So you picked up the little indie gem known as Rimworld?

Rimworld is a super-sim style game (simulate everything).  Your task is to control a group (i.e. tribe) of colonists as they try to survive on a “Rimworld” with a possible end-goal of building a ship to escape.

In the world of Rimworld, faster-than-light travel doesn’t exist, so as humanity spread out, the galactic core became a more viable region of space to settle and colonize since the stars are close together and travel times in cryosleep are short. The highest tech of these Coreworlds are called “Glitterworlds”, which are, high-tech utopias. “Urbworlds” are massive, densely populated worlds.  Humanity devolves just as often as it progresses and as you travel outward from these Coreworlds, the distance between stars gets farther and farther apart, extending travel times in cryosleep longer and longer, even into the hundreds of years.  Colonies established on these far away “Rimworlds” become isolated, and when problems arise, either through natural or man-made origins, help and support typically arrives decades too late if it arrives at all. It’s not uncommon to find compressed steel, compacted machinery, and even lost, ancient chambers potentially filled with thousand-year old horrors buried in the mountains of Rimworlds which have devolved from some earlier state of glory.  You won’t be alone, as there will be other humans stuck on the Rimworld with you.  Many devolved to primitive tribes, though Rimworlds are also home to lawless pirate and raider bands.

Rimworld as a game is still under active development and additionally has a healthy modding community.  This guide is specifically from the Alpha 17 version of the game.  It’s a step-by-step first-time run-thru to get yourself established in the game and learning how to build a productive and stable colony.  It also contains tips, techniques and advice that I find work pretty well when the game throws a curveball at you.  Even on the easiest settings, Rimworld can be brutal for new players learning the mechanics of the game. It’s known to kick you when you’re down, and badly handled events can send your colony into a downward spiral that’s hard to pull out of.  I’ve seen healthy colonies devolve into cannibalism because an animal attack caught everyone off guard and two colonists ended up dead and a third losing both arms.  Hopefully, this guild helps.

First-time Playthrough

Start a new colony.  Choose the Crashlanded scenario with 3 colonists.  Choose Cassandra as your AI storyteller on “Some challenge” difficulty.  Leave the map settings as they are and Generate.  For your location, find a temperate forest with some hills or mountains… mountains are nice, mining is a good thing and setting up in a mountain pass has a lot of advantages for defense.  The latest version of the game adds roads and rivers.  Roads add a bit of an advantage if you’re planning to set up a caravan or run a world mission, both of which I strongly suggest you avoid for your first playthrough.  River can be a defensive/choke-point natural structure but it’s a bit of a gamble.  Unless you want thye river flowing through your map, there’s really no reason to pick a sector with one.

Colonist selection is important.  Don’t be afraid to re-roll a lot.  You’re going to want someone good at medicine, cooking, growing, and construction.  Make absolutely sure you have a colonist who has a “growing” skill of 8 or better or you won’t be ably to grow some critical crops in the game.  Shooting, social, research and crafting should be the next important.  Watch out for red-flag traits like pyromaniac, volatile, hates (gender) or abrasive.  Life will be hard at first.  You don’t need them snapping and burning your place down.   It’s critical your first three colonists work well together.  Having a flame on any skill is a bonus.  Make sure they can all do things like hauling and firefighting.  Make sure they all do not have “Incapable of violence” in their traits.  Rimworld is no place for pacifists, especially with your starting three colonists.  You’ll need to do a lot of that with your first three.

When the game starts and your colonists crash land, pause immediately.

Items in the game, when outside of your “home” area, are marked as “forbidden” to your colonists and need to be marked unforbidden for them to go collect and use.  While it may not seem to make sense at first, as the game progresses, you’ll understand why it does this.  You can’t have your colonists blindly running off across the map to retrieve cargo pods when a manhunter pack of wild boars are on the loose.  Forbidden items have a small, red “x” on them.

Unforbid all the materials around you, especially the food.  Go around the map, unforbid everything you see that is locked.  There will most likely be more food laying around on the map.  Find it and unforbid it.  Click Architect and Zones and drag a stockpile area somewhere nearby, 4×5 or so is good, but don’t make it too large.  Tell your colonists to first rush across the map and collect any far away food by clicking on a colonist, then right-clicking on the food and telling them to make hauling it a priority.  The longer it sits out there, the higher chance it’ll be eaten by one of the many animals roaming around… and they WILL eat it.  First get the food in the stockpile, then everything else.

