Hello,
I started playing the game and it’s awesome! However I don’t really understand how moving with the colony works. I found out that you can indeed move to other tiles, but it seems like it’s impossible to have 2 colonies then that trade with each other, after for e.g. telling half of the population to go and settle somewhere else. It seems like you can always only have one.
In this case what’s the point of progressing on one part of the map? In the end resources on that tile of the map are finite. What happens when I for e.g. harvest all stone that exists on my part of the map? How do I continue building? Or if I run out of building space, etc.?
If moving is the goal what’s the point here, because as far as I understood it’s not really possible to move all stored items etc. to another place, so at the end you always loose what you have build or farmed?
Probably the answer is simple but that’s the main point I didn’t have figured out about the game yet.
You can have multiple colonies - it’s a setting somewhere that defaults to 1, but you can change it during gameplay.
I think the main reasons for moving a whole colony are resources, environment and trade with NPCs, and it’s probably more an early-game thing. Harvest the good surface resources, move, and repeat until you’re close to a couple good towns. Late game, once you get the deep miner, there’s no limit to the materials you can mine, you can send pods to trade pretty long distances, and if you’re playing mech, you can probably clean up any pollution you create.
That sounds very interesting, thank you!
Be careful though, because you shouldn’t have many without affecting performance (by default it’s limited to 2 colonies).
Also abandoned colonies gets an icon in the map that don’t allow them to be colonized again, so you are leaving those coordinates unusable. This is for techinal and performance reasons.
I’ve only done this once because an ice age it while i was based in a tundra zone. It was early game and I had no trees left.
Other then that I don’t really see a point unless the ending your hoping to achieve requires it.
However, I recently got a mod the let’s me build roads on the world map. I’m considering the idea of building Secondary “forts” near enemy bases so I can seige them. I typically avoid offensives so it may be fun.
Honestly, I find it to be something of an undercooked feature, and hope that the world outside one’s home tile gets built up a bit in a future update.
You can settle new tiles for: Getting away from a threat that’s too big. Infestations are a common cause for this. Cheesing resources - You can quickly grab up all the gold and silver of a map before leaving and settling a new tile. Sell at neutral bases for shock lances, horses, and food. Tomb raiding - Crack open those ancient dangers to very quickly level up your weapons and armour, as well as a consistent source of prisoners and bionics.
So new tiles can trivialise the early game gearing up and recruiting process, and at this stage there’s basically no consequence to it, since each tile gives you some grace time to settle. To a lesser extent it trivialises the mid-game rush for steel, because why scan when you can go to one of the 6 adjacent tiles and load up a herd of muffalo?
So all in all I feel like settling new tiles is OP in a broken way, and I’d like to see some more consequences. Ideally, threats should be based on faction wealth, not colony wealth, and start appearing after game start, not tile settled, and some threat types should be able to chase your caravan on the world map.
Threat size relative to faction wealth would probably make the raids on fresh tile unplayable. The difficulty curve however would be a good thing to have drastically shortened, let’s say to a week instead of several years. So only on the first few days you’d have it relatively easy
I recommend you try going for the charlon whitestone existing ship ending, you should get the quest for it pretty early game. It involves a pretty lengthy trek across the planet then defending a ship as it powers up, which should give you a chance to mess with a nomadic base style that requires you to make progress travelling while harvesting and transporting enough resources to build defenses.
I’m pretty sure caravans (i.e. The ability to walk to other tiles) is vanilla. You can take colonists and animals and the more colonists and/or pack animals you have the more stuff you can bring along. It is definitely possible to have more than 1 base at a time. Usually having 2 bases means 2x the income. The ability to have more than 1 base can be disabled in settings so make sure that isn’t disabled. You definitely can exchange resources between bases using caravans or drop pods.
Running out of resources is just a thing that happens. You can steal resources by stealing them from other tiles but if you’re doing some serious resource intensive stuff in your playthrough vanilla is balanced to generally make that kind of thing be really slow and take forever. Human leather dusters, drugs and organ harvesting are all things you can do to sell for profit.
Things you can do to increase your maximum achievable rate of income include downloading a trade ship frequency mod and downloading (if using royalty dlc) a death acidifier removal mod so when the empire inevitably declares war on you after some important guy stubs his toe on your map tile and blames you for it, you can at least profit a little from it. There’s also a mod called phinix which allows you to trade resources with other rimworld players.
If late game grind is still running slower than molasses and you don’t like it that way, consider rimfactory. I don’t recommend this for new players since it changes the game a lot but for people that want that, it’s an option. It’s also complicated to learn.
You can create farming or mining colonies, if you need a lot of resources for whatever you’re building. Some people simply like the challenge of running multiple colonies at the same time
