Summary
RimWorldis an unforgiving game. It doesn’t hold your hand or give you much time to find your bearings when things go wrong, but that’s what makes it so much fun. You’ll be no stranger to losses after playing. Raids, infestations, diseases, and manyother dangerous eventscould be your colony’s demise.
If you’ve been playing for a long time, deviating from how you’re used to playing can be hard. You might be looking for more of a challenge, something to test your skills as a colony leader that throws you into the deep end. This article gives you a few ideas for how to make your game more of a challenge.
9Settle Your Colony In Different Tiles
It’s easy to find a tile with a year-round growing period with many animals grazing. It makes the beginning of your game easier since you immediately start with good food sources. The temperature in these tiles is generally manageable, so your colonists can roam free with no worry.
Setting up in a different tile gives you a more difficult start. A new climate can be tough to manage if you’re unfamiliar. Ice sheets and desert tiles can make it challenging to grow crops. Not many animals graze there either, so you’ll struggle for food if you don’t find alternatives quickly.
8Adjust The Global Temperature
The global temperature can be adjusted when setting up your world. Increasing or decreasing global temperature will change the types of biomes you’ll have access to. Since deserts and snow biomes make it hard to maintain a food source, you’ll need to find other ways to survive.
Extreme temperatures can also cause ailments like heatstroke or hypothermia. If left unchecked, these can kill your colonists quickly, so keep an eye on them. Changing the global temperature can give you the best challenge if you want to spice up base-game mechanics.
7Increase Pollution
Pollution came along with the Biotech DLC and can throw a wrench in your perfect colonies. Pollution can naturally occur on some tiles orspread through toxic wastepacks, which explode when not refrigerated. Polluted areas are easy to spot; they create a green, desiccated area that causes toxic buildup for your colonists.
Toxic buildup can kill your colonists and animals quickly, so you need a sheltered area to protect them. Pollution also poisons and kills plants, making it difficult to grow crops. Increasing pollution is a good test of how you’re able to survive without the outdoors.
6Make Flesh Purity A Necessity
Losing limbs is a natural part of the RimWorld life. With constant raids, infestations, and mad animals, it would be impressive if your colonists came out unscathed. Missing limbs can be fixed with prosthetics of any kind. Flesh Purity is a unique challenge to see how far your colonists can get in this brutal world.
You can have flesh purity as a meme in your ideology if you have the DLC. This will change their moods depending on whether they have prosthetics or not. If you don’t have the DLC, you can still play with the idea in mind.
5Limit Your Food Source
A food supply is essential in RimWorld; it helps your colony grow and stay alive. Limiting your food source can be a dramatic way to ramp up the difficulty. You might be used to farming and growing crops all the time, so why not switch it up and raise animals for food instead?
Events like animal flu and raids can make it difficult to keep animals. You’ll also have to ensure they’re safely in pens with enough food to stay alive. If you don’t like that, you can do it the other way around and have acolony of vegetariansinstead.
4Choose A More Difficult Scenario And Storyteller
If you don’t want to be too complicated, you can change the simple settings that apply to everyone. Scenarios decide how many colonists you start with. The ideal start is three colonists, but you can try Naked Brutality to test your limits. If you want something different, you can create your own scenarios to make it a more suited challenge.
Storytellers control the overall events in your colony, acting as a god in your playthrough. Storytellers can be kind and might give you time to recuperate between dangerous events. Others aren’t so kind and will hit you with everything they’ve got.
3Play On Commitment Mode
Lost a colonist? Reload. Surgery failed? Reload. It’s easy to turn back time when things don’t go your way. It’s also a lot easier to face harsh events when you’ve reloaded multiple times to find the best way to counter them.
Commitment mode is an option when choosing your Storyteller. It simply means you only have one save, so everything that happens is permanent. This playstyle forces you to deal with the losses as they come, which can be hard when you lose a great colonist.
2Commit To The Auto-Generated Colonists
Having the perfect colonist can make the game much easier to handle. It can take a long time to complete tasks when the worker isn’t skilled. At the start, you’re probably flicking through colonists to build a skilled starting team.
If you want something more challenging, take in the pre-generated colonists. That means no switching, no randomising, no changing anything. Take those colonists with you and work to their traits and skills. It might be brutal, but you can create a worthwhile game.
1Choose A Difficult Ideology
This is only available with the Ideology DLC.
Ideology can drastically change how your game plays out. Selected memes will force your colony to adapt. Some might make raiding necessary, so you’ll need to visit enemy factions often to satisfy that need. Others might focus on how you survive, like forbidding you from harming animals or cutting down trees.
Not abiding by your ideology can harm your colony. It can upset your colonists and cause them to suffer mental breaks. You can choose the ideology at the beginning and see which ones have a high impact on your colony.
