The release of RimWorld – Royalty has been a great success! Thanks to everyone who’s bought it so far, the testers and translators, modders, streamers and video makers.

I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about what to expect next. In the past I’ve rarely written about the future because release dates and game designs often change unexpectedly during development. I can’t tell you how many times in the past I had a firm expectation of some development outcome that was totally wrong in the end. Not talking about the future avoided the risk that something would change and people would get angry because they perceive some promise to have been broken. Talking less also allowed me to focus on making the game great instead of spending time managing public expectations.

Now, though, I think it’s time to give a bit more info of what to expect to to help people in the community make their own decisions and to help modders be ready for what’s coming next.

Hotfixes

We had some great testers play 1.1/Royalty in testing since September to help find issues, but with a game this complex, increasing the number of players by thousands will always reveal new issues. We’ve released a few hotfixes for issues that have cropped up, and we’re going to release more as needed. These should be compatible with savegames and mods.

We’ll hotfix as long as we need to to solve the noticeable bugs that are interfering with players’ enjoyment of the game, but I am hoping this phase will be done in a week or two

Royalty content add-on

We’re going to release a content add-on mostly focused on expanding Royalty content. It’ll be compatible with savegames and we’re going to try hard not to do anything to disturb mods either (which should be feasible if we stick to just adding new things).

With a huge amount of feedback available from the community, we’re in a better position than ever to find the best ways to improve the game, but the process is still iterative. So it’s not yet decided exactly what the content add-on will contain. Below is a list of things I’m considering, but I’ll emphasize that none of this is decided 100% so please don’t take any of these are promises. These are just concepts we’re looking at:

A way to renounce or otherwise get rid of a royal title you don’t want.

More bulk production recipes similar to cooking, for things like drugs.

Additional combat psycasts: I’ve got designs written for a few psycasts that seem like they could add a lot of interest. Testing will reveal how beneficial these actually are.

A new element or two for mech clusters. Specifically, I’m looking at ways to to make it sometimes optimal for players to *not* fight a mech cluster for a long period of time, and instead leave it sleeping. The dramatic tension of having a mech cluster present on the map, but not yet fighting it, seems valuable. So, if we can find more ways to have players intentionally keep clusters around it could add a lot of interest to play stories. This needs gameplay testing, of course.

Additional quest content: This one is definitely in the ‘maybe’ category, but quests are very expandable and it would be nice to have a few more variations.

We’ll be running public tests of this stuff as we work on it, on Steam’s ‘unstable’ development branch. Everyone is welcome to participate and feedback will be highly appreciated as always, but be aware that this branch is called ‘unstable’ for a reason and everything may break at any moment.

Later updates

We will be updating the game further after the content add-on. While the content add-on will stay on version 1.1 and generally not break mods, there will a version 1.2 some day, nd it will have more breaking changes. We’re going to try hard to avoid unnecessary code breakages and keep documents about changes for all future updates, and without such a big Unity update I hope mods in general will be easier or trivially easy to update than the 1.0 -> 1.1 shift. However, things will still inevitably need updating.

That’s it for now, thanks everyone for reading and for all the excellent feedback we’ve recieved!

-Ty