Characters
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RimWorld is a game centered around the story of its characters, from player-managed colonists to AI-controlled wanderers and raiders.
Each character possesses a set of skills, traits, and a personal backstory.
Character
Humanoids have a Character tab that displays the pawn's first name, nickname (display name), and last name, followed by their sex, race, character type, and age. The player may change a colonist's nickname by clicking the edit button, at the top right. Some characters have spent decades or centuries in cryptosleep. They have their biological age followed by their chronological age in parenthesis. Their biological age indicates how much they've aged, not counting time spent in cryptosleep. Their chronological age is their age since their date of birth, including time spent in cryptosleep. Biologically older characters will tend to have higher skills, developed by experience. They may also have gray hair and age-related health difficulties such as cataracts, a bad back, dementia, or frailty.
Skills
Main Article: Skills
A character's skills denote how effective they are at the relevant tasks. Depending on their backstory, a character may have some skills permanently disabled.
Backstories
Main Article: Backstories
Each character has a maximum of two backstory elements: a childhood and, if old enough, an adulthood. These elements affect the colonist's starting skills and may prevent the use of some skills entirely.
Note: It is possible for characters to be generated with contradictory backstories (e.g. childhood backstory elements disabling skills that adulthood elements are themed around).
Traits
Main Article: Traits
A character's traits are permanent modifiers that affect their stats like walk speed, work speed, base mood, and mental break threshold.
Records
The Records tab shows stats for doing various activities.
Needs
All humanoid characters have Thoughts and at least three needs, Food, Rest, and Mood. Colonists have additional needs.
Mood
Main Article: Mood
A characters' mood is the total value of the effects of their thoughts and traits. If a colonist's mood drops below their mental break threshold, they will suffer a mental break.
Thoughts
Main Article: Thoughts
Thoughts are a summary of a character's experiences over the last day or so. Thoughts are either positive or negative, and can be generated in myriad ways, including things like observing their immediate surroundings, being hungry, and sleeping on the floor.
Health
Main Article: Health
In RimWorld, each living creature has a detailed anatomy, each part of which is subject to injury. Injuries can be temporary or permanent, and range from bruises and scratches, to dismemberment and fatality.
Depending on where the injury occurs, it may simply hamper the colonist's effectiveness, cause them to be completely incapacitated or even killed.