RimWorld Tips and Tricks
Each entry below is one mechanic, what it costs you, and the version it was last checked against. Filter by category or difficulty to narrow the list, and use the anchor beside any heading to link straight to a single tip.
Defensive Layout
#Space sandbags one tile apart or they slow nobody
Only entering a cover tile costs extra movement, so a continuous line of barricades costs a raider nothing and the gaps are the entire mechanic. Cover works both ways as well, handing raiders 55 percent protection while they stand on it, so do not over-build the approach.
Verified on 1.6
Mechanoids
#Centipedes carry 72 percent sharp armor and 22 blunt
That gap is the whole fight, which is why a uranium mace beats a plasteel longsword against one despite the mace head having lower armor penetration. EMP stuns for around 25 seconds, but only once in a row, because a stunned mechanoid adapts and shrugs off the next pulse.
Verified on 1.6
Raid Types
#Three raid types walk straight past a killbox
Center-drop raiders punch through roofs to land near a random colonist, sappers mine their own route and have done since Alpha 11, and breachers added in 1.3 attack your built walls directly. Tribals cannot drop-pod and mechanoids lost it in 1.4, so keep internal choke points for the rest.
Verified on 1.6
Weapon Choice
#RimWorld has no suppression, so volume of fire is a myth
The minigun lost its forced miss radius back in Beta 19 and nothing replaced it. What actually carries a poor shooter is close-range accuracy, and a heavy SMG hits 85 percent at touch range and 65 at short, on the same burst of 3 an assault rifle fires.
Verified on 1.6
Caravans
#Caravan foraging returns nothing outside growing season
It also returns nothing from a pawn who cannot do Plants work, which is easy to miss when you pick a caravan for its combat skills. Pack packaged survival meals, which never rot, or pemmican, which keeps for about 70 days, and treat anything foraged as a bonus.
Verified on 1.6
Anomaly
#Ghouls are converted colonists, not raised corpses
A ghoul infusion permanently changes a living colonist, prisoner, or slave, while shamblers are the reanimated dead. Ghouls make good disposable front-liners, but they eat only raw meat and fresh corpses, and they turn on you permanently if you ever let them starve.
Verified on 1.6
Bionics
#A bionic arm is worth 12.5 percent, not 25
The part reads 125 percent efficiency against a natural arm, but an arm only carries half your manipulation, so two of them land you near 125 percent rather than 150. There is no cap above that, since manipulation multiplies limb efficiency by consciousness.
Verified on 1.6
Medical Tending
#Room cleanliness does not affect tend quality at all
Tending reads medicine potency, the doctor's Medical Tend Quality stat, and the bed, where a hospital bed adds a flat 10 percent and a vitals monitor another 7. Cleanliness is real, but it drives infection chance and surgery success instead, which is why the claim keeps circulating.
Verified on 1.6
Mood Management
#A higher mental break threshold means a weaker pawn
The stat is the mood level below which a pawn is at risk, so raising it makes them break sooner rather than later. The default is 35 percent, Nervous sits at 43, and Volatile at 50. Those pawns need artificially high mood from better meals or drugs, not merely an average room.
Verified on 1.6
Surgery
#Surgery success caps at 98 percent no matter what
It is never risk free, so stack the levers that matter most first: medicine potency, then bed type and quality, then cleanliness, then light. Light is a floor rather than a target, penalizing you below 50 percent and giving you nothing at all above it.
Verified on 1.6
Taming
#A failed thrumbo tame costs you nothing at all
Revenge chance varies far more than the shared handling requirement suggests. A Thrumbo's is zero, so a botched attempt only spends the 12-hour cooldown, while a Megasloth at the same Minimum Handling Skill of 10 retaliates 30 percent of the time. Odyssey's alpha thrumbo needs 14.
Verified on 1.6
Pens
#The pen marker counts the grass inside your fence
Its Food tab reads nutrition per day off the terrain and vegetation your walls actually enclose rather than a biome average, and forecasts it by season. That lets you size a herd against winter before you buy the animals instead of after they starve.
Verified on 1.6
Room Roles
#A room shows one role but pays the moodlet for each
Eating and relaxing in the same heavily decorated space hands out both moodlets even though the display picks a single label, so one impressive hall beats two adequate ones. The tiers run to wondrously impressive at plus 8, a step above unbelievably impressive at plus 7.
Verified on 1.6
Wall Materials
#A stone gravship will not stay pressurized in orbit
Only metallic walls hold air pressure, so the stone you build with planetside is useless above the atmosphere. Steel is a real fire risk since 1.5 tied fire damage to flammability, but it carries 300 hit points against wood's 195 and takes 135 work against granite's 950.
Verified on 1.6
Wealth and Raids
#Buying defenses makes the next raid bigger, not smaller
Colony wealth drives raid points, counting items at full value and buildings at half, with colonist count as a separate term on top. The contribution is flat below 14,000 and caps at 1,000,000, so the goal is turning wealth into fighting power faster than it turns into threat.
Verified on 1.6
Children
#Nothing you do steers which growth moment traits appear
Keeping a child's Learning need filled raises the growth tier, which widens how many options you are offered at ages 7, 10, and 13. Which options come up is random, so putting a child on a particular job all year changes nothing about the list you get.
Verified on 1.6
Psylink Routes
#You can reach psycasts without allying with the Empire
The Deserter quest pays out two psylink neuroformers on its own, and you can down or arrest a visiting bestower for the two he is carrying. There is no broader betrayal questline past that, so plan around those two sources rather than waiting for a third.
Verified on 1.6
Faction Goodwill
#Three faction types can never be bought with silver
Pirates, savage tribes, and cannibal tribes sit permanently at minus 100 goodwill, so anything you send them is simply gone. Everyone else moves at roughly 1 goodwill per 40 silver and gets more expensive as the meter rises, running from neutral at 0 to ally at plus 75.
Verified on 1.6
Rituals
#Room impressiveness is ignored by half the rituals
It feeds dance and drum parties, cannibal feasts, and speeches, and counts for nothing at funerals, gladiator duels, or executions. Participant count feeds almost all of them. Where a speaker matters the stat is Social Impact rather than raw social skill, and most rituals have no speaker.
Verified on 1.6
Trait Behavior
#A happy pyromaniac still burns your base down
The Fire Starting Spree has a flat trigger curve averaging one every 50 days no matter how good the pawn's mood is, and an average is not a countdown, so it can fire twice in a week. Pyromaniacs also cannot fight fires at all, so draft a second pawn to shadow them until the spree ends.
Verified on 1.6
What to Read Next
- Combat and Defense. Cover mechanics, raid types, and the mechanoid armor tables in full.
- Colony Management. Mood, room roles, traits, and the break thresholds behind them.
- Medical Systems and Surgery. Tend quality, surgery odds, and what bionics really buy.
- Base Building and Crafting. Wall materials, fire behavior, and layout that survives contact.
- Orbital Trade and Economics. Wealth, raid points, and faction goodwill in detail.
- DLC Expansions. What each expansion adds, and which mechanics come free with the version.
- Getting Started. First-quadrum priorities if this is your first colony.