Naked Brutality Guide

In the Naked Brutality scenario, you start with absolutely nothing, not even clothes.

Because of this, it is possibly the hardest scenario of all.

Scenario Parameter

Summary: Naked, alone and utterly unprepared. Can you survive?
Description: You went under anaesthetic for a minor surgery. Now you've awoken in a drop pod crashing into a distant planet. You're naked, alone and utterly unprepared. Can you survive?

• Start with one person, chosen from eight
  • They will be 'New Arrivals'
• Start with no items
• Colonist arrives naked

Starting colonist

Skills

You must choose a colonist that is capable of survival skills. They don't need to be good at them, but they must be able to do so at the very least. This includes:

• Dumb labor: Hauling, cleaning and refueling.
• Construction: Building shelter to live in and deconstructing ruins for building materials. You need 3 Construction to build a spike trap.
• Medicine: Treating oneself when injured or sick. High skill is more important as you have to rely on herbal medicine scavenged from your surroundings.
• Crafting: Making equipment and misc crafting. You need to craft your own starting equipment as you don't start with any. You need 2 Crafting to make a short bow.
• Violence: Defending oneself from mad animals or raiders, as well as hunting for food.

If the colonist doesn't have these skills then it's best that you reroll until you have one that does. You don't need them to be interested or skilled in any of them, but if you do then it's a plus. Passion in skills you'll be using a lot, such as construction or plant cutting, can also help your colonist's mood.

Some skills will make survival easier, but are not essential:

• Cooking: Making meals out of raw food and butchering creatures. You can eat raw food in a pinch but it's not a good idea to do so. Higher cooking skill and a clean kitchen both reduce the chance of food poisoning.
• Growing: Growing crops. While you can subsist on hunting and gathering alone very early on, you will eventually need to start planting crops to feed your colonists. In a biome with winter it is best to plant as soon as possible.
• Social: Recruiting new colonists and trading. If you are lucky enough to capture a raider then you can use your Social skills to recruit them - if you can spare the food and the time.
• Mining: Extracting mineral resources. More useful after settling down to begin expansion, though mining rare minerals early on can help you trade for things that are hard to make.

Some other skills are better left for future colonists:

• Animals: Training animals isn't quite a necessity early-game, but will greatly compliment you in combat, provided you have sufficient food to train animals. Most animals also have a revenge chance on tame fail. With a lone animal and a skilled colonist it may be worth the risk, but a lone colonist is no match for a herd of vengeful muffalo.
• Intellectual: Unless you started off in an extreme environment and need essential research (such as Hydroponics) then it's better that you focus on building up a working shelter for survival first, as research merely assists survival.
• Artistic: Early on you should not be making sculptures yet.

Traits

Besides this, you should also have a colonist with a decent trait selection.

These traits are especially harmful:

• Gourmand: This trait will certainly make starting off harder- you will need to rush food production in order to keep this one colonist fed, which isn't good.
• Pyromaniac: This universally hated trait is even more dangerous in a naked brutality start because if your lone colonist breaks, nothing but the rain can extinguish the fires started.
• Volatile: Having your lone colonist break down is not a good thing to happen, as this will put them right out of action, stagnating progress.

Some traits are more helpful:

• Industrious: Finishing your work faster means you can get more done. This is especially useful if only 1 colonist's doing everything.
• Fast learner: Improving your skills faster is very handy, as 1 colonist doing everything gives ample opportunity to train up skills.
• Jogger: With only one colonist, a small advantage in movement speed makes a big difference in how much work they can get done. For the same reason, injuries or traits that slow them down will make survival much more difficult.

At the beginning

It is essential that you solve the basic needs for survival first. In RimWorld, that is food, shelter and security.

Your most valuable resource is your starting colonist's time.

Shelter

This is one of the few situations where it's an acceptable risk to build wooden walls. A wood structure is better than nothing. However, it is still vulnerable to fire. Hopefully you will be able to upgrade it to stone before lightning or raiders take the decision out of your hands.

If you are on a map that has ruins, however, choosing one of the larger ruins and adding a roof and wooden doors can get your colonist indoors quickly and save you some time. If it is large enough, you can even put your first catch-all stockpile inside with the colonist for the first day or two. Otherwise, even a small roof over an outdoor stockpile is helpful, especially to slow the deterioration of your first scavenged food and herbal medicine.

