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DLC Expansions

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 Fallen Empire, a hyper-advanced faction of space nobility.

Core Features​

  • Titles and Honor: You can earn honor by completing quests for the Empire. Your colonists gain noble titles (Yeoman, Knight, Baron, Count).
  • Noble Needs: As pawns rank up, they demand better bedrooms, throne rooms, and fine clothing. They will refuse to do dumb labor.
  • Psychic Powers: Nobles gain access to psychic amplifiers, allowing them to cast space magic like teleporting allies, stunning enemies, or forcing raiders to vomit.
  • New Endgame: You can win the game by hosting the High Stellarch in your colony and surviving the subsequent raids.
tip

You do not have to ally with the Empire. You can rebel, capture their psychic amplifiers, and use them against them.

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: You assign social roles like Moral Guide and Leader, which grant unique abilities and mood buffs.
  • Rituals: Hold dance parties, drum circles, or gladiator duels to boost colony mood or trigger special events. Ritual quality is determined by room impressiveness, the number of participants, and the speaker's social skill.
  • Relics: Embark on multi-stage quests to recover ancient artifacts revered by your ideology.

Biotech​

Biotech is the largest expansion. It introduces children, genetics, and mechanoid control.

Core Features​

  • Children and Reproduction: Pawns can get pregnant and raise children. You control their education, which directly shapes their traits and passions as they grow 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 mechanitor chip into a pawn to let them build and command their own squad of mechanoids. You have to generate and manage bandwidth to control larger swarms of worker and combat mechanoids.
  • Pollution: Mechanoid infrastructure generates toxic wastepacks. You have to manage this pollution or risk poisoning your map tile and triggering acid smog.

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 monolith triggers the expansion's events, bringing darkness and unseen monsters to your map.
  • Containment: Capture horrific entities and lock them in specialized, heavily reinforced secure cells. You extract bioferrite from them to craft new technologies.
  • Sanity Threats: Colonists deal with unseen stalkers, mind-control parasites, and fleshbeasts erupting from the ground. Note that Anomaly also integrates core game updates allowing downed pawns to crawl to safety.
  • Ghouls: Resurrect dead pawns as flesh-eating ghouls to act as disposable front-line fighters.

Odyssey​

Odyssey (Update 1.6) expands the game vertically, introducing space travel and extreme hazard environments.

Core Features​

  • Gravships: Construct mobile colony ships for rapid terrestrial deployment across the world map.
  • Orbital Layer: Ascend into orbit to explore new points of interest, mine asteroids, and interact with orbital factions.
  • Hazard Biomes: Survive in extreme new environments, including active Lava Lakes that challenge traditional base cooling and thermal regulation strategies.
  • Ancient Machine Mind: A completely new endgame victory condition centered around investigating orbital anomalies and navigating a vast logic matrix in space.