Training

Untrained workers can be a liability – for example, an untrained cook can cause food poisoning, and an untrained miner can waste 1/3 of the potential resources while trying to extract them. All skills in Rimworld improve simply while they are used, there is nothing special that needs to be done in addition to that. If a colonist is assigned to a task (via the Work tab) with a sufficiently high priority, they will, eventually, perform it and gain skill points.

This article will suggest a few special ways to forcibly train colonists in certain specific skills.

Task/Skill connections

In a few cases it is not obvious that a specific task trains a seemingly unrelated ability:

• Cooking:

• Butchering a dead animal
• Making kibble (done at a butchering table)
• Brewing beer (not Crafting or Intellectual, either of which would be plausible)
• Making smokeleaf joints, either at a crafting spot or drug lab ^{(not clear if this is working as intended)}

• Making medicine and hard drugs (flake, yayo, etc.) requires and trains Intellectual (not Crafting).

Additionally...

• Cutting stone blocks does not train any skill (but requires Crafting to be allowed as a task).

• "Smith" and "Tailor", despite being listed separately, are actually sub-skills of Crafting, and do not have their own skill level.

• Many Construction tasks that could plausibly be Crafting tasks (smithing or tailoring) are not.

Training a skill

This is usually only necessary and recommended if you 1) want a certain ability on a specific colonist, 2) can afford to not use this person for normal productive work while they "train", and 3) are willing to invest their time (and yours) for their future in your colony.

A colonist that is bad at everything and passionate for nothing should be assigned to be a hauler and cleaner, or maybe the guy who fulfills that annoying caravan trade request 5 days away, before you give them a "real" job. Long, slow experience is not a great investment of their time, not when someone else can do it faster, and that "skilled" colonist would be wasting their skill hauling or traveling.

• If you train a colonist by letting them do busy work, you are wasting one of the most valuable colony resources, namely work hours.

Daily XP cap

There is a "soft" XP cap of 4000 points per day for each skill, after which experience is at only 20% of normal (multiplied by traits and passions, as normal). Some skills do train quickly, so find a different activity; training over the soft cap is not a good use of time. (This can be seen by mouse-hoving over the skill in the colonist's Bio tab.)

Candidates

A good candidate may not be completely, truly "useless" - maybe they have skills, just not the skills we want, or no skills that we can use now (maybe because other colonists are better, maybe they just need to be improved). Regardless, a candidate for focused training has 1) no skills that we currently value/need, and 2) some sort of potential we do value (or we'd ignore them and assign them as our full-time Hauler/Cleaner/Refueler/Ammo loader/Undertaker/Prisoner Feeder/etc.).

Specific combinations of traits (good and bad!) and/or passions can determine if a colonist is a trainee candidate or a faceless drone.

Temporary Zone restrictions

A technique that is mentioned a few times in this article, is to create a zone specifically to restrict a colonist to a very certain area, in order to force them to perform a task.

As an example, let's say you want a colonist to smooth the floor in your freezer in the next few days, and do nothing else. In this case, you will create a new zone for them, containing exactly these areas in your base:

• the area where the work needs to happen (freezer in this example)
• the colonist's bedroom (so s/he can go to rest as usual)
• the recreation area and dining table
• a place where food is stored, so they can get their meals (maybe not necessary in this example, because the freezer is already covered, but critical to include)

These areas do not have to be adjacent (connected). The zone can be composed of several disconnected areas.

Now you use the "Schedule" tab to restrict them to this newly created zone. S/he can still move freely between those areas, but will not perform any "task" unless that task is inside the designated zones. This means s/he will not use any skills outside the temporary zone, and you will not need to manipulate her work tab to keep her from doing anything but smooth the freezer floor.

This is a very effective method, not just for training, but for prioritizing important work in general. For instance, if you have several colonists assigned to Construction, you can assign all but your best away from your new dining room furniture that you're building.

Combat training

If you feel you are not prepared for the next raid, you can train a few combat abilities. This will always need to be done manually, i.e. with the trainee drafted. That means you can not manage the colony in the mean time, and it can be difficult to train more than one colonist at a time. This probably means a net loss of productivity in your colony, so only do it if you feel it is really necessary.

You can also assign them "Hunting", but this is slow and dangerous; animal "revenge" is always a risk. However, it has its advantages (see below).

Shooting

The best way to train shooting is to assign the colonist to the "hunting" task. Giving them a long-range weapon, for example, a bolt-action rifle makes hunting safer because animals are less likely to enrage and retaliate if shot at from long range. To be safe, only hunt passive animals that will never retaliate.

