![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So one of my intermittent amusements has been this beta game called RimWorld. (It is a very complete game with a super-busy modding community.) I have described the game as "Dwarf Fortress meets Firefly" and apparently that was part of the original pitch for the thing, so ha. Genre target: hit.
The background story in Rimworld draws from one of the near-archetypal structures of science fiction: there are wealthy, powerful core worlds (the Glitterworlds, in RimWorld argot) with amazing technology and luxury, and there are backwater frontier worlds (the Rim) where people have a hardscrabble existence and utilize whatever tech they manage to grab and figure out. (This is of course the setting of Firefly. And Star Wars. And arguably Dune. And...) Some people on those Rimworlds have lost most tech and live a tribal existence, others have retained more of the technology that got them there. Every world has multiple factions of people (unless modded so it doesn't) at varying tech levels and general hostilities to outsiders.
My version of RimWorld is... very modded. My current aesthetic for it is "suppose that this planet has a giant heap of genetic engineering experiments on it" for a setting. Which means that not only are there options for 3D printing organs and suchlike, but hideous genetically engineered crossbreed-abominations, humanoids with various animal heads, genetically engineered slave race bee people, Jurassic Park the Rimworld Mod, a similar mod for prehistoric megafauna, giant spiders (two sizes, giant and "oh fuck run"), and dragons.
In addition to this I have made it Star Wars adjacent, adding the Force, lightsabers, and Twi'lek (I like Twi'lek). And werewolves. (Very loosely based on W:tA.) (There is a vampire mod by the same modder, but it is recently enough released that it's patching three times a day or so and still produces hilarious bug reports.) I've also added some science-fantasy-metals stuff for sheer 'well, what the hell'. Along with piles of furniture, bits of tech, additional research, requirements to have seeds for crops, many many things that I can do with game!marijuana, and so on. Farming complexity, cooking complexity, clothing complexity, complexity complexity.
Anyway, KJ loves watching people play computer games, and so we started up a game together, picking out the place to land our colony and carefully building our set of people. There are several options for the basic game, and we chose the tribal start: very low tech, but five people. (The default start is roughly current-day tech known, at least the basics, but three people.)
I am going to chronicle the events in this madcap adventure over time.
Five survivors escape doom from the skies and horrible consequences: three humans and two apini (an engineered slave race seeded by the core worlds to begin terraforming rimworlds, some of whose members integrate into tribal societies).
Black Opossum, a middle-aged woman, is a skilled medic, in part because she is fastidious and extremely particular about treatments. She has many skills and interests, and is an honorable and trustworthy person who prefers to do her work at night. Her childhood was spent minding the herds, but when she grew up she became one of the keepers of tribal lore.
Her older brother, Eel Bren (Eel for short) grew up as a rambunctious tribal child but eventually drifted off to an adult solitude as a sharpshooter. He is an upbeat sort, willing to perform for others even if he is not good at interacting with them directly, and a skilled farmer with reasonable competences at a number of other things.
Brío Braga is a fine crafter, a competent cook and farmer, and would love to build things even though she's not terribly good at it. While she doesn't partake of drugs herself, she has an absolute passion for the cultivation of smokeleaf, despite her overall laziness. Her quick reflexes and love of thumping things make her a good melee fighter. She was abandoned as a sickly child when she was young, and once she found a new tribe to join she devoted herself to tending the homefires and the sick. She has a pet gecko named Patricia, who is almost certainly doomed.
Barry Skyflower, one of the apini, was grubnapped and forced into more overt slavery, and once she escaped and joined her original tribe she settled in to become an architect and for the most part not talk to anyone. She is kind, but despite that she has a deep viciousness, perhaps from her history, perhaps because she has inherited a package of genetic engineering traits designed for combat. She is an excellent builder and cook, and competent at several other things. The horse colt, Pharaoh, and the magyarosaurus, Stefan, are both quite attached to her.
