Colony simulators can be overwhelming. Games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld use migration as both a fuel and a pressure valve, delivering caravan after caravan of fresh colonists at regular intervals to ensure the centre of balance of your community is always tipping forwards. Space Haven, which is set not on the filthy ground but in that big empty boob we call space>, flip-turns the usual template upside down. You command a ship that quite literally is always moving forwards, resources are scavenged from passing derelict hulls, and fresh crew pilfered from other ships.

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The Dune-esque psychic warriors of RimWorld‘s Royalty expansion are great, but what if you want your spacewizards to not be dukes and lords but rather monks, hippies, or goths? The latest update has you covered. It revamps psychics by making them mediate to charge their wizardbrains, and different types of character will use different focuses. Sure, lords will still love their thrones and that, but maybe you’ll have a tribal lot who love a big psychic Avatar tree, a spooky wizard who mediates around graves, or other weird wizzes.

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Since colony sim RimWorld left early access at the start of the year, it hasn t changed. And that s fine. It can be hard to remember, when so many sandbox-type games are constantly having new content shovelled into them like coal into a furnace, that games sometimes just get finished. Still, when you re used to coming back to a game and falling in love with it all over again every time it gets new content, it can feel weirdly sad when the developer decides their work is done.

Nevertheless, I keep finding reasons to come back to RimWorld, and I want to share a few of them with you. Even without the cornucopia of bizarre mods available, the game offers a ludicrous potential for finding new ways to play. With your starting colonists, equipment, location and even game rules open to complete customisation, you can make it into whatever settlement management game your heart desires. Some gimmick playthroughs – for example, the dreaded Ice Sheet Challenge – are famous, but I ve got a few recipes of my own I think you ll enjoy. Here s five of them:

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RimWorld is a game of perfect catastrophe. Not simply a homage to Dwarf Fortress, or a skin graft of Prison Architect, it has spent five years of early access becoming its own simulation of farce, hopefulness and inevitable disaster. Today, it’s finally “done”. It starts as an opaque management game about the marooned survivors of a sci-fi shipwreck. But it quickly harnesses the darkness and humour of an absurd Yeatsian apocalypse. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, Landoa has raided the drug stash again. And through all this, what rough beast slouches toward your settlement in a manhunting rage?

Oh, it s a tortoise. It’s gonna take a while.

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Sci-fi colony simulator RimWorld is getting its official 1.0 release date on Wednesday 17th October, the developers announced today. The game s been in early access for five years, generating stories about crash-landed space explorers trying to survive and thrive on strange planets.

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The “Ah c’mon don’t pretend the possibility of cannibalism isn’t part of why you were interested in spacelife in the first place” colony simulator RimWorld has launched a big early access update focused on expanding the most important thing in life: being near water. Beta update 19 lets players build bridges and build light buildings atop them, and baselords can also build power-generating watermills and run power cables under rivers. Let us abandon this terrible landlife. The update also adds new turrets, lets you rename animals, and lets your beloved Cow spot get diseases. Happy days.

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Sci-fi colony catastrophe sim RimWorld is finally almost ready to leave early access and launch in full with a shiny version 1.0, creator Tynan Sylvester has said. It’s a game that one could keep adding to forever, he says, but after five years of development he’s ready to draw a line in the sand and call it ready. Sounds fair, really. He still plans to work on it, mind, but it will officially be finished. Additions and tweaks coming with v1.0 include reworking caravans, a water-driven power generator to make rivers useful, and improved loading times for mods. (more…)

RimWorld has left its awkward alpha stage, blossoming into a beta with update 18. It s called A World of Story, but the update really dabbles in everything, from crazy weather to orbital super weapons. Hitting beta also means that it s in the final stretch, says developer Tynan Sylvester, and there won t be any major new additions like entirely new systems before launch, though there will still be future updates.

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I’d quite happily write and read about Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld [official site] all day long. There might even be time to play them every now and again as well, though I’ve become accustomed to enjoying them vicariously, reading about other peoples’ virtual lives and escapades. A new RimWorld update arrived today and it’s a big one, changing the way that worlds are built and operate at a fundamental level. Simply put (and nothing about RimWorld is actually simple), worlds are now modeled as spheres, and you can travel across them, nomad style. Or warband style. Your call. … [visit site to read more]

Reed s having a bad day: her spaceship crashed, she s one of three survivors, and the other two won t stop hitting on her. Unfortunately for her, she s beautiful, which means that they re immediately enamoured with her; unfortunately for them, she s gay, which means the feeling is definitely not mutual. Her life is a constant hellish stream of corny pick-up lines and work for the colony.

RimWorld is a scifi colony management sim that seems to effortlessly weave dynamic stories around the player’s attempts to survive on an often harsh alien world, but when it comes to sexuality, romance and gender, it tells variations on this one story far too often. We dug into the code to find out why that is.

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