Build 4 walls and a door around this stockpile with your wood.  Don’t worry about beds or anything else yet, just get all your starting supplies secured within four walls and a roof.  The steel laying around the map can wait a bit, but the longer it’s in the elements, the more it’ll degrade.

The “Work” tab shows the jobs your colonists can and can’t do.  I recommend immediately switching to “Manual” priorities so you can place numbers 1-4 in the slots, or blank them out if you want to forbid it.  For now, set all your colonist’s “Hauling” job priority to “1” and your best Construction worker to Construction of “1”.

Go around the map again, make sure you didn’t miss anything.  Unpause and let everyone get to work.

Next, make each of your colonists equip a weapon.  If you have any brawlers or guys with crazy high melee skills, give them knife, otherwise, give it to the colonist who’s the worst shot. The colonist with the highest shooting skill, give them the pistol, which is fast but less damaging, less accurate with a shorter range – but deadly with a good shot due to that speed.  The colonist with the next highest, give the rifle since it’s more accurate, more damaging and has a longer range – they’ll need all the help they can get to hit something.

Scout around the map to find a good location for a base.  You need an area large enough for building – even if it’s into the side of a mountain.  You need an outside area for several growing fields (six 7×7 plots or there about is what I like to use) plus area for several solar power collectors and if you have any animals, area for them to roam and graze that is NOT your fields (more on this later).  Ideally, you want as few entrances as possible so you can wall them up or set up proper kill-boxes.  Ideally, you also want an area with one or more steam geysers.  These become valuable perma-power later in the game.

When you’ve found an area you think will do the trick and everything that was laying around the map is secured in that little shack you built, head over to it and build a small house.  You want a 4×4 or better area to migrate your starting stockpile to, and a larger area, like a 9×7 that’ll be a community area for now.  At this point, just build walls, roofs and doors.  When you have that set, put a stockpile in the smaller room and change it’s priority to “preferred”.  Your colonists will automatically start moving things over.

Build 3 beds in the larger room and a battery.  The first night, don’t worry if the colonists sleep under the stars.

Build a solar panel or two outside and connect them to the battery with conduit.  You can build conduits through walls.

Make 6 grow-zones.  As I said before, 7×7 is a good size.  Set the crops for each to: potatoes, rice, corn, strawberries, healroot and cotton.

Build a small sandbag wall in facing outward in each direction from your area  Five blocks long will work for now.

Build an in-wall cooler to that stock-room with the blue-side facing in.  Make sure your conduit is long enough to reach it, if not, extend it through the walls.  When it’s built, set the temperature to below freezing.  The cold won’t harm the other junk in there, but it’ll keep perishables cold.

Build an electric stove and a butchery bench.  Maybe not the first couple days since you have nothing to cook yet.

You probably started with a pet.  It’s your decision now if you want Frisky/Fido on the menu.  Cats automatically kill mice and small critters.  Bigger dogs can be trained for haul and rescue.  Regardless, a living pet needs food too.

Make a “dump zone”.  Not too far away though it can be outside your “walls” if space is tight.  Fairly big, like 9×9.  Have it hold chunks and dead animals that are rotting only.

There’s probably some wild healroot and raspberries around your area, might as well harvest them.  You don’t need to waste your good medicine on minor bumps and bruises this way.  Keep an eye on what everyone’s medicine allowance is.  It starts off set to “allow up to the most expensive Glitterworld medicines” which means, if you have Glitterworld medicine laying around and Bob-the-colonist gets a boo-boo fighting a squirrel, you can kiss that expensive medicine goodbye.  Set everyone’s medicine limit to “herbal medicine” unless something serious happens, then change it on a case-by-case basis.  This keeps your good medicines for treating the colonists that got eight bullet holes and a napalm bath from fighting raiders.

Build a large table and several dining room chairs.  Build an electric lamp for your main room.

Next several days, build everybody a proper bedroom.  3×3 should work and keep them happy, though I shoot for 4×4 to get a bonus.  Move the beds into them as you build them or if you have the lumber, build all double-beds.  Double beds are more comfortable, and eventually, some colonists may start shacking-up thus saving you space.

