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Rimworld - Establish a colony on an AI-driven frontier planet

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r1chard

Member
Trying the game out after a bit of a hiatus of a couple of alphas, so the animal taming and joy elements are new to me this time around. So far, it's been a fun old RimWorld just like previously, just with more stuff to play with (and to go wrong, of course :)

I feel like the rate of recruitment opportunities is much lower.

The UI for the animal stuff is horrendous. Tynan really needs to take a step back and have a good hard think about the UIs he's created for area management, and the various different patterns and actually choose one and stick with it. Not having the "animal areas" visible on the map unless you try to edit them is just plain dumb. Figuring out how to even create one took me way longer than it should have (and I ended up watching a Let's Play).

Ended up getting kinda steamrollered by an alien "poison" artifact that landed very close to the base, and I had 4 colonists (one of whom is a pacifist) and nothing remotely close to powerful enough to take on the mechanoids. This was with Cassandra - I think she needs a bit of tweaking...
 
H

h#shdem0n

Member
Never heard of this game before, but hard sci fi meets old west is crazy relevant to my current interests. This might be a perfect game for me to test drive the Steam Controller (unless combat is turn based, trad kb&m controls just wont work for me due to my set up).
 
R

r1chard

Member
okiemok said:
Isn't he taking like six months off now?
Click to expand...

Yep, six months off from the start of September. The changelog certainly has stopped as of then.

There's been other devs involved in the code though - it's not clear whether they've also stopped working on it.

h#shdem0n said:
Never heard of this game before, but hard sci fi meets old west is crazy relevant to my current interests. This might be a perfect game for me to test drive the Steam Controller (unless combat is turn based, trad kb&m controls just wont work for me due to my set up).
Click to expand...
Combat is real-time with pause.
 
R

r1chard

Member
okiemok said:
No, it has been just him - except for a young'in that is in school but has slung some code for him the past two summers.
Click to expand...

Ahh! Thanks for clearing that up.

My view is that stopping development of the core game at this point would not necessarily be the death of it, but if it's going to survive based on modding then it needs to have something like CKAN to make mod management simpler.
 
R

r1chard

Member
It's also happened in another Kickstarter project I backed, Limit Theory. In that case we haven't even gotten to play the game yet. The dev has been very open about why development stopped and the community is very supportive of him. He's very keen to get back on the horse and keep working on the game. My concern is that in this case, Tynan seems to feel like he's pretty much done with RimWorld. That concerns me because while there is a bunch of depth now, there's so much more potential. But I can't force the guy to be interested in exploring that :)
 
M

Mikeside

Member
r1chard said:
Actually, I think the lack of a Z index (which is up and down) simplifies the game well, and doesn't necessarily hold it back from getting more complex.
Click to expand...

I feel like it limits what you can do for building a cool base & massively limits the resources you can find.

It might be because essentially I'm looking for it to be Dwarf Fortress with better menus and mouse control. It's so close to being exactly that!
 
R

r1chard

Member
Update on the hiatus from Tynan, the lead dev:
Hey I'm on a trip, not dead!

I'm also still around. Just not enough to keep up day to day on the forums.

However Piotr is working fulltime on the game under my ongoing direction. If he works all the way through, the next release may have quite a bit of new stuff in it indeed. Possibly 2x or more the usual man hours in an alpha (though much of it may be non-obvious refactoring work.)

6 months may seem like a long time but it'll be like 15% of the game's dev time by the end of it. Not a big deal in the grand scheme. Moreover the game has more content than was ever promised. The marketing page doesn't even mention animal taming/training at all. So I'm comfortable with what we're offering now.
Click to expand...

Definitely reinforces the feeling I have that he thinks the game is "done"...
 
S

strata8

Member
Here's what they've added so far in the 'break':

Self-reproducing, spreading underground insect hives
•Social relationships with friends, rivals, family, chats, arguments, and fights
•Many more animals, some of which will hunt people
•“Components” resource used for machinery and electronics
•Ground-traveling trade caravans from other factions
•Character records which keep stats on each character like number of kills, injuries, surgeries, etc.
•Extreme desert biome
Click to expand...

https://ludeon.com/blog/2015/11/ongoing-progress/
 
P

Purkake4

Banned
New progress report:

Everything is rolling forward smoothly just as it was described in the last blog post. I’m working reduced time, keeping up with website, PR, paperwork and legal essentials, while writing designs. Piotr is working full time, slamming those designs into the game and refining the technicals.

Things are progressing as fast as they ever have, so the next alpha will be the biggest jump in features you’ve seen by far.

Here is a quick overview of some stuff that’s been added:

Colonist family and social relationship system.
Brothers, sisters, parents, children, aunts, uncles and so on are all randomly generated. So e.g. your colonist’s brother can appear as a refugee (or a raider!)
Colonists develop lover relationships – and break them off.
People have opinions of each other which change with circumstances (e.g. you botched my surgery and cut my eye out – I hate you! Or, you’re my brother – I love you!).
Social interactions play out different ways with different effects, depending on who is communicating and what they think of each other.
People can have “social fights” from social interactions gone wrong.
Marriages with ceremonies. Divorces. Love and heartbreak.
Multi-person beds.
Social bonds with animals.
Tons more in this system. But no kids (yet – that’s a whole other ball of wax).
People who leave the map while traveling, fleeing, being kidnapped, etc. can come back later as raiders, visitors, joiners, etc.
New diseases with new mechanics.
Carcinoma (on any body part).
Fibrous mechanites, sensory mechanites.
Gut worms.
Muscle parasites.
Trauma savant.
Asthma.
New “firefoam popper” provides a way to combat fire besides punching it.
Prison breaks. Prisoners pick the locks, get out, seek weapons and work as a group to escape.
Tons of other over and under-the-hood improvements.

