This is a grand list of some amazing tips that you need to know for Rimworld. This list won’t only have tips for new players to game, but may include some things you never knew after hundreds of hours in the game. At the time of writing I personally have over 400 hours in Rimworld and am still finding out new things every day. Rimworld is a simulation game with many different systems including base building, a climate and temperature system and a health system for each colonist in the game just to name a few. It is an extremely deep and sometimes complex system where learning everything on your first playthrough is impossible!
If you have found yourself here and are currently on the fence about purchasing the game, you can purchase the game from the official website, Steam, GOG and the Humble Bundle store. Note, I don’t earn any kind of affiliate commission from the links mentioned above, they are just there for the ease of the reader and to support a great game.
So, lets get to the list. I’ve asked my fellow Rimworld players over on the Rimworld Subreddit, to help me compile the greatest list of tips available for Rimworld! The guide will be split into parts, including a beginner, intermediate and veteran players section. This list will also include bonus sections underneath including a section relating to the official DLC for the game, Royalty.
Some of the comments have been paraphrased, or include extra information not previously mentioned by the reddit user that I figured was relevant. You can read my original post on reddit here.
Sections
Beginner Rimworld Tips
Experienced Rimworld Player Tips
Veteran Rimworld Player Tips
Rimworld Royalty Tips
Bonus: War Crime Related Tips
Credit
Beginner tips
These tips are there for beginners but are even worth looking through if you’ve been playing the game for a long time. Perhaps there’s a hotkey you didn’t know about or you, like me, played the game for years not realizing that the butcher table makes a room absolutely filthy. Without further ado and in no particular order, let’s get to the list!
- The butcher table is considered dirty, so best to keep it separate from the stove.
- It’s recommended to create airlocks to your freezer especially in warmer climates.
- You can have more than one research table + researcher at once.
- Material is important, for anything including clothing and weapons, clicking on the ‘i’ when creating production bills, let’s you to see the stats for every possible type of material. Compare them and choose the material that suits your needs, for example the heavy fur parka is more efficient than cloth for keeping warm when compared to using other materials.
- Don’t store your 900 units of chemfuel all in one room. Trust me. Instead, try to store it away from living areas and in smaller piles.
- Same for artillery shells, warheads or weapon ammo if you’re running mods. Someone throws a tantrum and decides to punch the dynamite and you’ll be happy you separated your stockpiles.
- Some jobs are best at night: Cooking, so that your chefs don’t run back and forth all day just to stock up a single meal. Cleaning, same deal, cleaning the whole base rather than being dragged back to the door a hundred times because Dave stepped the mud in again.
- Set default medicine to herbal: Don’t waste your Glitter World meds because Kaz and Dave have had a domestic again, obviously change the settings if your combating something serious. (adds a little micro for a lot of gain)
- Stone spike traps: Replacing steel spike traps over and over can make a real dent in your metal stockpiles, make them out of stone and its much more renewable.
- Have multiple specializations for your colonist’s because if you have 1 doctor and he dies you are in a bit of a pickle.
- Assign your animals to an area outside so they can eat grass but do not zone your crops otherwise they will eat them.
- You can have more than 1 researcher busy at the same time (if you have multiple research benches)
- Different stone types have their own strengths and weaknesses. In short;
– Granite: Strongest
– Marble: Most beautiful
– Sandstone: Quickest to mine and build with
– Slate: Lightest (for caravans)
– Limestone: Balances statistics - Sandbags and barricades provide the same protection, only difference is the materials they are built from and hit points (dependent on material)
- Smokeleaf joints require no research to make and can help with mood, though they do have fairly significant downsides.
- Psychite tea provides a good mood bonus with no downsides as long as you are not above the minimum psychite tolerance for addiction.
- Don’t waste a pawn. If you capture a pawn that has no skills then make them a hauler or a cleaner.
- Before you start, know if your chosen biome is going to have wild healroot. If not, make sure to include a pawn with high plant skills so you can start growing your own right away or very soon. The Vanilla biomes with wild healroot are temperate forest, temperate swamps, cold bogs, boreal forests, and tundra.
- Very Beginner Tip: Grow plants in fertile soil or hydroponics when you get them. Check the fertility sensitivity of whatever you’re growing to avoid wasting the valuable fertile soil.
- Even if your colonist has a 15 in medical skill, it doesn’t mean he couldn’t fail a simple operation. Always click on ‘i’ (info) to see what the success rate of a medical operation actually is.
- If you want to keep your base clean, but don’t want too many pawn to clean full-time: Prevent stuff from getting dirty to minimize cleaning efforts. Make sure your pawns don’t walk over dirt and sand too much (make flooring outside). Also don’t let animals inside, they produce a lot of filth.
- (…with the exception of cat & dogs. These animals don’t produce animal filth.)
- When recruiting in the early game don’t worry too much about starting stats. Pay attention to the passions your pawns have. Not only do they get a great mood buff when they perform a task related to their passion, but they also gain experience for the stat insanely fast.
- Don’t be afraid to lose colonists or colonies.
- Also, try different approaches to your colonies. Trying playing as a strict farming community, only selling your produce. Always wanted to be a drug kingpin? You could have crops of smokeleaf as far archotech eyes can see.