You’re going to need a ton of lumber in the early game, but rather than clearing the trees within your defensible borders, clean-cut all the trees outward from those sandbag walls.  You don’t want anything for the enemy to hide behind and want to take nice, clear shots at them as they come running at you.  It’s always a good idea to have extra lumber in reserve for fast building.  Polish off those new rooms with some nice wood flooring.

Make a bill for simple meals that is “until you have 15” – Enter details
Check “Pause when satisfied”
Set “Unpause at: 5”
Make a bill for butchering animals “do forever”

Build a 3×5 room and build or move those three beds to it.  This is a prison cell.  Set the beds for prisoner use.

Optional but highly recommended, build another 3×5 room exactly as the last.  This will be your starter infirmary.  Set the beds in it to medical use.   Put a small stockpile in it.  Clear all items and set it to only stockpile the three types of medicine.  Set priority to Critical.  This will move all your medicine to the hospital for fast use.  In a pinch, you can convert bedrooms or your prison to a hospital ward, but when things get ugly, you’ll wish you had this room.

If you see any nearby compressed steel or components on the map, send out colonists to mine it.  Don’t go overboard, just take a layer at a time.  Components will generally always be in short supply.  When you get the opportunity to trade, take whatever they have available unless you have more than 50 if you can afford it.

Build an electric tailoring bench and start making parkas for winter as a top priority.  One for each colonist plus one (just in case).  When you finish with those, make the same number of cowboy hats, pants, button down shirts and dusters in that order.

You should take the time to make some enjoyable things for your colonists to relieve stress.  Build a steel horseshoes pin and a chessboard and two stools.  Hold off on the pool table for now.

When the first raid happens, it’ll probably be a single guy with a club.  Enlist all your colonists, line them up behind the sandbags facing the direction he’s coming from and gun his punk-ass down.  Take the club to sell to the next caravan.  Drag his body to your far away dump.  Don’t bother stripping the clothes off him, it’s not worth the hit to wear dead man’s clothes.  If you don’t manage to kill him, examine him and see if he’s worth taking prisoner.  If they have worthwhile stats and don’t have any serious red-flag attributes (pyromaniac, lazy, slowpoke, unable to perform several types of labor, psychically hypersensitive, volatile, etc… use your judgement) and if you didn’t blow off any limbs (check the medical tab) then you have your first prisoner!  Capture him, give him medical care and on his Prisoner tab, set it to “chat and recruit”.  Also set it so you’ll use medicine to heal him.  Eventually, they’ll come around and join you, but you can check your recruitment chances in the Prisoner tab.  Some prisoners have a much higher change to recruit than others. If you get tired of them, you can always harvest their organs and sell them into slavery in the next pirate caravan.

Set up a second enclosed stockpile, larger – 6×8 is a nice size.  Set it so it holds everything EXCEPT food, plant products (like smokeweed, hops, etc), chunks, animal corpses and human corpses (only mechanoid ones).   In the food section, allow it to hold “fertilized eggs”, so when you do have animals that lay eggs, they don’t get eaten by other animals or refrigerated by your colonists.

For your original stockpile, change it so only food, plant products and non-rotting animal corpses are placed in it.  Untick “fertilized eggs” under Animal Products.  You don’t want to kill off all your potential food supply because your colonists were dumping them in the fridge.  If needed, expand it, and build an “airlock” to it which is a door, a space and another door.  This keeps the cold in better when people are running in and out of it.

Make another “dump zone”, put this one kinda far away, perhaps in a map corner if it’s not too far a run.  Clear all settings and only have this one hold human corpses.  This is where you will be hauling dead raiders since corpses make your colonists depressed.  Out of sight and out of mind.  Eventually, you’ll replace this with an electric crematorium or follow my advice for raiders and butcher them up for cheap animal feed.

Build a stone-cutting bench and start turning chunks into blocks.  Set a bill to “until you have 150” for at least one type.   Also, it should be time to build a research station to start getting tech upgrades.