If you are in a cold biome or starting in winter, building a shelter around a steam geyser will help you save on wood. In extreme cold biomes it may be the only option to survive the first few days. Once you are able to expand your structure, keeping the steam vent in a separate room lets you keep it as an optional source of heat. In warm weather, the roof can be removed. In cold weather, replacing the roof and adding a vent that leads to your living space can get you heat without using wood or electricity.

In any extreme temperature biome, it is worth the time to invest in double-thickness walls early on. This lets them retain heat or cold from low-tech campfires and passive coolers or electric heaters and coolers. Good temperature management will keep your colonist alive in extreme weather, and ideally avoid negative mood penalties from sleeping in a room that's too hot or too cold.

A dedicated storage/warehouse is not strictly necessary at this point. You will eventually need to build one - that is, once you take care of other things.

Building a few spike traps on the corners of your shelter or on a nearby choke point is a good idea within the first day or two, before your first manhunting small animal shows up. If your biome has plentiful wood, wooden spike traps are excellent for this. Steel traps are more powerful, though the steel available on the surface of any map is finite and needs to last until you research deep drilling. Stone traps do more damage than wooden traps, but also take much longer to build.

Even if you don't have a weapon, you can flee past the traps to trick a pursuer into pathing across them, or hide inside until the enemy steps on one of them.

Equipment

At the beginning, you will need some form of weapon. In order to hunt effectively, a short bow is best. If your colonist has a crafting skill of 5 or higher, you can make a recurve bow, which has slightly longer range and higher damage than the short bow. Longer range and higher damage per shot mean slightly lower chance of animal revenge, and better likelihood you'll be able to flee successfully from vengeful prey. You will need to go hunting to gather meat and fabrics.

After you gather enough leather from hunting, you can make tribalwear to cover yourself up, using 60 of any textile at a crafting spot. Tribalwear covers both torso and legs using fewer resources than a t-shirt and pants, so it is a more efficient choice in this scenario.

Once you build a hand tailor bench, you'll be able to craft better quality clothing. Not all clothing can be made from leather, but there are good options for every biome even before you have planted and harvested cotton. A parka is the superior garment for dealing with cold and requires 80 of any material to make. A duster similarly requires 80 material to make and is the most heat resistant garment. All hats which can be made from leather provide a small amount of cold protection, while the cowboy hat is the best for dealing with heat.

You may wish to build a leather bedroll if you are in a biome where wood is scarce, such as Desert or Tundra. You can also make a bed from steel or stone blocks if you have enough to spare after building walls and other equipment.

If you've changed the scenario to have your sole colonist be Tribal, a bedroll and purchased or scavenged outerwear will be your only option.

Food

Food can be gathered from plants around you, such as berries or agave. You should also start growing crops on day 1 or 2. Even a few tiles of rice planted on day 1 can be a lifesaver on day 7 or 8. If you can place your growing zones in spots where there are a lot of trees, this lets you chop wood and plant crops at the same time.

Rice is a good choice to provide constant food fast, but don't rely on rice extensively especially when you lack manpower. Planting slower growing plants with high yield is a good solution after you have secured enough food to wait for longer-growing plants to grow. Grow rice first, or strawberries if your colonist has 5 or higher skill in Plants. Then plant potatoes or corn. Potatoes are best if the soil is poor, for example, in a desert map where there is very little soil available. If your biome has winter, only plant corn if are confident you will have 20 full growing days before the temperature reaches -10C (14F) and kills them. Otherwise, stick with potatoes.

In a biome with year-round growing, a 7x7 plot of rice is approximately enough to keep one colonist fed if it is planted and harvested with maximum efficiency. It is best to anticipate misfortune and plant extra. Also keep in mind that your storyteller may send you additional colonists or animals, which quickly increases the amount of food you would have needed to plant to keep up with them.

You will likely not have the time or extra resources to build walls around your crop fields at first. If your biome contains rich soil, you may wish to plant in those areas exclusively. Having more than one crop field in different locations can also help avoid losing all your crops if there is Blight, an unlucky lightning strike, or if a raider spawns close to your field while you are too far away to put out the fire. Growing zones should be fairly close to your shelter to cut down on travel time for your colonist.