Deliberately damaging your own structures or buildings does not improve your shooting skill.

Giving a really bad shooter a weapon not suited for the task, such as a machine pistol of "awful" quality, means that they will possibly hunt for a long time before actually killing the animal. Do not expect a colonist that you train this way to be very productive for the colony.

The best possible method is with an EMP launcher or smoke launcher, since they do no damage, and therefore, a colonist can train for an indefinite amount of time without chance of hurting an animal and possibly triggering revenge.

Aggravating animals

Outside of hunting, some resilient animals such as the Megasloth, Rhinoceros and Thrumbo can give a lot of shooting skill by kiting them, and slowly shooting them with a low DPS weapon. You need to be very careful with this approach because those animals do a lot of damage if given the chance to get into your melee range.

This is a special case of deliberately slow "hunting".

The best weapon types for this tactic are weapons with a fast windup and high shot frequency, not too short a range, and low damage. This makes you use the skill more often, by firing more shots and having your "training dummy" last longer from low damage.

This approach does require extensive micromanagement, and you won't be able to perform other manual tasks in the colony in the meantime. It is even possible that actually killing the animal will take so long that your colonist will pass out from exhaustion or go into starvation. You must have a capable shooter available to finish off the animal and end the training if necessary.

(If using tamed targets, you can stop before killing them, and train up your Medical colonist(s), patching the target up for next time.)

Melee

Fighting anything with melee attacks will increase the melee skill. Hunting with melee attacks works, but animals are prone to fighting back so be warned (this is true even for animals that never retaliate when hunted from range). You will have to draft the colonist and "hunt" the animal manually by attacking it. An undrafted colonist will not hunt if they are lacking a ranged weapon.

If you want to train a character this way, use the best possible armor *(whether flak or plate armor, or just a good duster) so they will take less damage from the animal. Taking no damage at all is not likely, so do not train a colonist that you require to be in good shape; they will at least have a few bruises for a day or three, reducing their manipulation skills and movement ability. Also be aware that attacking herd animals (like muffalos and wild boars) can enrage the entire herd, usually leading to a heavily injured colonist, or worse.

Use bare fists, to make the training session last as long as possible.

Tamed animals will fight back, so they are not safe training dummies; they can however be kept in a controlled environment which makes them more convenient targets. There is also no risk of an entire herd taking revenge for you hurting their friend. You can patch up the animal you just abused afterwards, which will train the medical skill. Turtles, especially, make good training "partners", with a small target and good natural "armor".

Using melee attacks does raise the skill very quickly, and you will hit the "soft" XP cap of 4000 points in a matter of a few attacks. Disengage afterwards, because training over the soft cap is not efficient.

To level melee more safely, take prisoners who are incapable of "Violent" and repeatedly punch, then heal them in their prison cell. To avoid accidentally killing your prisoners, use fists only with neither a melee nor ranged weapon equipped. Carefully watch the health of the prisoner pausing the game between each punch if needed. A colonist with no weapon (not even a ranged weapon) does up to 7 base blunt damage per punch (see Base Melee Stats for details), so when any single body part falls below 8 hp remaining, stop and allow the prisoner to heal. This will allow you to train medical skill as well.

Civilian Skills

You can slow down the work deliberately, by working under poor conditions (outside, in the dark, not using electricity, in the cold, ...). For many skills, experience is granted over time and not by work units. Crafting as slowly as possible means you will waste less material in the same time span. Only do this while crafting at level 5 or lower; from level 6, you can expect to at least break even on average with regards to material cost.

Animals

The animals skill is very versatile, and can be trained in various ways.

There are two animals related tasks where unskilled colonists can be a liability:

• Failed tame attempts may cause the animal to retaliate; this often leads to the animal handler getting injured, usually as far away from the base as possible...
• Milking or shearing animals can fail, resulting in all of the product going to waste; this is especially painful when shearing (gathering wool), because wool takes many days to grow back.

Because of this it is best to let unskilled animal handlers only train animals that are already domesticated. If this fails, some food will be wasted, and the animal might lose some training from decay, but nothing worse will happen. Only your qualified animal handlers should be allowed to milk, shear or tame wild animals.

It is very finicky to assign all your animal handlers to the jobs best suited for them. It can be done with a lot of manipulation of temporary zone restrictions, but the recommended way is to install a mod like Work Tab: it allows for fine-grained control of the various animals related sub-tasks.

