Intermediate Midgame Guide

Overview

In some ways, Midgame is vastly different from early game in RimWorld. Sometimes the point comes that you have to use devious tactics when your colony is helplessly outnumbered, or drastically change the priorities of your colonists.

Construction

What you should have in a midgame base:

• Large-sized freezer with at least 5 days' worth of food
• Cover structures around the base
• Private bedrooms for your colonists
• Self-sufficient food supply
• Sufficient power supply + Backup Power
• Medium-grade Hospital
• Rec room
• Workshop

Power

Geothermal power is an important source of power from mid-game onward, as it is constant and high-powered. You will need to research Geothermal Power first before you can unlock it, and the generator itself is quite costly (though affordable in midgame). However, once researched and built you can have a constant power supply; you can even have a lot of excess power.

Hospital

While in early game you can live on a rudimentary hospital, or even a spare room converted into a temporary hospital, in midgame you should have something more dedicated than that.

For starters, a decent hospital should have sterile tiles as a floor instead of any other flooring. Sterile floors provide a slight cleanliness buff that can increase surgery success chance and reduce wound infection chance.

If you have hospital beds researched, obviously you will want to use them instead of your regular beds. Being made specially for medical purposes, they provide a boost to treatment quality and immunity gain speed, meaning that your colonists will gain immunity to diseases faster and are less likely to die. Colonists resting in a hospital bed also heal faster than they do when on a normal bed.

The vitals monitor brings even better boosts to treatment and immunity gain, so once you've researched them it's recommended that you put them down near your hospital beds.

Rec room

You should have a wide variety of joy sources so your colonists don't get bored repeatedly throwing horseshoes at a pin, or wander around aimlessly. Putting all of them in a room also provides a mood bonus after a colonist uses the facilities inside, depending on the impressiveness of the room.

Now that you're in midgame, basic resources will not be that much of an issue. You can afford to build more joy facilities such as chess tables or billiards tables. In addition, you can also obtain telescopes or televisions (coming in tube, flatscreen or megascreen varieties, in order of effectiveness) from exotic traders, which provide different kinds of joy for additional variety.

For increased mood buffs, decorate your rec room using sculptures, flower pots or quality furniture.

Failsafes

There are many types of ways you can set up buildings on your map to possibly save your colonists' lives in dire situations:

• Shelters: If your colony relies on hunting for food(tundra, desert, etc) building small rooms with an emergency food and wood supply can save your colonists from enraged animals.
• Backup power: Many events will cause you to lose power if you are unprepared. Some colonies rely on wind or solar power to power everything, and eventually every colony with electricity will suffer from a fault conduit explosion, also show as 'Zzzt...' Both cases will cause you to lose power, whether it's not enough wind or sun, or an explosion. Raider attacking and destroying power conduits connected to power generators can sever power from the colony, reducing the power available.

Always have spare power sources and storages, including multiple battery systems with switches. Have a handful of batteries constantly connected to the main grid, and only connect extra when they are about to run out, or are charging.

Resources

Useful resources include:

• Medicine to heal wounded and sick colonists
  • Glitterworld medicine for successful surgeries
• Stone Blocks to make your base
• Components and steel to make non-primitive things
• Plasteel for durable constructs and high-end equipment
• Silver to barter for nearly anything

Farming

At this stage you should have solved your food problems (mostly) and should turn to farm economic crops instead.

Two good choices are devilstrand and psychoid plants.

Devilstrand is an excellent choice as a mid-game fabric, providing good protection and can be farmed. It can net a large amount of silver for every harvest, but it's very slow-growing.

Psychoid can he harvested and made into drugs, which can sell for a lot. Be careful with drugs as colonists with the chemical interest or fascination traits will binge on drugs if given access to them.

Mining

There's only so much metals on the surface, but there's much more beneath your colony.

You will need to research deep drilling and ground-penetrating scanner first to use drills effectively. After this, when you put down a deep drill, you can see where mineral deposits are.

Deep drilling should be the main source of steel and plasteel for your colony at this stage onwards. You can also dig up any remaining steel found on the surface.

Equipment

While in early game you need to scavenge what equipment you could, or craft some very rudimentary equipment such as tribalwear or shivs. Now that you're in midgame, however, you should have the ability to manufacture your own equipment. Good equipment means that you stand a chance against raiders, even if you're outnumbered.

