Rimworld - Dances With Muffalos

So, I've been watching Rimworld for a while now, and finally I took the plunge and decided that the game had maintained too high a rating for too long not to get into.

Yeah, I've been having fun.

After several false starts learning the ropes with colonies, I managed to get one rolling. Nothing too fancy or too difficult since I'm still learning how the game works. But I got my first trio off the ground and through a year. Their number had grown to six through a mixture of Stockholm syndrome and persuading naked wild men to come live with them. I'd managed to tame an entire herd of five alpacas ... because I could.

And somehow, I managed to grow enough rice and potatoes, harvest enough berries, and hunt enough to get them all through the winter. Yay me!

So I was feeling pretty good.

We had spent the winter crafting for an exploratory trade caravan (I wanted to see how that worked and ... alpacas). And we were well into the process of mining out the nearby large sandstone mountain and carefully smoothing and walling off parts of the interior to create a new, more spacious set of living quarters for everyone. What else do you do over the long winter?

Life was long and hard and cold, and our stores were low, but we all made it, even including one enterprising rat who decided we cooked better than the trash on the colony midden pile tasted and up and self-domesticated.

So at the end of winter, we were six colonists, five alpacas, one Yorkshire terrier, and one rat.

And then it all fell apart.

My first unlucky colonist, the naked wild man gatherer got mauled by an angry animal and died before I could get him home for treatment. It was sad, but no one was very attached to him. We buried him and moved on.

I set up my caravan sending out my best negotiator and his misandryst wife (one of the two colony bad@sses) along with two loaded alpacas. I thought I'd sent them with enough food and figured they could forage along the way as she could hunt really well. The projected route said they'd be gone for a day and half. I figured that would be no big deal.

Meanwhile, the spring crops were in the ground and the berries were starting to come in, but our food was still low. So I sent out Fugly to hunt a muffalo ... BIG MISTAKE! Now, I'd been hunting all manner of things all winter, including muffalo. I'd even had a rhino go all vengeful on me and dealt with it with no big issues. But this muffalo had a buddy ... and they both decided to get revenge.

In short order, they trampled Fugly and he needed rescue. I sent out the fastest of my remaining colonists to retrieve him, and she gets trampled by raging muffalo too. Now I only have my farm oaf left to rescue the two trampled colonists, and he's hella slow. But there's nothing to it but to do it. So I send him. He does manage to retrieve both the injured colonists, but gets stomped on but good in the process, maybe gored a bit. Who knows? I do know that while he's tending the wounded, the two angry, mortally wounded muffalo have followed everyone back to my compound and are rampaging around the place pounding on everything from walls to the generator to the hapless rat whom they quickly kill while they spew blood all over the place.

It's like an abattoir.

Finally, they both keel over dead, but it's not over yet.

The raging muffalo cause the generator to short out, and now there's a fire! And wouldn't you know it ... my only ambulatory colonist can't. fight. fires. /facepalm

So now there's a raging fire spreading rapidly over their old living quarters which is made OF WOOD with WOOD furniture. And my colonist, the oaf, is busy playing doctor and not paying one bit of attention to the fact that the door is getting ready to go up in flames. Finally, he realizes the danger and grabs one of the two wounded and starts to haul her out. Along the way, he catches on fire. So what does he do? He drops he right in the burning doorway and runs off in panic.

So now, one of the injured is lying in the doorway on fire screaming for help while the other is trapped in his bedroom taking burns from superheated air while the oaf tried to put himself out. I finally manage to convince him to go back into the fire and rescue the chick he dropped and put her in an empty bed in the cave (all stone, should be safe). Then I get him to knock down party of the wall to Fugly's room to pull him out too.

So now my three colonists are safe, but it's not over yet.

While all of this is taking place and my living quarters and crafting tables and everything is burning up, roofs collapsing, raw materials burning, spring crops are even going up in flames, the Yorkshire terrier decides it's a good idea to run through the fire into the store room for some unknown to me reason. It goes up like a flaming ball of cotton and runs around yipping, and I have no one to spare to try to put it out. No one who can fight fires, remember? RIP, Yorkie.