Peanut was scarred horribly by a fire when young, and dedicated herself to medicine as a result. She is kind, and does not judge others on appearances (she knows how terrible that experience can be), she works hard and her will is difficult to break, but her terrible experiences mean that when she awakened to wielding the mysterious powers of the Force her inclinations took a darker cast. She is a very skilled medic, as well as a builder and farmer.
Our intrepid survivors find themselves on a plot of land with some coastline and a few scattered hills, and decide to work on setting up their initial encampment near one of the lakes. They divide up the weapons they managed to salvage, pick out a ruin to store their supplies in, and try to figure out what to do. They set up to build a defensive wall between two small hills, harvest some trees in fruit, and start constructing a larger shelter.
The shelter is not entirely complete the first day, between materials shortages and the people having other work, and there are only two beds, but the rest of the common room goes up quickly soon after. A large ruin nearby that they were hoping to use for space was deemed haunted when mysterious sounds echoed from within; a smaller one also seemed to contain spooks.
The area is not entirely safe, of course, though some of the more dangerous creatures seen elsewhere are, thus far, absent. However, a velociraptor killed a tortoise immediately in front of one of the survivors. Barry promptly went and made sure the butcher table was constructed so that the parts of the tortoise that weren't eaten by the predatory dinosaur could be salvaged for supplies.
Some visitors – Bringa and Red, pig-men from the Orange Ridge Kin League – drift in just as the private rooms are getting finished and the tribe is starting to move into new beds, freeing the original ones in the common room for guests. People are amiably sociable with them, but nobody feels the need to pursue a deeper relationship. The tribe is currently occupied with building defenses and mild entertainments (a horseshoe pin and a hoop-and-arrows game) and clearing useful plants to improve the food situation. The apini have cleared a field and planted it with frostbell, which is a crop that does not require them to have a supply of seed on hand. A nanny goat has been tamed for the milk.
Plans are made to mine out a hill in order to make a secure kitchen and food storage, which is a long-term project. For now the food will be stored and processed in the common room. Patricia the gecko is confined to indoors to minimise the chances that some wandering predator will devour her and break Braga's heart. Fields for japonica rice and grapevines for wine are planned, though nothing has come of them yet. With a stove up and running, some fresh meals are prepared, and the pemmican supplies are rebuilt, especially once a badly injured velociraptor is spotted. The beast, harmless from its own injuries, will feed the tribe for several days once it is hunted and butchered.
A wave of food poisoning sweeps through the tribe from a batch of poorly cooked meals, which takes Opossum so badly (due to her bad back) that she is confined to bed for a while. She finds this sufficiently traumatic as to develop PTSD, though after some kind attention from Peanut she gets up again and gets back to work.
On the 10th of Aprimay, the visitors leave; Red is pleased enough to leave a pile of pumpkin seeds which can be cultivated. Unfortunately, nobody has any idea what to do with them, and thus the tribe must research techniques of cultivation. They promptly set up a research bench in order to do so in the increasingly cluttered common room.
At which point I got overwhelmed by children climbing on me and had to stop playing, so there we end round one.
The background story in Rimworld draws from one of the near-archetypal structures of science fiction: there are wealthy, powerful core worlds (the Glitterworlds, in RimWorld argot) with amazing technology and luxury, and there are backwater frontier worlds (the Rim) where people have a hardscrabble existence and utilize whatever tech they manage to grab and figure out. (This is of course the setting of Firefly. And Star Wars. And arguably Dune. And...) Some people on those Rimworlds have lost most tech and live a tribal existence, others have retained more of the technology that got them there. Every world has multiple factions of people (unless modded so it doesn't) at varying tech levels and general hostilities to outsiders.
My version of RimWorld is... very modded. My current aesthetic for it is "suppose that this planet has a giant heap of genetic engineering experiments on it" for a setting. Which means that not only are there options for 3D printing organs and suchlike, but hideous genetically engineered crossbreed-abominations, humanoids with various animal heads, genetically engineered slave race bee people, Jurassic Park the Rimworld Mod, a similar mod for prehistoric megafauna, giant spiders (two sizes, giant and "oh fuck run"), and dragons.