Time to set up some “Area” zones.  The game starts you with “Home” which is automatic based on where you build and is generally pretty serviceable.  It also makes an “Area 1” and “Animal Area 1”.  Go into the Area Manager.  Rename “Area 1” to “Indoors” and “Animal Area 1” to “Animal Outdoors”.  Then, go into the Construction menu, and into zoning, and toward the end, are where you can define these zones.  For “Indoors”, paint all your indoor areas.

The “Animal Outdoors” one is a little more special.  Paint all the area around the outside of your base within your fortress limits (i.e. up to your sandbag barriers), then make sure to de-select all your grow-zones, or your animals will help themselves to your plants as they’re growing.  Eventually, you’ll want to make a barn for your animals if you have any, especially before winter.  Make another stockpile, a small one, like 2×1 or 2×2.  Clear it out and only checkmark “kibble” and “hay”.  Everything can eat kibble.  Make a Bill at the butchery to “until you have 50” kibble and give it priority before the butcher animal one.  If you ever start receiving messages your animals are starving, time to either increase that number or butcher some animals.

A note about animals.  Some animals are way more useful than others.  Camels, Alpacas, Muffalos and Megasloths all grow wool which can be made into warm clothes, comfy chairs, and soft animal beds.  Most of these animals and cows can also be milked.  Chickens lay eggs.  Chickens take some maintenance.  At first, you’ll probably get a Rooster and a Hen.  Have the hen lay fertilized eggs until you get around 6-8, then kill the Rooster.  One of those chicks will be male (most likely) and will become your next rooster.  Keep them all alive (just in case some get killed growing up) and when the Hen starts dropping fertilized eggs again, have some tasty chicken soup.  Keep building your number of Hens until you get about six adults all laying eggs for you, with periods in between where roosters grow up and you can kill off the Roosters and old Hens when the chicks reach adulthood.

Most other animals are somewhat useless except as a cheap source of food.  If you get a Boomrat or Boomalope, be careful.  Having these critters around can make things go sour fast, though if you train them to charge the enemy, you essentially have mobile bombs, and you may even be able to recover the carcass after if it doesn’t burn up in the process.  A note on training.  Only train and tame animals when you have food in reserve.  Never train during the winter when you can’t replace it by growing more.

Create a fire-break.  If the whole region catches a wildfire, you don’t want everything you’ve built burned up, so make a line of “floor” tiles that are nonburnable such as stone or concrete.  Wooden walls and floors, and especially carpet are highly flammable and a fire breaking out inside a base build from these can quickly get out of control.  You only need 1-wide, but don’t do diagonals, make it continuous in the cardinal directions (zig-zag).  Use concrete (if you have the steel for it) or a cheap stone.  Natural stone ground won’t burn so you’re safe there.  Make sure all your entrances have a fire-break set up.  Additionally, you’ll want to wall-off your colony’s enterance points to help with defense in the near future.  If made out of stone or steel, this also serves as an excellent fire-break.

When pods happen, go to them, unforbid their contents and grab whatever they drop ASAP.  Dropped food gets eaten by wildlife and everything else deteriorates.

Might as well build some extra bedrooms now while you can and have the wood laying around.  You may already have another colonist or two at this point.

As summer approaches, chances are, a Heat Wave will strike.  Time to upgrade your power a bit.  Build a room or small shed for your batteries and move them over to there. It also may be time to build a few more.  Three batteries will get you through your first winter and keep the heat on even if you had an eclipse that day killing your solar generators.  Build a few extra solar panels as well.  Build another in-wall cooler in your main room and keep the temperature at 70F/21C.  Build some “vents” between all your other rooms except your walk-in freezer.  You essentially want a good balance between “a cooler/heater for every room” and “one severely overworked cooler/heater for your entire base. In the fall, build an electric heater as well.  Check the temperature periodically.  If it’s still too hot or cold on the inside, build additional coolers and heaters.  Electric lights don’t cause fires, but they consume a lot of power.  It’s not a bad idea to skip lights for the bedrooms at first because your colonists typically won’t be in them for anything other than sleeping.

Expand and harvest until winter.  You want a sizable stockpile to last through it.  If your food stockpile starts becoming full from your harvests, increase the amount of pre-packaged meals you create.  Trade for supplies as needed.  Some items like art, spare weapons, spare clothing and drugs like smokeleaf joints, beer or harder things can sell for a pretty penny and earn you some good silver in the early game.  Decide if you want to grow the plants that yield these.  Be careful around your colonists with recreational drugs.  While beer and weed is fun to have around and adds joy, some colonists go overboard and start binging on them.  The only way to control them afterward before they get addicted is to totally remove it from your base.  If they get addicted, the only way to clean them up is to go dry for a very long time and have them irritable the whole time.

