According to Tynan Sylvester, the main developer, Rimworld is a sci fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. You follow three survivors from a crashed space liner as they build a colony on a frontier world at the rim of the galaxy. Think Dwarf Fortress or Prison Architect in space but it feels more like Firefly. Like in Dwarf Fortress you have only indirect control over your colonist and plan tasks for them to give them food, shelter and a way to defend themselves against evil raiders. A Storyteller throws events at your colony and you try to deal with them the best you can, ideally growing stronger as the game progresses. Some mechanics of Rimworld are quite grim and dark. To increase your colony size you arrest innocent travelers or raiders and convince them to join your colony, either by having your colonists talk to them or give them vicious beatings. What if the guy doesn't fit into your colony? You can let him go, sell him as a slave or execute and cook him. Yup, fresh raider is on the menu - if you want. Of course you can be a knight in shiny armor and try to make everybody happy. You can build your colonists a beautiful home, provide lavish feasts for them and hunt the local buffalo (called muffalo) almost to extinction. Should you buy Rimworld? My answer to that is: It depends. It's still in development and not exactly cheap for $30. It has enough content to keep you playing for many hours and a new patch should be available soonish with new, interesting additions. Rimworld is designed to be moddable. Tynan is constantly working on ways to add new hooks for modders and listens to their ideas. And basic modding is REALLY easy. Editing a couple of text files can go a long way. If you have even a little skill with Photoshop you can create your own look with a couple of png files. And if you don't have any talent for making textures you can ask for help from the Rimworld community. I think watching SplatterCat for a couple of minutes will probably tell you more than my entire firth post though so enjoy: Playlist with more episodes.
I've looked into Rimworld. It looks really epic and I'll probably buy it once the price goes down. $30 is still a little too much for a game like that.
Yup, I'd be more comfortable with a price range of $15-20 but I having a lot of fun with it since the first public version. I thought it would be a good time to make the thread now as things are beginning to take shape. The last version added modding which makes Rimworld a lot more interesting for me.
I'm really enjoying modding PA so modding Rimworld is something I'd probably get into. But for now I'm happy to wait until it goes down.
Truth be told, I find it a lot easier to tell what's going on in Dwarf Fort than in most other "manage your dudes" games. It's like ASCII was made to be readable or something.
Since the images aren't made up of multiple characters... yes. A water tile looks like ~ which is completely different from ☺. It's really easy to distinguish the difference between various differently colored monospace letters and symbols.
Rimworld has a different focus than DF. It doesn't have the complexity of DF but it has tactic elements (cover, variety of guns) and there are plans for 'away missions' where you can be the attacker. One of the core elements of RW is to manage your power. No electricity means no lights, no defense turrets, no decent food. It's not uncommon to see new players lose their entire colony to a single solar flair. Either because their colonist lose moral in a crucial moment or they relied on defense turrets too much. I really wish there was a demo for you guys. RW has good pacing, you get into a flow. The thing that always gets me in DF is that it is not fun to PLAY the game. Planning your base if fun, watching your dwarfs is fun, exploring is fun but actually building your base, getting the information you need and reading the tales is hidden behind a huge wall of meh. No other game has worse UI and controls. After a couple of hours I'm so annoyed with the controls that simply stop playing DF, actually before anything of relevance has happened. In RW I'm thinking "Yay, let's make new rooms and set up a hydroponics garden!" I DF it's more like "Oh noes, I need to dig up 10 rooms for my dudes, please kill me now!"
The ability to be an attacker sounds neato. It's a planned dwarf fort feature, but that's not even in the "soon" department so it'll probably be another decade till we see it. Gun centric combat is also entirely different, so that should be fun to toy with. I'll put Rimworld on my list of things to look at when they're either less expensive or more done. Though I kind of disagree about the dwarf fort UI/controls. The only thing that bugs be about dwarf fort is being unable to use the mouse to select squares. Menu commands are actually pretty damn fast once you get the hang of it. But defining rectangular areas and placing furniture is, like you said, a massive pain in the *** always.
Yup, building new bedrooms is a fun break in DF imo. What I really enjoy in Rimworld is modding. I gave it a try today and had set up a whole new resource chain in no time. From hydroponic coffee plant growing to making coffee with cookies to raise morale. It's all in XML files. Add a couple of small png icons for what you need and you are done. =3 In the next version we will get even more freedom with modding. Hopefully we can add our own animals and ores soon. And I want a pen with fluffy muffaloes for milk, cream and butter. And luxury beds with muffalo hides and squirrel pillows. Hmm, actually, I can do that already. First thing tomorrow!
Hmm, I've made cookies with coffee, but have never been able to make coffee out of cookies. Maybe if I made coffee cookies and then...... no, I can't do it
As proper coffee addict I eat roasted coffee beans if necessary. Might be worth a try to put them in cookies though... =3
