This review originally ran in PC Gamer UK issue 326 in December 2018. 

The best games are masters of illusion, making you believe a bunch of code and scripted behaviours are somehow real worlds or great stories. Even a game that's explicitly driven by values and numbers, abstract in its presentation, has to convince you that what you're watching unfold is an organic ecosystem. RimWorld aims to create complex drama from its systems, but as close as it sometimes gets, the illusion never quite takes hold. 

RimWorld is a game about establishing a colony on a remote planet sometime in the distant future. There's a whole Western vibe, resulting in a sort of Firefly-esque setting. It's a life simulator, a genre about a more hand-off approach to strategy and management, where you manipulate AI behaviour instead of controlling it directly. RimWorld sits somewhere between The Sims and Dungeon Keeper, though its presentation and style are reminiscent of games like Prison Architect. It's a story generator, promising to co-author all manner of wild tales for players. 

This isn't about creating the perfect colony, this is about creating drama. This means things going wrong, that the unexpected has to occur and that your characters have complicated motivations. They're given drives and needs, ones that are often extremely unhelpful to the mission but which are intended to make them more complex and rounded. Go in wanting to build a perfect little colony and you'll likely be frustrated. Accept the game's penchant for disaster and you'll have a much better time.

It's your colonists that are the main drive behind the game. When you begin a scenario you have to select your team (or individual, if you're going for the harder challenge) and they'll be generated with a load of traits and backgrounds. Some are helpful skills, like hunting or teaching, and some of which are simply there to inject personality—flaws and all. Old wounds, traumatic upbringings and bad attitudes… specific qualities to make sure your colonists are far from perfect little worker bees. 

There's a lot of promise in the ideas these characters bring to the table. In my first game, I had a colonist who, chronologically, was 114 years old, but, thanks to the weird complications of space travel, was really only 24. The son she'd left behind was now approaching his fifties. His daughter, her granddaughter, was now 31. RimWorld pitches itself as a story generator and these weird relationships are exactly the thing that fires up the imagination.

There are some peculiar aspects to this approach to character generation, though. Each character gets three traits, things like obsessive, lazy or misogynist. One of the modifiers is "gay" but "straight" isn't—that's just the default, which is painfully heteronormative and outdated for a game about the far flung future. Other aspects of queerness are included but in equally reductive ways, like a character's backstory discussing that they're transgender, proof of which being their “dressing up in their mother's clothes as a child”. All of which leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. It feels odd to have some traits sat alongside each other. "Misogyny" next to "ugly", "hard working" next to "psychopath". These things are not alike but are placed in the character generator with equal importance. [Editor's note: some of RimWorld's backstories were created by Kickstarter backers.] 

While the system gives you vivid images of characters like the ruthless bounty hunter who’s lazy and a vegetarian, in the end, they all interact in slight variations of the same way. They don’t speak, in text or otherwise, and so the facets of their identity are declared in a character sheet that's fed to you through a drip feed of tiny updates. “John talked about hunting with Bob”. It’s hardly stirring stuff and does nothing to make your colonists feel like much more than worker drones. 

It points to the main issue with the game's approach to character, which is to treat people as the sum of a few parts. It's not unreasonable that a game of this scale needs to have a simple system to generate its characters, and the end result is that while you have AI that behaves in interesting ways, they never quite feel like real people. As long as you're able to look past that and just enjoy the odd behaviour of these robotic colonists, there's fun to be had with RimWorld's unique sandbox.

Once you're down on the ground it's all a matter of laying out tasks for your colonists. You don't get to take control so must instead lay down blueprints and zones, stack up tasks for them to complete. The UI is a bit lacking to be honest. It's fine after enough time but far from intuitive and full of irksome inconsistencies like being being able to mass select some objects but not others. Going through an entire field of potato plants to order each of them to be harvested is the kind of busy work that feels needless.