Upgrade defenses.  Build stone walls around your perimeter with multiple doors in and out.  Build a “kill area”.  Have a zig-zagging hallway with sandbags or stone chunks every other space to slow down and space out enemies.  Have the end of the hall lead to an open shooting gallery with defenses all around.  This gives your colonists time to get into position and makes them come at you single-file with no defensive cover.  Eventually, you’ll want to make these areas “kill boxes” with turrets on the sides, a field of sandbags the enemy has to climb over, and a heavy shield on the far end with comfy chairs behind that your colonists can relax and wait in.  Nothing like entering a no-man’s land with a dozen angry colonists with machine guns relaxing in lounge chairs waiting to plug your body with a few thousand chunks of lead.

By now, you’ve probably seen friendly-fire can be a dangerous thing, especially to anyone with a melee weapon.  At your line of sandbags, put melee fighters up front against the bags, and ranged shooters directly behind them.  When in close proximity, the ranged shooters will effectively shoot over the shoulders of the brawlers in front, and the brawlers serve as a deadly shield for any raiders and animals that make it to them.

When winter finally hits, you should have a pretty good stockpile of food for your colonists and livestock.  You should have heaters set up and turned on.  Be sure to turn off the power to all your air conditioners except for the one attached to your freezer.  I typically switch them off mid fall and turn on the heat when winter hits.  You should have a serviceable barn for any livestock you have.  Days during the winter should be spent hunting to augment your food supply.  Make statues to add happiness and have objects to sell to traders.  Make extra clothing such as cowboy hats, pants, button down shirts and parkas.  Perhaps even some weapons such as assault rifles if you haven’t scavenged some good gear off raiders yet.

If you last through winter without starving, congrats!  Keep going and growing your colony until you build a ship to get off that rock!

Interesting Items

When trading with caravans and trade ships, some hot commodities you want to keep an eye out for:

• Components – they’re already rare.  Keep a stockpile of them.
• Medicine – Always useful to have the good stuff around.
• Uranium – it’s rare to find and even rarer for traders to have it, so when you see it, buy it.  You’ll need a lot late-late game to build the power core and engines of your ship to get you off the Rimworld.
• Psychic Insanity Lance – Awesome to stop sappers, especially when you zap the guy with the grenades or molotovs.
• Psychic Shock Lance – Useful when you’re being raided and there’s that one perfect raider who has the perfect skillset/stats for your colony.  Zap him before his friends throw themselves onto your killbox and take him prisoner for some applied Stockholm Syndrome.
• Neurotrainers – Give quick skill boosts, rare to find.
• Organs, Bionics – Also, always handy to have some around for when someone gets a limb blown off.
• Psychic Animal Pulsar – The awesome-button.  This thing is so deadly and dangerous to use.  All animals, including your livestock and pets if any go hostile.  If you have one of these, and are walled in tight with no animals around, this will end large raids quickly.  You just need to wait out the aftermath.

Events

Finishing off this guide is a list of various bad events that can happen and tips on how to handle them.

Raiders

What to do with all the bodies that are piling up?  If your defenses are working well for you, the large, angry tribe of a dozen and a half primitives armed with bows, pila and clubs just got decimated by six guys with automatic rifles and a trio of turrets.  As you’ve probably found out, even the sight of a dead body gives a negative mood effect to a colonists.  The quick way to dispose of them is with an electric crematorium.  This gives no further negative mood and is pretty fast.  There are alternatives though if you’re not squeamish.

