$34.99RimWorld Every colony falls differently
Three crash survivors, a patch of wilderness, and an AI that loves ruining your plans. RimWorld is a sci-fi colony sim where moods, wounds, love affairs and raids pile up into stories you will retell for years. Build, farm, trade, patch people up with peg legs and bionics, and watch it all go sideways in the best way.
Is RimWorld worth it?
RimWorld is worth it if…
- you like guiding needy, moody settlers instead of faceless workers
- you enjoy survival management where raids, disease and weather rewrite your plans
- you want stories that emerge from injuries, romances and bad decisions
- you like replaying new generated worlds with different biomes and challenges
Screenshots
Three survivors and a lot of bad luck
You start with three people who fell out of the sky in escape pods. One might be a nobleman who refuses manual work, one a farm oaf who cannot research, one a scientist who cannot stand talking to anyone. You pick a biome — frozen tundra with a two-month growing season, parched desert, temperate forest, steaming jungle — then cut wood, raise walls, plant rice, and assign jobs. Then a heat wave hits, raiders arrive, and your only doctor is lying in bed with food poisoning. Colony sim fans get exactly what they came for: shelter, food, work rosters, and disaster management.
Colonists with opinions and weak knees
Everyone keeps track of hunger, fatigue, pain, darkness, cramped rooms, and unburied corpses, and tells you about it through their mood. Push them too far and they break down or lash out. They also form opinions of each other, fall in love, marry, cheat, or start fights. You watch a married couple stay steady until one falls for the surgeon who removed a bullet. Bodies are tracked part by part — eyes, hands, spine, heart, gut — so a bad back slows your farmer until you fit a bionic spine and she strides off like she is 23 again. A peg leg after a rhinoceros incident works, just slower.
A storyteller who deals the disasters
Random events are dealt by an AI storyteller, and you choose the dealer. Cassandra Classic builds rising tension, Phoebe Chillax gives you room to breathe, Randy Random throws thunderstorms, pirate raids, and traveling salesmen at you with no sense of fairness. You fight pirates, tribes, manhunting animals, giant insects, and ancient killing machines with guns and melee, then capture survivors and talk them into joining or sell them to slavers. Between raids you trade with caravans and passing ships, tame cats, labradors, bears, chickens and camels, take in refugees, and send your own caravans out to rescue allies, attend peace talks, or move the whole colony.
Every world is disposable
The planet is generated fresh each run, pole to equator, with its own animals, plants, diseases, rainfall, minerals, and terrain. No two starts ask the same questions. A jungle chokes you with disease, a tundra starves you by calendar. An unobtrusive tutor walks you through the first harvests and sandbags, then leaves you alone. The look is plain 2D top-down, easy to read at a glance: who is bleeding, who is sleeping outside, who is hauling grenades like it helps. That readability keeps the chaos funny and darkly funny instead of confusing, and highly replayable — lose a colony, start another, make new mistakes.
Good to know before you land?
How much control do I have over colonists?
You do not steer them like soldiers. A great grower with a wounded leg moves slowly. A brilliant researcher may refuse to clean. Much of the game is deciding who should do what, when to draft them to fight or carry a friend to a hospital bed, and when to let a tired farmer sleep through the raid alarm.
What actually ends a run?
There is no single scripted ending in the base setup described here. Colonies end when everyone dies, leaves, or is captured, or continue for years while you research, trade, build transport pods, and send caravans across the planet.
Is it relaxing or stressful?
Both, depending on the storyteller and biome you pick. Phoebe Chillax in a temperate forest gives slow seasons of building, farming, taming pets, and crafting apparel and weapons. Cassandra Classic and Randy Random turn the same colony into siege management, with fires, raids, infections, and breakdowns stacking up.
What do I do with prisoners and refugees?
Capture raiders in combat, take in refugees, or buy people from slave traders, then choose. Recruit them through talk and decent treatment, keep them as prisoners, or sell them into slavery. Recruits bring their backgrounds with them — social skills, growing skill, murder skill only — so a former pirate can become your best crafter and carve a portrait of his lover into a masterwork weapon.
