RimWorld from Ludeon Studios is a colony management strategy/survival game that has been hugely popular on PC and recently made its way onto consoles. It's a tough world out there with players facing starvation, fire, wild animal attacks, disease, and threats from within their own hastily assembled, and in some cases, questionably motivated crew.
Among the biggest worries for players, especially in the earlier and middle portions of the game, are attacks from other factions in the form of raids. While these may be only lightly armed and few in number in the early stages of the game, if unprepared the player can soon find their entire colony on the brink of destruction, making defending against raiders in RimWorld an extremely important undertaking.
Building Defensive Structures In RimWorld
From the very start of the game, players have a number of defensive options in terms of building, namely sandbags, barricades, and spike traps. To construct these, simply select the Architect, then the Security tab to bring up the list of defensive structures that can be built around the colony.
Resources like wood and metal are relatively easy to come by if players don't already have sufficient amounts (simply select trees and choose "chop wood," steel can be mined from deposits in the rocks or walls).
The crafting interface in RimWorld will intelligently substitute missing ingredients with alternatives if possible. If there are not many trees around to get the wood, walls and defenses can be built with steel, stone blocks, or any other suitable material that is available. Clicking the right analog stick will bring up a list of alternative resources to use.
Spike traps will injure a single enemy that walks over that particular square so can be useful on choke points and doorways as the player's own colonists and animals will tend to avoid them under normal states. Its use is limited as the opponent needs to stand in that specific area to trigger them.
Sandbags need cloth made from cotton or similar materials like leather to build, so may not be the typical go-to when building the base at first. They provide good cover and will slow enemies down considerably but are ugly to look at and will cause the colonists to whine about the overall aesthetics of the place if the player goes too overboard, making it look like a prison colony.
Barricades are quite useful for hiding the colonists behind in a position where they can shoot out at enemies from relatively good cover. It's worth having a small barricaded bunker section somewhere near the front of the base, just in case a lengthy shootout should occur. This is an ideal posting point for any drafted colonists awaiting an impending attack from either raiders or wildlife.
Assigning Defenders
Although players do not need to physically choose who will defend the base and any can be drafted at any given time, it is worth having in mind a few hardened survivors who will act as the colony's security guards or soldiers.
This would typically be the two or three colonists with the best stats, weapons, and armor. In this instance, players should be looking for the two colonists who have the best shooting stats and one with the best melee ability, indicated in the colonist's information panel under stats.
Equip Ranged Weapons
Once it has been established who the best shooters and fighters are, they need to be suitably equipped for any coming threats. Select your shooters and hover over any ranged weapon lying around and select equip from the drop-down menu. The colonist will use this in any conflict as their personal weapon, with unlimited ammo.
In the early game, players would be looking for anything that "shoots" such as a revolver, an auto pistol, a bow and arrow, or pila, which is like a javelin that can be thrown. The colony will normally start with a few ranged weapons to get things going so have a look about the place and see if there are any lying around. If there are shortages then ranged weapons can be crafted relatively easily.
Crafting Ranged Weapons In RimWorld
Crafting weapons for the shooters (or snipers) in RimWorld is reasonably simple to do:
- Select a spot on the ground where the magic is going to happen. Things like cleanliness and light will affect the build quality and time so don't use a darkened corner of an animal pen, for example.
- From the architect menu select the production tab and look for a crafting spot - just a small square on the ground chalked out for colonists to do their crafting in - nothing fancy and does not require any materials.
- Place the crafting spot on a free space. If the floor is paved with metal tiles, stone blocks, or wood floorboards there will be a bonus to the overall cleanliness and work quality.
- Select the crafting spot and open the "Bills" menu. These are extremely useful and important menus found on a variety of things from patients to work tables but can be easily overlooked or missed. From here it is possible to select all the tasks that the player wants to be completed, in this case making things such as weapons.
- A variety of simple melee and ranged weapons can be crafted from this menu. In terms of ranged weapons, the initial options will be: the pila throwing spear that can be either thrown in unlimited supply or used as a reasonably effective melee weapon; the Bow which is a good all-rounder and useful for both hunting and warding off intruders, and possibly the more advanced Recurve Bow depending on the game type and difficulty selected.
