- Zoom in when selecting a starting site for finer-grained control.
- Look for a year-round growing season.
- Small hills might be ideal but each type of terrain has different pros and cons.
- Marble and granite are good stone types.
- Being close to a road is good.
- 275x275 (in "Advanced") cells is recommended by a Steam guide.
- Recommendation on starting colonists from r/RimWorld:
Usually one person who is good at shooting (5-6 or higher), good at growing/cooking (5 or higher), and a researcher/social/crafter (6 or higher) are my minimums. It doesn't make it exact so all Colonists will be the same every time. It leaves a level of randomness while keeping what is necessary in. You'll survive fine without perfect Colonists.
Also:
Cook who can grow, crafter who can med, constructor who is social. That's a good starting point imho. Nobody into drugs/pyro, all capable of violence and firefighting.
- A more recent perspective:
One person with high shooting, animals and cooking. One with mining, construction and crafting. One with plants, medicine, intellectual. Covers all your bases and gives each pawn a major task that they're good at, without overlapping the ones that take up a lot of time. Then usually I try to fill in the gaps with recruits/pod crashes/etc, and specialize the original colonists into single roles once I've got a few more pawns. I don't really start with xenos tbh, I'll fit them in as recruits later.
- Another perspective still:
TL;DR: Don't take cripples, the incapable or the criminally insane into your colony. Get a good constructor and a good planter, and don't have them be the same person. You'll also need someone with a good medical skill, but this can be anyone. Ideally, their other skills will also be alright, and the entire team will have a decent spread.
- Colonist age can be an important consideration, with younger colonists somewhat preferable.
- Other traits can be worked with but "Pyromaniac" is NOT OK.
- There are a few "Incapable of" traits that should be avoided.
- There are apparently skill caps that can only be broken by being passionate for a given skill. Additionally skills "rust" once over 10.
- Being good at "Plants" and "Construction" at the same time is kinda useless.
- Some initial supplies may be scattered away from the main crash site. (At least in that story mode.)
- A room with a 12x12 interior is the largest possible without needing roof support (but 11x11 offers better symmetry).
- Start more or less in the center.
- Create an indoor stockpile ASAP to prevent deterioration of goods stored outdoors.
- Stockpiles can have priorities associated with them.
- Look for "Rich soil".
- 100 tiles for an initial growing area is adequate.
- Cutting trees in the way is apparently automatic.
- Double-click an item to select all visible items of that type.
- Shift+Click a work task to increment the priority by one for all colonists; Shift+Right-click to decrement.
- Basic tasks can actually be quite important.
- Haul should actually be set at 4.
- Clean should be at 4 too (when it's finally necessary).
- Temporary changes in work priorities can be very useful.
- A colonist can be selected and then you can right-click a task to attempt to carry it out immediately. If that can't be done, there is useful diagnostic info.
- Smith, Tailor, Art and Craft should only be done by the most skilled colonists.
- Passageways between buildings should be at least three tiles wide.
- Leave a 6x6 zone free around steam geysers.
- Colonists want to eat at a proper table.
- Tables need chairs.
- Plant Cotton and Healroot early in the game. (50 tiles initially, then increasing to 100.)
- Q and E rotate the thing you want to build.
- Build both a Horseshoes Pin and a Chess Table early. (Chess Tables also require chairs.)
- For the freezer room, build two coolers, one set to -6°C and the other one degree higher to ensure consistent below-freezing temperatures and reduced load on the power grid.
- Running conduits through walls is ideal as colonists find them ugly.
- Rotting corpses can be barred from stockpiles.
- "Do until you have X" with three times the number of colonists works OK for cooking bills.
- Fuck it, I'm putting my stove in the freezer area.
- Reducing the number of doors in the freezer reduces the frequency of opening it and letting in all the hot air.
- Forbidding doors is a possibility.
- Multiple cooling and/or heating units may be needed for a given room.
- Caravans can be formed to explore the world.
- Selecting a colonist and right-click a workstation to direct them there. A message will appear explaining why the task can't be carried out if that is the case.
- Mine steel and other important minerals from formations on the map. Any given formation will likely have more than one resource.
- Rescuing people requires an open bed.
- Tame animals need places to sleep.
- Tame animals can be trained.
- Plants can be harvested and animals hunted for an early source of food.
- For hunting to be useful, a stockpile must accept corpses and a butcher's workstation needs to be given orders.
- Ensure an ample supply of wood for power generation etc.
- Animals will attack doors if a colonist is seen moving through them, as well as inactive turrets.
- Use rice as the first food crop then switch to something that will be more productive.
- Light sources are important.
- Medical beds are useful in treatment.
- Medical beds can't be used for regular colonist purposes.
- "As said above, a battery explodes if exposed to [rain]. A bzzzzt is a random event just somewhere on wiring circuit. So a split grid means separate power generators to separate rooms. So instead of say four windmills and twelve solars with eight batteries on one line connecting all, you split it up into four sets, powering four different sections of the base without any connecting, except perhaps an off switch."
