So when I heard that RimWorld was like a more accessible Dwarf Fortress (a game I tried very hard to learn but quickly realized I was never going to be able to do it), I decided I would go ahead and give it a shot. It still is not the most intuitive thing ever, but it is much easier to learn and to start to have those great stories that you always hear about with DF. So I thought I would share my first adventure with you all and would love to hear the stories of your colonies.

Josh was an aging depressed teacher who decided that life back on his home planet was too uneventful, so he packed up and headed off to a new world. He landed close to the sea in some forest with his trusty terrier dog named Babette. Josh got to work building a big wall around his stockpile of materials and began to plant some potatoes to start getting a reliable food source. However his depression along with randomly being in a terrible mood literally all the time did not help get any work done. Meanwhile Babette simply wandered around living a carefree life, having no idea of the grim future that laid in store.

I had picked the difficulty setting where things started out easy and gradually started getting worse. The first problem Josh encountered was a hare that went wild and tried to kill him. He had some awesome science laser gun but was an utterly terrible shot, so though he killed the hare, it also nearly killed him. In victory Josh decided it would be a good idea to eat the rabbit corpse, which drove him insane for some reason. Luckily Babette did not get in his way during Josh's craziness. Josh lay in bed for some time nearly dying from his fatal rabbit wound, when suddenly a naked angel named Blue showed up literally out of nowhere.

Yes a woman named Blue wanted to join my "colony" for seemingly no reason, and for some reason she was also naked. Blue asked what I wanted to name the colony, so I figured I'd be on the nose and call it "The Grave". She began to treat my physical wound but ended up creating a far deeper mental wound, as Josh repeatedly tried to get it on with her but was always rebuffed. She also was a much better shot than Josh and killed incoming bandits with ease.

Things started to settle down after that, we finished building my fortress together and started to figure out a better food system for the coming winter. Pretty soon after that my older sister Faris, apparently heard my glowing review of this new world and decided to join me. Yet for some reason in her preparations for this journey she forgot to bring clothes because she was also naked. It's also worth noting that Faris is an Empath, which made her coming to a place where we were consistently killing pirates an odd choice.

As summer came in, so did the heat, and Josh and friends did not prepare adequately for these new working conditions. They all got heat stroke, and Josh died of it a few short days later. Josh's death drove Babette insane who decided to fight a tortoise, a fight that Babette was not strong enough to win. At this point I decided to go hands off and see the colony fall apart. A new girl who was chased by bandits wanted to join in, so we let her. Faris and Blue slowly started going crazy after starving and eating the corpses of bandits, they had a duel that ended up killing them both. New girl then in an ironic twist was kidnapped by bandits, leaving my colony completely deserted other than the rotting corpses that littered the ground.

Fire loves me. The feeling is decidedly not mutual.

One of the first things that happened when my amusingly named Paradise Hills was getting on it's feet? The Northern most Wind Turbine in a vertical row of 3 exploded, which completely destroyed the middle turbine. Luckily the fire was put out quickly.

A while later we had a Molotov loving raider catch the storage area on fire. Lost about about 30% of it before putting it out (and one of my two firefighters got caught on fucking fire by the raider, and so couldn't help, but he survived). I had my psychopathic guy beat the raider to death. He was happy with that.

We've had two different thunderstorms that left hellfire burning across the land. The first was pretty far away, and was eventually put out by rain. The second? A solid 6 or 7 different fires across the map, three of which were enormous and on three different sides of my colony. Tried to build a granite wall to block the Northern and Western fires, but ran out of materials right before the breach could be sealed. Then I saw the Southern fire growing towards my crops (I never realized a fire was there, and so there was no wall) and the rest of my base. I gave in to despair and waited to burn, but right before the colony went up, it rained yet again and saved our asses.

A good while after that, three boomrats (or were they squirrels? not sure) decided to get all pissy and came at us. I didn't know what would trigger them to explode so I just had my rifleman shoot from a distance. Suffice to say I had a small fire and a large hole to fix in my stockpile warehouse (the perimeter wall was almost complete but I had a small hole next to the stockpile that still needed to be built, so they were able to get in there).

Raiders? They can damage stuff, but I can handle them. Just requires good tactics and strategy. Mad animals? Line everyone up and dump into it. If it makes it past that, everyone punches and kicks it. Simple. Mechanoid drop-podding into the colony? Hit it with grenades I got from a previous raider and have everyone start dumping rounds. But fire? Un-caring, all-consuming, forever eternal shall it burn until all is but ash and cinder, fire? Unless it's a tiny one and my two firefighters are next to it, fire will eat and consume until it is full.

And fire is never full.

(I had three colony-destroying fires that left me with nothing except the colonists themselves. Nobody died, but I lost damn near everything. Ended up reloading, got another apocalypse fire, reload, another...all from different sources - raider with incendiary grenades, some power explosion, and Odin raining down dry, concentrated hate-lightning across the base which was by far the most awesome. Fourth load were the 3 Boomrats and another fire but I got that put out. Fire is OP. I'll probably start a new game soon with permadeath / no reloads, see how quickly that dies, but for now I'm still learning how stuff works.)

Hope more folks got stories. I always love reading these things.