Rimworld game dev background7/22/2023 When Rebecca Barajas, my colony’s number one artist and moneymaker, lost a kidney, I realized she was only one kidney away from death. And a raider attack might lead to a favorite pawn losing a kidney. This was how I learned a dark secret: Every pawn is technically full of valuable cargo… their organs. But as I created new facilities and trained my pawns to provide medical care or research new technology, I was rewarded with alluring new choices. These are big problems to deal with, and RimWorld is eager to offer you a whole host of solutions, only some of which are “moral” or “nice.” At first, the player has options to grow crops or build a new room. Needless to say, her antics caused stress on Trovatelli’s marriage, which was less than ideal when I needed her to build spaceship parts and research cutting-edge technology. If you have a pawn who absolutely loves drugs, and you have drugs in the colony, that pawn - in this case, Maverick’s mother, who I rescued from a crashed escape pod - will take those drugs. Other times, it’s a little more dangerous. Sometimes, this is fun - a tortured artist might throw a fit, then get a huge boost to the next item they make because they got to be angsty for a bit. They’re fleshed out with childhood backgrounds, adult lives, and their own personal biological or personality quirks. I didn’t know my pawns would have so much agency. I was feeling pretty good about myself, but little did I know that the seeds of my colony’s disaster were already being sown by my own lack of planning. They were joined by raiders who had been rehabilitated in the Friendship Room. Sally was now the sheriff, and Maverick had fallen in love with Trovatelli and doted on her every need. Trovatelli, at this point, was the engine driving our colony’s research forward, bringing us from a rustic agricultural community into a sci-fi base with spaceship engines and plasma weaponry. I had automated my pawns’ daily actions, freeing me up to dream bigger. I had a thriving economy and trade caravans, and I was unlocking more sophisticated technology. Or, if you’re like me, you can go into the difficulty settings and choose a narrative difficulty curve that throws challenges at you for dramatic impact. It’s possible to play RimWorld entirely like Stardew Valley or an Animal Crossing, where the player focuses entirely on building a thriving community full of happy neighbors. They grew their own food and medicine, tamed horses and put them in a pen, and had beautiful little bedrooms crafted to their taste. These pawns need to survive, so I set to work building them a little base. She was joined by Sally, a spaceship tactician with anger issues, and Maverick, a former office drone. My motley crew of survivors included Trovatelli, a research wunderkind who grew up on a glamorous world, so she was great at anything intellectual or social but refused to do hard labor. To start, RimWorld assigned me a few randomized pawns, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Mondays, am I right? A colony of three people can quickly swell up until you have a couple dozen pawns running around, each carrying out their specific tasks. You might be able to save someone from raiders, and they’ll join your group - or a nuclear winter will set in, or a malevolent AI will make everyone angry and paranoid using psychic rays. In other simulator games you can fully run the show, but in RimWorld base building is balanced by random events and quests. I’ve been coping with the chaos of the real world by sinking a ton of time into RimWorld, a colony simulation game and story generator that is also very chaotic in its own way. The entire situation is a monument to my hubris and arrogance, and at the end of the day, only the strongest will survive. People are fighting in the dining hall, prisoners are trying to break out of a small structure I’ve called the Friendship Room, and a bunch of robots just broke through the residential quarters. My once happy space colony has completely gone off the rails.
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