- Select the number of weapons to be created e.g. 3 Bows, 1 Pila. Note - there is an interesting option here as with other crafting or production benches where the player can select "Do forever." This will mean colonists will continually return to this task with no limit on the pieces made. So if for example, the player wanted to create some kind of mass-producing tribal war factory, (and why not), they could do so by selecting "Do Forever" on an item such as Recurve Bow. Of course, the required materials will have to be taken into account but this is particularly useful on things like campfires, cooking stoves, and butcher's tables.
Attacking Raiders
Often it is best to sally forth and meet the attackers at a time and place of the player's choosing. This is normally preferable to waiting until the raiding party is hitting their colonists and buildings. At any rate, when the bullets start flying there will need to be some kind of plan or method in place to deal with the situation.
Hopefully by this stage players will have carefully constructed barricades and defenses in places to hide behind, a group of hardy individuals selected and ready for the task, along with weapons crafted and equipped for the right people. Of course, times are often tough in RimWorld so this may not always be the case. Thankfully these methods can be utilized in more or less any conflict situation, whether well-prepared for it or not.
RimWorld Fighting Guide
Most enemies on RimWorld can be dealt with efficiently with the age-old technique of running away while shooting in a less-than-heroic fashion. One of the frequent issues for players, however, is their archers and shooters being chased down by melee fighters wielding clubs and the like. The player wants to engage them at range but is often forced into a clumsy melee fight trying to bash them with a longbow while the enemy has a more suitable weapon.
Follow this basic process to get the better of any RimWorld opponents:
- Try to outnumber the enemy in general, but typically players should be looking to send 2 or 3 shooters and one melee fighter to handle most threats within the first few years of setting up a colony
- Draft colonists to take direct control of them. While drafted they will default to a state of "watching for targets." Even when not issued direct orders they will fire upon any perceived threat that gets within their range, from animal to human alike, making it particularly useful for this method
- The trick is to surround the enemy or at least approach from slightly different angles. Weigh up where the distance will be when the colonist starts shooting and send them into that range (as opposed to directly next to the enemy)
- If one particular shooter is being charged by a melee enemy, it is possible while drafted to direct the colonist to run away to a safe distance, fire, then run again. Clicking X anywhere on the map with the colonist selected will send them to that tile and from there they will automatically fire upon the enemy. Especially useful if a single colonist gets into trouble when hunting
- Send any surrounding archers to close the distance and chase the attacker, sending a melee fighter into the fray to engage the attacker, allowing the player's trapped archer to escape to a safe distance uninjured, avoiding a clumsy fistfight. Becoming injured will slow colonists down until they can be eventually healed with medicine
- If the player only has one colonist in the fight and is being continually chased by a melee fighter or wild animal, it is best to use the advantage of range and put enough distance between the target to fire a shot and then quickly escape, running in long rectangles away from the enemy before they have a chance to engage and injure the colonist.
Taking Prisoners & Battle Follow-Up Procedure
Once the dust has settled and nobody is currently being shot at or bludgeoned to death, with ideally all the raiders lying around unconscious, a basic procedure should be followed such as this:
- Check the health of the colonists in the information panel to ensure they are not in danger of death from any injuries sustained.
- Send medics to tend wounded teammates, healing and bandaging them on the spot. The option will become available with any character selected. Alternatively, select Rescue from the menu to extract the wounded colonist to the safety of a medical bed.
- Check the health of any wounded enemies that may be captured. As with the colonists, they should be tended immediately if only given one or two hours to live, as this can come around fast.
- Once rudimentary medical treatment has been given, select an uninjured colonist and hover over the wounded enemy, selecting Attempt Arrest. This will pack them off to be imprisoned and later recruited or dealt with as needed.
- Check for valuables and stow them away before something weird happens to them or they disappear inexplicably. This can include raider's weapons, drugs, supplies, or any high-value items they might have on them, including armor and clothing that can be unceremoniously stripped and put to the use of the colony. Bear in mind there will be a negative effect on mood for any colonist wearing the clothing or armor that is "tainted" - they are not particularly happy with wearing a T-shirt plucked from the corpse of someone who recently died in a gun battle. They are a fussy bunch.
RimWorld is currently available on PC, Xbox One, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.