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

Landing site

Example good landing site.

In all maps you have to choose carefully your landing site to increases your chances. 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 jut the area where you 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 a area where you can close it off more easily to lay down traps around the few entrances.

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 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.
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 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, 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 because your cactus plantation gonna take a while to kick in.

Summer is coming so focus on giving your colonists dusters and cowboy hats. After that you can replace their tribalwears for button-down shirts and pants.

You should still always have 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 basing is looking better, you have food, wood, clothing, drugs and defenses. You can now play normally.

Base relocation

Since the worse is gone, you can now move to the a proper area, more central where you can build your 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).

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