Artistic

There is not much to be said about training artistic; just have your aspiring artist craft as many sculptures as possible.

"Awful" sculptures have a negative beauty value, so they actually make the environment more ugly. Great to put into the bedrooms of ascetic colonists, but should be deconstructed or sold otherwise.

Use the material that you can spare the most of; wood is often a good choice. Jade has the best balance of beauty and availability, so it should be reserved for more capable, possibly inspired artists.

Cooking

The cooking skill level is increased by butchering, cooking meals at a stove or campfire, and also by making smokeleaf joints. If an unskilled cook prepares meals, they carry an increased risk of food poisoning. This is a fairly disrupting condition that should be avoided, so it is not optimal to train a new cook by letting them prepare meals.

Kibble

Kibble never carries food poisoning, making it a safe practice food. It is highly profitable to make kibble if you have insect meat or human meat, and hay – even if there are no animals to feed – because all kibble has the same market value, no matter the ingredients.

Smokeleaf joints

This strategy requires drug production to be researched, and to grow or buy smokeleaf leaves, but training Cooking with smokeleaf production is an excellent strategy. Smokeleaf products have good recreational and cash (trade) value, but be aware that the value added by making joints from leaves is not work efficient, so outside of training cooks or making the joints for personal use it is better to sell your leaves directly.

Joints have no quality and obviously cannot carry food poisoning, making it a safe task to train any cook. B

Set up a dedicated work bill at the crafting spot or drug lab, and restrict it to the character that you would like to train in cooking. The character needs to have priority to "Craft" things on the work tab. Make sure the drug lab is not occupied by other tasks; the easiest way is to put the smokeleaf job in the first slot on the list of bills.

Construction

Construction is already trained quite efficiently by simply using the skill, since construction is such a common activity in an expanding colony.

Smoothing walls and floors counts as construction, is very time consuming, and does have no quality penalty associated with it. It is maybe the best way to train a low skilled worker, without the risk of wasting materials or creating bad products. Having your apprentices do the smoothing keeps the master constructors free for more demanding work. Restrict the trainee colonists to the respective areas by creating a temporary zone, and let them do wall and floor smoothing exclusively for a while.

Making furniture is not the best way to train construction, because colonists with low skill will produce low quality furniture, which has then to be deconstructed and re-built, wasting material in the process. You can, however, keep deconstructing and reconstructing the furniture until the desired quality level is produced, if you do not mind losing some resources along the way; the popular mod Quality Builder helps tremendously.

If you are about to build a lot of walls in the colony, you can use zones (as described above) or temporarily take your capable builders off the construction task, and let only your trainee(s) build the walls and roofs. Walls do not have a quality stat, so it is not possible to create bad products. The apprentices will take a little longer, and probably "botch" construction several times, but the end result will be the same.

Do not train construction when high value material is involved, such as cloth (for carpets) or components (when making things like power generators). If the colonist "botches" construction in these cases, a fair amount of material will be irretrievably wasted; only do this if you have plenty of surplus so it would not matter.

Chair method

The amount of work it takes to build a wooden chair is much more than most other items. Each chair built generates roughly 1,000 progress points, allowing you to estimate 1K progress points to each chair built.

Repairing things

You can damage structures, usually purpose-built stone walls, deliberately by attacking them with melee attacks, shots or grenade blasts, and then have your construction builders repair them.

• Only do this with a colonist that really needs to be up to speed in construction now, and if you have absolutely no other suitable construction work to do at the moment. Damaging structures just for training is a waste of work hours not only for the trainee, but also for the colonists drafted to do the damaging.

This will not train shooting skill. Use the shooters only to damage the structure, then undraft them and have them resume their regular colony duties. Of course the shooters could be the very same people who will do the repair work just after. Shooting skill does not matter much in this case, as pretty much everybody is able to hit a wall from point blank range...

• By far the best approach is to smooth any stone wall, damage it, and repair it. Smoothed walls count as constructed walls, so they can be repaired. A smoothed granite wall does have 900 hit points, almost as much as a plasteel wall.
• Under the "Work" tab, designate the colonist(s) you intend to train so that they can only "Repair". Create a zone around the training area, and the general facilities of the base, then restrict the trainees to this zone.
• Skill training becomes much less effective (x20%) after 4000 XP has been acquired in a skill during a day. Take the trainees off the training task by removing their zone restriction after this soft XP cap has been reached for the day.