Intermediate Tips for Experienced Players
- Putting any type of production tables nearby to each other will make the pawns socialize while doing work. Very useful of you’re trying to create friendships and relationships.
- If you have different type of things in one impressive room, (for example, a dining table, recreation items, production benches and so on), the pawns will get buffs for all of them. (impressive dining room, impressive rec room and so on)
- Burn out insect infestations: Save your bacon by frying insects, if insects are multiplying in a dark corner of your newly mined out mountain, chuck some wooden furniture/old clothing in there and throw in a Molotov. (FORBID THE DOOR AFTERWARDS)
- Kibble can be used to tame just about any creature in Rimworld. Everything except for Wargs. Wargs will only eat raw meat and corpses, the latter cannot be used as taming food.
- You can shift-click an assigned task to increase it by 100 units, instead of having to manually increase it. You can ctrl+click to do the same for a 10 unit increase. For example, you can shift-click Simple Meals to be made, and it’ll queue up 100 Meals to be made. This can stack.
- You can store mortar shells on shelves near the Mortars – they don’t deteriorate outside if on a shelf!
- Have priorities – Look at your surroundings, and find the most defensible position you can. Don’t focus on Geothermal Power if the nearest Geothermal spot is leagues away from you. Similarly, if you’re in a biome with not a lot of trees, you want to rush Chemfuel production and Hydroponics to keep feeding it – as well as you!
- A pawn on luciferium will require 10 per year to stay out of withdrawal.
- Go-juice can turn a normal pawn into a temporary super soldier, being stronger than a pawn with even full bionics(two bionic legs, arms, and eyes). However be aware of the 2.7% addiction chance per dose, and the fact that they will not go down from ‘painshock’ meaning they will usually fight to the death unless you specifically tell them to move away. It also allows them to outrun any enemy in the game.
- Assuming a clean room, normal quality bed, industrial medicine, and no penalties to sight or manipulation, you need a level 14 doctor to reach the surgery success chance cap of 98%.
- Hospital beds are effectively two quality levels above a normal bed for surgery success chance. I.E. A normal hospital bed is as good as an excellent wooden bed.
- Drugs that increase sight and manipulation (go-juice, wake-up) improve surgery success chance.
- A flak vest can protect the torso almost as much as marine armour (100% vs 106% for normal quality)
- Psychite products are one of the most useful items in the game. It can be turned into flake, yayo and tea, all of which give their own mood boosts for a total of +82 mood. It also sells for alot. The only dangers are overdosing and too high colony wealth. If you have enough, addiction is fine and you can always harvest a kidney from a prisoner if an organ gets damage. They won’t mind, they’re too high to care. It also makes pawns move faster and need less sleep as well as being able to take more pain, which is good if they have strong armor and fall from pain from bruises.
- A decent size river between you and the raiders works just as well as a kill box.
- Tips to improve logistics for crafting/cooking jobs:
– Keep crafting materials close to the workbench (Make 1 spot of a high priority stockpile zone close to the workbench)
– Make a low priority Stockpile zone next to the workbench that can store the end result
– Set the bill up so that the end result is deposited in that low-priority storage
– (Optional) Use shelves for these small stockpile zones - When ambrosia sprouts pop up, just set the area around them to a growing zone and disable sowing. Your growers will harvest when ready, and this also can work for creating a forestry area without having to manually activate the ‘chop wood’ order.
- Have a day and night shift (especially for medics).
- As soon as you can research deep drilling and ground penetrating scanners. This provides an abundance of resources as long as you have someone who can spend a lot of time scanning and pawns that can operate the drills.
- The Assignment tab is one of the most useful tabs to keep your colonists prepared and using it wisely spares a lot of micro management. Not only are you able to select every colonists defensive stance and medicine but the three other restrictions (clothing, food, drugs) allow you to meticulously set up every colonist.
- Schedule drug intake to increase efficiency and minimalize overdoses and addictions, your colonists (except for a few cases like chemical interest) won’t touch other drugs than the ones that are scheduled (if recreational and addiction use is disabled)
- Go into your ‘Assign’ tab, under ‘Manage Outfits’ select ‘Anything’ and adjust the durability slider so that the minimum durability is 50%. This stops the “Wearing Worn/Tattered Clothing” debuff and saves you a lot of micromanaging.
- The default food restriction is the top food restriction in the list. If you don’t want your prisoners/visitors/new colonists to default to “Lavish”, change the first item in the list to what you want the default to be.
- Low quality/low HP weapons sell for almost nothing to traders. You’re better off smelting them for raw materials than trying to sell them.
Veteran Rimworld Player Tips
- One tip I haven’t seen before is that frag grenade can actually put out fires. It also destroy vegetation limiting the spread.
- If you’re running a base with a lot of batteries, consider assigning at least 3/4 of your batteries to a dedicated room, with only one power line leading to the rest of the base – with a switch to turn it on and off at will! It will prevent catastrophic short-circuits, as well as provide a lot of emergency power.
