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DLC Expansions

By ScotPublished Updated Sources checked

Tactical Quick Answer

RimWorld's major expansions are Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, and Odyssey, and each one changes how the colony plays. Royalty adds noble titles and psycasts, Ideology sets your colony's beliefs and rituals, Biotech adds children, genetics, and mechanitors, Anomaly turns the game into cosmic horror, and Odyssey adds gravships, five new biomes, landmarks, fishing, and over 40 animals. Do not turn them all on for a first playthrough. Learn the base game, then add them one at a time.

RimWorld has several major expansions that fundamentally change how the game is played. You do not need to buy all of them at once. In fact, turning them all on for your very first playthrough is a massive mistake. Learn the base game first, then add expansions one by one.

Here is what each expansion adds and how it changes your colony.

Royalty​

Royalty introduces the Empire, a hyper-advanced faction of space nobility descended from refugees who fled a calamity on Sophiamunda.

Core Features​

  • Titles and Honor: You earn honor by completing quests for the Empire. There are seven obtainable titles, not four: Freeholder, Novice, Acolyte, Knight or Dame, Praetor, Baron or Baroness, and Archon. Patch 1.5.4241 re-flavored the ladder, renaming Yeoman to Novice and Count to Archon, so Yeoman and Count are retired names for the same ranks.
  • Noble Needs: As pawns rank up they demand better bedrooms, throne rooms, and fine clothing. Work refusal applies only to conceited pawns, meaning Empire-born nobles and colonists with traits like greedy, jealous, or abrasive. Most noble colonists keep working normally. A conceited noble at Baron or above refuses skilled work too, including cooking, construction, smithing, tailoring, and crafting.
  • Psychic Powers: Titles grant psylink levels, which unlock psycasts. Real examples include Skip for teleporting allies, Stun, and Vertigo Pulse, which makes flesh creatures vomit. The item that grants a psylink is the psylink neuroformer, called a psychic amplifier only at Royalty's launch and renamed in patch 1.1.2647.
  • New Endgame: You can win by hosting the High Stellarch and surviving the raids that follow. It needs a pawn holding the Archon title first, so it sits at the very top of the ladder.
tip

You do not have to ally with the Empire. The Deserter quest is the route, and it pays out two psylink neuroformers. There is no broader betrayal questline beyond it, though you can also down or arrest a visiting bestower and take the two he carries.

Ideology​

Ideology changes the rules of what your colonists consider acceptable behavior. It is for players who want to heavily roleplay specific colony types, like undergrounder cannibals or tree-worshipping pacifists.

Core Features​

  • Belief Systems: You define your colony's memes and precepts. These dictate everything from what food they eat to how they handle executions.
  • Roles: Two roles are mandatory, the Leader, of which there is one across the whole game, and the Moral Guide, one per ideoligion. You can also define up to two specialist roles. Each grants unique abilities. They do not simply hand out mood buffs: role holders take a penalty for lacking role apparel and a larger one if the role is stripped, and Leaders carry expectations two levels higher than normal. The mood upside comes from the rituals the roles unlock. Role names are randomized per ideoligion, so yours may not be called Leader at all.
  • Rituals: Hold dance parties, drum parties, or gladiator duels to boost colony mood or trigger special events. Each is gated: the dance party is non-tribal only, the drum party is tribal only, and the gladiator duel needs one of the Pain is Virtue, Cannibal, Supremacist, or Raider memes.
  • Ritual Quality: The factors are per-ritual and not universal. Participant count feeds into almost all of them. Room impressiveness matters for only some, including dance and drum parties, cannibal feasts, and speeches, and is ignored entirely by funerals, gladiator duels, and executions. Where a speaker matters, the stat is Social Impact and not raw social skill, and it applies to leader speeches, throne speeches, and conversions. Most rituals have no speaker at all.
  • Relics: Embark on multi-stage quests to recover ancient artifacts revered by your ideology. Each relic chain runs five subquests before revealing the location, where the relic sits in a mechanoid-guarded reliquary.

Biotech​

Ludeon called Biotech their biggest expansion when it launched in 2022, back when only Royalty and Ideology existed. They have not restated that since Anomaly and Odyssey shipped, so treat it as a claim with a date on it and not a current ranking. It introduces children, genetics, and mechanoid control.

Core Features​

  • Children and Reproduction: Pawns can get pregnant and raise children. Growth moments at ages 7, 10, and 13 let you pick a trait and passions. Keeping the Learning need filled raises the growth tier, which widens how many options you are offered, but it does not steer which ones appear. Those are random, and no amount of putting a child on a particular job changes what comes up.
  • Xenotypes: You can extract genes and create your own custom xenotypes. You must balance genetic complexity limits and metabolic efficiency. Pair negative traits like high flammability with positive ones like fast healing to prevent your pawns from developing colony-ending hunger rates.
  • Mechanitors: Implant a mechlink into a pawn to let them build and command their own squad of mechanoids. Mechlinks are self-installed and pulled from dead ancient mechanitors and never crafted. You then generate and manage bandwidth to control larger swarms, and mechs left over your bandwidth limit go uncontrolled and eventually feral.
  • Pollution: Mechanoid infrastructure generates toxic wastepacks. Manage them or risk polluting your tile and triggering acidic smog, which cuts light, halves plant growth, drops mood, and accelerates item decay.