In addition to this I have made it Star Wars adjacent, adding the Force, lightsabers, and Twi'lek (I like Twi'lek). And werewolves. (Very loosely based on W:tA.) (There is a vampire mod by the same modder, but it is recently enough released that it's patching three times a day or so and still produces hilarious bug reports.) I've also added some science-fantasy-metals stuff for sheer 'well, what the hell'. Along with piles of furniture, bits of tech, additional research, requirements to have seeds for crops, many many things that I can do with game!marijuana, and so on. Farming complexity, cooking complexity, clothing complexity, complexity complexity.
Anyway, KJ loves watching people play computer games, and so we started up a game together, picking out the place to land our colony and carefully building our set of people. There are several options for the basic game, and we chose the tribal start: very low tech, but five people. (The default start is roughly current-day tech known, at least the basics, but three people.)
I am going to chronicle the events in this madcap adventure over time.
Five survivors escape doom from the skies and horrible consequences: three humans and two apini (an engineered slave race seeded by the core worlds to begin terraforming rimworlds, some of whose members integrate into tribal societies).
Black Opossum, a middle-aged woman, is a skilled medic, in part because she is fastidious and extremely particular about treatments. She has many skills and interests, and is an honorable and trustworthy person who prefers to do her work at night. Her childhood was spent minding the herds, but when she grew up she became one of the keepers of tribal lore.
Her older brother, Eel Bren (Eel for short) grew up as a rambunctious tribal child but eventually drifted off to an adult solitude as a sharpshooter. He is an upbeat sort, willing to perform for others even if he is not good at interacting with them directly, and a skilled farmer with reasonable competences at a number of other things.
Brío Braga is a fine crafter, a competent cook and farmer, and would love to build things even though she's not terribly good at it. While she doesn't partake of drugs herself, she has an absolute passion for the cultivation of smokeleaf, despite her overall laziness. Her quick reflexes and love of thumping things make her a good melee fighter. She was abandoned as a sickly child when she was young, and once she found a new tribe to join she devoted herself to tending the homefires and the sick. She has a pet gecko named Patricia, who is almost certainly doomed.
Barry Skyflower, one of the apini, was grubnapped and forced into more overt slavery, and once she escaped and joined her original tribe she settled in to become an architect and for the most part not talk to anyone. She is kind, but despite that she has a deep viciousness, perhaps from her history, perhaps because she has inherited a package of genetic engineering traits designed for combat. She is an excellent builder and cook, and competent at several other things. The horse colt, Pharaoh, and the magyarosaurus, Stefan, are both quite attached to her.
Peanut was scarred horribly by a fire when young, and dedicated herself to medicine as a result. She is kind, and does not judge others on appearances (she knows how terrible that experience can be), she works hard and her will is difficult to break, but her terrible experiences mean that when she awakened to wielding the mysterious powers of the Force her inclinations took a darker cast. She is a very skilled medic, as well as a builder and farmer.
Our intrepid survivors find themselves on a plot of land with some coastline and a few scattered hills, and decide to work on setting up their initial encampment near one of the lakes. They divide up the weapons they managed to salvage, pick out a ruin to store their supplies in, and try to figure out what to do. They set up to build a defensive wall between two small hills, harvest some trees in fruit, and start constructing a larger shelter.
The shelter is not entirely complete the first day, between materials shortages and the people having other work, and there are only two beds, but the rest of the common room goes up quickly soon after. A large ruin nearby that they were hoping to use for space was deemed haunted when mysterious sounds echoed from within; a smaller one also seemed to contain spooks.
The area is not entirely safe, of course, though some of the more dangerous creatures seen elsewhere are, thus far, absent. However, a velociraptor killed a tortoise immediately in front of one of the survivors. Barry promptly went and made sure the butcher table was constructed so that the parts of the tortoise that weren't eaten by the predatory dinosaur could be salvaged for supplies.