Can’t wait to get it to you guys. I’ll be back in March.
Click to expand...
 
M

More_Badass

Member
Here's what coming in Alpha 13 (no release date yet)
Relationships
Colonist family and social relationship system / Social relationships with friends, rivals, family, chats, arguments, and fights
Opinion system; pawns care about dozens of memories and situations to determine their opinions of each other
Family members out to cousins and beyond
Lovers, fiancees, marriages, ex-lovers, ex-spouses
Lovin’
People may get in social fights with those they dislike (even neutrals and enemies do this)
Animal bonding
People who leave the map while traveling, fleeing, being kidnapped, etc. can come back later as raiders, visitors, joiners, etc.
Marriage ceremonies and parties

Misc
New exotic infections: Gut worms, mechanite infections which give abilities at a cost of pain or fatigue, trauma savantism
New chronic diseases: Carinoma, asthma, hearing loss
New “firefoam popper” provides a way to combat fire besides punching it.

Prison breaks
Prison breaks. Prisoners pick the locks, get out, seek weapons and work as a group to escape.

Infestations
Self-reproducing, spreading underground insect hives
Insect hives are dangerous but produce succulent insect jelly

Animals and predators
Many more animals, some of which will hunt people
Some animals are now predators, including colony pets (e.g. cats catch squirrels)
Animals can gnaw corpses apart directly now

Threat response mode
Decide how colonists should auto-respond to threats: flee, attack, or ignore?

Economy
‘Components’ resource used for machinery and electronics
Ground-traveling trade caravans from other factions
Deeper research tree with more low-tech options and more things to research
New fueled buildings: stove and generator
Various new lower and higher-tech production buildings
Two research tables: simple and hi-tech. Hi-tech is required for some projects.

Misc
Character records which keep stats on each character like number of kills, injuries, surgeries, etc.
Extreme desert biome
Colonists in relationships can share beds
New double bed; royal bed is now gold-trimmed and fancy
New flatscreen and megascreen TVs
Colonists can now visit sick people in bed to cheer them up
Sick people in bed can now watch TV
Building damage overlays
Days are now twice as long as before, with years being half as many days. (This means that years are exactly as long as before in actual play time, just divided into a smaller number of longer days.)
The year is now split into seasons instead of months.
Animal kibble
Deep rooms stay cool in the heat
Richer tale recording and better art descriptions
Hundreds of balance improvements, optimizations, tweaks and fixes
Click to expand...
 
R

r1chard

Member
I've played every second release of this game until recently where I've played both the recent releases and this latest one improves the (already amazing) game so much it's well worth it. I've lost two whole days to it so far, with one colony that crashed and burned (well, got dragged off unconscious to be slaves for some pirates) and another that's doing a pretty amazing job of limping along, even with blights, alien ship crashes, various family members fleeing pirates for the safety (ha!) of my colony, and so on. The combination of all the factors in the game combine to some pretty amazing stories, and it still has that incredible "just one more day" pull.
 
O

Octavianus

Banned
I remember trying this out a couple of years ago.
I was already pretty impressed then but there wasn't a whole lot to the game yet... watched some youtube stuff today and that made me decide to get back into it.
 
O

Octavianus

Banned
Are there any good up to date youtube tutorials for this? I've been watching some regulair playthroughs today and I've played it a couple of years ago.. but I'm still feeling pretty overwhelmed, in a good way.
 
R

r1chard

Member
Steam's a-coming: https://ludeon.com/blog/2016/05/steam-release-this-summer-with-scenario-system/ and http://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/

I’m planning on releasing RimWorld into Steam Early Access this summer.Steam release will also be the release of Alpha 14, which will be very content-rich and have at least one major new system.
<snip>
For Alpha 14, we&#8217;ve been working intensely on two tracks. The first is just refining everything that was there. We&#8217;ve consumed a massive amount of feedback and applied that to the game. So there have been hundreds of balance changes, interface tweaks, systems adjustments, and bugfixes to solve the issues that are coming up.

The big feature is the scenario system. The classic RimWorld experience is to survive with three crash-landed passengers &#8211; but the game isn&#8217;t limited to this any more. Now you can customize, trade, and randomize different scenarios. In each one, the starting conditions, items, characters, research, and persistent game rules are different.

scenario_example.jpg
Click to expand...


... and so on. More at the first link.
 
O

Octavianus

Banned
I'm so bad at this game. My people keep getting dying for various reasons. I lost count on how many restarts I've gone through at this point.

I'm still enjoying it a lot though. Failing can be fun.
 
O

Octavianus

Banned
Yep, just finished another game in failure.
Things started out going pretty well untill I started getting raided every couple of in game days and then everyone started getting really sick and I ran out of medical supplies and the only people who survived were two people who were incapable of hauling, which was inconvenient.... and then those last two got dragged off into slavery.

Circumstances can really screw you over in this game. Reminds me a lot of Dwarf Fortress, FTL and Crusader Kings II in that way.

I hope the steam early access brings a lot more attention to this game because it deserves it.
 
R

r1chard

Member
Yeah, and then there's the ignominious ending seeing your last two remaining colonists, unconscious and dragged off the map by raiders.

Great game :)
 
K

Kuntz

Member
I suck at this game and I love it.

Capturing every fainted raider/animal to practice medicine is now my hobby.
Still haven't manage to tame anything.
 
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