This is largely the boring bit. The real fun stuff happens once you've got a competent colony running and can begin to watch your colonists deal with all manner of scenarios, building relationships with each other and then falling out. Rivalries develop, in-fighting can happen and that's all before you take into account all the external factors. External factors like a random faction sending a hunter to my colony with apparently the sole purpose of murdering my dog (naturally, we had him shot on sight). The longer you survive, the more bizarre the events become. Mind-controlling drones and mythical beasts all show up, to steer your little colony in radical new directions. RimWorld thrives when it's at its most unpredictable, never letting you get too comfortable. 

To manage all this potential chaos though is an AI storyteller, similar to the Director in Left 4 Dead, that analyses your game and, based on how things are proceeding, it conjures up suitable events. There are three storytellers to choose from with varying difficulty levels, so you can tailor the game to the kind of story you want to have. This ranges from a completely laid back experience where dangerous events scarcely occur, all the way up to a whirlwind of terror that never ends. While obviously you'll want to start on the milder end of the spectrum, it won't be long before you'll want a scenario where events happen at a much more rapid rate because in RimWorld, there is a lot of busy work. 

Waiting for your colonists to build or explore is what the vast majority of your time with the game amounts to, especially in the early hours. You'll have the game on fast forward as much as you can just to get through the tedium of each day. Things become more complex and varied the longer a colony survives, but even still, so much waiting around occurs. In that dullness, you can't help but begin to see the gears and cogs in the machine. Interesting things happen, but when the characters themselves already feel so artificial they rarely take on the life required to make me believe in the stories unfolding. I'm not watching a drama, but the chaos of a petri dish. Which isn't to say RimWorld doesn't have its moments or there isn't fun in its attempt to tell engaging stories, but it doesn't entirely live up to its promise. 

After five and a half years of development, Ludeon Studios has released the 1.0 version of its colony management game Rimworld. 

You can watch a trailer for it above—the latest version is "mostly the same" as beta version 19, save for lots of bug fixes and a food restriction system that lets you manage what your colonists and prisoners can eat.

If you've never played before, then Rimworld tasks you with building a new colony in the far future, starting with the three survivors of a starship crash. It's a dense, deep game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and it simulates ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, your colonists' mental state, and more. 

It's full of detail: a character's background will change how they act, and wounds or infections are tracked for individual body parts, which each one affecting the capacity of a colonist. 

Ludeon describes it as a "story generator", and where you land on the planet—desert, jungles, forests, snowy tundra—will have a huge impact on your journey.

The Steam user reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and Steven had a blast when he played through a custom scenario in 2016. There are a ton of mods available in the Steam Workshop.

After five and a half years, Ludeon Studios will finally release the 1.0 version of RimWorld on October 17th. Originally scheduled for much earlier this year, version 1.0 saw delays based on what the developer called “the 90/10 principle, where the first 90% of development takes 90% of the time, and the final 10% takes another 90% of the time.” The developer has not committed to further updates for the game other than supporting fan translations and a bug-fixing patch. However, the announcement post does say that they can think of “a variety of interesting directions to go with the game.”

Here’s what’s in the update:

“1.0 is mostly the same as Beta 19, with a lot of bugfixes. The only significant new feature is a new food restriction system that allows you to determine what your colonists and prisoners are allowed to eat.”

RimWorld is a survival or colony management game set in a far future where players manage a burgeoning colony of starship crash survivors. Beta 19, released in late August, added a handful of changes including bridges, water mills, a message history, and a slew of new and murderous automated turrets. It also added a survival gauntlet to the end game spaceship escape event, requiring heavy defenses and a large weapons stockpile to make it through.

You can read the full details, including what to do with all your mods, on the Ludeon website. 

Back in November, RimWorld mastermind Tynan Sylvester declared the colony sim as in its "final stretch" of development. Now, the creator has confirmed Ludeon Studios is working towards version 1.0, and is "furiously refining the hell out of this thing" along the way.

That's according to this Reddit post, wherein Sylvester explains at length why implementing every player-made suggestion is unfeasible. Here, he also explores some of what Ludeon is currently working on ahead of full release. 