You should have a fueled smithy or an electric smithy to craft melee weapons, electric tailoring bench for sewing clothes (faster than a hand-tailoring bench), and a machining table for armor and guns.

Apparel

You should always craft button-down shirts over T-shirts, as they provide better insulation and coverage than simply T-shirts. It's always worth it spending a little more cloth than a replacement arm.

In addition, you can equip your colonists with dusters, jackets or parkas if you need to.

• Jackets provide additional protection against attacks or the cold.
• Dusters provide protection against both the heat or the cold, as well as additional protection. Has a wider coverage than the Jacket.
• Parkas provide very good insulation against the cold, but are uncomfortable in hot areas, slow down work by 20% and provide minimal protection.

Devilstrand is the best for protection; though it isn't as protective as hyperweave (which is hard to fine and very costly), it can be farmed and produced in mass amounts.
Wool is best for insulation.

For your soldiers, you should always have armor vests and kevlar helmets. Just this can protect against a large part of the damage taken. Melee fighters should have personal shields as well; however, these will have to be bought or stripped from dead raiders.

Power armor should wait until later as it costs a lot, either to buy or to make.

Weapons

Obviously, you should give your best fighters your best and most skill-based weapons.

For your guns:

• Sniper rifles or survival rifles are highly destructive in the hands of skilled marksmen.
• Charge rifles dishes out heavy damage at medium range, and is suitable for moderate-high skilled gunners.
• Assault rifles are suited for gunning down mid-long range targets, when handled by good soldiers.
• LMGs can mow down targets at medium range with a large burst of bullets. Best in the hands of low-mid skilled colonists.
• CQB weaponry such as Heavy SMGs or Pump shotguns are best served in the hands of regular workers for self-defense.
• Miniguns excel at point-blank destruction or crowd control. Accuracy is completely irrelevant for this weapon due to the forced miss radius, such that it's best used in the hands of a trigger-happy colonist, disregarding skill.

For melee:

• Longswords are the must-have weapon for melee colonists, being the highest damage dealing weapon in the game.
  • Spears or gladius are cheaper but deal less damage, as such you should leave these for lower-skilled colonists.
• Maces are cheaper and deal blunt damage, best used by wardens for taking down escaping prisoners or berserk colonists without killing them. It's also more effective at taking down armored enemies as most armor types protect poorly against blunt trauma.

Prosthetics & Organ Replacements

By now you'll probably have colonists missing fingers, toes, arms, legs or other body parts (especially captured people, being more prone to have lost a leg). If you have the money you should get a replacement for them if you can. All prostheses except the peg leg can only be bought from traders in the base game.

All prostheses heal like normal limbs, but do not bleed and never scar.

Peg leg

Your humble peg leg is for replacing a missing foot or leg. All you need is 1 log of wood, medicine and a doctor. At 60% efficiency, it's good for getting a colonist back up and running but not good for anything else. This should only be used if you can't afford better.

Simple prostheses

Simple prosthetic legs work at 85% efficiency, making it good for replacing a few missing toes.
Simple prosthetic arms, in comparison, work at 50% efficiency only; it should only be used to replace a missing hand or arm.

Bionics

Bionic legs are an enhanced leg replacement, granting +20% moving; two of them means a total of 140% moving. Good for caravaneers, kiters or anyone who needs to move fast.
Bionic arms are strengthened arm attachments with a +20% bonus to manipulation; they are good at a large variety of tasks, from shooting to mining to crafting.
Bionic eyes are advanced eye replacements that gives +20% to sight: it's the only eye replacement so far, meaning you will have to depend on it to replace colonists missing eyes. Sight isn't very important for most tasks, with bonuses from sight capping at 100% sight for many tasks, meaning that enhanced sight is obsolete in most tasks. Shooting however relies greatly on sight, so you may consider giving your gunners bionic eye replacements before they need them.

