RimWorld: New Beginnings
According to Steam, at the time of this writing I have put approximately 555.5 hours into RimWorld, a game that—much like Minecraft—I frequently start over from scratch regardless of how much progress I have made. I have no idea how many “games” of RimWorld I have played, but I guess it might be as many as 30 or 40. I have a game in progress right now that is going extremely well a dozen or so hours in, but the game’s developer Tynan Sylvester has just given me the perfect excuse to delete my colony and start a new one. After years in Steam’s Early Access program, RimWorld has hit version 1.0.
Unlike many previous RimWorld updates, version 1.0 does not introduce a slew of new features, nor does it break existing saves; according to Tynan it mostly just fixes bugs that were present in version Beta 19. Makes no difference to me, the early hours of RimWorld are always a lot of fun and this is as good an excuse as any to randomly generate some new survivors, crash-land them on a procedurally generated planet, and put them to work establishing a colony.
In case you are unfamiliar with RimWorld, here is the official Steam description:
“A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Firefly. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.”
Here is how Tynan described it in his tweet announcing the release of version 1.0 today:
“It took five+ years, but my dream of chinchilla farming, lovemaking, pirate-shooting, organ-trading space cowboys has come to fruition.”
Neither of those read a whole lot like what I tell friends about RimWorld when trying to convince them to play, but that is only because I am typically too busy regaling them with stories from my colonies. I tried to save power by heating my prison with the exhaust port of my cooler and ended up giving all of the prisoners heatstroke. I bred so many dogs with the goal of selling them to passing traders that I could no longer feed them all and resorted to slaughtering them for meat. One time I brought an injured bear into my colony in the hope that I could tame it; my colonists nursed it back to health and, as soon as it was well enough, it killed two of them. The official trailer for version 1.0 takes a similar approach:
No two games of RimWorld will ever be the same, which is definitely a big part of the game’s appeal for me. My significant other and I frequently make a point of generating our planets using the same seed, and starting in the exact same areas with the same difficulty setting and such, just so we can see how differently our games play out. We start with different random colonists, the game inevitably throws different challenges at us, and we typically take very different approaches to building our colonies. We have put over 1,000 hours into RimWorld between us; not bad for a $34.99 game developed by a team of one.
