So I’ve been playing this ongoing game of Rimworld for a couple weeks now, and I had to share this story with you. The colony was nothing of great note, but it was solid. Good location, abundant resources, and a team of characters who could get stuff done. I’d been working to carve out rooms in a mountain, build up the infrastructure, set up a huge food chain with crops and hunting, and generally made my cast very happy. It eventually grew to nine colonists, all decked out with heavy submachine guns and a hearty outlook on life.
Cue an early winter day when two of my colonists get married. Everyone’s assembled in a bedroom for some reason, and the ceremony begins. Right at that point, something happens I’ve NEVER seen in this game to date, which is that I was raided via drop pods. These transport pods crash through the ceiling of the bedroom where everyone’s at, and six raiders emerge firing guns all willy nilly.
I’m trying not to panic — I was playing commitment mode, so no going back to an earlier save — and I tried to pull my pawns out of there and into one of the two security nests I’d set up with gun turrets. One of my guys gets killed during that retreat and a bunch others wounded. Then the raiders set a giant fire to the room in which they’re looting, gutting four rooms in total.
Eventually the raiders emerge — some ON FIRE — and are gunned down by my turrets and run away. But the damage is done. Half the base is on fire, and my guys are dropping like flies from wounds and burns. Out of the nine that I started with, only one is without any wounds. She drags a few people to one of the remaining beds to try to tend to them, but infections start setting in. Within a day, I’ve lost six colonists, with two more bedbound. It’s not good, but I can recover, right?
I almost just quit and restarted, but I do try to keep playing until there’s no colonists left, and that wasn’t the case yet. So I kept going.
My healthy colonist almost immediately snaps, partially because her husband was among those killed. She then tries to outright murder one of the surviving colonists, so I drag the other one from bed to arrest her and throw her into prison until she calms down and I can reform her.
By the next day, we’re out of prepared meals and nobody is available to cook. Half the power is out, the snow is blowing into the holes of the walls, and I have characters sleeping in rooms with piles of corpses because I haven’t had anyone available to bury them.
Day three, my prisoner/former colonist breaks out, grabs a gun lying on the ground, and goes nuts again. This time, she sets fire to the common room, which guts most of the other half of the base and kills another character.
I really thought it was over then, but the game threw me a lifeline — a Man in Black and a wandering nomad, both of whom join the colony. So I’m down to just three characters, but they’re clothed, they’re fed, they have heated bedrooms, and there’s more than enough food to last the winter. Now I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the bad events stay away long enough for us to repair and clean this mess…
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