If you have a lot of livestock, you need to feed them as well and that means making a lot of kibble.  Kibble doesn’t spoil so you can make warehouses of the stuff.  Kibble takes 20 animal product and 20 vegetable product to grind out 50, which makes it fairly economical for feeding animals.  Of the vegetables to use, hay is considered viable for making kibble and you get a LOT of hay per harvest which makes it extremely worthwhile to grow, especially if you use chopped raider as the meat portion.  Butchering up a dead human will give all your colonists a mood penalty, but this is a one-time penalty, opposed to harvesting organs or selling into slavery which grows for each instance.  The colonist doing the butchering will gain one additional mood penalty because they’re the one doing the butchering unless of course they’re a cannibal or psychopath. The penalty isn’t that bad though and the amount of meat even one body produces is huge, let alone a dozen or more.  The trick is, I have my butchering table set up with the following bills in order:

1. Butcher corpse – Do Forever – Only non-colonist humanoid corpses
2. Make Kibble – Do Forever – Use only human meat and Hay
3. Make Kibble – Do Forever – Use only human meat and any vegetable
4. Make Kibble – Until you have 150 – Use anything
5. Butcher corpse – Do forever – Only animal corpses

This works because every start of work, it looks down the list in order and sees if the criteria for the bill can be filled.  First, it’ll see if there are any dead raiders and chop them all up.  You don’t want dead bodies laying around giving everyone daily mood penalties, so get it all done while the corpses are still fresh.  Next, it’ll see if it can make kibble from human meat and hay, which is almost free animal feed.    It’ll do this regardless of how much you have, which is good to get all the meat out of your freezer and into a non-perishable form.  The third one is just to finish off the human meat into kibble if you happen to run out of hay.  The fourth one will make kibble with normal animal products, only if the total amount of kibble is less than 150 units (adjust based on your amount of livestock) and finally, an order to butcher all animal corpses.  It should be noted that animals don’t care if they eat Soylant-green kibble and neither do your colonists.

Likewise, if you really desperate, you can also cook the human meat into meals for your colonists.  It should be noted that this will give you all a very large mood penalty and is enough to send a whole colony off the deep end unless you’re seriously making them happy with joy-producing items.  Unless you’re playing with all cannibals or psychopaths, avoid it if you can.

Live raiders are always worth saving.  If their personality and stats are worthwhile (and you didn’t blow off half their limbs), you almost certainly will want to convert them.  As mentioned earlier, having a psychic shock lance laying around for those “perfect” raiders you want to convert is worth it.  If you heal them up and let them go, you may receive a good-will bonus from the enemy faction, which can eventually lead to them no longer attacking you (I think the last faction, the pirates who are always enemies of everyone are always hostile no matter what).  If you can spare the colony mood hit for the next couple days, you can sell the prisoners into slavery to the next pirate or slaver caravan or ship to come by.  This typically nets you $800 silver which isn’t bad.  You’ll take a cumulative hit for each slave sold though.  If you can really afford a hit, or you just need some emergency supplies laying around, you can harvest their organs. Single kidneys and lungs can be removed and not cause the death of the prisoner (unless your surgeon botches the job).  Each harvest adds a cumulative mood penalty to your whole group.  Combined with selling what’s left of the slave off can tank your colonist’s mood pretty quickly so be careful.  Organs are very valuable though and are not only nice to have on hand to replace one destroyed by a raider or wild animal, but can also be sold for a good amount. Even if you’re trying to keep on the moral high-road, I recommend the occasional organ harvest to keep your colony healthy.

There are one other type of raider in the game, and that’s Mechanoids.  These killer robots come in smaller packs than the human raiders but are generally more heavily armed and deadlier.  The tactics typically work the same.  Additionally, it helps to arm some colonists with EMP grenades when you can to give you a good edge in battle.  The sight of dead mechanoids gives no mood penalty.  A dead mechanoid can be dismantled at a machinist’s workbench for very valuable plasteel and components.  A disabled Mechanoid can be “deactivated” from it’s surgery menu.  A disabled Scyther Mechanoid can have its blade arms surgically removed as well, and these are good money when sold to exotic traders.  Harvest all the Scyther blades you can.  In a pinch, if you have a colonist lose a hand in battle, you can implant the blade in it’s place.  It won’t help manipulation (manual operations still take twice as long) but it’s a permanent melee weapon.  If you like using animals to attack things, you can even implant the blades onto your animals to make them cybernetic killing machines.

Sieges

When a Siege raid happens, I immediately gather up all my colonists and head out to meet them.  by spreading out in a long line and creeping up to where they’re setting up early before they’ve built much of anything, I’ve typically managed to sniper-kill some targets of opportunity which brings the others forward into my skirmish line.  I’ve rarely had a loss doing this.

