Extreme Desert Guide

Template:Tocright This guide details how to survive in one of the most hostile environments in Rimworld - an extreme desert. We focus on the Lost Tribe start because it is the hardest one to thrive in hostile environments since you got more people to feed and less technology to help you.

Introduction

See also: Biomes#Extreme Desert

Extreme deserts are the most arid option of hot maps. They have the least amount of animal and plants, in fact you should not expect to find anything more than three iguanas and a single cactus in your start. You should also not expect to see more than one new iguana per week and not a single plant ever growing in the wild.

In addition to that, they do not have any soil available, if you wanna grow something you will be doing it in stony patches around hills and mountains.

They are not necessary hot though, their average varies from 30 °C (86 °F) to 10 °C (50 °F) and growing periods varies from all year to 30/60 days due to the temperature. You should expect to only have problems with heatstroke during summer and during heat waves.

Landing site

Example good landing site.

In all maps you should to choose carefully your landing site to increases your chances of survival. You want to build a colony in an area with some of the following characteristics:

• Next to a friendly faction base (faster trading)
• Without many mountains around (faster moving around)
• With a road (faster moving around)
• With a river (enable watermills)
• With coast (to turn into large growing areas later)
• With caves (early food source)

While you should not be surrounded by mountains, the landing site itself can be mountainous.

Of course you do not need to land in an area in all those characteristics, but try to get as many of them as you can.

Base area

Once you choose your landing site you should also choose your base area. It is important to notice that this area does not need to be final, it is just the area where you are more likely to survive the early game.

You want to find an area with two characteristics: more growing areas and more easily defendable.

More growing areas means more stony patches and more easily defendable area is an area with few entrances where you gonna lay down your traps.

Since you do not have trees you can not build a proper base yet. You can then either take a ruin or make a cave. Ruins might look like good starting locations but are often on undesirable areas. It is easier to make a cave in a good location, since choke points are always surrounded by hills and mountains. But if you happen to get a ruin in the right place, then go for it.

Area between the two hills make a good choke point.

First Agenda

• Get some easily accessible steel and use it to build your stuff, so you do not have to use wood.
• Make your starter base. Give people a place to sleep, eat and play.
• Hunt those iguanas before they leave the map.
• Kill your starting animals.
• Only use wood to cook and make passive coolers once you need it. Make sure your wood is forbidden so they do not refuel the campfire unnecessarily.
• Plant rice. There is hardly any food on the map and you can not survive long enough to grow anything else yet.
• Make your research bench and start researching stone cutting so you can start using stone instead of steel.
• Plant strawberries, if you do not have much growing area then plant potatoes.

First harvest

Surviving until your first rice harvest is the hardest part. Your pemmican plus your hunting plus your starting animals is not enough. If you have caves in your map, you can go insect hunting and that might be enough, but if you do not... You gotta go visit your nearby friendly base and trade whatever you can for food. For that, you gotta get something you can trade:

• You can mine expensive things like components, plasteel, uranium, jade, silver or gold.
• You can open the ancient shrine and sell whatever you find there.

One smart way to reduce your food consumption is to put some colonists inside the ancient cryptosleep caskets until your first harvest.

Opening the ancient structure is dangerous! Bring them one by one and use your animals as meat shield.

Desperate measures

If that fails, you can also go to the closest base outside the extreme desert and attack them. Hunt the animals and harvest the plants around the base and run back to your base. You can make peace with them later.

Another more undesirable option is to sell some colonists. They are usually worth a lot and it results on a lower food consumption which makes things much easier, but do not expect to see them again.

Likewise, another even worse option is to kill some colonists, but they are not worth many meals.

If you do survive though... Now life will be much easier.

First rice harvest is a glorious moment.

Second agenda

• Plant cotton. Later you will use it to make dusters and cowboy hats.
• Plant healroot.
• Make stone deadfall traps.
• Plant cactus. Your future wood source.
• Plant smokeleaf. This will help your guys relax later.
• Research complex furniture. Once you done, make steel or stone beds.
• Research complex clothing. Once you done, make dusters and cowboy hats with your cloth.

Second harvest

Hopefully, now you grow strawberries, so you will not need to worry about wood. If you decided to stick with potatoes, you gonna have to make some extra visits to your nearby friendly base and buy wood for cooking because your cactus plantation gonna take a while to kick in.

Summer is coming, focus on getting cloth to give your colonists dusters and cowboy hats. After that you can replace their tribalwears for button-down shirts and pants.

You can also make some smokeleaf joints to help with the moods.

Always keep a stock of wood with you because if a heat wave happens you will need those passive coolers.

If you want, now you can accept more people in your colony.

Defenses

Now the usual threats start, time to make some deadfall traps to defend your base. Since you do not have wood and probably not enough steel, you will have to go for stone deadfall traps.

First defenses with stone.

Third agenda

• Research eletricity.
• Research battery.
• Research air conditioning.

Third harvest

Your colony is looking better, you have food, wood, clothing, drugs and defenses. You should focus on making a freezer for all that food you got.

Base relocation

Since the worse is gone, you can now move to a proper area, a more central location where you can build that huge colony you always dreamed of.

Moving out of caves.

Moisture pumps

If your map has coast you should focus on moisture pumps, with them you can create huge crops fields so you do not need to stick to stony patches around mountains.

Before a beach (left) and later a crop field (right).

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Guides

Progression

Quickstart Guides • Basics • Intermediate Midgame Guide • Advanced Endgame Guide • Ending the game

Scenarios

Lost Tribe Guide • Rich Explorer Guide • Naked Brutality Guide • The Mechanitor Guide

Survival

Extreme Heat Guide • Extreme Cold Guide • Extreme Desert Guide • Ice Sheet Guide • Sea Ice Guide • Events Guide

Combat

Defense tactics • Offense tactics • Weapon Guide

Construction

Colony Building Guide • Defense structures

Production

Food production • Money making guide

Other

Skill Training • Permadeath save conversion guide •
Ideology Min-Maxing