If there is a stand of wild berries near your shelter, you can put a growing zone on them and forbid sowing. This way your colonist will automatically harvest the berries when they're ripe, without you having to manually select the plants to harvest.

Hunting / Scavenging

One risky but effective hunting method is to draft your colonist and manually shoot all animals in a herd until they are bleeding, then let blood loss do its work. In the meantime, you can do other things. This is especially useful in a biome that has winter. Frozen corpses don't spoil. Wildlife in a winter biome will become scarce (with most of the few remaining animals being tough predators) or entirely absent as you approach the end of Decembary.

Dead animals aren't shown in the Wildlife tab. However, if you search the map often, and check the locations of predators in the Wildlife tab - particularly if the predators are injured - you will often find fresh animal corpses. These may be either prey that wasn't completely consumed, or predators who succumbed to their injuries after their prey fought back. You can unforbid and butcher these corpses for free food and leather.

If your starting colonist has high melee skill and low shooting, it is also possible to manually draft them and hunt with a melee weapon. This may be effective for smaller game such as rats (but not boomrats!), or modestly-sized animals such as turkey or raccoons. Individual 0% revenge chance animals will fight back if you melee attack them, although you will be only fighting that one alpaca rather than angering the entire herd. Drafted melee hunting is not recommended for large or aggressive animals, however, or if you are on a biome such as Arid Shrubland or Tropical Swamp which does not have healroot.

Melee hunting risks your colonist's health.

Medicine

Go to your colonist's Health tab and turn on self-tend. If the "Self-tend" check box is not turned on, your colonist will not treat their own injuries.

Harvest a few healroot as early as possible if they are available in your biome. If your colonist has 8 skill in Plants, it's a good idea to make a small growing zone and plant some as quickly as possible. Healroot is the only crop other than trees which is not killed by cold temperatures, so it is always worthwhile to plant more if you can.

Diseases and infections need to be treated IMMEDIATELY.

With even a few points of medical skill, herbal medicine should be enough to keep your colonist alive. The sooner you tend an injury and the cleaner your living space, the lower the chance of infection. If you're away from your shelter and your biome has wild healroot, manually harvesting the nearest healroot plant and self-tending where you stand is better than taking a long walk back and letting the infection counter run up. Poorly applied herbal medicine is much, much better than bleeding to death from picking a fistfight with a squirrel. Quick tending with no medicine is still better than leaving a health condition un-tended. Also, allowing your colonist to get bed rest when they have an infection or illness will give them a small but valuable boost to immunity gain speed.

Next step

Defense

Lack of equipment and manpower makes it harder to fight against raiders. Traps will help you a lot in the early stage. Placing traps at chokepoints or on the corners of buildings, and luring raiders to trigger them, make it much easier to win.

Luring raiders across traps is efficient. If they don't die immediately, be sure to take their clothes.

Check your raiders' Health tabs often. If they're more injured than your colonist, running around in circles until they're downed can help you win without risking further injury. Terrain can also be used to your advantage if you have even a slight lead on them and your speed is at least equal to theirs. Running across a wet or debris-filled area and turning around to take a shot at them while they're slowed can help you chip away at the raider's health.

One small bright side to this scenario is that with only one colonist and very low wealth, your raids will stay small (often just one raider) for quite some time.

New colonists

New colonists can join by chance, or you can encounter someone who can be saved and potentially join your colony. All AI storytellers, even Randy, consider 4 to be the "critical minimum" number of colonists. They will send you events which can potentially increase your number of colonists on a fairly regular basis until you reach this number. Those events will still happen afterwards, but less frequently.

Consider carefully if you will be able to obtain enough food or other resources to take on another colonist, or if the potential new arrival has traits that would make them more harmful than good. If the new arrival has terrible traits but is healthy enough to walk, you may need to banish them immediately. Murder instead of banishment is also an option, particularly if your colonist has traits that make this beneficial, such as Bloodlust or Cannibal.

Here are the ways a new colonist can be gained. An attempt has been made to start with the worst and end with the best, though this is somewhat subjective.