Sappers

The bane of all late-game raiders.  They go right up to areas you thought nobody would attack and then proceed to burrow or blast through 12 layers of wall even though there’s an open path directly to your base just off to the side through your killbox.  Sappers ignore most funneling.  I built an incendiary mortar to set fire to the region they attack from and if I have several layer thick walls, I’ll hide incendiary IEDs and granite pitfall traps in between the layers.  Psychic insanity lance on the guy holding the grenades works amazingly well and well worth burning it.  Barring that, going on the offensive works well, especially if you can slip out a bunch of snipers from another exit and attack them off-sides.

Killer Animals

For small animals, especially single ones, send out one or two colonists to finish them off, or wait for them to come through your kill-box.  For bigger animals, if you’re sending out colonists, send out a larger group.  Manhunter packs can be deadly from overwhelming numbers, even for a killbox, but the killbox is the best defense for quickly taking these packs out.  Huge packs like two dozen wild boars, will overwhelm even a good killbox unless you use a lot of explosives in the process and don’t mind some reconstruction.  If you don’t think you have enough manpower or firepower, it’s best to have everyone just wait it out indoors.

Infestation

This one sucks hard.  Infestations only happen when you build under mountains.  The chance of their spawn increases the deeper you go.  A new “trick” is to build a honeypot room with a long hallway leading to it deep within the mountain.  Cover the floor with carpet or wood and put in an item of furniture such as a stool or some wooden walls to “seed” it since infestations only happen when you have something built in the vicinity.  Keep it dark.  Bugs like dark and increases the chances they’ll spawn there and not anywhere else.  Finally, make a “foyer” area between the hallway and the room, about 3 blocks wide and 6-10 deep.  Make sure this foyer area is floored in wood or carpet and tile it with colonist or animal “sleeping areas”, which the bugs won’t spawn on.  Seal off the room by building multiple stone doors down the hallway and marking them as forbidden.  When infestation strikes and it happens in this room, send in a single colonist with a molotov cocktail.  Open the door to the foyer, and manually throw it in on the carpet, then get back out and re-forbid the doors.  The fire will spread rapidly and increase the temperature in the room to deadly levels.  At some point, the bugs will try to break their way out and they might make it a door or two, but the fire should rapidly kill them.  Clean up, rebuild, reset.

Toxic Ship/Psychic Ship

These crashed objects are filled with Mechanoids.  First thing you want to do is equip all your EMP and high explosive weapons like grenades.  Next, mark the whole area where it came down as “Home” so your colonists extinguish the fires – it’s not fun to fight in the middle of a raging wildfires.  When the fires are almost out, recruit any colonists not on site to get them out there and when the fires are out, recruit them all. There have been a couple strategies for dealing with these but from what I can tell they all come from earlier versions of the game and none work anymore, so about the best you can hope for is a rapid, high-power concentrated open assault.  Surround the ship and spread out your colonists.  you don’t want them too close to each other due to Caterpillars using napalm launchers and Gatling guns. If there is nearby cover, use it.  Save your game at this point.  If you don’t feel like playing ironman or hardcore, and everything goes sideways, you can always reload back to this point.

Select the colonist with the weakest weapon and tell him to shoot at the ship.  Go to slow-speed and wait for the Mechanoids to pop out.  You did this because colonists have a delay between shots.  If everyone shot at once, you’d all be waiting for the Mechanoids to return fire before shooting again.  Immediately pause again and now, tell every colonist specifically which Mechanoid to target.  They’re all deadly… Scythers are really amazing at blowing off limbs with perfect charged lance shots and Caterpillars are great at wrecking mass-havoc.  Your target is the mechanoids, not the ship at this point.  If you need to reposition colonists to get a clear shot, do it.  Hopefully, when all is done, you didn’t lose anyone or get anyone maimed.  Unrecruit any injured colonists and any that are too good for hauling and let them go home, or carry back any incapacitated wounded.  Harvest any Scyther blades and deactivate any remaining Mechanoids while you have the remainder of your guys finish off the ship from a safe angle so your doctor doesn’t get caught in the crossfire.  Keep an eye at the wounded back at base and make sure someone there is attending to them so they don’t bleed out.  When the ship is destroyed, unrecruit everyone and have them all haul back Mechanoid bodies for disassembly, blades and the steel and silver from the ship.

