RimWorld: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips

The Hard Truth About RimWorld

Look, I'm going to be straight with you. RimWorld is not a game you "win." You're going to lose. Your colonists are going to get their heads blown off by a raider with a club they found in a trash can. A squirrel is going to go berserk and bite off your best shooter's finger. A solar flare is going to destroy your freezer full of food right before winter. And you're going to sit there, staring at the screen, wondering why you even bother.

But here's the thing nobody tells you in the Steam trailer: that's the point. The game is a story generator, not a strategy game. I've got 2,300 hours in this pile of pixels, and my most memorable colony died because a colonist named "Rat-Face" got high on smokeleaf, threw a tantrum, and punched a nuclear reactor until it exploded. I laughed for ten minutes. Then I started a new colony.

I wrote this guide because when I started, I spent my first three runs building box-shaped bases, forgetting to build a freezer, and wondering why everyone died of food poisoning. I searched for "RimWorld help" and got twenty-page guides written by people who used words like "optimize your workflow." Screw that. This is me, a dude with too many hours in the game, telling you what actually works.

Why This Game Makes You Want to Throw Your Mouse

Let's talk about the specific moments where RimWorld punches you in the gut. Knowing these exist won't stop them, but at least you won't think you're doing something wrong when your colony catches fire for no reason.

The "Random Event" Screw Job - The game has an event system that is completely, utterly unfair. You can be doing fine, nice little base, six colonists, some crops growing, and then the game decides "today is the day this guy hates this." A toxic fallout event can cover your map for twelve days. Your crops die. Your animals starve. Your colonists get sick. There is no way to "prevent" this. You just have to survive it. This is not your fault.

The Raid Scaling Lies - The game calculates raid strength based on your "wealth." But here's the dirty secret: it counts everything. That beautiful golden statue your artist spent a year making? That's 4,000 silver worth of raid points. That herd of muffalo you've been breeding? That's another 2,000 points. You can literally get killed because you made your base look too nice. I've had a colony of 8 people get hit by a raid of 25 pirates because I had too much silver sitting in a stockpile. The game doesn't tell you this.

The Mental Break Roulette - Your colonists have needs and moods. If their mood drops below a certain number, they have a "mental break." These range from annoying (wandering around sad) to absolutely catastrophic (going berserk and beating your doctor's face in with a chair). The worst part? A colonist can be perfectly fed, warm, and happy, then watch their best friend die in a fight, and suddenly they're trying to set the hospital on fire. There's no "I'm fine" button. You just have to deal with it.

The Food Poisoning Curveball - Your cook has a skill level of 3? Congratulations, every fifth meal is going to give someone food poisoning. They'll vomit everywhere, making the room dirty, which lowers mood, which causes more breaks. I lost a colony to a cascade of vomit once. I'm not joking.

Understanding that these things are baked into the game, not signs of your own failure, is step one. Step two is learning how to bend the rules in your favor.

First Steps: What You Actually Need to Do on Day One

Forget everything you think you know about base-building. You are not building a fortress. You are building a mud hut that might survive the first year. Here's the exact checklist I run on every new colony.

Your First Ten Minutes (Real Time):

• Pause immediately - The game starts paused. Leave it paused. You have time. Panic later.
• Build a room that is "indoors" - Find a patch of fertile soil (darker green on the ground). Build a small room, maybe 8x8 tiles, using whatever material is nearby. Wood is fine. Don't worry about walls yet. Just four walls and a roof. This room will be your initial barracks, storage, and crafting area.
• Place a sleeping spot - Click the "Architecture" menu, find "Sleeping Spot" under Furniture. Plop one down for each colonist. They'll sleep on the ground. It's miserable but it works for a week.
• Forbid your starting animals - Those two little dogs or whatever you started with? They'll eat your food. Click the "Animals" tab, select them, and change their area to "Home" or better yet, make a tiny zone in a corner and restrict them there. Feed them kibble later. They will starve if you don't micromanage them.
• Set up four tasks immediately - Click the "Work" tab at the bottom. Set one person to "Construction" as priority 1. Set one person to "Growing" as priority 1. Set one person to "Cooking" as priority 1. The last person should be "Mining" or "Crafting." Do this before you unpause. If you don't, everyone will wander around hauling rocks and nobody will build a wall.