Crafting

The only way to practice crafting is to make things, either at a crafting spot, tailoring bench or smithy. Fabrication benches are only usable by already skilled crafters. Drug production and brewing does not train crafting.

If you have no good Crafters yet, you will produce many items of "poor" or "awful" quality. It is not possible to retrieve raw materials from crafted items (unlike constructed items) – after you have crafted an item, you have to either use it or sell it as it is. This means you should not use any valuable materials, such as Thrumbofur, Megasloth wool, Hyperweave or Plasteel to practice crafting. Only let your most competent people handle these super-valuable materials.

If you're looking to sell, "weapons" are generally not a good class of items to practice crafting, because they only sell for 20% of the normal price (for game balance reasons), making it tough to make money from crafted weaponry. However, you can make wooden weapons, which uses no steel - and steel is too valuable to waste on training, as we've already discussed. The gladius is one of the best value melee weapons, only requires Smithing to be researched, and for some reason arms dealers accept wooden novelty swords.

Aside from weapons, armor requires valuable ingredients, so usually crafting is practiced making clothes. Dusters are the best material/value clothing item*.

(* It's not clear what is the best experience/material item, but few colonies have "more textiles than they need".)

Crafted items get a market value that is composed of

• the work invested into making the item
• the value of the raw materials used
• the quality of the item

The market value multiplier for "awful" items is 50%, for "poor" items it is 75%. In those cases it would have been better to sell the raw materials instead of the item! To cut your inevitable losses, only use the cheapest material you can find if you expect to produce a lot of bad quality stuff. Good candidates are (in order of less to more useful/valuable): birdskin, pigskin, lightleather, patchleather and plainleather. (Note that human leather is, for some reason, quite valuable).

• See Textiles for a comparative table and full information

Alternately, you could create a couple extra (large) growing zones with cotton plants, for cloth to "practice" with. Even poor-quality dusters sell for a reasonable price.

If you have a competent crafter (level 8 or higher) that you want to train further, they have the requisite Crafting level (8) to make advanced components at a fabrication bench. You will need a lot more advanced components to build the space ship than you can usually buy from traders, so making them early is never a waste of effort. They do not have a quality rating, as long as your crafter can make them you will get full value. Likewise, bionic limbs and organs can be made by anyone who meets the skill requirement, but it is difficult to know in advance which ones you will need (arms are never useless, however).

Intellectual

Intellectual skill is gained by doing research, and by making hard drugs and medicine. There are no special techniques available to make this more efficient. All research done is equally valuable, and neither medicine nor drugs have a quality rating; this means that who you employ for these jobs only influences how long it takes to finish them.

Usually your colony will want to research new technologies, so there is normally no question how to employ pawns with intellectual skill or interest. This is also a good use of any "retired" simple research bench(es).*

(* Note that while a simple research bench can be uninstalled and re-installed elsewhere, a hi-tech research bench can only be deconstructed!)

Crafting wake-up, flake and go-juice are all very profitable, so this is recommended if you do not need another researcher at the time, and can stock up on neutroamine and psychoid leaves.

Mining

Unskilled miners will let resources go to waste if they mine an ore vein. You can check a colonist's mining yield stat to see if they are already at/near 100+%, but even a Skill 6 miner is wasting 5% (or 2 Steel out of every tile), and very high skill levels give a (small) bonus return. If they're not high-skill, do not use them to extract valuable resources from a mountain.

To train miners, restrict them to a temporary zone with a mining job in it that does not include any valuable ores. If you dig into a mountain face randomly, be aware that this could become a space for infestations to spawn if the location is too close to your colony.

If you have developed deep drilling already, you can let your apprentice miners work the drills. Waste of resources is usually not a problem anymore at this point.

Medical

There is something that a typical Rimworld campaign never lacks: work for your doctors and surgeons. Still, it is still possible to arrange some extra training.

Performing any type of surgery is staggeringly efficient for training Medical; performing surgery awards 16 times as much XP (per time spent) as other work. This includes all kinds of body part replacements, organ harvesting, and euthanizing animals (and humans).

The XP granted by a surgical procedure depends on work speed of the pawn, work units required and skill passion. For reference: at 100% medical operation speed and Interested passion, 2,000 XP are granted from performing a leg replacement.

Note: Because performing surgery gives so much XP, a single colonist will hit the soft learning cap of 4,000 XP per day rather quickly. Spread out the procedures over multiple doctors and days.

