RimWorld Beta 18 – A World of Story is released! Here’s the video (where I accidentally call it Alpha 18 – old habits die hard).

To get the update: If you’re on Steam, the game will update automatically. If you’re DRM-free, you can re-download from the same link you got the game from originally. It always has the latest version.

If you want to keep playing Alpha 17 on Steam: Right click RimWorld in the Library list -> Properties -> Betas -> Choose alpha17b from the drop-down menu.

It’s finally in Beta! This is build 0.18.1722 of RimWorld. That last number is the number of days since I first started working on RimWorld in February 2012. 1722 days – almost five years. It’s come a very long way since the first public look in September 2013. It’s time to start bringing it to a close, which is why version 0.18 is Beta 18 instead of Alpha 18.

The “Beta” designation means that we’re on the final stretch before the 1.0 release, and that there won’t be major content additions like whole new game systems. Of course we will almost certainly add more content, before the 1.0 release or after. We will also continue seeking feedback so we can fix those little bugs and design problems that only become apparent after tens or hundreds of hours of play. RimWorld has become an exceptionally complex game, and it takes a long time and a huge amount of play to understand how to improve it. So it’ll keep evolving for a while.

In any case, enjoy Beta 18. There is a lot of new stuff. See the features list below for details, and watch the video.

Compatibility: Saved games from non-modded Alpha 17 should still be loadable, though some things may change upon loading (e.g. characters may forget what they are doing; buildings may insta-deconstruct if they changed size and no longer fit, etc). Complex mods made for A17 won’t be usable and will need to be updated. Very simple mods may still load.

Rough features list:

New swamp biomes: Swamp biomes are hard to move through due to choking vegetation, and hard to build in due to swampy terrain. Many new plants were added to fill out these and other biomes. Tropical swamp Temperate swamp Cold bog

New incidents: Meteorite impact. A meteorite impacts, leaving a lump of mineable ore. Aurora. A beautiful aurora lights up the night sky, improving mood. Tornado Peace talks quest World refugee quest Prisoner rescue quest

Storyful combat: A major rework of melee combat, and a new way to report all combat interactions. Storyful combat generates a combat log that reports each blow, miss, swipe, block and fall in the combat. During or after a fight, you can review the combat log to see what happened, to generate a richer story.

Various research has been split up Gun research is now broken into several stages, so making advanced guns like assault rifles takes more research than making simple revolvers Melee weapon research is now broken into several stages

New furniture Bedroll: Portable bed Dresser: Passively improves room Endtable: Passive improves room Various new table sizes

New quest reward special items: Psychic emanator Vanometric power cell Infinite chemreactor Techprof subpersona core Healer mechanite superdose Resurrector mechanite superdose Orbital bombardment targeter Orbital power beam targeter

Tribal content upgrade: Ikwa melee weapon War mask Tribal headdress Recurve bow Tribal hunter Tribal heavy archer Tribal berserker

New world site components (used in various situations): Sleeping mechanoids Animal ambush Enemy ambush

New mental breaks: Insulting spree. Randomly go around and insult people. Targeted insulting spree. Follow around a specific other colonist, insulting them repeatedly. Tantrum. Go around randomly smashing furniture, buildings, and damageable items. Bedroom tantrum. Go to your own room and randomly smash furniture, buildings, and damageable items. Targeted tantrum. Go to destroy a single, specific, randomly-chosen, valuable item or building. Sadistic rage. Melee attack prisoners for a while. Fists only. Only occurs when there are prisoners to attack. Does not attack downed prisoners. Corpse obsession. Dig up a corpse and drop it on a meeting spot table or in a random high-traffic area. The mental break then ends. Catatonic. Collapse on the spot into a downed state with a psychological breakdown. Recover some days later. This can be implemented by a “catatonic breakdown” hediff. Jailbreaker. Colonist goes to a random prisoner (who is capable of prison breaking), and upon doing a special “spark jailbreak” action with them, induces an immediate prison break in that prisoner. Slaughterer. Slaughter random colony animal(s) periodically. Murderous rage. Hunt down a specific colonist or prisoner (randomly chosen) and attempt to kill them by melee attack. Uses melee weapon or fists, as equipped. Keep attacking until the target is dead. Run wild. The pawn basically starts acting like an animal. You can tame him to try to get him to rejoin.

New mental inspirations. Basically reverse mental breaks – these give temporary bonuses to colonists in high moods. Work frenzy (1 day): Global work speed 2.5x Go frenzy (1 day): Walk speed 1.5x Shoot frenzy (3 days): Shooting hit chance improved as though the pawn is 10 skill levels higher. Inspired trade Inspired recruitment Inspired surgery Inspired art

World features like lakes, mountain ranges, and bays are now detected and named. Names are displayed in the world view.

Caves now form sometimes in mountainous maps. Inside there are special cave plants. There can also be dormant insect hives.

Many new tale types were added. So, the game will record many new types of events, and colonists can make art about them. Art descriptions should be much more diverse.

Crop blights now appear and spread over time instead of instantly destroying crops

Spaceship is now bigger and has one more component, the sensor cluster

Spaceship quest ending phase: When going to the hidden space ship to finish the game, the game does not end instantly on arrival. The map generates with the ship intact. To take off, first you must power up the ship, which takes some days, during which you must survive raids.

Space ship construction now requires advanced components, which have their own tech tree and production method

Split pistol into revolver and autopistol

Boomalopes can be milked for chemfuel

Added chemfuel generator, which generates electricity from chemfuel

Artillery works differently now. There is one type of mortar, which can fire any type of shell, with each shell creating a different effect. The shells are explosive, incendiary, firefoam, and antigrain (a special high-tech warhead).

Seasonal latitudes: Seasons now more reasonably adjust depending on latitude. Instead of flipping at the equator, there is a seasonless crossover zone.

Redesigned alert letter types and sounds to be more specific.

Pawns can now be banished. This is analogous to abandoning pawns in caravans.

Technical: The save file now contains the actual contents of the planet map, instead of just the seed to generate it. This speed up loading, makes forward compatibility possible, and makes it technically possible to modify the world map during play.

Many many tunings, bugfixes, and redesigns.

EDIT (Nov 20): I forgot to mention another feature we added, which is queuing orders. You can now queue multiple orders for colonists. This was a ton of work to do because it forced us to separate the code that validates jobs from the code that initiates jobs, but should make many things much more convenient for players.