Some visitors – Bringa and Red, pig-men from the Orange Ridge Kin League – drift in just as the private rooms are getting finished and the tribe is starting to move into new beds, freeing the original ones in the common room for guests. People are amiably sociable with them, but nobody feels the need to pursue a deeper relationship. The tribe is currently occupied with building defenses and mild entertainments (a horseshoe pin and a hoop-and-arrows game) and clearing useful plants to improve the food situation. The apini have cleared a field and planted it with frostbell, which is a crop that does not require them to have a supply of seed on hand. A nanny goat has been tamed for the milk.
Plans are made to mine out a hill in order to make a secure kitchen and food storage, which is a long-term project. For now the food will be stored and processed in the common room. Patricia the gecko is confined to indoors to minimise the chances that some wandering predator will devour her and break Braga's heart. Fields for japonica rice and grapevines for wine are planned, though nothing has come of them yet. With a stove up and running, some fresh meals are prepared, and the pemmican supplies are rebuilt, especially once a badly injured velociraptor is spotted. The beast, harmless from its own injuries, will feed the tribe for several days once it is hunted and butchered.
A wave of food poisoning sweeps through the tribe from a batch of poorly cooked meals, which takes Opossum so badly (due to her bad back) that she is confined to bed for a while. She finds this sufficiently traumatic as to develop PTSD, though after some kind attention from Peanut she gets up again and gets back to work.
On the 10th of Aprimay, the visitors leave; Red is pleased enough to leave a pile of pumpkin seeds which can be cultivated. Unfortunately, nobody has any idea what to do with them, and thus the tribe must research techniques of cultivation. They promptly set up a research bench in order to do so in the increasingly cluttered common room.
At which point I got overwhelmed by children climbing on me and had to stop playing, so there we end round one.
From:
no subject
I gave up on my first colony after an hour or so since one of my 3 colonists turned out to be relentlessly useless - I couldn't get her to do *anything*. (I've subsequently figured out some of the game controls that might have helped with that, but oh well.) My second colony started well - three well-skilled colonists with useful, likeable personalities, all of whom are good workers. They've survived raids, lightning storms and rabid animal attacks, but look as if they're about to expire from a heatwave because I've yet to figure out how to nudge them into finishing building a large coolroom rather than the other silly shit they seem to prefer to build. Oh well. :-7
Rimworld's a lot of fun! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. :-)
From:
no subject
To deal with a heat wave, if you have the tribal-tech cooler thing researched: Build some of those. Click a colonist who can construct, and say 'no, don't do what you were doing, GO BUILD THAT SHIT' by clicking on the blueprint.
Also check the work tab to make sure that people are set up sensibly!
(Other option for heatwave is of course make everyone strip naked for a bit. They won't like it but they might not die.)
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Are you playing it through Steam? I can point you at some useful utility mods if you are.
From:
no subject
I know there are a lot of mods out there; I figure that when I've got a decent grip on the gameplay fundamentals it'll be worth my while checking them out, for sure! I imagine that there are some plausible ones available in the not-Steam format as well. We shall see. :-7
From:
no subject
The ones I was thinking of throwing at you aren't gameplay-changing, they're things like 'a temperature map option' and 'when a minion is halfway across the map and heading home to do something, they'll pick some stuff up and bring it with them'. :}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Some of these may want HugsLib, which is the most popular library mod. Fortunately people basically standardised on one major library.
Straight up utilities/minor tweak things:
For actual gamechanging mods, the best, hands down, is Psychology. Which would be worth it if it were just for adding bisexuality to the game (and means that being queer doesn't take up a trait slot), but it adds a wealth of nuance and interaction as well.
I have other recs for mods that change things, or add things, or whatever (RimFridge: makes 1x1, 1x2, 2x2 refrigerators that you can use to store meals!) but I will stop here.
(Oh, I missed putting in Outfitter: lets you set default clothes stuff better.)
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Most of those are wee things that just do one minor "ARGH THIS IS INFURIATING" fix.
Maybe at some point I'll do a post of "this is the mod layout I'm using for this ridiculous game I'm chronicling".