The First Week Blueprint:

• Build a freezer - Make a room that is 5x5 tiles. Place a cooler (from the temperature menu) with the blue side facing into the room and the red side facing out. Set the temperature to -5°C (23°F). Build a door. DO NOT put the door on the cooler wall. Put the door on an adjacent wall. Your first colony WILL starve if you don't do this. I've done it three times.
• Start planting rice - Rice grows fast. Plant a patch of at least 30 tiles of rice. Don't plant potatoes. Don't plant corn. Rice. Trust me. Potatoes are for rocky soil. Corn is for when you have a full-time farmer. Rice is for "I need food in 4 days or I die."
• Build a horseshoe pin - It's under "Miscellaneous" in the furniture menu. Put it in the barracks. It gives +5 to "recreation" for everyone who uses it. This stops the "I'm bored" mental breakdowns. It costs 20 wood. It's the most important furniture in the early game.
• Gather 500 wood - Not for building a mansion. For building a second room. You need a separate room for your research bench. Why? Because the research bench creates dirt, which lowers cleanliness, which slows research speed. Put it in its own small room with a sterile tile floor later. For now, just get the walls up.

This is not a "starter base." This is a "don't die in the first 30 days" base. You can expand later.

Expert Tips: The Stuff the Tutorial Never Tells You

I'm pulling back the curtain here. These are the techniques that separate "I survived a year" from "I have a thriving colony of 15 cyborgs with sniper rifles."

The "Stonecutting" Scam - Wood burns. Wood walls catch fire. Wood floors catch fire. Your entire base made of wood will turn into a funeral pyre the second a raider throws a molotov. As soon as you have a steady food supply, queue up "Stonecutting" on the crafting bill. Chop all the chunks of stone on your map into blocks. Build your walls out of granite or marble. Granite has the most hit points. Marble gives a beauty bonus. Never build exterior walls out of wood again. I lost a 40-hour colony to a fire because I was too lazy to cut stone. Never again.

Animal Husbandry is a Trap (At First) - You see those cute muffalo or alpaca? They eat 15 units of haygrass per day. A single muffalo consumes as much food as a colonist. Do not start breeding animals until you have 20,000 units of haygrass stored in a barn. Otherwise, winter hits, grass stops growing, your animals starve, and you spend all your silver buying hay when you should be buying medicine. I had a herd of 30 chickens that ate through my entire 2-year food stockpile in one winter. I had to eat the chickens. It was not efficient.

The "Recruit or Release" Rule for Prisoners - You capture a raider. They have bad stats. They have a trait like "Pyromaniac" or "Chemical Fascination." Do not recruit them. Seriously. A pyromaniac will randomly set your base on fire. A chemical fascinator will break into your drug stash and OD. Just patch them up, release them, and take the reputation boost with their faction. You want colonists who are "Hard Worker" or "Industrious" at minimum. One hard worker does the work of three average colonists. Be picky.

Defense is Not Walls - You think walls keep raiders out? Walls keep them contained so they go through your killbox. A proper killbox is a narrow corridor, 3 tiles wide and 20 tiles long, lined with sandbags and traps. Place it at the entrance of your base. Raiders will walk through it single file. Your colonists with guns stand behind a stone wall at the end. They shoot the raiders as they enter. It's dirty. It's effective. My first killbox reduced my colony's death toll from "weekly funeral" to "yearly funeral."

The "Pause and Draft" Trick - A raid shows up. Don't panic. Pause the game. Click "Draft" on all your colonists. Move them to defensive positions. Unpause. Fire. This is not cheating. This is using the game's mechanics. Real-time tactics in a paused state is how every veteran plays. If you're not pausing to issue orders, you're playing with a handicap.

This mechanic is similar to the tactical flow in Oxygen Not Included — you pause, you plan, you execute. Both games punish you for rushing.

The Mistakes That Got My First Five Colonies Killed

I've made every mistake in this game. Let me save you the pain.

