New to Rimworld? Start HERE! Play Along Tutorial [1.6]

Summary

MysteriousFawx presents a vanilla, play-along introduction to RimWorld 1.6, explaining not only what to build but why the game’s systems work. The example colony uses the Crashlanded scenario, Cassandra Classic, and a temperate forest. The tutorial does not cover every item, leaving players room to discover the game for themselves. Console versions may differ in some details.

Starting a Colony

• Choose a storyteller and difficulty with care:
  • Cassandra provides a relatively steady ramp-up of events.
  • Phoebe leaves longer quiet periods but may follow them with a major threat.
  • Randy is less predictable, alternating between dangerous streaks and stretches with little happening.
  • New players might choose Community Builder, Adventure Story, or Strive to Survive. Peaceful removes danger, while higher difficulties are intended to be much harsher.
• Pick a site with useful terrain. Temperate forests are a forgiving start thanks to moderate temperatures, plentiful plants, and buildable ground. Seasonal growing periods still require planning.
• Screen starting colonists for useful traits and passions, combat ability, and work incapabilities. Avoid weak group chemistry where possible. Check health and age, too: scars, addictions, and age-related conditions can reduce a pawn’s effectiveness.
• Pause as soon as the game begins. The interface provides controls for speed, search, temperature, fertility, roofs, zones, room stats, wealth history, messages, quests, research, wildlife, and more. The information (“I”) panel is a useful first stop when something is unclear.

Core Colony Management

• Colonists need food, sleep, recreation, suitable temperature, and manageable mood. Low mood can lead to mental breaks; positive mood can produce helpful inspirations.
• Configure assignments and schedules:
  • Leave automatic combat behavior on “run” unless you draft and control a colonist yourself.
  • Use appropriate medicine, prevent the automatic use of tainted apparel, and set clothing condition and quality limits.
  • Restrict rotten and unsuitable raw food, while leaving emergency options available if starvation is imminent.
  • A simple sleep-and-recreation schedule works for most pawns. Adjust it for traits such as Quick Sleeper or Night Owl.
• Use manual work priorities to ensure skilled colonists do important jobs first without leaving everyone else idle. Priorities are checked from left to right, so stagger them rather than setting every job to the same level. Doctoring and wardening are often worth prioritizing.
• Keep an eye on colony wealth. Threats generally scale with wealth, and large unused stockpiles can attract bigger raids. Slow, useful growth is safer than accumulating valuable goods without improving the colony.

Building the First Base and Food Supply

• Establish a central, accessible site, then build a basic storeroom with walls, a door, and a stockpile. A room up to 13 × 13 tiles can support a roof without extra pillars or internal walls.
• Beds, a table and stools, lighting, and a horseshoes pin cover basic rest and recreation. Use wood initially if necessary, but plan to replace flammable wooden structures with stone.
• If the starting animal needs a pen, enclose an area with fences, add a gate and pen marker, and assign an animal handler. Check whether the pen can feed its animals through winter.
• Harvest wild berries for emergency food, but establish grow zones for a dependable supply. Fertile soil especially benefits crops with high fertility sensitivity, such as rice. As a rough starting guideline, plant about 20 tiles of rice per colonist in fertile soil. Heelroot, cotton, psychoid, and optionally dye plants can fill other useful needs.
• Chop enough wood to support construction, but remember that plant-cutting priorities also determine how soon trees are chopped.
• Set up power and food production:
  • A wood-fired generator provides a straightforward early power source but consumes fuel and produces heat. Hidden conduits keep wiring tidy and avoid the conduit-discharge event associated with ordinary conduits.
  • Build a freezer with a cooler’s cold side facing inward and exhaust facing outdoors. Aim well below freezing—around −20°C—to buffer against temperature changes, power loss, and frequent door openings. A single entrance and an airlock help keep cold air in.
  • Use stockpile priorities and shelves to organize food and other perishables. Shelves hold more than floor stockpiles; set them to a higher priority so they fill first.
  • Keep butchering separate from cooking. Butcher tables reduce cleanliness, and dirty cooking areas raise the risk of food poisoning. Flooring can improve cleanliness, but choose materials with fire risk, cost, and beauty in mind.
  • Use bills to automate work. For example, set butchering to repeat, and use “do until you have X” for meals so cooking stops at a target amount and resumes when supplies fall below a lower threshold. Keep some raw ingredients in reserve in case meals spoil during a power failure.

