KnockTwice]

Yes!  Many things you mentioned remind me of my first colony.  Boomrat surprise, rescuing an escape-pod victim leading to the (family member) wandering off, etc.  In my case the colony burned to death due to a massive fire breaking out in the greenhouse.

It sounds like your experience with similar games paid off -- your first colony made it pretty far.

[Kryo]

Yes!  Many things you mentioned remind me of my first colony.  Boomrat surprise, rescuing an escape-pod victim leading to the (family member) wandering off, etc.  In my case the colony burned to death due to a massive fire breaking out in the greenhouse.

It sounds like your experience with similar games paid off -- your first colony made it pretty far.

If anything they taught me to be excessively cautious. My next game I'm going to start taking risks and really seing what this game has to offer. I'm absolutely loving the storytelling element. You find yourself starting to form attachments with your colonists. With Banished, you're basically keeping a bunch of anonymous settlers alive.