The game's interface is in the process of being heavily redesigned, says Sylvester, as is balance measures for caravans. A new watermill power generator and accompanying underwater power cables allow rivers to be "meaningfully playable", while mod loading has been improved substantially. 

The economy for trading animals has also been redesigned, as have the animals themselves. "I reworked the doctor AI so they'll prioritize tending people differently," adds Sylvester, "and not go to get food while someone's bleeding to death."

Sylvester's thoughts can be read in full here, where he also considers how long he's likely to grow RimWorld in the face of an "endless treadmill of requests."  

After listing the above and more, he continues: "That's just some random stuff off the top of my head. We made hundreds of other changes wrought by watching dozens of hours of play videos and reading thousand of suggestions. There are so many things to refine in a game like this; it's almost unbelievable! Still working on it. Oh yeah, the most critical change of them all: Sheriff backstory is no longer ridiculously awful."

Browse the rest of our RimWorld coverage in this direction.  

Sci-fi colony sim RimWorld's latest update finally brings the game into beta, adding features big and small. Alongside three new biomes and a revamped melee combat system is a chance for your colonists to go on a "targeted insulting spree" if they have a mental breakdown, where they "follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly". Excellent stuff.

The new additions come in the Beta 18 update, which signals that the game is in its final stretch of development, and there won't be any "major content additions" before a 1.0 release.

The big changes include three new swamp biomes filled with plants, a handful of new 'incidents'—including tornadoes and meteor strikes—and a rework of melee combat. A new combat log will chronicle each strike, miss and block so you can review it after the action.

But the minor changes interest me more. The beta adds a lot of 'mental breaks' including the aforementioned barrage of insults, bedroom tantrums, corpse obsessions (colonists dig up a random corpse and drop it in a high-traffic area) and murderous rages.

It also adds new mental inspirations, basically the opposite of mental breaks. A colonist might work extra hard for a day, walk extra fast or shoot more accurately.

The full list of changes is here, and you can watch the developer go into more details on the changes in the video above.

Most patch notes are boring. Fixed a bug that stopped a menu from opening properly. D.Va's Defense Matrix doesn't last as long. Wukong's attack speed is 10 percent slower. That's the usual stuff, chronicling important but dull balance changes across years of a game's life. And then there are patch notes like this: "Added cat butchery." "Made all undead respectful of one another." "Tigerman does not have ears."

That's the good stuff.

Those are the kinds of wonderfully crazy patch notes Dwarf Fortress has given us over the years. Determined to top the absurdity of Dwarf Fortress's bizarre changelogs, I put on my deerstalker, grabbed my magnifying glass, and set out to find the strangest patch notes in the history of PC gaming. These absurdities are the result. 

Rimworld

Alpha 12

• Colonists will visit graves of dead colonists for a joy activity. 

Alpha 16

• New alert: Unhappy nudity 

Alpha 17

• Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors. 

---

Conan Exiles

Patch 15.2.2017

• Rhinos should no longer try to walk through players 

Patch 15.2.2017

• Emus now give less XP 

Patch 23.02.2017

• Players can no longer use chairs to travel great distances 

Update 24

• Imps, ostriches and other non-humanoids no longer go bonkers if you hit them with a truncheon 

Update 25

• Seeing dead people can now lead to great rewards 

Update 28

• Fixed a small issue where a player in some instances could walk underwater. 

--- 

Rust

Update 149

• Bucket no longer hostile to peacekeepers 

Update 152

• Pumpkins only have 1 season (instead of 7) 

August 28, 2014

• Bald inmate digging grows hair bug fixed 

---  

Terraria

1.2.0.2

• The game will no longer look for the square root of zero. 

1.2.1

• Mice can no longer spawn in hell 

1.2.3

• Red Stucco no longer spreads corruption. 

---  

The Sims 4

02/04/2016

• Sims carving pumpkins or working at a woodworking table will no longer ignore Sims who die near them. 