And that's when I get the notification that my caravan is starving. So I go check on them. I have no idea who's navigating that thing, but they did not use the waypoints *I* set for them. I have no idea how they got where they are or if they even know how to get home, and when they do? No food. It just burned up.

I was thinking about trying to pick up the pieces from all of this after laughing so hard I was crying. But then game said, "Oh and btw, you're being raided now ..."

In one of my playthroughs i made a drug lab , where my colonists would craft smokeleaf joints , i had around 4000 in stock all the time , i could buy all the Steel , Plasteel , or any other things from the traders , just by selling them back a few 100 smokeleaf joints.

i had around 15 to 20 colonists , most of them had the robotic legs and arms , for faster speeds , only not those that dislike it.

I bought some muffallo couples from traders , at some point in the game i had over a 100 grown or baby muffallo's in the designated barn , and used huge amounts of space just for haygrass , had to build many extra freezers to store the meat and milk , and would mostly butcher the males except for a few to slow the breeding.


I would not be able to build this colony without mods.


Most important would be :

A mod that gives you acces to hauling and cleaning robots , they come from a trader for around 3000 silver and they haul and clean stuff , i bought about 15 hauling and 10 cleaning robots , so i do not have to assign colonists to that. furthermore they continue hauling and cleaning stuff during the night when the colonists are asleep , they cost a lot of elektricity though.

I also used a mod that gives you acces to Nuclear reactors , giving huge amounts of elektricity , you gotta feed it uranium every now and then.

For base defenses i used a mixture of different mods, that allow you to place water , and place walls with a hole in them that allows colonist to shoot through , i surrounded my base by deep water and only leaving open one area.

Any raid that would would enter this entrance would be shot at from 3 sides in a huge U shaped area with walls with shooting holes at 3 sides , and the door at the bottom center of the U shaped killzone.


Inside the zone i put more water infront of the walls with the shooting holes so they cannot reach it , only leaving them able to be centered in a small area in the middle.

I would use colonists with flashbangs from a weapon mod to stun them , while they would recieve huge fire from turrets and colonists shooting from behind the walls , also using mods that give you more advanced turrets and mortars.

If i would get a siege raid i would use Devastator mortars that shoot 3 explosive shells per shot , they are really expensive and cost a lot of elektrcity but i build 4 to quickly deal with the Siege attacks.

I prefered them to just Raid the entrance , since i used the bodies and cremate them to make fertilizer for plants and dissassemblethe clothes and make fresh clothes out of the base materials.

Any weapons they would drop would be sold off to traders , wounded pirates would be treated , with low grade medicine in the prisoner Area , wich houses the hospital for them and individual cells.

Some i would try to recruit , others i would leave in the cells feeding them and socialize, occasionally selling one off to a slave vendor , but rarely since it has negative impact on your colonists , so does executing them so i didnt do that neither.

If they would try to escape they would enter a small area filled with 4 shotgun type turrets, so really no way to get out alive , but that is too bad for them , i feeded them , gave them luxury cells lets not forget they tried to raid me.


Even raids up to 50 enemies would not stand a chance in the killzone , no one would even reach the door , and they became another source of income.


This was the last playthrough i did until a few weeks ago i deleted it by setting the game version to the 1.0 unstable build to check out the new features.

Did the spawn naked scenario , it went rather good untill i was raided by a guy with a knife , armed with a club my colonist did not stand a chance.

In one permadeath game i played with a zombie mod , in wich if you get bit by them causing your colonists to get ill and eventually turn into a zombie themselfs.
One colonist got bit in the hand,got sick i had to make the choice to amputate the hand , wich was succesfull and the infection stopped , they guy made it and even got a bionic hand installed later.

Long story short , wonderful game

Oh, yeah, I plan to dive into mods sooner or later, but I like to learn a game in the vanilla version first before I start adding the layers.

I just got it earlier this week, so I'm still getting the basics down.

But, of yes! There aren't many games I have that don't end up with mods.

a reply to: ketsuko


Yeah it is best to start off the game without mods to learn the ropes.

Just some advice : try to maximize the crafting tables efficiency by putting 2 stockpile zones next to each side , one for the base material and one for the finished product.


This way your colonist do not have to walk to your main storage , they can pick everything up from behind the crafting table or place the finished product.