You have time with this one since you activate it yourself.  If you’re getting too hurt, try again and back off your colonists.  Maybe even dot a couple sandbags or shields around the area so you have better cover.   You have time for construction.

Disease

Keep your colonists in bed and put up with it until they’re immune.  Use the good medicines to keep bad diseases at bay long enough to get the immunity.  Once immune, the levels will quickly reverse and the disease will disappear.  Be prompt with treatment.  Every hour untreated, the disease can grow quickly.  For the diseases it’s designed to prevent, administer Penoxycyline to your colonists.  This typically gives themm a large boost toward immunity.

Toxic Fallout

Basically, during toxic fallout, everything not inside takes toxic buildup damage until they die.  Being inside slowly reverses toxic buildup damage.  This goes for your colonists and every creature on the map.  Success means creative use of zoning.  First, if you have livestock, they should have a barn.   If they don’t, then you’ll need to either move them into the house with you or slaughter them and save them the suffering.  You need to make an animal zone called something like Animal Barn or Animal Indoors that mark all indoor areas your animals are allowed to be.  You should already have an Indoors zone for your colonists.  Make sure it’s updated.  If you have a lot of independent buildings, now would be a good time to burn up some of that lumber in your stockpile and connect them all with hallways.

Limiting exposure is the key to survival.  I find it best to treat Toxic Fallout like a strange winter.  Switch everyone to indoors.  If you have things sitting outside to haul, put your best haulers on unrestricted and manually prioritize that they go haul it in.  Switch them back to indoors afterward.  Watch your crops, when you notice a patch ready to harvest, prioritize Grow and Haul and unrestrict your colonists so they can get to work.  With everyone working, they should make short work of the field and replant it.  Manually tell colonists to haul leftover items.  When it’s done, back to indoors.  A day or two in, start checking the map for animals that are either dying or freshly dead from the fallout.  Mark any dying ones as hunt-able, unrestricted the dead ones, unrestricted some colonists and send them out to manually go grab them.  Think of it as free food.

Every three days, unrestricted your adult animals so they can graze.  Infants and juvenile ones, as well as smaller animals will succumb to the fallout much faster than large ones like Megasloths and Muffalos.  This will extend your food further.   Do a checkup on your colonists and make sure nobody is reaching moderate or higher toxic exposure.  If they are, prefer them to remain indoors while you send others out to do necessary work.  By the tail end of the fallout, all creatures on the map will be dead and nothing but bones.  Even moderate rationing of your exposure should make this event easily passable.

Volcanic Winter

A season-plus of near darkness.  This really hurts if it happens during the winter and puts further limits on your grazing and food options.  You may want to create a new animal zone called Animal Graze Extended or something and make it like your Animal Outdoors one but with an extended roaming area outside your base region.  Conserve power.  If you don’t have non-solar power, you may want to build a wind turbine or fuel generator.  Build a cheap base in front of and behind the wind generator to keep it tree-free and productive.   Aside from “more power”, make sure all but essential lights, heating/cooling, and workstations are powered.  Become a power miser and remember all those times your parents berated you for leaving lights and appliances on.

Likewise, if you have any hydroponics going, you want to make sure your new power balance can support it.  When they lose power, your plants rapidly die.  If you can support them, then you have a good emergency source of food that’ll last you through it.  Remember, while you can make a simple meal with 10 meat, it takes both meat and vegetables to make kibble. Animals eating your simple meals will deplete your food reserves fast.  Volcanic winter lasts a long time usually but while light and growth is at a premium, it’s not impossible.  If you’re going through more food than you’d like, it might be time to slaughter some of your livestock.

Caravan Requests, Stockpiles, and other “World” Events

New to the latest build will be requests and adventures requiring you to form a caravan and have a portion of your colonists leave home, travel across the world to some location and return.  My best advice on these is don’t.  Caravans are tricky and require a lot of preparation.  I don’t recommend them on your first play-through.  Stay home.  Stay safe.  Learn the game before you split your colony in two for the majority of a season and send them ill-equipped across the map.  You’ll know when you’re ready to try your first caravan.