Rimworld: The Worst Generation (a diary)

11th of Decembrary - 15th of Decembrary 5514.

I'm happy for them, but I don't think we'll have time for a marriage.

We got a quest to call down and destroy a mech cluster, and I decided to accept it. Not to fight it and get the quest rewards, but I'm happy to have it sitting there outside the walls, as it should destroy any humanoid enemies coming from the south-east.

I'm too slow to get the psykers out, so have to bring in everyone and have a skirmish outside. Not enough of them to be a serious threat, though.

I'm almost disappointed, I was expecting a much bigger difference from pushing up the threat scaling. Well, it's as high as it goes now. The frequency of raids is very high, but that's almost working in our favour with all the infighting.

Next we get a "too deep" infestation. We need granite bricks to repair walls and replace traps, so I've been deep drilling for rock chunks. It triggers bugs to burrow up now and then, but they're never very big infestations and certainly not a threat at this point. 

I keep forgetting to get the utility bots out of harm's way. As soon as a fight breaks out the cleaners and haulers come to tidy up the mess, and they have absolutely no sense of self-preservation.

Mech raid from multiple directions, but it's only scythers (melee only). A big raid, 100 in three groups, but much less scary than Centipedes. I'm sending Scotty to mess with one group, but there's honestly not much point trying to thin them out.

While the scythers are still preparing, the wookes are also back to seige us. We don't have time for this.

WE DON'T WANT ANY OF YOUR MORTAR SHELLS!

So, uh, that's what an orbital power beam targeter does. We've only got one in the whole playthrough.

They're dropping through the roof of the armoury. Our ten remaining doomsdays are stored in there, and they tend to go off catastrophically when damaged. There are about 80 high explosive shells stored by the mortars. A stray shot could set off the apocalypse. If they have grenades... 

I could maybe lure them out of there. But no, they will wreck everything, possibly setting off the explosives on their own. We'd lose the armoury, but also break the killbox, the mortar room and the pod launchers.

There's a few seconds between drop pods landing and opening, so I rush everyone in. We have to tie them up in melee as best we can, and we can't let our own pawns wildly spray bullets around either.

Phew, no frag grenades, just tox weapons and small arms. A berserk pulse, a little micromanaging to take out their automatic weapons, and then let the melee pawns off the leash to automatically engage whatever is closest.

While that's going on the scythers decide to attack, but they're scattered and easy to deal with.

I check the ship reactor.

One hour. I think...

It's done.

There are a few quick things I want to do before we leave. There's still that mech cluster outside, and we have a few fireworks we never got to use...

Prepare four invisible psykers.

Add two orbital bombardment targeters, one aerodrone salvo and two doomsday rocket launchers.

Stir for thirty seconds.

I set all the prisoners to be freed.

And the animals to be released to the wild.

It's time to go. 

(I recommend putting the sound on. There's a nice song.)

The End.

It ended up a much longer run than I expected. To anyone who came along: Thank you!

This is from the Numbers mod, sorted by kills. They're insane, or at least would have been insane the last time I played (a bit over two years ago). This is mainly due to the Biotech expansion.

Tasha is - by far - top on the murder ranking. Not a surprise given she was one of the initial three, has been on almost every raid, and shoots twice as fast due to her shooting specialist role. I wasn't expecting Chakotay at #2 since he's pure melee, but his damage is insane and he's also been on most raids.

This only counts direct kills though, not things like psycasts that make enemies kill each other. If that was counted, Wyll would easily be in the multiple thousands, and the other psykers would also shoot up the list.

Wyll's movement speed is absurd. The baseline is 4.6c/s and she's at 15.47. They're all faster than normal thanks to genes and bionics, but she gets extra speed from sanguophagy and doesn't have armour to slow her down. Her 525% psychic sensitivity is also bonkers.

Pawn value is mostly due to bionics and overall health. The baseline is $1750, Pansy is on top at $28,230.

Number of updates: 27 chapters, plus 5 other updates. There are two chapter nines because of a mislabeled folder.

Playtime: ~170 hours, though a lot of that is time with the game in the background or leaving it running while AFK. Maybe 100 hours of actual playing.

Each update took 1-2 hours for sorting and cropping screenshots, editing video, making gifs, uploading and writing them.

Manual screenshots taken: 2097

Jpg and gif files for use in the diary: 1034 (some didn't make it into the actual posts).

Automatic timelapse frames taken: 22,717 (only a few thousand stitched together into video and used).

Total folder size: 22,6GB.

This doesn't include most of the video recorded, as I was deleting them along the way.

It's the first time I've ever done something big like this for a game and it was very much by the seat of my pants. I enjoyed it all the way through, but there are definitely some things I would do differently with hindsight. More of a plan, both for the game and what to include, and most importantly edit myself the heck down. It turned out to be a much longer playthrough than expected.

I'm very happy some people stuck with it and read all my self-indulgent ramblings. Again, thanks!

First of all, I love this game. There aren't many that can offer anything like it, and it's much more pleasant to play than Dwarf Fortress.

This was a very "vanilla" playthrough, but there are lots of different ways you can play it. My last colony before this was a custom game I called "We Came and Ate Them"; a bunch of tribal cannibals with the backstory that their tribe had been wiped out by high tech raiders. My survivors were obsessed with acquiring the means to take revenge and my end game goal was to completely wipe out every pirate base. I had caravans of 10+ pawns that didn't return to base for years. They'd go through every biome - deserts, jungles, tundra, ice sheets - destroying every hostile base they came across. They were of course still cannibals, so at least food was never an issue...

With Biotech it might be fun to make a super low-tech game (like tribals with bows and arrows, or at most "cowboy tech") and letting everyone have as many kids as they like, just to see what would happen. I also didn't dig into the mech stuff, so the opposite - a super high tech colony with just 4-5 pawns and a mechanoid army doing most of the combat - could also be interesting.

Biotech does have the potential to make pawns ridiculously overpowered (which definitely happened towards the end of this game). With all the genetics stuff and how you can customise the children it's easy to eliminate or compensate for any weakness. That's cool, but it also takes away one of the interesting challenges of the game. I'll definitely look into ways of increasing difficulty or putting limits on tech/upgrades if I play it again in the future.

The Anomaly DLC was fun and offered the most intense moments of the game, but it's also the one I'd consider least essential. Unless you're playing a very specific colony (like an evil cult or something) the new mechanics don't fit as seamlessly with the rest of the game. The main events are fairly linear, and things that were weird and surprising wouldn't be as exciting a second time around.

I should mention the modding scene for this game: It's insane, both in scope and the dedication to keep mods alive and up to date. I didn't use anything super impactful this game, but there are huge mods that completely change the game (like Save Our Ship for example). In every case where I looked up a mod I'd used years ago they were either still maintained by the original author, or someone else had taken over and made a new version.