Mistake 1: Building One Giant Room - I built a "great hall" that was 20x20 tiles. Everyone ate there. Everyone slept there. Everyone crafted there. Then one colonist got a mental break and threw a tantrum, destroying a wooden support. The entire roof collapsed on everyone. Four colonists died instantly. Build separate rooms. Bedrooms should be 4x4 tiles each. The dining room can be big, but put pillars inside. Roof collapses if a support column (a wall) is more than 6 tiles away from another support wall. Count your tiles.

Mistake 2: Ignoring "Cleanliness" - Your hospital is dirty because you built it next to the butcher table? Your doctor is performing surgery with a 20% success rate because of the blood on the floor. Colonists track dirt everywhere. Build "Sterile Tile" (from the floor menu) in your hospital. It costs silver but it's worth it. Also, set your doctor's schedule to "Anything" and force them to clean the hospital every morning. I lost a colonist to an infection from a botched surgery because the room was too dirty.

Mistake 3: Accepting Too Many Refugees - A group of 4 refugees shows up. They ask to stay for a few days. You say yes because you're nice. They eat all your food. They leave. You have 2 days of food left. Winter starts. Everyone starves. Only accept refugees if you have at least 60 days of food stored. One refugee eats as much as a colonist. Four refugees eat as much as four colonists. They don't help with work until you recruit them. They're just mouths. Be ruthless.

Mistake 4: Over-Engineering Your Power Grid - You don't need a geothermal vent on day 20. You don't need a network of 12 solar panels connected to 8 batteries. You need one wind turbine and two batteries. That's it. Anything more is complexity that will fail when you're not looking. Go look up the Factorio guide on this site for a lesson on modular expansion — start small, grow as needed. RimWorld is the same way. Don't build a power plant until you need a power plant.

Mistake 5: Forgetting to Set a "Food Restriction" - By default, colonists will eat any food they can find. If your food stockpile has 500 raw rice and 30 fine meals, they will eat the fine meals first. Every single time. You get fine meals for 2 days, then everyone eats raw rice and gets mood penalties. Set a food restriction policy. Click the "Assign" tab, click "Food Restrictions," create a new one called "Basic." Set it to allow only simple meals and raw vegetables. Then click the "Health" tab on each colonist and assign them that policy. Save your fine meals for when someone is in a bad mood.

Questions You're Too Stubborn to Google

Q: "What difficulty should I play on as a beginner?"
A: Play on "Strive to Survive" (normal). Don't play on "Peaceful" because you won't learn how to handle raids. Don't play on "Losing is Fun" because you'll quit. Normal difficulty gives you enough breathing room to make mistakes. After 100 hours, bump it up.

Q: "How do I get components? I can't build anything."
A: There are two ways. First, mine them. Compacted machinery is on your map as little yellow dots. Click "Designate" and then "Mine" on them. Second, build a fabrication bench and research "Fabrication." Then you can make components from steel. Steel is found as "Compacted steel" on the map. Mine it all. You'll run out eventually, but that's a problem for year 3.

Q: "My colonist keeps having a mental break every time someone dies. What do I do?"
A: Build a "Sarcophagus" for the dead colonist. Put it somewhere nice. Also, give your grieving colonist some beer or smokeleaf (from the "Recreation" menu). It temporarily boosts mood. If they're still breaking, have them sleep in a nice private room with a "Heater" set to 21°C (70°F). Comfort and temperature are huge mood modifiers.

Q: "Is it worth it to use 'mind-control' mods or dev mode?"
A: You bought the game. Do whatever makes you happy. I've used dev mode to spawn a herd of elephants when a raid was too unfair. Nobody is watching. The mod community is huge — check out "Prepare Carefully" to customize your starting colonists. But play vanilla for your first 50 hours. Learn why things break. Then mod the hell out of it.

Q: "How do I deal with infestations?"
A: Infestations happen when you build into a mountain. The bugs spawn in deep darkness. The best defense is build your base in the open. If you must build in a mountain, build a room with only one entrance, fill it with wooden furniture, and set it on fire when bugs appear. The heat gets to 200°C and kills them. Or just don't build in a mountain. I build in open fields. Bugs can't spawn if there's no dark roof.