Please explain me the world...

[Kenjiro75]

Hi there! I'm a relatively (50+ hours) new Rimworld player. I'm constantly disovering new things in the game, however I'm pretty experienced in early-to-middle gameplay now. There is one thing, however, that still puzzles me. Three questions, then:
1/ Could you please explain, what the reason is for generating the entire planet with tens (if not hundreds) of various settlements. Yes, I send trade caravans to my closest neighbours and it still takes a few days of game time, so what could be the reason for sending my people across the continent? Is it a necessity in a late game?
2/ Is it possible to go to an adjacent hex on the map (without any settlement) and enter its map to look for resources? I can't find such an option...
3/ What about hostile settlements? Is it viable to send people and attack them in a certain phase of the game? How to assess the benefits of such a raid and how many people to take stand any chances in a fight?

Thank you!

[Canute]

1. No it isn't needed at the endgame.
The only reason to create a caravan is when some event created some enemy site closeby that affect your settlement too. Like a smokesprayer. I don't think they got a timelimit and stay forever until destroyed.
But beside that you allways should think twice if it is better to stay home and develop your colony with the manpower then to head out for an event.
Sure you can trade with settlements to buy stuff you might need instead to request a caravan, or you could accept the offer from that AI and travel to that spaceship.
Caravaning is just an option, but not a must do.

2. vanilla game (without mods) no, you allways need to create a settlement. The mod Setup Camp allow you to create temp. maps like these quest maps you can stay for awhile. At these maps you can do mining,hunting.
But noone prevent you to create another settlement just for mining, you just need to expand your max. settlements at the options first, and you will get similar event's like at your first settlement.
And you can abandon your settlement later if you don't need it anymore.

3. They are stronger then outpost your might encounter from varios quests/events. And they have a fixed strenght not like the outpost which scale with your colony wealth.
Are they worth it, not much. Beside he typical raider loot drop you can get some resources you can get from deconstruct stuff and loot. But don't await master/legendary stuff.
The only benefit might be that these faction don't raid you that often.

[Kenjiro75]

So please confirm - if I don't have a specific quest, it's not worth to travel to another friendly place, which is - say 20 hexes away - to trade, if there is a friendly place within 6 hexes? And attacking hostile settlements is simply unprofitable? So it's simply better to defend myself than plan attacks by myself?

[Canute]

Please confirm that "worth" have the same status like it would have for me ! :-))
20 hex could be just a 2 day trip (i would consider it) or 10 days (around the mountain,through the swamp). So it isn't a bad idea to settle on a road between some (friendly) settlements you can have quick access to, in case you realy NEED something like medicin or components.
But you can decide, that isn't that important and you can wait to grow own healroots.
And special at the beginning when you can request caravan's because they arn't ally so far.
And not every settlement got anything for sale.

I can't say that it is worth or not, it is an option.

[B@R5uk]

As of v1.1 trading, caravaning and questing have been made crucial part of the game in my opinion. So, settling your colony on the road between two (or better more) settlements is a very good strategy, especially late game, when you need a lot of resources to make ship and stuff.

[Serenity]

You don't have to generate the whole planet. There are settings to have a partial one. That said you can have a semi-nomadic lifestyle where you move around a lot. Check out different biomes maybe.
There is also a victory condition where you have to travel to a crashed ship and start it up. On a full planet that's on the other side of the world.

For attacking other bases see this series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgPhYLBaEbA&list=PLS-hAL3jgjOuIcCMt_s-SXmriJNwNH4nD
In the 60s episodes there are are about two base attacks per episode. There is stuff to be had there. Dining chairs are surprisingly profitable. So much that he started to measure the quality and worth of a base in their number of chairs. lol. He then uses the money from that to visit friendly bases to buy supplies

Also keep in mind that you don't have to min/max everything. If you dismiss stuff because it's not the most optimal thing to do then you won't do a lot of things

[ProfZelonka]

You can pretty much play the game how you want..

As far as efficiency, it's best to stay home and profit from wounded raiders or grow and craft your own things, just request friendly caravans to come to you. But again, that might not be fun for some, I personally just enjoy the sandbox for my own goals of colony perfecting.

It's really all up to you with how you prefer to play and what you want to do. Late-game just means a well established base with later technologies researched. The actual game end is to go to the ship across the planet, defend it and then press launch. So in theory, you can start and just caravan over to it right away. Not my thing personally.

Have fun!

[Bozobub]

As mentioned above, RW is VERY open-ended.  In this case, the original game didn't have a "victory" condition and was always just one colony.  Because of this, to this day you *do not* actually ever have to leave your original colony's tile (barring disasters, of course) if you'd rather not.

If you don't plan on much, or even any caravanning (even to travel to a ship, in a later quest), there's really not much point in generating the entire rimworld you're on, beyond aesthetics.  On the other hand, you can travel around the globe in all sorts of ways for many different reasons, from gathering resources to simple bloody conquest, if you prefer.  In that case, generating more (or even 100%) of the globe makes a lot more sense.

Luckily, once you've passed the world-generation step, AFAIK there's little to no particular extra load on the game from generating a larger world (as opposed to using larger *tile maps*).  So if you don't mind a short wait at the very beginning of the game, feel free to generate the whole globe (or not) as you like, w/o worrying about a performance hit, as long as it fits your playstyle =).