World Travel & Logistics
Caravans carry pawns and goods across the world map, and pack animals like muffalos, horses, and mastodons shoulder most of the weight. Pawns with high Plants skill forage while traveling, but treat that as a supplement and not a food plan and pack survival meals or pemmican for anything long. Ambush frequency scales with a visibility score, and that score counts the bodies in your caravan and not the value of its cargo, so hauling silver costs you nothing while the extra animals hauling it cost you plenty.
RimWorld is not restricted to your starting map tile. To complete quests, trade with other factions, or escape the planet, you have to form caravans and travel across the world map.
Caravan Weight and Foraging
Your colonists can only carry so much weight. To move large amounts of trade goods or supplies, you need pack animals.
- Pack Animals: Muffalos, horses, and elephants are excellent pack animals that drastically increase your caravan's total carrying capacity.
- Foraging: Pawns with high Plants skill actively forage for berries and wild food while traveling, which eases the logistical burden in lush biomes. Yield rises by roughly 0.09 per level of Plants and doubles while the caravan is stopped. Two conditions decide whether it happens at all: foraging only works during that tile's growing season, and a pawn incapable of Plants work forages nothing.
Pack Animal Comparison
Exactly nine species can carry caravan load: alpacas, bison, donkeys, dromedaries, elephants, horses, muffalo, yaks, and mastodons. Only the mastodon needs an expansion, arriving with Odyssey. Carry capacity is body size multiplied by 35, so several of them tie.
| Animal | Carry Capacity | Rideable | Why You Would Take It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mastodon | 157.5 kg | Yes, 130% | The highest capacity in the game, and the reason the elephant no longer holds that title. Odyssey only, and it eats like it. |
| Elephant | 140 kg | Yes, 130% | The base-game capacity leader. Eats about three times a muffalo and is genuinely difficult to tame. |
| Horse | 84 kg | Yes, 160% | The fastest pack-carrying mount and by far the most food-efficient, at roughly 100 kg carried per unit of nutrition per day. |
| Muffalo | 84 kg | No | Same capacity as a horse and produces wool. Native to cold biomes, so it is often what you already have. |
| Bison | 84 kg | No | Same capacity again, another cold-biome herd animal. |
| Dromedary | 73.5 kg | Yes, 130% | Thrives in desert starts where muffalo do not. |
| Yak | 73.5 kg | No | Slow, but cheap to tame and to feed. |
| Donkey | 49 kg | Yes, 130% | Needs no handling skill at all, which makes it the earliest mount most colonies can get. |
| Alpaca | 35 kg | No | The smallest of the nine, and usually a starting animal and not a choice. |
Thrumbos and alpha thrumbos can be ridden, and ride faster than anything on this list, but they refuse to carry packs. Biotech's friendly mechanoids also add caravan capacity if you have them.
Horses are the default answer. The mount rule is precise and not approximate: the game takes each rideable animal's speed bonus, sorts them best first, keeps only as many as you have human pawns, and averages them. So a tenth mount for nine colonists does nothing. Extra pack animals are a different matter and still help, because a caravan carrying well under its limit moves faster, up to double speed at zero load.
Elephants look tempting on capacity alone. Their food consumption and taming difficulty make them a poor trade unless you are hauling something genuinely enormous and have the nutrition to spare.
What to Actually Pack
Foraging is a supplement, not a food plan. Two things break caravans that lean on it:
- Regular meals rot. Simple and fine meals spoil within days, which caps your realistic travel range regardless of how much you loaded.
- Raw forage carries a food poisoning risk. Eating raw food has a 2% chance per meal of poisoning the pawn, and a vomiting colonist mid-journey costs you far more time than the meal saved.
Packaged survival meals are the correct cargo for any long trip. They never rot, though they do deteriorate if you leave them lying outdoors back home. Pemmican is the cheaper alternative and keeps for about 70 days, longer than a RimWorld year, which makes it the practical bulk option for a colony that cannot afford to burn survival meals on routine trade runs.
Pack a margin on top of the game's arrival estimate, but understand why. The estimate itself is honest: it walks the whole route, costs each tile, and already accounts for the overnight rest period. What breaks schedules is events. An ambush or a demand forces a map and stops travel entirely until you resolve it.
Biome Traversal and Seasons
Movement speed across the world map is dictated by the terrain and the current season.
- Terrain Penalties: Flat plains allow for rapid travel. Hills and mountains slow you down, swamps and bogs are punishing even when flat, and impassable mountain ranges and water tiles cannot be crossed at all. Roads halve the final cost, so a longer route on a road often beats a short one across country. Odyssey's gravships sidestep this entirely, ignoring terrain difficulty altogether, though they still cannot land on an impassable tile.
- Seasonal Hazards: Cold slows travel and exposes your caravan to hypothermia without parkas. The slowdown is driven by temperature and not snow, starting to bite below about -17°C and maxing out around -22°C, which means it applies just as much in a freezing desert with no snow on the ground. Always check the season and temperature of your route before departing.
Visibility and Ambushes
Traveling the world is dangerous, and your caravan's visibility score scales how often you get ambushed. It affects frequency only. How bad an ambush is, and who shows up, comes from the storyteller's threat points, exactly as it does at home.
Visibility is worth understanding because the obvious guess is wrong. It sums the body sizes of the pawns in the caravan and nothing else. Cargo mass contributes zero. Wealth contributes zero. A courier carrying ten thousand silver is no more visible than the same courier carrying nothing, while three elephants brought along to haul that silver raise visibility considerably. The curve starts at 20% for a single small pawn and reaches its cap around six body sizes, and a caravan that has stopped moving drops to under a third of its traveling visibility.
The practical version: send fewer and smaller bodies instead of less valuable cargo, and stop moving when you want to be left alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best pack animals in RimWorld?
Nine species can carry caravan load, and the mastodon leads at 157.5 kg, ahead of the elephant at 140. The horse is the best all-rounder, carrying 84 kg at the fastest riding speed of any pack animal and the best capacity per unit of food. Only the mastodon needs an expansion.
Do I need to pack food for a long caravan trip?
Yes. Foraging is a supplement, not a food plan: it only works during the tile's growing season and returns nothing from a pawn who cannot do Plants work. Pack packaged survival meals, which never rot, or pemmican, which keeps for about 70 days.
Why does my caravan keep getting ambushed?
Visibility scales how often ambushes fire, and it counts the body sizes of the pawns in your caravan, not your cargo. Silver and plasteel add nothing to it, while the elephants hauling them add a lot. A stopped caravan is under a third as visible as a moving one.
What slows caravan travel down on the world map?
Terrain and cold. Hills, mountains, swamps, and bogs all slow you, water and impassable ranges block you outright, and roads halve the cost. Cold slows you separately below about -17C, which applies in a freezing desert with no snow at all.
How do I travel safely in winter?
Check the temperature along your route instead of just the season, because the movement penalty tracks temperature and not snow cover. Equip parkas against hypothermia, and remember that world pawns feel the tile's seasonal temperature wherever they are.
What to Read Next
- Animal Husbandry and Pens. Pack animals that carry the load.
- Orbital Trade and Economics. Trading at settlements you reach.
- Combat and Defense. Surviving an ambush away from base.