02/04/2016

• Babies will no longer send text messages congratulating your Sims on their marriage, engagement, or pregnancy. 

01/12/2017

• Confident children will no longer get a whim to practice pick-up lines. 

05/25/2017

• Babies will no longer change skin tone when they are picked up. 

---  

Don't Starve

January 29th 2013

• Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin. 

October 1st 2013

• You can no longer trade with sleeping pigs. 

November 19th 2013

• You can properly deploy or murder captured butterflies 

---  

Ark: Survival Evolved

254.9

• Beers can no longer be eaten by Dinos 

---  

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

1.2

• Taking items from dead owned creatures is no longer a crime 

--- 

World of Warcraft

1.3.0

• The quest NPC Khan Jehn no longer becomes confused and unresponsive 

1.4.0

• Roast Raptor now has an more appropriate inventory sound 

2.1.0

• Fixed an error where some characters appeared to be drinking while standing up 

2.4.0

• Zapetta will no longer become confused about whether the zeppelin in Orgrimmar is arriving or leaving 

3.1.0

• Yaaarrrr! now has a detailed tooltip 

--- 

Uplink

1.314 

• Fixed : Dead or jailed people don't answer their phones 

1.35 

• Fixed : LAN Spoof progress graphic overflow 
• Fixed : Time freezing and unclickable buttons on computers running for several weeks

--- 

Everquest

July 10, 2001 

• Reevaluated the values of the various fish fillets 

--- 

August 15, 2001 

• The Giant Tree Flayer is now Large instead of Tiny 

December 6, 2001 

• Fixed a bug that was preventing characters from being bald 

--- 

Two Worlds 2

1.4

• Horse behaviour - improved 

--- 

Battlefield 1942

1.2 

• Bots do not jump in and out of vehicles anymore 

--- 

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

1.02 

• Dead party members will no longer show up later in the game. What with thembeing dead and all 

--- 

Black and White

1.1 

• The word "Death" no longer said when villagers die of old age
• Creature doesn't become constipated if you punish him for pooing 

--- 

No One Lives Forever 2

1.3 

• Fixed problems with camera rotation after slipping on a banana 

--- 

Hitman: Codename 47

Patch 1 

• Dancer in "Gunrunner's Paradise" is no longer confused by dead bodies 

Whether it be herding clans of cannibals, getting blind drunk and setting colonies on fire, or sampling its vast array of user-made mods—RimWorld is brimming with weird and whacky story opportunities. Its latest update has now arrived—Alpha 16 Wanderlust—which adds a spherical world and the option to travel with "multiple caravans."

Which means the game's world map has been remodelled with newly generated mountain ranges, hill clusters and continents. The time of day is now tied to the planet view and time zones are modelled out of necessity. Factions are now able to occupy multiple bases across multiple simultaneous maps—"for example, you can have your colony running as well, as a group of soldiers attacking an enemy base, at the same time". 

Wanderlust is a pretty exhaustive update, with which Ludeon Studios' Tynan Sylvester goes into detail below. 

The Wanderlust's extensive list of changes, tweaks and adjustments—including a slew of bug fixes—can be viewed here, however one other particular highlight is RimWorld's new 'Travel' victory ending. "A friendly person offers a ship, but it is distant, across the world map," explains a Steam update post. "If you travel there, you can escape the planet and complete the game. But, travelling there will take a long time and you'll need to stop at various points to build up supplies or solve problems."

While your game should update automatically, Ludeon notes the Alpha 16 update will break game saves as a result of its huge structural changes. If you wish to continue an old save you'll want to change the 'alpha 15' beta branch on Steam by selecting the Betas tab in the Properties menu. You can switch back to the default branch from there at will.

From Diablo's Tristram to the Horned Reaper's chambers in Dungeon Keeper, homes in games take many strange forms. Dishonored gives you a pub, and Assassin's Creed Syndicate gives you a train, but few homes are as good as the ones you can build yourself.

