Let's Play: Rimworld - Part 0 The Set-Up

So, it finally begins the very first part of my written Let's Play for Rimworld. Initially I was just going to jump in and start writing away but I thought it might be best to include the set-up as well, a sort of prologue if you will.

First thing to select, the scenario, I did really consider playing the 'Lost Tribe' however I feel the classic 'Crashlanded' will do given I haven't played Rimworld since about alpha 16. Having more people to me is good but the lower level of tech you start off with means it's probably not the best idea given I am more than a bit rusty.

Next is choosing the AI story-teller and selecting the difficulty as above due to not having played in some time I feel it's best to keep it a bit more reasonable. So I'll be sticking to Cassandra Classic for my story-teller and keeping the difficulty at medium (I used to play it at rough or higher.) I will however be using the 'Commitment Mode' which used to be called Permadeath mode I believe. This is mainly because I feel the mistakes and failures are as important as the success and triumph in Rimworld. No save scumming here!

Now for world generation, I opted to change my seed to 'thewrittenletsplay' because why not, 30% world coverage is more than enough even if I do sometimes like the idea of using 100%. Average temperature and rainfall for now, if I do more let's plays of this we can change things up.

Not a bad little world, now for one of the most important steps in the set-up choosing a starting location. The kind of biome you opt to start within determines a lot, from the average temperatures at different times of year, the growing period for plants, the kinds of animals that call it home, the availability of certain kinds of rock etc. For me I already knew the kind of place I wanted to start in as it's quite possibly my favourite kind of biome, the boreal forest.

I enjoy the boreal forest biome the most as I have had some absolutely amazing games in them, they are not too different from a temperate forest biome but the differences make it more interesting to me. They have a decent enough growing period, warm summers, plenty of wildlife, however their winters are far more harsh than a temperate forest and there's something appealing about trying to survive in the snow to me. So as you can see above this is where I opted to have my landing site, large hills rather than mountains, mountains give me nightmares in this game.

Next up is likely the most important part of setting up a game of Rimworld. Choosing your reluctant colonists. It's important to make sure your starting three can do as many jobs and tasks as possible, missing out people who are good at building or farming can make things just a little bit tricky. So make sure you have a good range of skills between everyone, which is what I am going to do.

Didn't even need to randomise this lady at all, she has at least a modest amount of passion for most everything. Passion basically means they learn and improve that skill a lot faster than someone without passion. Her traits aren't actually too bad psychopath basically means dead bodies, violence, harvesting prisoner organs and other things which would make anyone else feel nervous don't bother her at all. Quick sleeper means she doesn't need as long to rest as others so she's definitely a good first one. Angel seems like a fairly ironic name though so I kept it.

And yet another lady being dropped from the sky onto this world, Syd is incapable of violence so she won't be able to help defend the colony nor take part in hunting. However her skill and passion at mining and construction alone would have been good enough. She even has high passion for cooking not to mention decent medical skill. Ladies and gentlemen, your doctor is in!

Last but not least is Nicole.. Yet another lady I guess this is just how things are going to be. She seems to be a bit of a wild card given her traits of being too smart and neurotic which may end up making things a bit interesting. However her skill with social and intellectual is hard to pass up, research is going to be pretty important plus she has decent combat ability like Angel does. Hopefully having two decent combatants will make it less of a detriment that Syd is a non-combatant.

So with everything set-up, watch this space for part one of this written let's play!