• Prisoner rescue quest: Leave your home map to rescue a prisoner somewhere on the world map. The prisoner is guarded by hostile pawns and possibly turrets. A Naked Brutality starting colonist with excellent combat skills and a decent weapon might be able to pull this off. But dry lightning, raiders, etc. may destroy your base while you're gone.

• Incapacitated refugee quest: Leave your home map to rescue an incapacitated person somewhere on the world map. More or less the same risks as the Prisoner rescue quest.

• Capturing prisoners: This needs to be included for completeness, but note that it's dependent on player action, so it's not factored in as one of the "Storyteller events" that add new colonists. Taking a prisoner can gain you a new colonist, but will also use resources. The time your colonist spends wardening is also time they cannot spend hunting, harvesting and building defenses.

• Man in black: Man in Black events are extremely rare in Naked Brutality. This event would technically gain you a new colonist if it ever happened - but it probably won't.

• Wild (human) wanders in: Any colonist with an Animals skill of 6 or higher can attempt to tame a wild human. Wild humans have a fairly high chance to turn manhunter on tame fail, and your colonist will be in close melee range if that happens. On the plus side, wild humans are always naked and unarmed. Note that they will harvest and eat un-walled crops if you simply ignore them.

• Purchasing humans: Slavers and friendly towns may have enslaved humans for sale. If you can afford one, they will become a new member of your faction. This method has the benefit of knowing what your new colonist's skills and traits are before they join. The main drawback is opportunity cost: on average, with low-to-medium skill in Social, a human will set you back 1000-2000 silver. Over time, humans are less and less likely to be available at towns, and slaver caravans are uncommon. In most cases, by the time you can afford a human there are no longer any for sale.

• Refugee chased: These are usually worth accepting if your starting pawn and defenses are in decent shape. Since you only have one colonist and very few resources, even the slightly stronger raids that spawn for this event might still only be a single raider, or two or three relatively weak raiders. If you dislike the new colonist, banish them.

• Transport pod crash:
  • Rescue them, then strip them and steal their clothes, THEN decide what to do with them. All transport pod crash victims arrive seriously injured. They will almost always die if not rescued. Strip their gear before they perish so it won't be tainted. This can be a highly efficient way to get weather-resistant gear without having to craft it, as transport pod crash victims will sometimes have good quality clothing, such as a duster or parka.
  • If they would not be a good addition to your colony, you may have to leave them to die.
  • If the transport pod crash victim looks like an acceptable new colonist, you should always try to rescue them. They might already be a member of another planetary faction. Members of enemy factions need to be captured, kept as prisoners and recruited in order to join. If an unaffiliated space refugee or a member of a friendly faction chooses to join your colony after you have rescued them, they will do so as soon as they regain consciousness. If their status changes to "injured" (instead of unconscious / incapacitated / pain shock) and they have not joined, they are not going to. As soon as they are able to walk, you can deconstruct their sleeping spot or uninstall their bedroll, and they will leave on their own.

• Wanderer joins: The best possible way to gain a colonist. If you like them, keep them. If you don't like them, take their stuff and then banish them. (Or let them keep some stuff if you're feeling generous.)

After you find an acceptable second colonist, things will start to be much smoother and easier.

Extreme Biomes Survival

The above will work fine in normal biomes, but if you start in extreme biomes, you will need a different set of survival tactics.

Generally, wood and Healroot is scarce or even nonexistent in Extreme Desert and Tundra, so you are unable to make bows for hunting. If you choose these biomes, it's better to choose a colonist with high melee skill instead of shooting.

Extreme Heat Biomes

The most dangerous threat in hot biomes is the temperature, rather than the lack of food. Heat waves will kill you for sure if you are unprepared.

You need to build a temperature controlled room as soon as possible. Simply a wind turbine and cooler already help.

If you start as a tribe (through changing the scenario), stock enough wood for the passive cooler. Planting saguaro cactus will provide a fast and reliable source of wood, helping you to build up your base and fuel for passive coolers, especially for extreme desert runs.

Food is actually not a big problem here. There's gravel everywhere that you can grow potato and other plants. You will have a hard time at the start but after the first harvest, things will go much better. Heat waves will slow down the growth rate of the plant but won't kill them, so the food supply is steady.