Combat hands

Power Claws are a relatively balanced hand replacement; it incurs a small manipulation penalty, but greatly increases unarmed damage, to the point where it can even rival a normal or good plasteel longsword.
Scyther blades can be removed from incapacitated scythers or occasionally found on traders. They are extremely specialized in fighting; 2 installed on a colonist gives the highest melee DPS of any pawn in-game. However, it is also atrocious in anything else, with only 20% manipulation, meaning that only your most dedicated combatants incapable of anything else should have them.

Organs

You can buy natural organ replacements from traders, or brutally harvest them from colonists and prisoners. Harvesting them gives a mood penalty for the whole colony (except your trusty psychopath colonists, and a dire mood debuff of -30 to the victim, so you may want to think again before harvesting organs from anyone (especially fellow colonists).

As of Alpha 16 there are no bionic organ enhancements in the base game (though mods exist to add them in-game).

Trade

As of version 0.16.1393 (21 December 2016), players can form and travel around in caravans, as well as transport pods. This greatly opens trade opportunities and enables the player to command multiple colonies (options) at once. It also raises the importance of Silver and economics in the game, as well as, inevitably, drug trafficking.

For the average colony, earning money mainly relies on either cash crops like Smokeleaf, stone sculptures or the brutal treatment of prisoners. It is important for every colony to select at least one of these options as their main income source, to obtain important resources like Steel.

With the comms console you are able to call factions to send traders to visit your base. It's better to do so than wait for them to send traders on their own, as they rarely do so without being prompted.

You should also send your own caravans to friendly bases for trade, as they are considerably better-stocked than their traders, and also offer a small discount.

Diplomacy

The comms console also allows you to give gifts of silver to factions, improving goodwill.

To do so, call the faction, then select 'Offer gift'. As with trading, select your colonist best at Social to improve the goodwill increase.

Increasing goodwill allows you to call traders at a lower price and to call for immediate military assistance if you need help.

If tribals raid you should pacify them by capturing, healing and releasing their prisoners, as well as gift them. Turning them friendly will stop them from trying to raid your colony with their massive raider forces, which is helpful at long-term survival. You don't want to deal with 100+ angry tribals shooting arrows, throwing pila or clubbing your colonists all at once.

Pirates cannot be reasoned with; releasing their prisoners won't grant any goodwill, they refuse any kind of communication and they live just to make others' lives worse by raiding their bases and stealing their stuff. You can wipe them off the face of this rimworld by destroying ALL their bases but it'll take an immense amount of time.

Drugs & Chemicals

Main article: Drugs

Once you've taken care of your food supply, you can spare some more land to grow plants to make drugs out of. They can provide a boost to colonists' mood, improve their performance at work, protect against disease or sell for a lot of silver.

Be careful with drugs, especially when you have colonists with the Chemical Interest or Fascination traits; you will have to keep drugs away from them, or they will binge on them and get addicted or die from overdose.

Beer

Beer is a social drug that improves mood and can provide joy.

To make beer, you need to have Brewing researched. Then, you will need to grop hops. Next, you will need to build a brewery and some fermenting barrels Your colonists will turn hops into wort, a precursor to beer. They will then haul wort into the fermenting barrels and wait for the beer to be made.

Colonists can enjoy a beer occasionally (every 3 days or so) without risk of addiction.

Smokeleaf joint

A social drug smoked to provide joy, and provide a decent mood boost. However, colonists stoned on smokeleaf suffer from quite some debuffs so it's not a good idea to smoke it unless you need it.

All you need is some smokeleaf leaves and a crafting spot. The process of rolling leaves into joints is quick.

Colonists can enjoy a joint occasionally (every 3 days or so) without risk of addiction.

Psychite

A type of hard drug refined from the leaves of the psychoid plant. Comes in 2 variants, flake and yayo.

While they provide a good buff to both mood and stats, they are extremely addictive.

Besides this, they are highly profitable. Being very light, you can carry lots on a single caravan trip, and net you a ton of silver in return.

Go-juice

A synthetic combat drug made at the drug lab. As its description says, it's suited for your soldiers to take a hit before combat to boost their effectiveness.

It's highly addictive however, and soldiers that frequently use it will quickly find that they are hooked to it and will need to regularly take a hit or suffer from its horrible withdrawal symptoms.

Wake-up

Stimulant drug that improves consciousness and reduces the need for sleep.

It does not provide any mood buffs but it isn't as addictive as other hard drugs. Colonists can take 1 every ~3 days without getting addicted so it's good for occasional use.