Combat, Prisoners, and Medicine

• Range and positioning matter. Equip the best melee pawn with a knife and the best shooter with a rifle. Draft colonists to control movement and attacks, and pause freely to manage a fight.
• Keep ranged fighters together and place melee fighters in front to protect them and block enemies. Avoid firing through your own fighters because friendly fire is possible outside the protected close-range zone.
• Use cover and terrain to your advantage. When practical, channel attackers through a predictable approach rather than allowing attacks from every direction. Narrow corridors and doorways can let several defenders engage one opponent at a time. Avoid standing directly in a doorway where enemies can outnumber the defender.
• Build a small, secure prison with a single door. Prisoners may be recruited by reducing their resistance through wardens; unwaveringly loyal prisoners cannot be recruited through the normal process. Prisoners still have needs, so decent sleeping conditions and a table can help their mood.
• Doctors treat bleeding wounds first, but pain, blood loss, and injuries can also impair consciousness and other abilities. Keep patients fed and resting when recovering from illness or infection; immunity must reach 100% before an infection or illness reaches 100% severity.
• The health and operations tabs show conditions and available treatments. Later, prosthetics and bionics can replace or improve body parts. The tutorial also notes that the game permits organ harvesting and other morally dark options, and that repeated practice operations can build medical skill—though botched surgery can badly injure a patient.

Research, Crafting, and Equipment

• Build a research bench in a clean, lit room and give the researcher a chair. Cleanliness, lighting, and temperature affect research speed. Brewing is used in the example to demonstrate research, bills, and safe drug scheduling.
• Expand the base as needed with bedrooms, dining or recreation rooms, workshops, and stonecutting. Stone walls are fireproof, tougher, and better at insulating than wood.
• Tailoring bills can maintain a limited supply of useful clothing without filling storage with unwanted gear. For instance, keep one suitable spare duster and exclude tainted, damaged, or low-quality clothing from the count.
• Clothing coverage and layers affect protection. Different garments can cover different body parts and occupy different layers, allowing protection to stack. Quality generally improves an item’s stats but also increases its market value—and therefore colony wealth.
• Material choice matters for weapons: steel is a dependable baseline, while plaststeel tends to suit sharp weapons and uranium blunt weapons. Compare item information rather than assuming one material is best for every weapon.
• Psychoid tea can be scheduled as a mood or recreation aid. Check the item’s information and keep within its safe interval; other drugs carry different risks.

Power, Animals, Travel, and Defense

• Renewable power can combine wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. Keep turbine clearance areas unobstructed, protect batteries from rain, and size generation and storage to match actual consumption. Sunlamps allow indoor, year-round growing but draw a great deal of power.
• Animals can provide meat, leather, eggs, milk, wool, chemfuel, combat support, or hauling. Check diet, handling skill, and retaliation risk before taming. Manage breeding and slaughter settings to prevent the herd from growing beyond available food.
• Pack animals can increase caravan capacity and travel speed. Bring enough food for the trip, consider local foraging and climate, and pack bedrolls for better rest. Supplies should match the purpose of the journey, especially if combat is expected.
• Cover, traps, turrets, and mortars support defenses, but turrets are not a substitute for colonists and can explode when damaged. Traps work best where enemies tend to move, while leaving a safe route for your own pawns.
• Trade beacons let orbital traders buy items in their coverage area, and a comms console enables contact with factions and orbital ships. Faction relations matter: not every trader will assist during a fight.
• Further systems build on the same ideas already learned: research unlocks new buildings, and workbenches use bills just like the stove and butcher table.

Additional Tips and Closing Advice

• Burn corpses rather than burying large numbers of them if you want to avoid accumulating wealth on the map.
• Gifts can improve faction relations. The tutorial also describes attacking traders and later sending goods back as an apology, but warns that the extra wealth and ensuing threats can make this risky.
• Caravans can discard unwanted goods by leaving them on the world map, though sending gifts by transport pod is preferable when available.
• The overall lesson is to work backward from a need, identify what resources and systems support it, and build the production chain step by step. Experiment, adjust the difficulty, and treat setbacks as part of the story generator rather than as a reason to play on the hardest settings.

Gamers and Sources Featured

• MysteriousFawx — presenter and tutorial guide.
• Twitch chat — credited by MysteriousFawx as a source of help when learning RimWorld.
• RimWorld’s in-game tutorial, Reddit, Steam discussions, and unnamed creators’ combat and killbox tutorials are referenced as learning resources. No other individual gamers are named.