Keep an eye on wild animals. In deserts, there's only a few naturally grown plant for the animals to eat, so a group of camels will be a big threat to your farmland. Better hunt them down soonest or enclose the farmland with walls.

Extreme Cold Biomes

These recommendations are for Ice Sheet.

An ascetic cannibal is highly recommended. If your colonist has a mental break before you acquire a parka they are very likely to die. Your pawn will need high skill in mining, construction and melee, since there is no wood to make fires or low-tech ranged weapons. Research is more important in this biome, as your pawn will need advanced technologies more quickly to survive the harsh landscape.

The first day

Look for a steam geyser somewhere on the map. Ideally it should be close to a hill with a deposit of steel, but in a pinch any steam geyser will do. This is where your first shelter should go.

Create a stockpile and butcher spot near where you plan to build the shelter. The only animals on the map will be a handful of snowhares and a predator such as an arctic wolf or arctic fox. Drafting your colonist and punching a snowhare or two right away, before hypothermia sets in, may result in fewer injuries than waiting until you can craft a club. (Be sure to turn on self-tend in the Health tab!) The animals will likely disappear at night when the cold gets more intense, and may not return the second day.

Mine at least 70 steel. A skilled miner can get that from mining 2 tiles but most characters will need 3. Extra is good if you can get it, since hypothermia gives your pawn a penalty to manipulation, which increases the chances of botched construction. But don't spend too long; you have only a few hours before your pawn collapses from hypothermia. Steel is faster to work with than stone blocks, so trying to do this by deconstructing a ruin is more likely to result in death.

This much steel will allow you to build a tiny shelter around the steam geyser. You can build nine wall sections and a door: three tiles long on two sides, two tiles long on the short side, and then one wall segment next to the door.

By the time your pawn's hypothermia is gone, they will have heatstroke. This is fine. Go mine more steel and bring it back to your shelter. Use it to craft a few extra walls, and perhaps a club.

This is fine.

Build a second, larger room connected to your first shelter and set the door between the two rooms to "hold open," the temperature in the outer room will cycle between a little too low and a little too high. This will make it possible for your pawn to get a full night's rest without dying.

The next few days

Add corners to your shelter and build at least one steel spike trap. Then you can start getting steel and components to build your first wind turbine and electric heater. Deconstructing ruins can get you more stone for stone walls and furniture such as a table, stool and a bed. Double walls around the outside of all your living areas can help retain warmth from steam geysers or heaters.

It is possible to build an indoor grow room even before you have enough power for a sun lamp, as long as you have heat. There is a small amount of usable dirt around the hills on an ice sheet. As long as at least 75% of the roof remains covered, you can remove the roof above your grow zone. The heater will still be able to heat the room slightly faster than the heat is lost through the open part of the roof. If there is a steam geyser close to a patch of stony soil, this can be used as extra heat as well. Over time, an enclosed steam geyser seems to provide about as much heat as 1.5 campfires. (This is an estimate based on experience; testing is needed.)

Within the first few days, there should be a traveler passing by. If you are able to kill them, you can take their clothes and weapons. Even a non-cannibal may need to consume human meat in this instance, particularly if the wildlife has not returned. Be sure to put their parka on (tainted or otherwise) before doing so.

It's best to lure your first raider across a spike trap. A pawn with great melee skill could defeat them in combat, but even if they win, they are likely to sustain injuries which will slow them down.

You may be able to trade un-tainted gear and human leather for better quality clothes, food or even a gun by trading with a nearby friendly settlement.

After death

It is very likely that your starting colonist will die, even if you've planned well and made prudent choices.

One way to extend this scenario is to choose "Keep playing" after your starting colonist dies. Set the game to speed 3, and wait for a "Refugee chased" or "Wanderer joins" event. Your AI storyteller should send you a colonist-adding event within the next several days.

If anything survives of your base that has not been destroyed by raiders or natural disaster, your new colonist can use what's left to rebuild. As a bonus, refugees and wanderers are often wearing at least a few clothes. Between that and the work done by your starting colonist, the newcomer will have an even better chance of survival.

See also

• Basics - for survival with an industrial start in general, especially 'Crashlanded'

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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