Penoxycyline

The only medical drug in the game so far. It provides resistance to the plague, malaria or Sleeping Sickness.

It can be used reactively to instantly boost immunity to 61%, or actively every 5 days to prevent diseases from progressing to a visible stage.

Luciferium

A performance-enhancing mechanite concoction. It provides good functional buffs, and given enough time can heal old scars (including dreaded brain injuries) but doesn't help at mood at all. It cannot be made and must be bought at traders or found occasionally.

One of its most significant features is that withdrawal from luciferium is fatal and incurable.

Due to its high price and constant need not recommended at this stage, unless you need to heal someone's brain injuries.

Combat & defense tactics

When you are outnumbered, thinking smart with your combat tactics is also key to not losing colonists. It's also worth checking out defense tactics with more in-depth detail in defensive strategy, and cover for how cover works.

Turret mounds

Sometimes sandbags and your colonists alone are just not enough. Building "turret mounds" around the map in strategic locations can decimate a good number of raiders before they even get to the colony. Turret mounds are built on a 3x3 block of land:

O#O
###
O#O

Where O is a turret and # is a stone wall. Remember, however, that turrets can be a bit expensive to build and repair. They also require a lot of electricity, so try hooking them up to a wire which is remotely turned on to save your batteries.

Note that you will have to sacrifice some turrets this way as raiders often target the turrets before your colonists due to proximity.

Diffusing your opponent

Don't be too arrogant when facing a bombardment of arrows and pila - each can deal almost an equivalent amount of damage as a survival rifle. Diffusing your opponent consists of separating the melee attackers from the ranged, and dealing with each of them with your melee and ranged colonists.

One way of diffusing your opponent is with a smaller version of an attention suppressor. This means that the majority of raiders will end up attacking the walls instead of your colonists. Those that come through can be easily dealt with using tactics from the next section. You can also use turret mounds as mentioned above surrounded by a nest of rock chunks to to catch the raiders in the explosion.

Fighting in the small numbers

Once you have diffused your opponent's army, their forces will trickle towards you slowly so you can easily deal with each one alone.

Kiting

Kiting is the method of using a colonist as bait for an attacker to run towards, and a second colonist taking shots off while the attacker is focused on the first. It does not work if the raider has a personal shield that protects them from bullets. Note: Colonists incapable of violence can still act as bait.

         R
 C       |
         v
         C

Diagram of kiting. C is a colonist, R is a raider and -> is the direction the raider is going.

Splitting

When two of your colonists are being chased by one person and your weaponry is significantly poorer than the attacker's, you can conduct a split so that the enemy can only chase and down 1 colonist while the other escapes. If one of your colonists has ranged weapons, then you could split and then conduct a kite.

Rushing

Rushing is the tactic of sending your best melee attackers to finish off the ranged attackers at the back. The ranged attackers who do not succumb to the attention suppressor could be a pain for your own ranged forces, so it's best to send your melee colonists with personal shields to distract the ranged attackers. Before battle, hide your melee attackers behind a nearby hill outside your base so that they remain hidden until all enemy melee attackers are engaged with either the walls or your ranged.

New colonists

With more colonists in, the chance of you getting wanderers or escape pods become much rarer. From midgame onward, capturing and recruiting prisoners becomes the main source of new blood. Occasionally, you will still see slaves for sale, wanderers, escape pods or chased refugees, but don't count on them.

Attacking enemy bases

However, now that you have more colonists and better equipment, you have a new option to getting new blood: attacking enemy faction bases.

To do so, create a caravan with your soldiers, food for the journey and medicine to treat the wounded. Once the caravan is ready, set it to go attack an enemy.

Once you succeed in destroying the base, you will be given 24 hours to treat the wounded and rest before your caravan packs up and leaves.

The journey usually takes days so remember to bring enough food. There will also be people guarding the base so you should have enough soldiers. 10 well-equipped soldiers should be enough to take down any base without much problem, though sometimes you will still lose someone. The base also has food, drugs and medicine. They always have some food, but don't count on them having enough medicine to treat all your injuries.

Other guides

Continuing guided play

• Advanced Endgame Guide: Ending your colony on YOUR terms