Over a month ago, I wrote RimWorld off as a "poor man's sci-fi Dwarf Fortress". Shortly after writing that, the game finally clicked with me, and 250 hours of gameplay later, it's one of my favorite games of the year. I've had trouble explaining its appeal since the systems are so densely layered on top of each other, so I finally decided to just play through a single game of it and detail things as I go along. This is my attempt to document the entire lifetime of a RimWorld colony, one season daily.

Starting Out

I randomly chose to play a game on Cassandra (the standard storyteller) on the 2nd-hardest difficulty. Cassandra likes to slowly ratchet up the threat against your colony, eventually throwing 2 or even 3 simultaneous disasters/raids at you in waves, and this is the first time I've played above Medium difficulty, so I'm... cautious about my chances of success. (Did I mention I've only won once in over 250 hours of play?)

Once that was done and the map was created, I chose a random spot & season to start out in: a mountainous boreal forest during springtime. The combination of forests and mountains ensures I won't run out of wood and minerals anytime soon, but with a growing period less than a season long, I'll be hard-pressed to plant enough crops to feed my colony for the year. I may have to resort to indoor planting to survive if there isn't enough wildlife to hunt, but first I have to survive a spring with temperatures below freezing.

As for my unlucky starting colonists, I have:

• Euterpre, an elderly female Night Owl that's a crackshot with a rifle and Interested in (gains a bonus to learning) several skills, including Cooking. She'll be my main hunter and moonlight as a cook, but she takes a mood penalty if she's up during the daytime.
• Yukiko, a middle-aged female with high Medicine and Mining skills. She'll let me quickly carve out a niche in the mountains, but her Too Smart trait combines an increased learning rate with a higher chance of mentally snapping, and her Chemical Fascination means she'll binge on any hard drugs I have in stock.
• Sparkles, a young female with insanely high Crafting and Artistic skills, but she likes to insult fellow colonists (Abrasive) and isn't fond of the cold (Heat Lover), which is troublesome on this map.

Luckily the RNG didn't give me any really useless colonists for my starting three, so I have high hopes I can manage a decent start.

Spring, Day 1: Landfall

The day starts with my 3 colonists climbing out of their escape pods (along with a pet yorkshire terrier) and promptly puking their guts out from cryosleep sickness. As they arm themselves with the supplied weapons (a knife, a pistol, and a rifle), I take a look around the map: there's a large mountain range to the north, and in one of the cubbies along it is two abandoned buildings perfect for holing up in during my first night. First order of business is to make a few beds, then turn on Manual Priorities and set up who does what tasks when.

Proper task priorities continues to be a finicky point for me. Priority 1 tasks are done first from left to right in the priority queue, then Priority 2 tasks, and so forth. For example, with this setup, Yukiko would do Doctoring jobs first, then Hauling & Cleaning, then stay in bed as a Patient (if she has life-threatening injuries) before Mining. (In this case, I probably should've set Hauling and Cleaning to Priority 2 instead.)

To start, I have Sparkles focus on Construction and Tailoring while the other two focus on Hauling materials, because I need beds and clothes ASAP. (If you look across the status icons on the top of the screen, you'll notice two of my colonists are nearly naked; not good for a tundra map.) I quickly build a Campfire inside for them to warm up around before hypothermia sets up, but I quickly replace that with a wood-fueled generator & electrical heater.

By Day 2, I have a basic base setup:

I start hunting the muffalo herd on my doorstep for meat & leather, hoping to add some elk leather from another nearby herd, but once I've hunted all the muffalo I look over and notice the elk herd has wandered off the map. As-is, I only have enough leather to make a single shirt.

I get desperate enough for leather I start hunting everything else on the map. During one of these hunts, the Name Your Colony dialog box pops up:

Since we landed in a boreal forest of a world named Old Hyadum, I decide to name my colony New Anchorage. After a few days, my colony already has some rudimentary defenses (a barricade on the only entrance into this nook) and an electric tailoring bench. Now I just need some more leather...

Spring, Day 5: A New Arrival

On Day 5, in midst of Yukiko pigging out on food (she suffered a minor mental break due to a lack of clothes and sleeping with 2 other colonists in a cramped room), I get a notice that a Wanderer decided to join our colony:

A young female teenager with decent skills in Shooting, Medicine, and Research. Once I build my Research Bench, she'll basically be assigned to it every waking hour, and another colonist good at shooting & medicating is always a plus. When I zoom in on her to check her stats, I notice a cougar roaming the wilderness nearby; I quickly send out a hunting party to kill it and takes its precious leathers.

The next day, I get hit with my first raid: a single raider armed with a shiv. I easily do enough damage to her to drop her into shock from the pain; I can now capture her and try to convince her to join my colony... once I quickly construct a new bed and stuff it into the tailoring room as a makeshift jail cell. And strip off all her clothing to outfit my naked colonists.

She doesn't seem too eager to join a colony that locked her naked in a sewing room, but talking to her was raising my colonists' Social skill and I didn't have enough leather to sew anything, so I let her be.

That's when I noticed a herd of boars had wandered onto the map.

Spring, Day 8: The Great Boar Hunt

Early the next morning, I drafted and equipped every colonist who was decent in combat and headed for the southwest corner of the map, shooting every boar that crossed my line of sight. By the time I was done, my colonists were hauling back enough boar hides to make a full outfit from them.

Having a sudden need for a tailoring room, I execute my prisoner on the spot and haul out her corpse just in time to sew some pants.

Spring, Day 12: More Guests

A few days later, I get a distress call from a woman trying to escape some raiders. She offers to join my colony if I protect her from her pursuers. I accept.

When she appears on the map, I notice she not only has 2 scars on her legs that reduce her running speed, but she's also stark naked.

I'm not sure whether she'll get caught by the raiders before she succumbs to hypothermia, but I decide to give her a shot and move to intercept the raiders before they catch up with her.

She's being pursued by 3 raiders with melee weapons and personal shields (which block most ranged attacks against them). Luckily they're chasing her one by one; I give all 4 of my colonists melee weapons and send them out to swarm the raiders one at a time. I take two of them down with minor wounds on my side; the last one quickly flees as I strip off their clothes and take an unconscious raider prisoner.

By the time summer rolls around and planting season has begun (although it was warm enough to start planting crops a few days beforehand), I've set up a nice cozy with some minimalist bedrooms. A traveling merchant stopped by and bought the (expensive) silver mace I looted off the raiders, giving me plenty of silver for future purchases, and I've tailored/looted enough clothes to keep my colonists relatively warm.

Now that summer's rolled around, I have a limited amount of time to grow enough food for an entire year and excavate a freezer large enough to store it all... and my colonists have some of the lowest Growing skills possible.

Next Summer: Growing Pains