- Memorize Lab-related items’ sizes! You do not want redo your entire laboratory because an Analyzer couldn’t fit where you wanted it. You can freely use anything to mark down the size of those items/benches/structures, so you always have a reminder.
- Regarding backup batteries; You can also uninstall and store/transport charged backup batteries, and rotate them out with full batteries as they slowly loose their charge. This reduces the number of switches, either early game when you can’t afford them, or if your short in space.
- Keeping a mountain base at -17C (0F) or below will entirely stop insects from spawning
- Large quantities of luciferium can be obtained by settling map tiles and raiding ancient dangers
- You can start the spaceship reactor without having to build (and defend) the rest of the ship.
- High Explosive Grenades will one-shot Mech Cluster turrets WITHOUT causing the turret to explode.
- A Smoke Launcher pawn and an HE Grenade pawn can clear Much Clusters and allow you to collect all the Unstable Power Cells. Just be careful to aim a little away from the turret and use the natural inaccuracy to eventually ONLY hit the turret without hitting the Unstable Power Cell.
- If you’re spending too much power on heating your colony, connect your thermal generator-room to the other building and add a vent. You can harness the heat if your are careful.
- The overall dirtiness of a room is an average of how dirty all the tiles of the room are. Therefore, a few dirty tiles in a large room will have less of an effect than the same number of tiles in a small room. Therefore, it’s beneficial to build hospital rooms on the large side, and to place the beds as close to the door as possible so if someone comes in bleeding they won’t dirty the room up as much.
- Wargs only eat corpses and raw meat, and can be trained for hauling. This makes them good for helping haul in food from harvests, as they won’t eat the crops or the harvested food unlike other animals that will help themselves to your crops.
- Pyromaniacs get a bonus for equipping a fire-based weapon.
- Rooms that are only missing a few roof tiles are still considered indoors and can be heated. This allows you to grow trees in the winter, which is especially useful for biomes where the growing season is otherwise too short for cocoa trees. Just poke some holes in a roof over soil then plant cocoa trees where the holes are. This can take a lot of energy to keep the room heated, so this is best combined with free heat from a geothermal vent.
- You can prevent infestations by placing walls under any overhead tiles. This isn’t useful for mountain bases, but can be used in flat maps if you mine into a hill and happen to expose a handful of overhead mountain tiles.
- More about indoor tree farming; the limit for open roof is less than 25%. Example: In a 10×10 room (100 roofs, not including walls), you can leave up to 24 roofs open for the room still be considered indoor. But with each roof missing, the ability to keep stable temperature in that room will get worse & worse.
- A resource on the value multiplier for crafter apparel
Rimworld Royalty Tips
These tips and tricks are specific to the official DLC for Rimworld, Royalty. I haven’t included any tips pertaining to any mods for the game.
- Mechanoid turrets can’t see through smoke, so making smoke launchers or smokepop belts makes them significantly easier to take out.
- Hitting a mech high shield with an EMP mortar shell will temporarily disable it allowing you to get a mortar salvo through
- If wanting to gain honor by giving gold to the royal tribute collector, it takes 67 gold for 1 honor
- Psycasts can affect mechanoids despite them not being human
- The solar pinhole psycast generates heat, and so can be used in place of a heater. Useful for tribals and during solar flares.
- The beckon psycast will override any action something is doing. This especially useful if an enemy is about to shoot you, or if one of your pawns goes on a mental break or catches fire and is heading toward the enemy.
- Design your mid to late game defensive positions with Broad shields (since renamed to low-shield packs) in mind – you will be thankful when Lancers and Centipedes attack your colony and you set up a Broad shield that covers everyone who can shoot.
War Crime Tips
These are tips for players with a questionable (or possibly broken) moral compass. Read on at your own digression. (Thank you u/ChaoticEvilBobRoss for the suggestion!)
- “Don’t waste a pawn. If you capture a pawn that has no skills then make them a hauler or a cleaner.” (Or organ donor)
Sources/Credit for the tips
A personal thankyou to everyone who helped make this list possible! This could have only made with the help of all of you! If you have some other tips to add to the list write them down in the comments below.
Legend:
Beginner Tips – B
Intermediate Tips -T
Veteran Tips – V
Royalty Tips – R
War Crimes – WC
u/kleine_rosie B 1-4, I 1-2
u/Hobbvots B 5-6
u/Retrofited B 7-9, I 3
u/Habsburg242 B 10-12
u/AnxiousZebrafish V 4
u/BrozTheBro I 5-7, V 2-3, R 7
u/Zarathustra_d V 4
u/Hanif_Shakiba B 13-16, I 8-13, V 5-7, R 1-6
u/Lufesucksthenyoudie I 14
u/EpicAftertaste I 15
u/SamSamnarg B 17
u/morgecroc WC 1
u/Camellia_Sin B 18
u/KerbalCitizen B 19
u/F0xd3m0n I 16
u/spappo94 B 20-21
u/pollackey B 22
u/MortalSmurph V 8-9
u/BPB4D I 17-18, V 10
u/InstalledTeeth B 23, I 19
u/Paknoda I 20-21
u/odrop B 24-25
u/AftT3Rmath I 22
u/toddestan I 23-24, V 11-15
u/pollackey V 16 – 17