Anomaly​

Anomaly turns RimWorld into a cosmic horror game. It focuses on containment, study, and surviving eldritch threats.

Core Features​

  • The Monolith: Activating the dormant void monolith triggers the expansion's events, bringing darkness and unseen monsters to your map. If you pick the Ambient Horror setting the monolith never appears at all, and that endgame is off the table.
  • Containment: Capture entities onto holding platforms inside a containment room. Containment strength comes from wall and door hit points, lighting, bioferrite plate flooring, and inhibitors, and an unroofed room loses a large chunk of it. A bioferrite harvester attached to a platform extracts bioferrite, at the cost of some containment strength.
  • Sanity Threats: Colonists deal with the sightstealer, which stays psychically invisible until it closes, the revenant, which hypnotizes a new victim each night, the metalhorror, a parasite hiding inside a host body, and fleshbeasts erupting from the ground.
  • Ghouls: A ghoul infusion permanently converts a living colonist, prisoner, or slave into a ghoul under your control. They are not resurrected corpses, and that is what shamblers are. Ghouls make fine disposable front-line fighters, but they eat only raw meat and fresh corpses and turn on you permanently if you let them starve.

Odyssey​

Odyssey is a paid expansion, not a free update. It launched on the same day as the free 1.6 base-game update and the two are constantly confused, but everything below is behind the DLC. Despite the marketing leading with space, most of Odyssey's content is terrestrial.

Core Features​

  • Gravships: Build a ship around a grav engine and fly it to any tile in range, where landing on empty ground immediately founds a colony. Travel burns chemfuel, range scales with thruster count, and you extend it by collecting gravcores from crashlanded orbital platforms, insect-infested caves, and trapped reactors.
  • New Biomes: Five of them. The glowforest sits in permanent darkness where normal plants cannot grow and you live on fungi. The scarlands are ruined cities under constant toxic rain, patrolled by mechanoids and mutant animals. The grasslands are long-season farming country with strong winds for turbines, spoiled by droughts and brushfires. The glacial plains bring blizzards, mastodons, and scimitar cats. The lava fields send rivers of molten rock across the map in sudden bursts, drop volcanic debris from the sky, and fill the air with ash you need cloth masks to breathe through. You survive them by building barriers to divert lava, not by managing base cooling.
  • Landmarks: A map generation system that reshapes every playthrough, space or not, adding cliffs, chasms, crevasses, valleys, islands, archipelagos, atolls, peninsulas, fjords, abandoned colony buildings, and ancient structures to settle in or raid.
  • Over 40 New Animals: Tameable, trainable, tradeable, or edible, from mastodons and great wolves down to porcupines and hermit crabs. Animals now nuzzle colonists, dig, forage, and hunt, and a sentience catalyst makes even simple-minded creatures trainable. Odyssey also adds fishing.
  • Orbit: Fly the gravship up to land on collapsed orbital platforms, ore-rich asteroids, and hollowed-out satellites. Orbit is vacuum, so you need airtight metal walls, oxygen pumps, airlocks with vac barriers, and vac suits before you go. Expect no diplomacy up there: the salvagers are permanently hostile, and the rest is automated defenses and mechanoids.
  • New Weapons and Enemies: A unique weapon system that hands out one-off finds like a sawed-off shotgun or an AI-assisted rifle scope, plus hunter drones that explode on contact, wasp drones that paralyze, ancient sentries, the shield-piercing cyclops mechanoid, and an insect hive queen.
  • The Mechhive: The new endgame. Inspecting your grav engine opens a quest chain that ends at a fortified orbital platform housing the cerebrex core, an AI superbrain commanding every mechanoid on the planet. It is invulnerable until you destroy three hidden stabilizers, each of which calls in a mech drop. Then you choose: destroy the core and permanently shut down every mechanoid planetwide, or scavenge it for a weapon of your own.

Frequently Asked Questions​

Which RimWorld DLC should I buy first?

Learn the base game before you add any of them. Turning every expansion on for a first playthrough is a massive mistake, so bring them in one at a time once the core systems make sense.

What does the Royalty DLC add?

The Empire faction, seven obtainable noble titles running Freeholder, Novice, Acolyte, Knight, Praetor, Baron, and Archon, psylink levels that unlock psycasts like Skip and Stun, and an endgame where you host the High Stellarch and survive the raids that follow. Nobles demand better bedrooms, throne rooms, and fine clothing, though only conceited ones actually refuse work.

Do I have to ally with the Empire in Royalty?

No. The Deserter quest is the route, and it pays two psylink neuroformers. There is no wider betrayal questline beyond it, but you can also down a visiting bestower and take the two he is carrying.

What is a mechanitor in Biotech?

A pawn carrying a mechlink, which lets them build and command their own squad of worker and combat mechanoids. Mechlinks are scavenged from dead ancient mechanitors and never crafted. You manage bandwidth to control larger swarms, and mechs beyond your bandwidth go uncontrolled and eventually feral.

What does the Odyssey expansion add?

Gravships you build and fly anywhere on the planet or into orbit, five new biomes, a landmarks system that reshapes map generation for every playthrough, over 40 new animals, fishing, a unique weapon system, new drone and mechanoid enemies, and the mechhive endgame. It is a paid expansion, separate from the free 1.6 update that launched alongside it.