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 and cutting plants. Cleaning is optional.
• Construction: Building shelter to live in.
• Medicine: Treating oneself when injured or sick. High skill is more important as you have to rely on herbal medicine scavenged from your surroundings.
• Violence: Defending oneself from mad animals or raiders, as well as hunt for food.
• Crafting: Making equipment and misc crafting. You need to craft your own starting equipment as you don't start with any.

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.

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.
• 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.
• Social: Recruiting new colonists and trading. If you are lucky enough to capture a raider then you can use your Social skills to turn them to your side.
• Mining: Extracting mineral resources. More useful after settling down to begin expansion.

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.
• 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.

At the beginning

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

Shelter

Your shelter should be built out of wood. Any wood structure is better than nothing.

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.

A dedicated storage/warehouse is not strictly necessary at this point, however it is better that you build one- that is, once you take care of other things.

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. 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.

Not all clothing can be made from leather, but there are a few options for every biome even before you have planted and harvested cotton. A jacket is not as good as a parka but helps protect somewhat against cold, and provides a bit of damage protection. A duster similarly provides a little bit of armoring, and protects against heat. 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 to increase your colonist's comfort and avoid the "slept on the ground" debuff, since beds also require cloth.

Food

Food can be gathered from plants around you, such as berries or agave. If you have a good grower you should also start growing crops now. Grow rice first, followed by corn. Do potatoes if the only soil around you is poor.

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.

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 having all your crops burn down if there is an unlucky lightning strike, or if a raider spawns close to your field while you are too far away to put out the fire. They shouldn't be too far from your shelter, however, to cut down on travel time for your colonist.

Hunting / Scavenging

An 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.

Search the map often, there will be a couple of dead animals which were attacked by predators. You can unforbid and butcher them for free food and leather for your first Tribalwear.

Medicine

Harvest a few healroot as early as possible. Keep adding one here and there as you can fit it in between other tasks until you have a decent stockpile. Be sure your colonist's self-tend is turned on -- this can be done from the Health tab. You'll need to set down a second sleeping spot and mark it medical, even if your colonist patches themselves up where they're standing and doesn't actually go to the sleeping spot. Poorly applied herbal medicine is still much, much better than bleeding to death from picking a fistfight with a squirrel.

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, and luring raiders to trigger them, make it much easier to win.

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 either join by chance, or you can encounter someone who can be saved and potentially join your colony.

If it's a wounded person dropping in, you should always try to rescue them first. They can choose to join your colony right away. If they don't, arrest them later.

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 is healthy, you may need to banish them immediately. If they are a transport pod crash victim, you may have to leave them to die. Be sure to strip their gear before they perish so it won't be tainted. Murder is also an option, particularly if the new arrival is unaffiliated or allied with a faction you don't mind angering.

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.

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