- Be careful when deconstructing buildings because they can collapse on colonists.
- Set brewery to make wort until you have a small amount like 25.
- Pets will consume beer and easily drink themselves to death. Use the Animal tab to set where they can go (and be aware that they still need to be fed).
- Be VERY careful when selecting crop fields and setting their production that you don't apply the same setting to others nearby.
- Putting shelves or other storage spaces near beer production can help speed things up when specialized for hops, wort and beer.
- Wort has to be refrigerated though!
- Bowler hats seem like a pretty decent way of making money from cloth.
- Shelves give a more vertical element to storage and make more efficient use of space.
- Shelves seem to take away from more general storage areas even when latter areas allow said items. (Which is good.) (It's because they have "Preferred" priority by default.)
- "An effective tool for ensuring that only quality garments from a tailoring bench are retained is to set your colonists to only wear clothes above a certain quality level using the 'Assign' tab. This way, you can ensure they only wear the best clothes, and you can leave the inferior quality clothes to sell."
- Colonists won't pick up items if storage room doesn't exist.
- You really might want to forbid steel from being used in sculptures to be traded later until there is a steady supply of steel.
- Comms consoles should be under a roof.
- Use stockpile priority to make trade goods available to a beacon.
- Build more than one beacon if necessary.
- Beacons need access to silver to buy things!
- If a storage room is full, click twice to interface with it.
- Schedule, Assign etc. can be used for more advanced colonist management.
- Select a colonist and right-click a task to ensure that it gets done pronto.
- Medical procedures can be scheduled by going into a colonist's Health then using the Operations tab.
- Columns are needed to hold up the roofs of larger buildings.
- It's best to interact with traders using pawns with high Social. (Traders have a blinking question mark above their heads.)
- Ctrl-Click also works for operations like harvesting.
- Allies bring more caravans.
- Dirt and raw meat look similar in your inventory. Be careful!
- Make sure you're not cooking fine meals or higher grade if ingredients aren't diverse enough.
- Colonists will tend to optimize clothing automatically but the choices can be altered in Assign.
- Appropriate food is needed to tame animals.
- Ways to avoid fire:
- Breaking up buildings into separate ones
- Using less flammable material
- Firebreaks (e.g. concrete floor three or four strips wide)
- Building out the roof area and cutting all plants under it.
- Wardens need to take care of prisoners.
- Hover mouse over shooting target after selecting shooter to see accuracy.
- Drugs can be burned if causing an issue.
- Ctrl and Shift can be used to increment or decrement the number of times an order is to be carried out at a workstation 10 and 100 times respectively.
- Friendly fire never occurs when allies are close.
- Hunting animals with "boom" in their name can be dangerous.
- Once a shuttle is loaded for a quest, send it immediately.
- Ruins can be deconstructed for valuable resources.
- Animals have to be assigned trainers to be trained and this requires proper food for the type of animal.
- A workstation needs to be not busy if it is to be deconstructed.
- Healers need to enable self-tend explicitly.
- Gold can be found in some rock deposits.
- Colonists can become jealous of others' accommodations.
- Food storage near cooking facilities in addition to letting cooked food drop rather than be taken to the storage area can greatly improve the efficiency of cooking.
- In fact you should put a storage area specifically for cooked food very close to where it is prepared. Even AT the stove if you're going to use the drop on the floor technique.
- Use a colonist with high Social to interact with traders.
- Undraft everyone after combat.
- Batteries are a good first research item.
- Chairs make workstations more efficient.
- Meditation time can be set in Schedule, and psyfocus for psykers can be set individually.
- Psykers require meditation sites specific to their focus. See here: https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/294100/view/2241050403490947258
- Books, which can be stored in bookcases, can be used to enhance colonist efficiency.
- Hostility response modes can be set in the "Assign" menu.
- Allowed areas can be created and assigned in the "Schedule" tab and can be used to do things like preventing colonists from going outside.
- Making allies will increase the number of traders that come.
- Apparel settings can be made in the "Assign tab.
- Stockpiling lots of valuable resources invites raids.
- Devilstrand is maybe not as profitable as cotton but makes for good defensive gear for colonists. Cotton also requires more labor.
- Selling raw devilstrand might be a good idea.
- Some tamed animals such as dogs can be trained to do useful tasks.
- Make the butcher's table separate from the kitchen due to its dirtiness.
- As new trade goods are created, don't forget to put them in areas where they can be accessed for the purposes of orbital trade.
- x4 orders reduce the amount of time running to get ingredients.
- Make vegetarian simple meals to reserve meat for pemmican.
- A two-square stockpile continuously stocked with kibble can greatly increase the capacity of an animal pen. (Or even just one-square.)
- That didn't actually work very well. What seems to be even better is raising hay then using shelves to feed the animals. (The shelves prevent deterioration of the hay.)