Whether caused by iinjury or included from the start, it's often an improvement to a colonist to replace a damaged limb or organ; a heart with even minor artery blockage can cause a fatal heart attack at any moment. See various links on artificial body parts for costs and improvement/penalties the post-operative patient will acquire.

Animals

If human subjects are not available, you can "sterilize" and then euthanize animals, either tame or wild ones that are "rescued" after not downed but not killed. This not only gains Medical XP, but gives a larger yield of leather and meat than hunting an animal. This is a shorter procedure than the jaw replacement (worth only a third of the XP) but it has no medical skill requirement, so is great for training completely unskilled doctors. A failed procedure is both unlikely and of no consequence. You can euthanize one of your tame animals, or "rescue" a hunted (downed) animal, just to euthanize it straight away. Tame chickens are the best source of animals, because the breed like flies and you usually want to weed out the males, and euthanizing a freshly hatched chick will give the same XP as any other animal would.

Non-elective surgery

If you are not squeamish about it, you can use Prisoners for a wide variety of very effective "practice" purposes. Most require nothing more than herbal medicine* and a (often terrifyingly low) minimum Medical skill.

(* at minimum; you probably want to use actual medicine if the operation is important to you.)

• Install and remove jaw denture, repeatedly. This requires medical skill 2, herbal medicine, no special prosthetics needed, and the patient has no risk of dying on the table. It will leave the person permanently mangled (80% speak/eat), lowering their market value (which is not important unless you want to sell the person into slavery). This procedure is not counted as "organ harvesting", even if performed on a healthy patient.

• A little more brutal is repeated peg leg/wooden hand replacements - install, remove, repeat. Requires minimum Medical skill 3 and some herbal medicine. Oh - and one (1) "log" (seriously!). Some prisoners start with a prosthetic of some sort, but that's hardly a requisite. Also not counted as "organ harvesting".

• The grim business of organ harvesting is great training, and can be done up to four* times per customer. The surgeon can take a tongue (no market value), one kidney and one lung without killing the victim (altho' they will be the worse for it), and a heart or liver, which kills the patient*. It is strongly frowned upon by most colonists. It is also profitable, but only do it if you can afford the colony-wide mood penalty, which lasts for 8 days.

* A heart can be replaced with a prosthetic heart (and minimum Medical skill 4), which then either allows the patient to live (in which case this (only) is not considered "organ harvesting"), or allows the surgeon to continue and harvest the liver, which does kill the patient. For the accountants, a prosthetic heart has a market value of 230 (and/or can be crafted at a machining table), while a human heart is valued at 500 - profit, even after a trader gets his percentage. There is no prosthetic liver.

Removing any organ will give all colonists without the Psychopath or Bloodlust trait a negative mood modifier. (For a more complete discussion, see also organ harvesting.)

Plants (growing)

Letting an unskilled grower harvest your fields will waste some of the product; check the plant harvest yield stat of the colonist. If you need to avoid this, you will have to create a – possibly large – restriction zone to keep this colonist out of the area that they must not harvest. Allow them access only to areas where sowing needs to happen; lower skill levels are slower, but do not hurt harvest amounts.

Chopping trees is a good, safe way to train plants. Disallow the task ("plant cut" in the work tab) for your skilled growers, so your trainees will get more opportunities to chop wood.

If you are growing plants that only skilled workers can sow (like Devilstrand and Healroot), make sure that your trainees will sow all the other fields. Do not let your skilled growers take that work away from them. Again, you will probably need to use restriction zones or work tab micromanagement to facilitate this.

• The Work Tab mod by Fluffy makes partitioning the growing tasks a lot easier, avoiding the use of temporary zone restrictions.

Social

Each social chat with a colonist gives 4 social XP per per speech balloon at Interested passion and neutral mood modifier.

Having a friendly chat with a prisoner in order to convince him or her to join the colony gives roughly 50 social XP at Interested passion, per speech balloon. If you are recruiting prisoners, only assign the "Wardening" work type to the colonists whose social skill you want to improve. The Work Tab mod (or a similar mod) allows more control over the various tasks related to wardening, so it is recommended to make this more viable in normal colony operation.

Setting the prisoner interaction mode to "Reduce resistance" (and not "Recruit") will allow wardens to keep having conversations indefinitely, allowing skill training. However, this costs a lot of food over time to keep the prisoner alive. Only do this with prisoners you do not want as colonists; recruit them immediately otherwise, so they become productive and improve their skills.

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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