In this respect the Sims is surely king. It's a series dedicated to everyday aspiration, in which you give your little people better jobs, bigger homes and a stable existence in the sun-drenched suburbs of a fictional town. You can manufacture some family drama, but the buildings are always clean, and the lawns are always immaculate a vision of the American dream lifted from soap opera sets.

I love it. I've heard the Sims criticised for being a game about consumerism, but the consumerist 'buy stuff to get more stuff' reward loop is so deeply baked into games that it's a relief to see it expressed nakedly in this everyday context. Besides, the rat race aspect of The Sims is just background noise. It offers some gentle sense of progression while you get on with the important business of building a nest, and here The Sims shares multiple traits with home-building systems across many genres.

Number one: boxing out space. Rimworld, Dungeon Keeper, Minecraft and so many other games provide the alluring notion that space can be segmented and controlled. In a survival game context this creates a sense of safety, of course, but there's more to it a sense of imposing order on someone else's system. Absurdly, it's the feeling of stealing away the game from the designer and making it yours.

Number two: player-controlled clutter. We have claimed our cubes of game real estate, and now that space reflects us somehow. Through ownership we are now invested, and personal pride is now a factor. It's time to express our organisational power by placing some gosh darn furniture. The furniture must be correctly rotated and placed in an orderly fashion, of course, even in apocalyptic nightmare scenarios such as Rimworld. Clutter matters, and it must be ours to control. This is one of the reasons Fallout 4's base-building systems don't feel as good as others. There is clutter in the building spaces that can't be cleared without help from a mod.

Number three: visitors. Now you've got a place, you've got to show it off. The visitors don't even have to be human for this to be fun. Terraria, The Sims, Rimworld all have NPCs wandering through your place. In Dungeon Keeper some creatures won't even show up unless your dungeon meets their standards.

That makes games such as Minecraft and the sadly departed Star Wars: Galaxies standout cases. These games let your friends come over and admire your handiwork. Great customisation systems are essential the more sweet faux pine Ikea-esque flatpack furniture the better but it all means less if you can't open up your front door and play the host.

RimWorld bills itself as a sci fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller and while the former is what makes it tick, the latter is what makes the game so interesting. Everyone has their own story to tell be it getting drunk and razing the world to the ground, or forming a clan of flesh-hungry cannibals which is why Jecrell s H.P. Lovecraft Storyteller mod looks super interesting.

In this mod, Lovecraft will be added to your list of storytellers, reads the creator s description. In Lovecraft's tales, protagonists often face their own mortality and insignificance in the universe. Threats to your colony and its sanity will be constant. Can your colony survive a cosmic horror tale?

If my RimWorld experience is anything to go by, I m fairly certain the answer to that question will be a resounding no which is essentially why I want to try it. Those of you who re familiar with RimWorld will appreciate that no matter how skilled you think you are, or how well you think you've prepared, failure stalks every turn. Those of you who aren t, well, good luck, you ll need it.

Should you wish to up the Lovecraftian levels further still, Jecrell s Steam Workshop page boasts a few other mods, one of which is the Call of Cthulhu Cosmic Horrors Monster Pack that adds Lovecraftian monsters to your game. There is a lingering fear that strokes the hairs on the back of the necks of your colonists, reads its description. Something terrible is coming, and there is little time to prepare. Cosmic horrors are already upon us. Yikes.

Subscribe to Jecrell's mods via their Steam Workshop page. If you fancy checking out some more, we've gathered some of the best RimWorld mods here.

Thanks, Kotaku.

People who own RimWorld can now better learn how to play RimWorld with the aid of a "rich" new tutorial system. The tutorial "teaches the basics of setting up a game, building a small self-sustaining colony, and defeating the first raider", and that sounds like enough to get you started with the colony sim.

Alpha 15 of the early access sandbox story game also whacks in a drugs system, letting your colonists dose up in order to improve their performance or mood (there are of course downsides, including addiction and blood toxicity/death). It's a massive, enormo-update, and if you don't fancy reading the entire list, here's a handy video summing up the main additions: